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More "Imaginary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his village fled from Agra and came to Chhattisgarh, where they founded the Agharia caste. And, in memory of this, when an Agharia makes a libation to his ancestors, he first pours a little water on the ground in honour of the dead Chamar. Such stories may be purely imaginary, or may contain some substratum of truth, as that the ancestors of the caste were Rajputs, who took wives from Chamars and other low castes. The Kirars are another caste with more or less mixed descent from ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... still at his elbow; and one day, when the scholar was in the highest exultation at his good fortune, the master humbly requested him to bestow upon him some landed possession, as a reward for the extraordinary benefit he had conferred. The imaginary emperor cast upon the necromancer a glance of the utmost disdain and contempt. "Who are you?" said he, "I really have not the smallest acquaintance with you." "I am he," replied the magician, with withering severity of countenance and tone, "that gave you all these things, ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... often lead To Shame and Disappointment in the End, And tumble blindfold on their own Disgrace. True Valour's slow, deliberate, and cool, Considers well the End, the Way, the Means, And weighs each Circumstance attending them. Imaginary Dangers it detects, And guards itself against all real Evils. But here Tenesco comes with Speed important; His Looks and Face ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers
... dying, and live happy under the rule of Rhadamanthus. The Elysium of Hesiod and Pindar is in the Isles of the Blessed, or Fortunate Islands, in the Western Ocean. >From these sprang the legend of the happy island Atlantis. This blissful region may have been wholly imaginary, but possibly may have sprung from the reports of some storm-driven mariners who had caught a glimpse of ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... like Damocles' sword over the head of every samurai and often assumed a morbid character. In the name of Honor, deeds were perpetrated which can find no justification in the code of Bushido. At the slightest, nay, imaginary insult, the quick-tempered braggart took offense, resorted to the use of the sword, and many an unnecessary strife was raised and many an innocent life lost. The story of a well-meaning citizen who called the attention of a bushi to a flea jumping on his back, and who was forthwith ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... other influences—the old man's vision, in which he had seen him journeying into the desert in search of some hidden treasure—and now many visionaries in Egypt had not found treasure, but had lost their lives and their minds on journeys after imaginary gold?—and Margaret's influence, Margaret, who had been given a message for him—of that he felt convinced. She, at least, could be trusted, with her sane, practical Lampton brain. She had made up no fable. Her vision had not been ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... fellow countryman, van Calcar, are very much in advance of anything previously seen, except those of Leonardo. The title-page, one of the most celebrated pictures in the history of medicine, shows Vesalius in a large amphitheatre (an imaginary one of the artist, I am afraid) dissecting a female subject. He is demonstrating the abdomen to a group of students about the table, but standing in the auditorium are elderly citizens and even women. One student is reading from an open book. There is a monkey ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... create imaginary characters, which in their own way revealed my sorrows, my weaknesses, my follies and my virtues, forming new personalities with independent life: as my dear friend Goethe created Werther, ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... that gave his mind another opening. He counted the number of trees in every street in town. He learned to tell at a glance and with relative accuracy how much lumber could be cut out of a tree. He built imaginary houses with lumber cut from the trees that lined the streets. He even tried to figure out a way to utilize the small limbs cut from the tops of the trees, and one Sunday went into the wood back of the town and cut a great armful of twigs, ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... rights to be secured; Then from his patriot tongue of flame The startling words for Freedom came. The stirring sentences he spake Compelled the heart to glow or quake, And, rising on his theme's broad wing, And grasping in his nervous hand The imaginary battle brand, In face of death he dared to fling Defiance ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... be careful never to over-exert myself, madam—those are the doctor's orders," said Nickie, in his sad, calm way. "The smallest excitement, the slightest strain, and my life goes out like that." Nickie puffed an imaginary candle with dramatic significance. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... the hearts of Aliena and Oliver, he was no less busy with Ganymede, who, hearing of the danger Orlando had been in, and that he was wounded by the lioness, fainted; and when he recovered he pretended that he had counterfeited the swoon in the imaginary character of Rosalind, and ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and it did not matter to her if they did cheat some hungry one out of the necessary morsel. Her ambition was to be equal with the Airlys in point of establishment, therefore she toiled on to lay up the glittering heap, and every little while she sat down by it to build up imaginary fabrics of splendor and show. There was a house to let near her friends, with the same external marks of gentility, and she was negotiating for it, and it was to be furnished as nearly like her neighbor's as possible, and she ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... time a man might have been seen there working alone, quite alone. Even a space was left about him, as if an invisible circle were drawn, within which no person would venture. If a word were flung at him across this imaginary cordon, it was nothing but a taunt or a curse, and it was invariably spoken by a man. No woman so much as glanced at him. He toiled on doggedly, and in silence, with a weary-looking face, until his task ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... muscles standing out in knots, his frame quivering with excitement, the thick hair falling back in masses from his brow, and the fire of the chase in his eye. I trembled for my boy, who was the object of the imaginary onslaught, the passion of sport ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... do not often vary much in size, though they may be thicker or finer according to the character of the pen used; but observation will show that the difference in a handwriting caused by the use of different pens is much more imaginary than real. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... were, however, purely imaginary; for at that time the dawn had extinguished the lesser lights. Ere long, the bright beams of the rising sun suffused the eastern sky with a golden glow. On passing the place where Alice had been left, a couple ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... changes I made have vastly strengthened the whole team," he said, as he and Frank came together during a period of rest, after a fierce foray, in which every player worked systematically, and really clever passes and runs were made around imaginary hostile forces. ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... terms is equally true whether we consider those terms used extensively or intensively, that is to say whether in relation to all the members of the species or in relation to an imaginary typical specimen. The logician begins by declaring that S is either P or not P. In the world of fact it is the rarest thing to encounter this absolute alternative; S1 is pink, but S2 is pinker, S3 is scarcely pink at all, and one is in doubt ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... from heaven into his mouth and by repeating the mystic formulas called Dharani.[12] Annoyed by hobgoblins with whom he was obliged to converse, he got rid of them by surrounding himself with a consecrated imaginary enclosure into which they were unable to enter against ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... strong enough to endure the wear and tear of gambling excitement. No wonder if, after having failed in the game, men have begun to sweep off imaginary gold from the side of the table. The man was sharp enough when he started at the game, but a maniac at the close. At every gaming-table sit on one side Ecstasy, Enthusiasm, Romance—the frenzy ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... tenants blundered on together on the most amicable terms. It is hardly necessary to state that the golden age of Ireland, like the golden age of every other country, never had any real existence. It is like the good old-fashioned servant who from the time of Terence to our own has always lived in the imaginary past, but never in the real present. The belief in a recent golden age is, however, so prevalent in Ireland that I have thought it worth while to investigate the grounds on which it is based and the means by which it has been kept ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... debut. His reply was: "I was just fourteen, and I played the soubrette characters in an amateur company—a line that I could hardly assume with any degree of vraisemblance now." And he put his head on one side, thrust his hands into a pair of imaginary apron-pockets and looked around with a pert, chambermaid-like air so absurdly unsuited to his noble features and intellectual brow—to say nothing of his stalwart physique—that all present shrieked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... the angel wings of inspiration had been brushing his brow all the morning, and such visits were too rare to be flouted. He sat at his piano and in a composer's raucous varied voice, imitated the imaginary timbres of orchestral instruments. Sent forth, Mrs. Van Kuyp and Rentgen slowly walked into the little Parc of Auteuil, once the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... very polite!" said Mrs. Faber, and turned away. She recalled her imaginary danger, however, and turning again, said, "But though I differ from you in opinion, Mr. Polwarth, I quite recognize you as no common man, and put you upon your honor with regard to ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... sure you will have no objection to take service with us." "What!" cried the prisoner; "I go with the French to fight against the English! Your honour must excuse me; I could not do it to save my life." [722] This poor fisherman, whether he was a real or an imaginary person, spoke the sense of the nation. The beacon on the ridge overlooking Teignmouth was kindled; the High Tor and Causland made answer; and soon all the hill tops of the West were on re, Messengers were riding hard all night from ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of the premises, comes here sometimes just between daylight and dark, and talks to me till I am ready to put forth my hand to find yours. Oh! Anna, you must be everything that is pure and good, through to the very depths of your heart, that mine may not ache in finding it has loved only an imaginary being. Not that I expect you to be perfect—for I shouldn't love you if you were immaculate—but pure in aim and intention and desire, which I ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... and down the showroom floor in an ecstasy of imaginary hunger, and as he was making the hundredth trip the elevator door opened and Max Linkheimer stepped out. His low-cut waistcoat disclosed that his shirtfront, ordinarily of a glossy white perfection, had fallen victim to ...
— Abe and Mawruss - Being Further Adventures of Potash and Perlmutter • Montague Glass
... has small effect unless it is to be seen in your disposition, in your ordinary life, in your loving consideration for other people, or in your patient endurance of injury, real or imaginary. Without that your profession of Holiness is ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard
... slave may be punished at his master's discretion—without trial—without any means of legal redress; whether his offence be real or imaginary; and the master can transfer the same despotic power to any person or persons, he ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... excoriation is made visible, and brought under the influence of the applications employed. Without this entire knowledge of the extent of the evil, the result will be failure. The disgusting sloughs and discharge, and the fear of an imaginary contagion, make the nurses very unwilling to introduce their fingers into the reluctant little patient's mouth, and without this scrutiny all is in vain. The physician is compelled to set the example, to try the looseness ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various
... is cause and effect; there is no such thing in it as chance, nor is there even in all the wide universe. Are we not satisfied with whatever comes into our lives? The thing to do, then, is not to spend time in railing against the imaginary something we create and call fate, but to look to the within, and change the causes at work there, in order that things of a different nature may come, for there will come exactly what we cause to come. This is true not only of the physical body, but of all phases ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... the dark days after Jena, when, pressed back to the Baltic, his brave followers succumbed to the weight of numbers, he began to store up vials of fury against the insolent conqueror. Often he beguiled the weary hours with lunging at an imaginary foe, calling out—Napoleon. And this almost Satanic hatred bore the old man through seven years of humiliation; it gave him at seventy-two years of age the energy of youth; far from being sated by triumphs in Saxony ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... keep body and soul together. We were living on our Red Cross parcels, and we ate none of the German food except the bread. It's the only time I ever worked for nothing and boarded myself. We were punished for every offence, real and imaginary, and when a man is driven harder than he can bear, and refuses to work any more, the methods used to force him to work would put any slave-driver to shame; and we were ready to do anything to try and even up the score. This is one plan that ...
— Into the Jaws of Death • Jack O'Brien
... that the greater part of the persons concerned are dead, it is the general opinion that Hindye's only crime was her ambition to pass for a saint. The abominable acts of debauchery and cruelty of which she was accused, are probably imaginary: but it is certain that she rigorously punished the nuns of her convent who hesitated to believe in her sanctity, or who doubted the visits of Jesus Christ, of which she boasted. ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... pennyweights. It varies, however, everywhere and in Morocco the "Mezkal" as they call it is an imaginary value, no ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... by the Jewish people. Mahomet, when he stole all his great ideas from the Mosaic and Christian revelations, found it inevitable to add one principle unknown to either: this was a religious motive for perpetual war of aggression, and such a principle he discovered in the imaginary duty of summary proselytism. No instruction was required. It was sufficient for the convert that, with or without sincerity, under terror of a sword at his throat, he spoke the words aloud which disowned all ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... de The Imaginary Mistress The Duchess of Langeais The Girl with the Golden Eyes The Peasantry Ursule Mirouet A Woman of Thirty Another Study of Woman The Member ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... avoiding speculation, the Neutral Text appears hardly in history except at the Semiarian period. It was almost disowned ever after: and there is no certainty—nothing more than inference which we hold, and claim to have proved, to be imaginary and delusive,—that, except as represented in the corruption which it gathered out of the chaos of the earliest times, it made ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... drifted away and would have nothing to do with it. They were too polite to criticize; but Russ knew that the Armatage children felt themselves "too grown up" to be interested in the building of a steamboat or the driving of an imaginary motor-car. ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Mammy June's • Laura Lee Hope
... happened that an imaginary history of three human hearts, whose emotions were not without correspondence with these material circumstances, found in the ordinary incidents of such church-renovations a fitting frame for ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... had any of them anything of their own, but they regarded all that they had as common property; nor did they claim to receive of the other citizens anything more than their necessary food. And they practised all the pursuits which we yesterday described as those of our imaginary guardians. Concerning the country the Egyptian priests said what is not only probable but manifestly true, that the boundaries were in those days fixed by the Isthmus, and that in the direction of the continent they extended as far as the heights of Cithaeron and Parnes; ...
— Critias • Plato
... arsenic to improve the complexion, and her appearance a confused result of belladonna, bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... objected, the ancient tragedians at least observed the Unity of Time. This expression is by no means precise; it should at least be the identity of the imaginary with the material time. But even then it does not apply to the ancients: what they observe is nothing but the seeming continuity of time. It is of importance to attend to this distinction—the seeming; for they unquestionably allow ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... He held an imaginary book in one hand and waved an eloquent gesture. "So too shall every Hero inasmuch as notwithstanding for evermore come back to Reality," he parodied the enthusiastic Parsons, "so that in fashion and thereby, upon things and not ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... annotated with admirable erudition by M. Germain Lefevre-Pontalis. This chronicle, or to be more precise, the letters it contains, are very valuable to the historian, but not on account of the veracity of the deeds here attributed to the Maid, which on the contrary are all imaginary and fabulous. In the Chronique de Morosini,[44] every single fact concerning Jeanne is presented in a wrong character and in a false light. And yet Morosini's correspondents are men of business, thoughtful, subtle Venetians. These letters ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... ambitious, and swells don't have as interesting diseases as poor people. One gets tired of giving them bread pills for imaginary ailments. But Dr. Wyant is not strong himself and I fancy a country practice is better for him ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... Indeed they existed, as the schoolmen used to say, in posse, but not in esse. To be less pedantic and more exact, they existed as slips of blank paper, with a Government stamp. To give them a mercantile character for a time—viz., until presented for payment—they must be drawn by an imaginary ship-owner or a visionary merchant, and indorsed by at least one shadow, and ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... eyes, but imagined, in his sleep, that his palace and gardens were overwhelmed by an inundation, and waked with all the terrours of a man struggling in the water. He composed himself again to rest, but was affrighted by an imaginary irruption into his kingdom; and striving, as is usual in dreams, without ability to move, fancied himself betrayed to his enemies, and again started up ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... of a young man struggling against difficulties to obtain admission to a legal career and convicted of having supported himself for a time by reporting. Then he informed the House that this was no imaginary picture, but the case of 'the humble individual who now addresses you.' Immense applause followed; Croker and Sheridan expressed equal enthusiasm for Stephen's manly avowal, and the benchers' representatives ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... quite irreducible into 1 1/5 column of a paper, that I was perfectly ashamed to show it you. However, it is become a serious matter that I should convince you I neither slunk from the task through a wilful deserting neglect, or through any (most imaginary on your part) distaste of "Chaucer;" and I will try my hand again,—I hope with better luck. My health is bad, and my time taken up; but all I can spare between this and Sunday shall be employed for you, since you desire it: and if I bring you a crude, wretched paper on Sunday, you must ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... knew the truth. She knew that she had "drugged her brain against realities, and lived in dreams,"—dreams which had been, as most dreams are, strange compounds of self-deception and hallucination, distorted, imaginary ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... kindly feeling, first for ourselves and afterwards for them, should make us desire to change them. Let us rather judge from the past and from the present than take flights, unguided by experience, into the imaginary regions of the future. What do we find has been, and is, the tendency of the peoples of this continent? Does not history show, and do not modern and existing tendencies declare, that the lines of cleavage among them lie along the lines of latitude? Men spread from east to west, and from ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... is not so easy to make the same corrections in what, for the sake of simplicity, may be called right or left errors, that is horizontal firing. To make these corrections it becomes needful to inscribe imaginary circles about the target, in this case the ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... Hugh, whose eyes glared in a strained, shamed face. The older man's fingers worked nervously; he opened his lips and closed them again. It was easy to understand the travail of his mind, unwilling to forego the imaginary bit of heroism, and yet abashed by the boy's awareness of ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... witnesses for the truth and martyrs for righteousness, then I humbly venture to represent that, instead of going back to, you have gone away from, the Christ of the Gospels, who said, 'The Son of Man came ... to give His life'; and that such a Christ is not a historic but an imaginary one. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... fierce look. He was an educated soldier, of unquestioned courage, but the responsibilities of outpost duty bore rather heavily on him, and he kept all hands in a state of constant worry in anticipation of imaginary attacks. His ideas of discipline were not very rigid either, and as by this time there had been introduced into my brigade some better methods than those obtaining when it first fell to my command, I feared the effect should he, have any control over it, or meddle with its internal affairs. ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... considered as modifications of a few simple plans. The best way to understand the relation of one crystal to another is to look upon every crystal as having its faces and angles arranged in definite fashion about certain imaginary lines drawn through the crystal. These lines are called axes, and bear much the same relation to a crystal as do the axis and parallels of latitude and longitude to the earth and a geographical study ...
— An Elementary Study of Chemistry • William McPherson
... John Falstaff, illustrated in a Series of Twenty-four original Etchings by George Cruikshank. Accompanied by an imaginary Biography of the Knight, by ROBERT B. BROUGH. Royal ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... sobriety leading through bright green fields, over flowery plains, by pleasant rivulets, where all was peace and harmony, and over which the spirit of heaven itself seemed to brood and watch; and that of drunkenness, in which all the miseries and tortures of the imaginary hell were concentrated in a living death; of blighted hopes, of wasted life, of ruined homes, of broken hearts, of a conscience goaded to an insanity—to a madness—to fairly wallow in the Lethean draft, that memory might be robbed of its poignant goadings; that the ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... and hermit with a special purpose. It was by the influence, actual or imaginary, of such, that the Teutons, after the destruction of the Roman empire, were saved from becoming hordes of savages, destroying each ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... has planted in the hearts of our cities; I beg of you, if by some chance this obscure book falls into your hands, do not smile with noble disdain, do not shrug your shoulders; do not be too sure that I complain of an imaginary evil; do not be too sure that human reason is the most beautiful of faculties, that there is nothing real here below but quotations on the Bourse, gambling in the salon, wine on the table, a healthy body, indifference toward ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... dissecting a dead body he can infallibly put his finger on the cause of death, and, in cases where poisoning is suspected, the nature of the poison used. Now all this supposed exactness and infallibility is imaginary; and to treat a doctor as if his mistakes were necessarily malicious or corrupt malpractices (an inevitable deduction from the postulate that the doctor, being omniscient, cannot make mistakes) is as unjust ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors • George Bernard Shaw
... By drawing an imaginary line between the spot where the bullet struck the mattress and where it went into the floor—extend this line and we find the quarter from where the shot was ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... pith helmets the corporation sand cart spreads sand in front of you, and you are supposed to be in Egypt. To accomplish The Great Practical Joke, Troops are trained to exercise their imagination. They begin by being soldiers in blue, and imaginary uniforms. Then they do arm drill and imagine they have rifles. Then they do Brigade operations and have an imaginary enemy, get killed by imaginary shells, shoot with imaginary rifles, fire imaginary cartridges out of imaginary guns. In the end there is Heath Robinson and his ...
— Letters from France • Isaac Alexander Mack
... swept moaningly round the deserted mansion. The fire was almost out, but the candle in the lantern which stood by her bedside shed a feeble light upon the oaken floor; and the moon, though occasionally overcast, was still high in the heavens. Readily concluding the disturbance to have been wholly imaginary, the result of the impression made by her waking thoughts upon her sleeping fancies, Anna composed herself again to sleep; but scarcely had she lain down, when the same sounds, low at first, but gradually becoming louder and more distinct, broke in upon the silence. The noise ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... and found the towns chiefly occupied by Bavarians. Unless I am much mistaken, this country will soon be a bone of contention; the people (as far as I can judge in three days) are dissatisfied, and the leaders of France look with a jealous eye on the encroachment, and an imaginary line of separation will not easily be respected. Here I saw what is meant by a German forest—as far as the eye could reach all was wood. Austria may, if she pleases, by her new accession of territory become charcoal vendor to the whole world. The road is excellent, carried ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... she was not unwell at each month. Friends filled her ears with wild stories about the dreadful effects likely to follow the absence of menstruation. This worried her greatly, and as a consequence she became pale and anaemic, with loss of flesh, appetite, and sleep, and a long train of imaginary nervous symptoms. She presented herself for treatment, and insisted upon a uterine examination. This revealed no pathological condition of her uterus. She was assured that she would not die, or become insane, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of one nation to another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest, in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation into the quarrels and wars of the latter, without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... half the wealth of her people is now in that medium, the private revenue of her money-holders, or rather of her paper-holders, being, I believe, greater than that of her land-holders. Such a proportion of property, imaginary and baseless as it is, cannot be reduced to vapor, but with great explosion. She will rise out of its ruins, however, because her lands, her houses, her arts, will remain, and the greater part of her men. And these will give her again that place ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... real life, and less of love and marriage, up to the time she had met Rex! Her heroes had been imaginary ones, her ideas of love only girlish, romantic fancies. It was all very exciting and charming. She was very fond of handsome Rex, but she had yet to learn the depths of love which, sooner or later, brightens ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... friar named Rubruquis, with two companions, was sent to Tartary by Louis IX. of France to search for Prester John, an imaginary Christian potentate supposed to reign in the centre of Asia, to visit Sartach, a Tartar chief also reported a Christian, and to teach the doctrines of Christianity to all the Tartars he should find. Rubruquis did his work well, and, while failing to find Prester John or to convert ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... beneath a glacial covering, though, as before noted, the region about the Gulf of Mexico may have swayed upward when the northern portion of the land was borne down by the vast load of ice which rested upon it. Notwithstanding this possible addition to the land, our imaginary explorer would have found the portion of the continent fit for the occupancy of life not more than half as great as ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... sensible people. The stir may not be so demonstrative in cities as formerly, but through the country there is a general awakening. If we can only have patience to wait, we shall not be disappointed. Right, sooner or later, will come into its kingdom. Women are no longer children to be frightened by imaginary bears, neither will they be satisfied with playthings, who ask for better. The distance between men and women is lessening every year. Colleges are bringing them on to the same plane, and the agitation of this question of woman's right to a voice in the government, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... he is not an imaginary case—who is married, and has young people growing up in the home. He is wealthy, with a reputable position in society. But there is a sinister something in the background of his life, and he sets himself to do what he knows full well is an irreparable wrong to an inexperienced ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... broad and cheerful daylight, looked a gloomy and comfortless and unhallowed place. Noman commanded that silence should be kept, that not even a whisper should breathe from other lips than his own. He drew a line with his crutch upon the floor, and forbade that any should attempt to pass this imaginary demarcation. The auditors were all agape, and but that the door was fastened, some would doubtless have gone back, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... seemed to walk daily with her, and to know all those delicate and sweet propinquities by which liking passes into affection and affection is glorified into love. So far did these happy day-dreams carry me, that they brought me to the extreme of imaginary bliss, and poured out for me the wine of untempered joy which thrills the hearts of lovers on the verge of their betrothal. The dreams that followed that magic draught denied me no convincing touch of circumstance, and projected upon a credible and familiar scene the bright possibilities ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... kept thus: 4 Damas 1 Paisah; 4 Paisahs 1 Ana; 8 Anas 1 Mohur. The Ana is an imaginary money. The coin called a Mohur varies in its rate of exchange, but is commonly worth 34 Paisahs. The Paisah always exchanges for 4 Damas. On Prithwi Narayan’s accession, he called in all the gold and silver money and recoined it, so that I could procure no pieces of a more ancient ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... The imaginary pedlar entered, and placed his box on a table near which I was standing, the whole party immediately gathering around it. My presence had attracted no particular attention from either Seneca or his sister, the room ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... and then formed them into a band, which he called the Scottish Avengers. With them he would retire into valleys far away from the village, where none would mark what they were doing, and there they practised with club and stake instead of broadsword and pike, defended narrow passes against an imaginary enemy, and, divided into two parties, ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... cause. Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, vice-president-at-large, referred to the fact that she was born in England and transplanted to America, and said: "While you are divided from us by geographical lines, which are imaginary, and by a language which is not the same, you have not come to an alien people or land. In the realm of the heart, in the domain of mind, there are no geographical lines dividing the nations. You come to us as members of one ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... lines of the exclusive fisheries from the common fisheries will give certainty and security as to the area of their legitimate field. The headland theory of imaginary lines is abandoned by Great Britain, and the specification in the treaty of certain named bays especially provided for gives satisfaction to the inhabitants of the shores, without subtracting materially from the value or convenience of the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... that the gods have attained the nature of Brahman. Death doth not devour creatures like a tiger; its form itself is unascertainable. Besides this, some imagine Yama to be Death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. That (imaginary) god (Yama) holdeth his sway in the region of the Pitris, being the source of bliss to the virtuous and of woe to the sinful. It is at his command that death in the form of wrath, ignorance, and covetousness, occurreth among men. Swayed by pride, men always walk ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... half of her life grew more discouraging, harder to steer toward any object that seemed worth attaining, her imaginary life with Rodney lost its grip on fact and reason; became roseate, romantic, a thinner and more iridescent bubble, readier to burst and disappear altogether ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Venus is nearer to us and easier to study. For a long time astronomers had a fancy that there might be another planet even nearer to the sun than Mercury, perhaps hidden from us by the great glare of the sun. They even named this imaginary planet Vulcan, and some thought they had seen it, but it is tolerably certain that Vulcan existed only in imagination. Mercury is the nearest planet to the sun, and also the smallest, of course excepting the asteroids. ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... state whether that lady ever did get a present from me, for the statement would be an anti-climax. Suffice it that as a result of profound meditation I found myself in possession of a "Philosophy of Presents," which, copied fair on imaginary vellum, or bound in ideal morocco, I now lay at the feet of my friends, as a very appropriate gift, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... don my imaginary characters? Truly, it may seem to be a compliment, as proving that they speak from heart to heart, of universal human nature, not unaptly; still is their inventor or creator embarrassed terribly by such unwelcome honours; your precious balms oppress him, gentle friends; lift off your palm branches; ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and affectionate praises and appreciations of our old boastful big Standard-Bearer, now gone silent forever, his real and imaginary battles all fought, his work done, his life ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... been a clear case of economy to buy him off with a little loose silver, so that his lamentable figure should not limp at the heels of your conscience all over the world. To own the truth, I provided myself with several such imaginary persecutors in England, and recruited their number with at least one sickly-looking wretch whose acquaintance I first made at Assisi, in Italy, and, taking a dislike to something sinister in his aspect, permitted him to beg early and late, and all day long, without getting a single baiocco. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... well for the student to take an imaginary journey from the sun forth into space, along the plane in which extends that vast aggregation of stars which we term the Milky Way. Let him suppose that his journey could be made with something like the speed of light, or, say, ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... The short dialogue with Priscilla in the garden had determined the current of retrospect in that frequent direction this particular Sunday afternoon. The first wandering of her thought from the text, which she still attempted dutifully to follow with her eyes and silent lips, was into an imaginary enlargement of the defence she had set up for her husband against Priscilla's implied blame. The vindication of the loved object is the best balm affection can find for its wounds:—"A man must have ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... created. This is the meaning of defunct, which has made all the difficulty of the passage. WARBURTON.] I do not think that Mr. Theobald's emendation clears the text from embarrassment, though it is with a little imaginary improvement received by Hanmer, who ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... have used a device to tie together many isolated familiar facts. I have never found that six-year-old children did not readily discriminate the actual from the imaginary. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... death, but afraid of the unknown. Men like him commit suicide rather than face reality. He wants security. He's afraid of uncertainty. He lives in an unreal, imaginary world and when uncertainty, which is reality, intrudes, he is ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... through the death chamber, helmets are inspected, to see that they are sound and unpunctured, and the men are drilled in the open to practice putting them on quickly. Suddenly the warning whistle of an imaginary gas attack sounds. One backward fling of the head and the steel helmet falls off, for there is no time to lift it off. A dive into the bag carried on the chest and the respirator is grasped and with one ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... superstitions of the Russian peasantry. He had seen the work of his hands brought to naught, and a boring abandoned just short of the oil because a cross-eyed man, attracted by curiosity, had come and looked at the work. He had seen his wells go up in smoke for some imaginary act of witchcraft on the part of his foreman, and, though he laughed, he was in no ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... tears and blood; enumerate the blows they had inflicted, the warriors they had slain, the scalps they had brought off in triumph. Then, having said everything that could stir a man's spleen or pique his valor, they would dare their imaginary hearers, now that the Bannacks were few in number, to come and take their revenge—receiving no reply to this valorous bravado, they would conclude by all kinds of sneers and insults, deriding the Blackfeet for dastards and poltroons, that dared not accept their challenge. Such is ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... in the very mood to conjure up all the imaginary beings with which poetry has peopled old ocean, and almost ready to fancy I heard the distant song of the mermaid, or the mellow shell of the triton, and to picture to myself Neptune and Amphitrite with all their pageant ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... rhythmic legend is true and how much imaginary is uncertain; but it is quite probable that in the course of this survey Holyoke's name was given to the mountain, of which ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... life, the use of fire, of the bow and arrow, the barbing of hooks, and so forth, we understand them at once. Nothing can be more natural than that man should believe in an original inventor of the arts, and should tell tales about the imaginary discoverers if the real heroes be forgotten. So far all is plain sailing. But when the savage goes on to say that he who taught the use of fire or who gave the first marriage laws was a rabbit or a crow, or a dog, or a beaver, or a spider, then we are at once face to face ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... still wider. Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable appetites for wonders real and imaginary. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... the clock hadn't finished striking, and the convulsive little Hay-maker at the top of it, jerking away right and left with a scythe in front of a Moorish Palace, hadn't mowed down half an acre of imaginary grass before the Cricket joined in ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... town, lying within certain bounds—geographical or imaginary,—these events (really or in imagination) occurred. Precisely when, the chroniclers do not say. Scene opens with the breezes which June, and the coming of a new school teacher, naturally create. After the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... is half-humorous, half-serious. The speaker, in her imaginary conversation, gives her own history and that of the man she thinks she might have loved. The story is on the "Maud Muller" motive, but with less of sentimentality. The setting suggests the life of art students in Paris, or in some Italian city. ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... that might possibly be used in his defence, he always wandered off to accounts of previous outrages committed by the press-gang, or to passionate abuse of the trick by which men had been lured from their homes on the night in question to assist in putting out an imaginary fire, and then seized and carried off. Some of this very natural indignation might possibly have some effect on the jury; and this seemed the only ground of hope, and was indeed a slight one, as the judge was likely to warn ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... journey much as a provost-marshal leading his brother to prison.[936] Now the imaginary resemblance was turned into a sad reality. On Thursday, the thirty-first of October, the Bourbons reached Orleans.[937] Their reception soon convinced them that they had placed their heads in the jaws of the lion. None of the courtiers save the cardinal, their brother, and La Roche-sur-Yon, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... burden on to others' shoulders, the absence of a certain animation in production that is becoming more and more apparent; all this is beginning to preoccupy the economists of the "classical" school. Some of them ask themselves if they have not got on the wrong track: if the imaginary evil being, that was supposed to be tempted exclusively by a bait of lucre or wages, really exists. This heresy penetrates even into universities; it is found in ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... mountains of a lesser Switzerland, called the Morvan. These forests belong to Les Aigues, and to the Marquis de Ronquerolles and the Comte de Soulanges, whose castles and parks and villages, seen in the distance from these heights, give the scene a strong resemblance to the imaginary landscapes ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... her patriotism overcame her prudence, and having called the Protector ill names, she was compelled to give up her property. She was then habited in the garb of the Inquisition,—a garment painted with imaginary devils!—and taken to the great square, where an accusatory libel being fastened to her breast, a human bone was forced into her mouth—her tongue being condemned as the offending member—and then secured; in which state, with a halter round her neck, she was paraded through ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... very far-off times are apt to be unsatisfactory; the mist in which events and personages are enveloped, takes away from that appearance of reality which is the great charm of the historical novel. We are hardly concerned, in reading "Sarchedon" and similar books, to get away from the purely imaginary pictures which spring from the Novelist's own brain, and the danger is that the very elements which add to our interest in the tale as such, will go far to mislead us in our conception of the period dealt with. There is none of that sense ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... history, and to obscure certain features of character which we are not usually accustomed to associate with greatness. "History," says Cooper, "is like love, and is apt to surround her heroes with an atmosphere of imaginary brightness. It is probable that Louis de Saint Veran will be viewed by posterity only as the gallant defender of his country, while his cruel apathy on the shores of the Oswego and the Horican ...
— Canadian Notabilities, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... so. At any rate, I don't see that Sir Charles Langton has any claim upon you." There was silence for a minute, Sissy drawing an imaginary outline on Hardwicke's carpet with her riding-whip, he following her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Wuerzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Treves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... here were, to Pierston's mind, charged with a something that did not burden them elsewhere. They brought it up from that sinister Bay to the west, whose movement she and he were hearing now. It was a presence—an imaginary shape or essence from the human multitude lying below: those who had gone down in vessels of war, East Indiamen, barges, brigs, and ships of the Armada—select people, common, and debased, whose interests and hopes had been as wide asunder as the poles, but who had rolled each other ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... gloom through which he had struggled, could not find words enough in which to praise God for this promise of brighter days. He prayed that it might not be fleeting, and that morning might not show this gleam of brightness to be only imaginary. But the morrow came, and proved yesterday's events to be real and true, and Uncle Richard still without his stern and gloomy face, and ready to perfect the plans which they had discussed the ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... Rock, She plunged beside it, into gulphs profound. —She slept not, ate not, heeded no kind word, Caress of fondness, or benignant prayer: She only shriek'd, "My boy! my beautiful! They bind his hands!" And then with frantic cries She struggled 'gainst imaginary foes, Till strength was gone. Through the long syncope Her never-resting lips essay'd to form The gasping sounds, "My boy! my beautiful! Hence! Caitiffs! hence! my boy! my beautiful!" And in that unquell'd madness life went out, Like lamp before ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... seigneur had indeed fallen soundly asleep. Returning from his gallant adventure, he no longer felt the same ardor and courage to defend himself against distant or imaginary dangers with which he had rushed into the perils of the night. He had even postponed till the morrow the cleaning of his soiled garments; a great blunder, in which all else conspired. It was true that, lacking the moonlight, he had ...
— Maitre Cornelius • Honore de Balzac
... is the last of the historical plays we shall have to speak of; and we are not sorry that it is. If we are to indulge our imaginations, we had rather do it upon an imaginary theme; if we are to find subjects for the exercise of our pity and terror, we prefer seeking them in fictitious danger and fictitious distress. It gives a SORENESS to our feelings of indignation or sympathy, when we know that ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... there, on the horse," added the driver, sweeping an imaginary horse's head, with a fine ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... monstruosa opinionum portenta mentioned by the XIXth General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not to the intellectual, worship of "Nature," which moderns define to be an "unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of observed phenomena." Consequently he holds to the "dark and degrading doctrines of the Materialist," the "Hylotheist"; in opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... informed him of every circumstance of the quarrel; at which the vizier, burst out into a fit of laughter, and said, "This is one of the strangest occurrences I ever heard. Is it possible, my son, that your quarrel should rise so high about an imaginary marriage? I am sorry you fell out with your elder brother upon such a frivolous matter; but he was also wrong in being angry at what you only spoke in jest, and I ought to thank heaven for that difference which has procured me such a son-in-law. But," continued ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... sounds they hear, so the men and women of an early time personified everything that lived or moved or gave any sign of life. They filled the earth, air, and sea with imaginary beings who had power over the elements and affected the lives of men. There were nymphs in the sea, dryads in the trees, kindly or destructive spirits in the air, household gods who watched over the home, and greater gods who managed the affairs of the world. When ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... was at last on the table, he felt more at ease; his host's genial manner gave him confidence; and he was led on to talk of his work and prospects at Cloon, of the long drives over the "mountainy roads," and the often imaginary ailments of the patients who demanded his attendance, and their proneness when really ill to take the advice of priest or passer-by on sanitary matters rather than his own. "But I'll get out of it, I hope, some day," he said, looking at Louise; "when I get a few more paying patients and the infirmary, ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 6, June, 1891 • Various
... will have no objection to take service with us." "What!" cried the prisoner; "I go with the French to fight against the English! Your honour must excuse me; I could not do it to save my life." [722] This poor fisherman, whether he was a real or an imaginary person, spoke the sense of the nation. The beacon on the ridge overlooking Teignmouth was kindled; the High Tor and Causland made answer; and soon all the hill tops of the West were on re, Messengers were riding hard all night from Deputy ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... passes and defiles; he fought glorious battles, gained magnificent victories, and possessed himself of all the treasures of Asiatic wealth and power. It ought to be stated, however, in justice to the poet, that, in narrating these imaginary exploits, he had sufficient delicacy to represent Philip and the Persian monarch ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... a volume of poetry was useful, because it gave one something to learn by heart and repeat during the blank hours of the daily march, when the idle mind is all too apt to think of food in times of hunger, or possibly of purely imaginary grievances, which may become distorted into real foundations of discord under the abnormal strain of living for months in the unrelieved company of three other men. If your companions have much the ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... went to a big switch and threw it. The dynamo hummed, raised its pitch to a high, almost intolerable keening note. The ring of pseudo-searchlights seemed in an ominous sort of way to spring into life. The impression must have been entirely imaginary; actually the projectors didn't move in the slightest, didn't even vibrate. Yet the conviction persisted in the minds of both Jim and Dennis that some black, invisible force was pouring down those conduits, to ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... came near home, and stirred up the minds that would have cared for little else. Just as four hundred years before, Jack Straw was an imaginary champion whose name inflamed the people to rise, so now Jack Swing, or whoever it was who acted in that name, sent messages round that such and such a place should be attacked at such ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... young people who had two or three separate imaginary lives, which they took up on such occasions. One was a supposed life in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Robert used to plan the whole house and grounds; just what horses he would keep, what hounds, what cows, and other stock. He planned all the neighbors' houses, and who should ...
— How To Do It • Edward Everett Hale
... religion was more or less a mystery and there was no divorce from it of philosophy. The popular theology, taking the multitude of allegories and symbols for realities, degenerated into a worship of the celestial luminaries, of imaginary Deities with human feelings, passions, appetites, and lusts, of idols, stones, animals, reptiles. The Onion was sacred to the Egyptians, because its different layers were a symbol of the concentric heavenly spheres. Of course the popular religion could not satisfy the deeper ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear Grasped in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen, save to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... far and wide the vast expanse of down, cutting sharply against the sky, and dwarfing to mere shrubs the clumps of old fir trees that relieved its magnificent monotony. I was deep in a daydream and an imaginary conversation with Frank Lovell—in which I was running over with much mental eloquence what I should say, and what he would say, and what I should reply to that—when a shrill whistle caused me to start and turn suddenly round; whilst at the same instant a ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... same position as she was before her marriage. Nor does he give the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These, and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning of Greek words. But ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... not have been said of the provinces. There the landed proprietors were in a very different frame of mind. They had to struggle with a multitude of urgent practical affairs which left them little time for idyllic dreaming about an imaginary millennium. Their serfs had been emancipated, and what remained to them of their estates had to be reorganised on the basis of free labour. Into the semi-chaotic state of things created by such far-reaching changes, legal and economic, they did not wish to see any ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... direct: there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, no wire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates in this, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to have entertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into England blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian versi sciolti, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm for English versification ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Physical culture, along with many other things intended for sedentary adults, should never be forced upon little folks who get all of the exercise they need in the many journeys they take building their blocks, sailing their boats, tearing down imaginary houses, making imaginary journeys—from morning until night the little feet are kept busy—never stopping until the sandman comes at sleepy time. Do not yourself attempt to stimulate a child who seems backward. ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... deliberate. He relates in his book, "Lourdes," the story of an imaginary case of a girl, suffering from tuberculosis, who goes to Lourdes as a pilgrim, and is, apparently, cured of her disease. It breaks out, however, again during her return home; and the case would appear therefore to be one of those in which, owing ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... know about him, Thomas! What are his faults?" he snapped, and settled back to squint at his imaginary stage again. ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Academy, and performed many other duties cast upon him, besides appointing all the committees of the House. The Speaker is naturally the person to whom members, employees, and others having business with the House flock for advice, assistance, and with their real or imaginary grievances. An extensive correspondence and social duties demand much of the Speaker's time. All this, independent of his real duties as presiding officer of the House, in performing what is expected, without time for deliberation, to decide correctly all parliamentary questions and inquiries. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... say, Austria might have recovered not only Parma and Piacenza, but the kingdom of Naples itself,—no France at present able to hinder it, no Spain ever able. But Austria, contrary to expectation, would not: a Country tenacious enough of its rights, real and imaginary; greedy enough of Italy, but of Silesia much more! The matter was deliberated in Council at Vienna; but the result was magnanimously, No. "Finish this Friedrich first; finish this Silesia. Nothing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... is scarcely a bird of which you can make a pet in your mind, as you may of the chickadee, for instance, or the bluebird, or the hermit thrush. He does not lend himself naturally to such imaginary endearments. But it is pleasant to have him on one's daily beat. I should count it one compensation for having to live in Florida instead of in Massachusetts (but I might require a good many others) that ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... imaginary line which divided the two salons unless she was called upon to do so. She was still summoned like a child to speak to certain persons who took an especial interest in her, and who were kind enough to wish to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... many descriptions of travel to the Holy Land, whose authors, trusting to the fact that their assertions could not easily be disproved, have indulged their fancy, seeking to impart interest to their works by the relation of imaginary dangers, and by exaggeration of every kind, for the sake of gaining praise and admiration. Many such men might blush with shame on reading this journal of a ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... them. An oft-quoted instance of their cruelty is recorded of a bailie named Landenburg, who publicly reproved a peasant for living in a house above his station. On another occasion, having fined an old and much respected laborer, named Henry of Melchi, a yoke of oxen for an imaginary offence, the Governor's messenger jeeringly told the old man, who was lamenting that if he lost his cattle he could no longer earn his bread, that if he wanted to use a plough he had better draw it himself, being only a vile peasant. To this insult Henry's ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... maid wearied of her organ and her picture-making, she seated herself at the card-table, and played l'hombre, or tarok, with two imaginary adversaries, enjoying the manner in which the copper coins won the ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... of dying; some lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part convinced that there were now no gods at all, and that the final endless night of which we have heard had come upon the world.[44] Among these there were some who augmented the real terrors by others imaginary or wilfully invented. I remember some who declared that one part of Misenum had fallen, that another was on fire; it was false, but they found people to believe them. It now grew rather lighter, which we imagined to be rather ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... written since the world began has been written by some one person, by an "I," though that "I" might have been omitted from the composition or replaced by the journalistic "we." To some extent the journalist does sink his personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a personality built up, like the human personality, by its past; and the result is a pompous, colourless, lifeless simulacrum. But in every other department of letters the trail of the "I" is over every page and every sentence. The most impersonal essays ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... crowning the audience.> Both Leaders: Crowned by the throngs again, <On this line they walk backward, playing great imaginary harps.> You shall make songs again, Singing along For ten ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... He would project mental photographs of her at the top of a table, beaming sweetly upon him, opposite, with her dim, lovely eyes, and pouring out the tea from a small silver pot. Overtop never could explain it; but this imaginary picture realized all ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... his brother without cause, let him put his finger to his lips, and forgive others as he would be forgiven. One's first [5] lesson is to learn one's self; having done this, one will naturally, through grace from God, forgive his brother and love his enemies. To avenge an imaginary or an actual wrong, is suicidal. The law of our God and the rule of our church is to tell thy brother his fault and thereby help [10] him. If this rule fails in effect, then take the next Scrip- tural step: drop this member's name from the church, and thereafter "let the dead ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Like a bat.] The description of an imaginary being, who is called Typhurgo, in the Zodiacus Vitae, has some touches very ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... was now at hand. Do not laugh at me, ye self-assured ones, with your comfortable sense of your own powers,—ye who care as little for an audience as for a field of cabbages,—do not jeer at one who has felt the pangs of shyness and quailed under the imaginary terrors of a first public appearance. For you it may be a small matter to face an audience,—that nearest approximation to the many-headed monster which we can palpably encounter; but for one whose diffidence had become the standard of that quality to his acquaintances the venture was perilous and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... this performance Eustacia was half in doubt about the security of her position; yet it had a fearful joy. A series of attentions paid to her, and yet not to her but to some imaginary person, by the first man she had ever been inclined to adore, complicated her emotions indescribably. She had loved him partly because he was exceptional in this scene, partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly because she was in desperate need of loving ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... adornments lent their inviting charm. The general plan of these houses seems to have been of Greek origin, as well as the system of decoration used on the walls. These, when not wainscoted with marble, were covered with fantastic, but often artistic, painted decorations, in which an imaginary architecture as of metal, afantastic and arbitrary perspective, illusory pictures, and highly finished figures were the chief elements. These were executed in brilliant colors with excellent effect. ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Mattern," continued, "if I may say so without offense, the age (real or imaginary) of the speakers may make a difference in Albuquerque, but with ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... attorney-general of the province, and later on a judge of the supreme court. Mr. Wetmore, when haranguing St. John audiences, used to depict the dreadful effects of confederation in a manner peculiarly his own. His great plea was an imaginary dialogue between himself and his little son, that precocious infant asking him in lisping tones, "Father, what country do we live in?" to which he would reply, "My dear son, you have no country, for Mr. Tilley has sold us to the Canadians ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... the gentleman has avoided the capital mistake of commenting on things that actually exist. Comments on its facts are generally esteemed by the people of a country, impertinent and unjust; and your true way to succeed, is to treat as freely as possible its imaginary peculiarities." ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... race. A young noble is at a ball; must he quit its bright enchantments, and the society of the fair whom he admires, because a bearded coachman is freezing without? A beauteous lady, wrapped in ermine and velvet, is weeping in the theatre over the woes of some imaginary heroine; would you have her dry her tearful eyes, and leave the scene of touching interest and elegant excitement, because icicles are hanging from the locks of her little postilion, and his head is gradually sinking on his breast, as the fatal sleep steals over him? Selfish!— ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... intelligence, but matter, through its own arrangement, produces intelligence. Let us fix intelligence where it is, in the organized body; we must not detach it from its support to perch it in the sky on an imaginary throne. This disproportionate conception, once introduced into our minds, ends in perverting the natural play of our sentiments, and, like a monstrous parasite, abstracts for itself all our substance.[3315] The first interest of ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... their ferocity, and were proportionately gratifying. These he called his "war arrows," and would send one into a tree and watch it shiver, then grunt "Ugh, heap good," and rejoice in the squirming of the imaginary ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... my imaginary assailant was only Hans, who emerged from some place where he had been hiding; a ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... his first aim to make his people look as if they belonged to their station. The "mute inglorious Milton" and Maud Muller with her "nameless longings" had no place on his canvases. His was the genuine peasant of field and farm, no imaginary denizen of the poets' Arcady. "The beautiful is the fitting," was his final summary of aesthetic theory, and the theory was put into practice on ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... the instrument of Warwick's vengeance, and had thrown himself entirely in the power of his most inveterate enemies; that the mortal injuries which the one royal family had suffered from the other, were now past all forgiveness, and no imaginary union of interests could ever suffice to obliterate them; that even if the leaders were willing to forget past offences, the animosity of their adherents would prevent a sincere coalition of parties, and would, in spite of all temporary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... party leaders. Especially in international diplomacy is truthfulness far to seek. Secretary Hay, indeed, stated in the following words: "The principles which have guided us have been of limpid simplicity. We have set no traps; we have wasted no time in evading the imaginary traps of others. There might be worse reputations for a country to acquire than that of always speaking the truth, and always expecting it from others. In bargaining we have tried not to get the worst ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... on a rug surrounded by foreign consuls. Anton, dressed in his high-school uniform, with his grandfather's old sabre coming to his shoulder, used to act the part of the Governor with extraordinary subtlety and carry out a review of imaginary Cossacks. Often the children would gather round their mother or their old nurse to ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... Direck would have found it difficult to recall afterwards what it was they chattered about, except that somehow he acquired the valuable knowledge that Miss Corner was called Cecily, and her sister Letty, and then—so far old Essex custom held—the masculine section was left for a few minutes for some imaginary drinking, and a lighting of cigars and cigarettes, after which everybody went through interwoven moonlight and afterglow to the barn. Mr. Britling sat down to a pianola in the corner and began the familiar cadences of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... jailer to let me out o' this here abominably real-lookin' imaginary lockup. Hang ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... mentions at the same time with them, he does not inform us. Nor can I learn that any other person, whether Greek or Barbarian, except himself, has ever yet been so fortunate as to meet with these imaginary countries. ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge
... a shudder, not a real shudder though. The sort one makes over a purely imaginary prospect. Some expression of her feeling must have betrayed itself in Mary's face, for Paula, happening to look at her just ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... the State finances were suffering a violent reaction from the extravagant legislation of 1836 and 1837. One of the popular ways of attacking an obnoxious political doctrine in that day was writing letters from some imaginary backwoods settlement, setting forth in homely vernacular the writer's views of the question, and showing how its application affected his part of the world. These letters were really a rude form of the "Bigelow Papers" or "Nasby Letters." Soon after ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... then he had spent days and nights such as sap the foundations of a man's moral being and shake convictions which appeared impregnable. The catastrophe which had come upon him was proportionate in its effects to the immeasurable happiness which preceded it. Remember that it was not only the imaginary wrong from which his mind suffered; the fact that Thyrza loved Egremont was in itself an agony almost enough to threaten his reason. His love was not demonstrative; perhaps he did not himself know all its force until jealousy taught him. How, think you, did he spend that night on the ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... Genii, one holding a pulley, one upholding the column upon his hands, alternate with two Disciples, for whom their extended wings create a background. One of these is complemented by hammer and anvil, the other by furnace and tongs. Both share the column's weight on powerful arms. The imaginary figures show potential strength in repose, the human figures potent strength in action. The frieze in low ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... could not admit of impulsion; for to do this I must have known that a celestial matter was the agent. But so far from knowing that there is any such matter, I have proved it to be merely imaginary. ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... Porters,—they are not beautiful either, to a taciturn Majesty of some sense, if he cared about their doings or them. Voracious, plunderous, all of them; like hounds, long hungry, got into a rich house which has no master, or a mere imaginary one. "MENTERIS IMPUDENTISSIME," said Walpole in his dog-latin once, in our Royal presence, to one of these official plunderous gentlemen, "You tell an impudent lie!"—at which we only laughed. [Horace Walpole, Reminiscences of George I. and George ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... times a merchant carrying goodly pearls, at other times a bandit engaged in feats of plunder. All possible scenes in history or imagination that she understood did the child try to enact in the wilderness. But she went there now with no intention of posing in any imaginary part. She went there because her heart ...
— Daddy's Girl • L. T. Meade
... dog dashed from a gateway ahead of them and threatened the car furiously. They both applied imaginary brakes to the car with feet and hands and taut nerves. The puppy escaping death by an inch, trotted back to his saved home with an air that comes from duty well performed. They looked from the ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... what to do with his people,—yet it is all to no purpose, for there is a counsel above, an older counsel which must stand and take place in all generations. If men's conclusions be not according to the counsel of his will, they are but imaginary dreams, like the fancies of a distracted person, who imagining himself a king, sits down on the throne, and gives out decrees and ordinances. May not he who sits in heaven laugh at the foolishness and madness of men who act in all things as if they had no dependence ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... national debt—the persons whose affairs are under the care of the Court of Chancery, and whose money is laid out by the Accountant General, all these may be injured by a temporary rise of the public funds, growing out of a conspiracy of this kind; and, Gentlemen, this is no imaginary statement of mine, for it will appear to you to-day, that all these persons were in fact injured by the temporary rise produced by this conspiracy. Undoubtedly the public funds will be affected by rumours, which ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... invited to realise them, of societies in which all were workers on equal terms, and groups of fraternal citizens, separated no longer by the egoisms of the private home, dwelt together in palaces called "phalansteries," which appear to have been imaginary anticipations of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here lapped in luxury, they were to feast at common tables; and between meals the men were to work in the fields singing, while a lady accompanied their voices on a grand piano under ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... totally unqualified for this undertaking, they yet were highly pleased with it. They fancied that they were exercising their judgment, while they opposed to the prejudices of ancient authority more powerful prejudices of another kind. The novelty itself of the doctrines; the pleasure of an imaginary triumph in dispute; the fervent zeal of the reformed preachers; their patience, and even alacrity, in suffering persecution, death, and torments; a disgust at the restraints of the old religion; an indignation against the tyranny and interested ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... less indispensable. The great dramatic poet must add to this rare assemblage, a thorough acquaintance with the characters and ideas of former times: with the lore of the historian, he must embody in his imaginary characters the incidents of actual event; with the fervour of the poet, portray the transactions and thoughts of past times; with the eye of the painter, arrange his scenery, dresses, and localities, so as to produce the strongest possible impression of reality on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... notice than the once celebrated latin poet and philosopher, Hobbes: his connexion with the Devonshire family began early in life, and Chatsworth, in consequence, became his occasional residence; he was a man originally of a weak constitution, and he is said to have been subject through life to imaginary and unnecessary personal fears, which continually preyed upon and agitated his spirits; yet by a strict and uniform attention to diet and exercise, he lived to the age of 92. He was a very early riser, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 553, June 23, 1832 • Various
... especially as I am using a commercial pollen with the hope of getting a hardy white walnut with possibly a coarse bark like the black to ward off sun-scald in this climate. They are on their way. I don't know when we'll be eating these imaginary nuts. However, it is not so long ago that fruit growing on the cattle range was a dream. I grew the first pears in Alberta, so far as we know. Now we are insulted if there is not a crop of fruit every year. I have many ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... drawn battle, in which both sides gained and lost. The slave system obtained in esse an additional slave State and two others in posse, out of the Louisiana territory, while free industrialism secured the erection of an imaginary fence through this land, to the north of which its slave rival was never to settle. Maine was also admitted to preserve the status quo and balance of political forces between the sections. Alas! however, for the foresight of statesmen who build ...
— Modern Industrialism and the Negroes of the United States - The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers No. 12 • Archibald H. Grimke
... Willoughby feel this. She feared that she had neglected the artless and simple-minded child; she feared that she had not been sufficiently thoughtful about her; and now longed to do something to make amends for this imaginary neglect. So she sought to make the journey as pleasant as possible by cheerful remarks and lively observations. None of these things, however, produced any effect upon the attitude of Minnie. She sat there, with unalterable sweetness ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... Belford; since, otherwise, some misunderstanding might have happened between them: for although I hope this Mr. Belford is an altered man, and in time will be a reformed one, yet is he one of those high spirits that has been accustomed to resent imaginary indignities to himself, when, I believe, he has not been studious to avoid giving real offences to others; men of this cast acting as if they thought all the world was made to bar with them, and they with nobody ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... child, who at first had been afraid of him, became before the summer was through! What talks they held! How merrily they laughed together! and how serenely Argus listened while Sunshine told him long histories of imaginary wanderings among the clouds, in enchanted forests, or "away beyond the blue up in the sky"! Confidences these; ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... take this little walk, when it began to grow dusk; and, being so pitilessly cold, we hurried back to our hotel. Thus far, I think, what I have seen of Paris is wholly unlike what I expected; but very like an imaginary picture which I had conceived of St. Petersburg,— new, bright, magnificent, and ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... not let your printer embellish them with cuts of roosters, chickens, pigs, or the like. Not that we are ashamed of them; far be it from such. You do not, however, need to have a sheet of paper littered up with pictures of imaginary animals in order to convince your customer that you are selling the meats of that animal. I like a plainly printed letterhead that carries my name, my address and ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... or with fortune were not always suffered to marry in this humdrum fashion. Abduction was by no means an imaginary peril. Mrs. Delany tells the story of a lady in Ireland, from whom she received the relation, who was entrapped in her uncle's house, carried off by four men in masks, and treated in the most brutal manner. And in ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... consequences, that is the proper object of censure. Many of the diseases to which we are subject might be traced to this source; yet we are generally so little aware of it, that we impute them to the state of the weather, to infection, or any other imaginary cause, rather than the true one. The weather has very little serious effect upon a person in health, unless exposed to it in some unusual manner that suddenly checks perspiration, or some of the ordinary evacuations. ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... the water, and were thus still more dangerous to other ships, when they could strike an antagonist on the side. The bow of a ship was generally ornamented by the head of some animal, such as a wild boar or a wolf, or some imaginary creature placed above the rostra. On both sides of the prow were painted eyes, such as are seen on the bows of boats and vessels in the Mediterranean at the present day. The upper part of the prow was frequently ornamented with a helmet covered ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... in close proximity. Then was repeated the alarm and consternation of two years before, fears for the safety of the capital being magnified by the confusion and discord existing among the different generals in Washington and Baltimore; and the imaginary dangers vanished only with the appearance of General Wright, who, with the Sixth Corps and one division of the Nineteenth Corps, pushed out to attack Early as soon as he could get his arriving troops in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... lonely star, I have taught them to forget Theology; with Architecture, I have hidden the ramparts of their cloudy heaven; with Music, the fierce planets' daughter whose hair is always on fire, and with Grammar that is the moon's daughter, I have shut their ears to the imaginary harpings and speech of the angels; and I have made formations of battle with Arithmetic that have put the hosts of heaven to the rout. But, Rhetoric and Dialectic, that have been born out of the ...
— The Hour Glass • W.B.Yeats
... a period of at least two or three months for a newspaper or magazine in that language, if it is a modern one. Translate as before, but give most of your time to rapid oral translation for a real or imaginary ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... Relating imaginary events of this character or repeating what mariners had told or written about wreck and storm at sea in the safe harbor of the old store on the Shell Road was different from being an eyewitness ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... road; and as they fluttered and strutted, scolded and cooed, the little watcher at her desk unconsciously imitated their movements, thrusting out her chest, cocking her head pertly on one side and nodding and pecking at imaginary birds, just as her pretty feathered friends were doing as they basked in the warm sunshine. Involuntarily the woman smiled. Then, as the girl continued to mimic the doves, she tapped her foot impatiently on the floor and repeated ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... on which the Proportional Representation Society mainly relies is an imaginary election, held in November 1906 by means of ballot papers distributed through members and friends of the society and through eight newspapers. 'The constituency,' we are told, 'was supposed to return five members; the candidates, twelve in number, were politicians whose names might ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... and ideal forms more lovely than ever trod this earth, hovered around us:—and then those thoughts which would intrude—remembrances of the far-off absent, who are or have been loved, mingled with the whole, and shed an imaginary splendour or a tender interest, over scenes which required no extraneous powers to enhance their native loveliness.—no charm borrowed from imagination to ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... all our thoughts is sped ineffective through the dark; not one drop of the magical elixirs love distills is wasted. Let us consider how this may be. There is a habit we nearly all have indulged in: we often weave little stories in our minds expending love and pity upon the imaginary beings we have created. But I have been led to think that many of these are not imaginary, that somewhere in the world beings are thinking, loving, suffering just in that way, and we merely reform ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... would be upsetting Blenkiron's plans, for he had given me no instructions about housebreaking. All this unsettled me worse than ever. I began to lie awake planning some means of entrance ... I would be a peasant from the next valley who had twisted his ankle ... I would go seeking an imaginary cousin among the servants ... I would start a fire in the place and have the doors ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... occupy my leisure in constructing imaginary cases, mostly criminal, for the purpose of study and for the acquirement of experience. For instance, I would devise an ingenious fraud and would plan it in detail, taking every precaution that I could think of against failure or detection, ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... meantime Lady Rosamond is enjoying the constant whirl and gaiety of London life. Her husband is immersed in the broil of parliamentary affairs. As a representative of his native borough, he is responsible for every grievance, real or imaginary, under which his constituents are daily groaning. The party with whom he was associated was daily becoming unpopular—a crisis was at hand—a dissolution was expected. Another appeal to the country would probably take place. Her ladyship was ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... made me so long hesitate, always feeling that the case of Man and his Races, and of other animals, and that of plants, is one and the same, and that if a vera causa be admitted for one instant, [instead] of a purely unknown and imaginary one, such as the word 'creation,' all ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the clue to her irritation. It was that imaginary young lady of Ernest Breslaw's. Had she been a man, ere this she would have plunged into vigorous attempt to dislodge that or any other rival, no matter how assured his position, but being a woman and compelled to await "The idiot Chance ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... had quieted it, Mr. Fogg, although a little nervous and excited, concluded to try it again. Turning on the imaginary mutton, he began. Only sixty-four sheep had slid over the fence, when Fogg's aunt knocked at the door and asked if he was awake. When she learned that he was, she said she believed he had forgotten to close the back shutters, and she thought she ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... when they are ugly, and he chooses to take pains with them, he knows nothing else: the more pains he takes with even familiar animals, the worse they are (witness the horse in that plate of the Good Samaritan), and any attempts to finish the first scribbled energy of his imaginary lions and tigers, end always only in the loss of the fiendish power and rage which were all he could conceive in ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... he said, 'and was apparently holding a conversation with you, as she used to keep silence at intervals as if listening to your replies.' I asked him if he could possibly remember the hour at which the imaginary conversation took place. He replied that, curiously enough, he could tell it accurately, as he had looked at his watch, and found the time between half-past ten and eleven o'clock—the exact time of the mysterious manifestations heard ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... anyone can define a "local" bird from a "British" bird, or a "British" bird from a "foreign" bird? Lastly, every one should know that every bird found in Leicestershire is a "British" bird, and that every "British" bird is a "foreign" one; and that each of these imaginary divisions is being constantly recruited from the division immediately above it. [Footnote: There are but two birds belonging to the Paridae (Titmice), which are claimed as being peculiar to Britain; and these merely on the ground ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... and Richard and I, Margaret, played on Sophronia years ago. If the thunder-storm had not brought you all up-stairs, there would have been some very pretty ghost-gliding, and the poor soul would very likely have been frightened into a real fit instead of an imaginary one. Children don't realise that sort of thing; I certainly did not, nor my brothers; but I think these two realise it now, and they are not likely to try anything of the kind again. ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... slave-traders have used it as a pretext for stirring up the rebellion among the natives. England for many years has been doing her best to suppress slave-trading, and the slave-traders make use of any grievance, imaginary or otherwise, in their attempts to overthrow the power of the white men, in order that their barbarous man-hunting may not be interfered with. Several men-of-war have been sent by England to Sierra Leone, and are to be reinforced by others; troops have also ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Rio Guayavero, he found only treeless savannahs, extending as far as the eye could reach. The chain of mountains placed by several modern geographers, between the Meta and the Vichada, and which appears to link the Andes of New Grenada with the Sierra Parime, is altogether imaginary. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... changelings I mean a belief that fairies and other imaginary beings are on the watch for young children, or (as we shall see hereafter) sometimes even for adults, that they may, if they can find them unguarded, seize and carry them off, leaving in their place one of themselves, or a block of wood animated by their enchantments ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... at the festivals of Bacchus, of taking the disguise of satyrs, doubtless originated in the desire to approach more nearly to the presence of their divinity. The desire of escaping from self into something new and strange, of living in an imaginary world, broke forth in a thousand instances in those festivals. It was seen in the coloring of the body, the wearing of skins and masks of wood or bark, and in the complete costume ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... Friday Street, William Paterson, the founder of the Bank of England, and originator of the unfortunate Darien scheme, held his real or imaginary Wednesday club meetings, in which were discussed proposals for the union of England and Scotland, and the redemption of the National Debt. This remarkable financier was born at Lochnabar, in Dumfriesshire, in 1648, and died in 1719. The ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... tall, spare, handsome man, with gray mustache and a fierce look. He was an educated soldier, of unquestioned courage, but the responsibilities of outpost duty bore rather heavily on him, and he kept all hands in a state of constant worry in anticipation of imaginary attacks. His ideas of discipline were not very rigid either, and as by this time there had been introduced into my brigade some better methods than those obtaining when it first fell to my command, I feared the effect should he, have any control over it, or meddle with ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... imagined, in his sleep, that his palace and gardens were overwhelmed by an inundation, and waked with all the terrours of a man struggling in the water. He composed himself again to rest, but was affrighted by an imaginary irruption into his kingdom; and striving, as is usual in dreams, without ability to move, fancied himself betrayed to his enemies, and again started up with ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... of the song except the general laws of good taste. The only plan is to try and try again until the result contains something of the singing quality. Very often it is helpful to fit the words to some air imaginary or otherwise which runs in the head. The song may be long or short, tell little or a great deal. In practice, as a rule, it is less than twenty-four lines in length and expresses a single thought or emotion. Its only two essentials are that it be ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow
... authorities of the Admiralty as a trustworthy document, and duly preserved among the official records. But at the time the court refused to receive it in evidence, and adopted instead two falsified charts, in which, by the introduction of imaginary shoals and the narrowing of the channel to Aix Roads from two miles to one, the success of the scheme appeared impossible. Although this gross deception was more than suspected, both then and afterwards, ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Admiral of the Red, Rear-Admiral of the Fleet, Etc., Etc. • Thomas Cochrane, Earl of Dundonald
... he wanted an Anti-Abbot. Friar John was the handiest person, and he took him. But it is worth noting that the Abbot of Thelema never afterwards appears as such, or in the slightest relation to this miniature but most curious and interesting example of the Renaissance fancy for imaginary countries, cities, institutions, with its splendours of architecture and decoration, its luxurious but not loose living, its gallantry and its learning, its gorgeous dress, its polished manners (the Abbot must have had some trouble to learn them), and its "inscriptions and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... twilight was deepening when the old man signaled to his boy in the distance to bring up the mare. Wheat was slowly walking the brown horse over the course, when the boy came up, cantering the mare, blanketed with an old government blanket, over the imaginary track also. These preliminaries thrilled us like the tuning of a fiddle for a dance. Stallings and the old homesteader went out to the starting point to give the riders the terms of the race, while the remainder of us congregated at the finish. It ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... to struggle. He sometimes dreamed of hanging there himself, in Jesus's place, his head crowned with thorns, nails driven through his hands and feet, and his side rent by spears. What a coward he must be to complain of an imaginary wound, when God bled there from His whole body, and yet preserved on His lips the blessed smile of the Redemption! And however unworthy it might be, he offered up his wound as a sacrifice, ended by falling into ecstasy, and ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... or Benshie, sometimes called the Shrieking Woman, is an imaginary being, supposed by the Irish to predict, by her shrieks and wails, the death of some member in the family over which she exercises a kind of supervision. To this fable Moore alludes in ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... for the sake of a fish,' was his proverbial philosophy. It behoved him to forget his holidays (there would always remain the fun of inventing imaginary adventures) and, as Lurgan Sahib had said, to work. Of all the boys hurrying back to St Xavier's, from Sukkur in the sands to Galle beneath the palms, none was so filled with virtue as Kimball O'Hara, jiggeting down to Umballa behind Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, whose name on ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... artist can be born. But they come in such a rainbow of glory that all subsequent achievement appears dull and earthly in comparison. We are all artists; almost all in the age of illusion, cultivating an imaginary genius, and walking to the strains of some deceiving Ariel; small wonder, indeed, if we were happy! But art, of whatever nature, is a kind of mistress; and though these dreams of youth fall by their own baselessness, others succeed, grave and more substantial; ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... would give his all to be able to rise, yet whose limbs were immovable, held by some subtle and cruel power. I had read in novels about men agonized by remorse and indecision. I now experienced those sensations myself. I discovered they were not imaginary states. ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... the spiritual with the practical, the imaginary with the real. The maxims that have been followed in the earlier and the later period produced their inevitable result. In the former that maxim was, "Ignorance is the mother of Devotion in the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... curious property of this instrument is, that, by drawing out the keys, the hammers are transferred to different strings. By which means a composition may be transposed half a note, a whole note, or a flat third lower at pleasure, without the embarrassment of different notes or clefs, real or imaginary." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... like a tiger; its form itself is unascertainable. Besides this, some imagine Yama to be Death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. That (imaginary) god (Yama) holdeth his sway in the region of the Pitris, being the source of bliss to the virtuous and of woe to the sinful. It is at his command that death in the form of wrath, ignorance, and covetousness, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... reader, this colloquial chapter, as the author's apology for a preface, an imaginary short conference, or letter of introduction, which brings you acquainted with the eccentric writer of this volume; and as in all well regulated society a person is expected to give some account of himself before he is placed upon terms of intimacy with the family, you shall in the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... thousands, and the perpetrators eulogized by the community as "honorable men," reveals such a prostration of law, as gives impunity to crime—a state of society, an omnipresent public sentiment reckless of human life, taking bloody vengeance on the spot for every imaginary affront, glorying in such assassinations as the only true honor and chivalry, successfully defying the civil arm, and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Romancing freely, he was hardly conscious when he was lying either on a small scale or on a large, being equally delighted with his own conceits and with the pleasure he was giving to his auditors. While thus recounting real and imaginary incidents, he could almost delude himself into the belief that he was still the bold, radiant Casanova, the favorite of fortune and of beautiful women, the honored guest of secular and spiritual princes, the man whose spendings and gamblings and gifts must be reckoned in thousands. It was possible ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... philanthropic. His labors, which are principally intended to show the evils of our taxes upon food, will not be in vain; though he will find many in England, as I found in America, who have no ear for truth when it opposes their prejudices or imaginary self-interest. He gave me a most cheering account of the march of abolition in Ohio, and said he had lately attended a meeting held at the invitation of the abolitionists, on the 5th of July, at which there were three thousand persons, who had come to the place of meeting in nine hundred ...
— A Visit To The United States In 1841 • Joseph Sturge
... it to the old man. 'Hair off his dog, you know,' he said. And two or three times Con made an effort to induce his father to take a whiff of smoke, but old Peetree shook his head disgustedly, and returned to his mutterings and the picking of imaginary ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... appearance a confused result of belladonna, bleached hair, antimony and mineral acids, until one is compelled to discuss her character, and wonder whether the line between a decent and indecent life is, like the equator, an imaginary line. ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... reflection in the water, presented a broad, unbroken belt of utter blackness. The effect was quite startling, like some huge conjurer's trick. It seemed as if we had crossed the boundary-line between the real and the imaginary, and this was indeed the land of shadows and of spectres. What magic oar was that the guide wielded that it could transport me to such a realm! Indeed, had I not committed some fatal mistake, and left that trusty servant behind, and had not some ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... Saturdays, when Lawrence came down, and ended on the Mondays, when he went away. If, in the meantime, she sat down to work, she went off into a trance; if she was sent out for fresh air, she walked quarter-deck on the esplanade, neither seeing nor hearing anything, we averred, but some imaginary ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... waggish comrade, throwing his head back and performing an imaginary air by briskly drawing one arm across the other, "who knows that I may not fiddle myself into her majesty's good graces so as to became a sort of ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... institution show the following: On admission he was yelling, cursing, and very much excited; completely disoriented; repeated the same sentence over and over again in a singing fashion. He talked to the Lord, and answered imaginary questions; had auditory and visual hallucinations, and various delusional ideas; thought someone was talking to him constantly; that he was being shot at every few minutes, and yelled with anguish at every supposed shot. He cried and ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... year he composed the allegory of "Real and Imaginary Time," first published in the Sibylline Leaves, having been accidentally omitted in ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... Simiti, in far-off Colombia. His life had been wrecked by holding to the belief of evil as a power, real and intelligent. He began to see the light; but he did not overcome fear sufficiently to make his demonstration and break the imaginary bonds which held him. He saw, but he did not prove. He will, some day. And, Doctor, you and everybody else will have to do the same. For, unless Jesus uttered the most malicious falsehoods ever voiced, every human being will have ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... which lighted the fire of his genius, and of the difficulties which surrounded him. Moreover, a knowledge of the real facts serves to clear away all the misleading fables about student life at Pavia, about service with imaginary uncles who were corsairs or admirals, and about galleys commanded for King Rene. Some of these fables are due to the mistaken piety of the great discoverer's son Hernando, and to others, who seem to have thought that they were doing honor ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... that she should have promised Hicks to practice a song with him, and no process of reasoning could have made it otherwise. The imaginary opponent with whom he scornfully argued the matter had not a word for himself. Neither could the young girl answer anything to the cutting speeches which he mentally made her as he sat alone chewing the end of ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... take an imaginary journey through the provinces and begin at Hong Kong, where, in 1850, I began my actual ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... and glancing back over her shoulder for goblins and burglars to-night as she put the key into the door! No scared chattering of teeth in the dark hall! No skipping three steps at a time up the stairs pursued by imaginary hands that would grip at her ankles! She faced the darkness with wide-open eyes, instead of feeling her way with lids squeezed down as had been her custom; and when eyes seemed to look back at her from the darkness, her boyhood laughed ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... upon his subject as a purely imaginary one? Surely he must have had some definite form before his mental vision; for although sculpture cannot, like painting, tell an elaborate story, still each figure must have a moral and a meaning, must show cause for its existence, and indicate ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... curve an imaginary ball in his right hand, then glanced over the principal's desk. A small, but thick, heavy ...
— The Grammar School Boys of Gridley - or, Dick & Co. Start Things Moving • H. Irving Hancock
... towards the East River, as if it were disgusted with the smell of old clothes, and had determined to wash itself clean. This excellent intention it has, however, evidently contributed towards the making of that imaginary pavement mentioned in the old adage; for it is still emphatically a dirty street. It has never been able to shake off the Hebraic taint of filth which it inherits from the ancestral thoroughfare. It is slushy and greasy, as if it were twin ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... tower' and 'the strong city'; the man lifted up above danger on the battlements of the one, and the man fancying himself to be high above it (and only fancying himself) in the imaginary ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Moli'ere's Bourgeois Gentilhomme; in which the nouveau riche is persuaded that the Grand Seigneur has made him a mamamouchi, a knight of an imaginary order, and goes through the ceremony of ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did; and entirely he thought he did. But see how the notions of such retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad passions he punishes. It is true the punishments are imaginary. Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be dehumanised or he would cry out against them with horror and detestation. But the poem draws them as truths; the writer's creed threatened them; he himself contributed to maintain the belief; and however we may suppose such a ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... incontinently, in company with the rest. Had my captives invited this one? Assuredly not. Heedless of others' efforts, he hastened up, attracted by the odour of the Mole. So it was with those whose obliging assistance is extolled. I repeat, in respect of their imaginary prowess, what I have said elsewhere of the Sacred Beetle's: it is a child's story, worthy to rank with any fairytale for the amusement ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... a patch of forest, and from that came suddenly upon a clearing where a spacious bamboo house stood half hidden by a clump of umbrageous trees, beneath one of which was drawn up a group which at the first glance made the boy wonder whether he was gazing at a scene in real life, or some imaginary picture from ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... right. But many do not stop there. They suppose that divine inspiration has given the Book certain grammatical, rhetorical, logical, historical, scientific and metaphysical qualities which it has not given it, and they even attribute its superior worth and saving power to those imaginary qualities. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... can show you in my flower-bed one little white flower, of no great beauty and conical in shape, from which I have produced in two years another, saucer-shaped, pink, and of thrice the size, almost exactly realising an imaginary flower, drawn by my sister-in-law to represent one of which she had dreamed. We can often produce the very shape, size, and colour we wish from something that at first seems to have no likeness to it whatever; ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... was strongly affected by the spectacle of his dead body borne past her father's door. In about a fortnight afterwards she assured her family that he appeared to her. She saw the apparition, in the beginning, only at night; but ere long it ventured, as she imagined, to appear in day-light. Many imaginary conversations took place between them; and the fact of the peasantry flocking to the herd's house to satisfy themselves as to the truth of the rumor, is yet well remembered in the parish. It, was also affirmed, that as the funeral of M'Kenna passed to the churchyard, ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... I think it wholly groundless, or my fears altogether imaginary, that the abolishing of Christianity may perhaps bring the Church into danger, or at least put the senate to the trouble of another securing vote. I desire I may not be mistaken; I am far from presuming to affirm or think that the Church is in danger at present, or as things now ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... children at the breast to swallow a quantity of cold water from a calabash. An infant was nearly choked on this morning by the injection of more than a pint of water down its throat. Whether the mothers follow this custom for the purpose of curing the children of any imaginary complaints, or, as is more probable, in the hope of rendering them less eager for their natural food, was not ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... friendly Assistance that she could expect from her, during Bellamora's stay in Town: which she did with so much Earnestness, and visible Integrity, that the pretty innocent Creature was going to make her a full and real Discovery of her imaginary insupportable Misfortunes; and (doubtless) had done it, had she not been prevented by the Return of the Lady, whom she hop'd to have found her Cousin Brightly. The Gentleman, her Husband just saw her within Doors, and order'd the Coach to drive to some of his Bottle-Companions; which gave the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... over the new game, Mike tore about, panting, and dashing from side to side through the underbrush on real, or imaginary, scents, now stopping to dig madly for a moment, then racing on to catch up with his master, who frequently had to haul him over the precipitous crags by the shaggy hair on ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... carbonic dioxide), surrounding its polar regions, which increase considerably during the winter, and decrease during the summer seasons on that planet; but there are no canals! The fact that our largest and best telescopes failed to show these imaginary canals, was an insurmountable barrier to the advocates of these markings, but the "Canalites" made their contention ridiculous when they actually suggested that the reason for this failure to perceive them was that our telescopes were too large to ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... dark, even forest-line that surrounded us, doubled by reflection in the water, presented a broad, unbroken belt of utter blackness. The effect was quite startling, like some huge conjurer's trick. It seemed as if we had crossed the boundary-line between the real and the imaginary, and this was indeed the land of shadows and of spectres. What magic oar was that the guide wielded that it could transport me to such a realm! Indeed, had I not committed some fatal mistake, and left that trusty servant behind, and had not some wizard ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... persecute an imaginary foe, as such I reckon the creeds and ideas of other men; still, I cannot but ask myself whether it can add to the prosperity of the state when citizens cease to struggle against the pressure and necessity of life and console themselves ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... from the gratification of a proud feeling of independence or from a dignified sense of isolation or an imaginary riding down of opposition or the consciousness of being master of what ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... make an imaginary excursion to some pleasant field or grove, where we may study the habits, the plumage, and the songs of ...
— Graded Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... project mental photographs of her at the top of a table, beaming sweetly upon him, opposite, with her dim, lovely eyes, and pouring out the tea from a small silver pot. Overtop never could explain it; but this imaginary picture realized all his ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... Paradise, were still there. At times, also, he fixed his eyes obstinately upon the holes in his doublet, in order to cling to reality, and not lose the ground from under his feet completely. His reason, tossed about in imaginary space, now hung only ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... they who rail so loudly against existing institutions would take the trouble to trace them to their source, and would, for instance, compare this state as it is today with its condition five hundred or a thousand years ago, instead of measuring it by the standard of some imaginary Platonic republic, they would find, if not less subject for complaint, yet fuller means of understanding and remedying the abuses ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... knowledge that it was composed by one of themselves. "Precaution" was not merely a tale of English social life, it purported to be written by an Englishman; and it was so thoroughly conformed to its imaginary model that it not only reechoed the cant of English expression, but likewise the expression of English cant. To talk about dissenters and the establishment was natural and proper enough in a work written ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... thinking that perhaps a workman had not deserved the harsh word that he had spoken to him in the heat of the moment, how he sprang up out of bed to straighten the position of a ruler that he had left lying crooked on the table. At the same time Fritz kept on blowing imaginary fluff from his sleeves. He saw indeed that his efforts were having an opposite effect to what he wished. Irritated by this he went on to stronger measures. He pitied poor Anne whom Apollonius had made fall in love with him ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... foolish affair—began to decline. But that decline brought a dark night to thousands of poor, innocent men and women; for then came the era of witchcraft, and persons of every rank, convicted of this imaginary crime, were hurried to the scaffold or ...
— Wreaths of Friendship - A Gift for the Young • T. S. Arthur and F. C. Woodworth
... over and put his head in it, thinking that his food had come at last. Jack picked himself up and ran to rescue the pail. The calf raised his head suddenly, the pail caught on one of his little horns, and he started off around the yard, unable to see, and jumping wildly over imaginary objects. Jack followed. A cow, which was perhaps the mother of the calf, started after Jack. The family dog, hearing the commotion, came running down from the house and began to pursue the cow. This wild procession went around the yard ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... Soldiers who had learned from experience how difficult it was for their enemy to keep a skirmish line even when his officers were behind with pistol and machine gun persuasion, now grew sick of this imaginary war in Archangel. One company going out to the front on March 27th, was actually singing in very jubilation because they were getting away from battalion mess and "stand-to" ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... sing one of the 'old duets with her mother. She saw her mother's breast lift in a mechanical effort to try imaginary notes, as if doubtful of her capacity, more at home in the dumb deep sigh they fell to. Her mother's heroism made her a sacred woman to the thoughts of the girl, overcoming wonderment ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... robberies. The same false shame is common to fallen women, among whom contempt is incurred, not by excess of depravity but by the failure to command high prices. Grellinier, a petty thief, boasted in court of imaginary offences, with the desire of appearing in the light of a great criminal. The crimes in the haunted castle, attributed by Holmes to himself, were certainly in part inventions. The female poisoner, Buscemi, when writing to her accomplice, signed herself, ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... when in the midst of your mental, moral and physical agony, with weakened mind and exhausted body, physicians will tell you that masturbation is practically harmless, that its consequences are exaggerated, and that your sufferings are mostly imaginary. Then will you pity their ignorance and bemoan the fact that to such men must sufferers in your terrible extremity apply without any feeling of being understood, appreciated or sympathized with, and, far less, ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... death; others raised their hands to the gods; but most imagined that the last eternal night had come, and that the gods and the world were being destroyed together. Among these were some who added imaginary terrors to the real danger, and persuaded the terror-stricken multitude that Misenum was in flames. At last a glimmer of light appeared which we imagined to be a sign of approaching flames, as in truth it was; but the fire fell at a considerable distance from us, and again we were ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... robe-maker, who, with many more smirks and imaginary washings of the hands, hoped to be favoured with the gentleman's patronage on future occasions, and begged further to trouble him with a card of his establishment, - our hero proceeded with his father along the High Street, and turned round by St. Mary's, and so up Cat Street to the Schools, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... me awake all night to listen to the mice in the garret. Every time I would doze she would ask, "What's that?" and insist that the mice were men. I had to get up and look for an imaginary host, so I am ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... that country, and shortly after landing was captured and taken to the palace of the king, where he was appointed court dwarf,[35] and remained for a considerable time the attached and faithful adherent of the king. The collector of this story has assumed that it is purely imaginary. But let it be contrasted with the following extract from the Heimskringla. The period is the early part of the eleventh century, and the scene Norway: "There was a man from the Uplands called Fin the Little, and some said of him that he was of Finnish ...
— Fians, Fairies and Picts • David MacRitchie
... the happiness they had once enjoyed, she would lay her head upon the pillow and sob herself to sleep: often starting up again, before the day-light came, to listen for the bell and respond to the imaginary summons which had roused ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... [Footnote: Preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.] had been to write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been—to use her own characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting it—'the following up trains of thought which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents'. All readers of Shelley's life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen—and a two years' wife—she was present, 'a devout but nearly silent listener', at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland (June 1816), and how the pondering over 'German ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... so far, a good; but it also imposed most painful restraints. He had a strong persuasion that Bonaparte had not given up the pursuit of his supposed treasures, or the hope of mastering all his designs, real or imaginary; and he suspected that Mars Plaisir would be left long enough with him to receive the overflowings of his confidence (so hard to restrain in such circumstances as theirs!) and would then be tampered with by the agents ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... apart from such cases, it is possible to understand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may, through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt—and not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries prosecute in the courts—to spread terror among those who feel the political or economic power ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... on all sentry-duty. I rarely found the night watches long. There was plenty to do in watching the horses, which are marvellously ingenious at untying knots, and in patrolling the camp on the look-out for imaginary rebels. By the way, the only live rebel I ever saw was the owner of a farm, near which we halted during one sultry dusty route-march. He refused to allow us to water our horses and ourselves at his pond, defying ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... journey, and you received an advance of wages to provide for your families during your absence. You have lately filled yourselves with meat, and you have become lazy; you have been frightened by the footprints of the Bas-e; thus you wish to leave the country. To save yourselves from imaginary danger, you would forsake my wife and myself, and leave us to a fate which you yourselves would avoid. This is your gratitude for kindness; this is the return for my confidence, when without hesitation I advanced you money. Go! Return to Katariff to your ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... his thoughts Archie had forgotten his imaginary exploit at the Harbor drug store and realized that he must have his wits about him if he expected to retain the Governor's regard and confidence. The ease with which the supercrook rode around policemen vastly increased his feeling ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... created, but by the Consent of the Fraternity; nor abdicated, but by Tryal before their Colleagues; nor impeach'd before any other Court of Judicature; so these Peers were not bound by any judgment or Sentence, but that of the Parliament, that is, of this imaginary Council; nor could be elected into the Society, or ejected out of it, but by their ...
— Franco-Gallia • Francis Hotoman
... culture, along with many other things intended for sedentary adults, should never be forced upon little folks who get all of the exercise they need in the many journeys they take building their blocks, sailing their boats, tearing down imaginary houses, making imaginary journeys—from morning until night the little feet are kept busy—never stopping until the sandman comes at sleepy time. Do not yourself attempt to stimulate a child who seems backward. Consult your physician. You had much better put a child out to grow up in the yard ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... that superb form something of its roundness and its stag-like state; the crimson glory of that mantling cheek had faded like the fading eve; and yet it might be thought, it might be suffering, perhaps, the anticipation of approaching death, and as it were the imaginary contact with a serener existence, but certainly there was a more spiritual expression diffused over the whole appearance of Henrietta Temple, and which by many might be preferred even to that more lively and glowing beauty which, in her happier hours, made her ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... supplied the hiatus, dealing out an imaginary pack of cards with the flourishing dexterity ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... handful. Meantime their tongues were not idle. Ulrich boastfully told her that Pater Benedictus had seen his picture of her father, recognized it instantly, and muttered something over it. His mother's blood was strong in him; his imaginary world was a very different one from that of the ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a standard authority, both among Catholics and Protestants. Even more inflexible was Remigius, criminal judge in Lorraine. On the title-page of his manual he boasts that within fifteen years he had sent nine hundred persons to death for this imaginary crime.(256) ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... you know about snow!" rejoined the Hon. Bovyne. "Let us get on, there's a good fellow—confound you! don't stare at those imaginary trees any longer, but ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... with the spiritual beauties of Mary: vol. iv. 87). I do not think that the name was "manufactured by the Arab story-tellers after the pattern of their own names (e.g. Nur al-Din or Noureddin, light of the faith, Tajeddin, crown of faith, etc.) for the use of their imaginary Christian female characters." ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... he pleased himself with this fanciful soliloquy it did not occur to him that he had already caught the "fairy in the woods," and ever since the capture had been engaged in cutting off its "sunbeam wings" with all a vivisector's scientific satisfaction. And in his imaginary pictures of what might have been if "ideals" were realised, he did not for a moment conceive HIMSELF as "worshipping" the woman who was to worship HIM, or as being at HER "beck and call," or as shielding HER from trouble—oh no! He merely considered himself, and ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... punish imaginary crimes, attributed to individuals or townships, or without even taking the trouble to discover any kind of pretext, the Germans often, especially after looting, set everything on fire so as to make all traces disappear. Sometimes, as at Courtacon, ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... shall set these three down as forming one class of portraits. No. 2. has, however, a curious inscription, Edmund Spenser, obiit 1559, which would lead us to reject it altogether, and look on it as an imaginary likeness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 77, April 19, 1851 • Various
... training with which the Brigade was going to occupy itself while out at rest. For the morrow the colonel had arranged a scheme—defence and counter-attack—which meant that skeleton batteries would have to be brought up to upset and demolish the remorseless plans of an imaginary German host; and there was diligent studying of F.A.T. and the latest pamphlets on Battery Staff Training, and other points of knowledge rusted ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities and governing the universe as an earthly monarch governs his kingdom. Their addresses to this imaginary being, indeed, are much in the same style as those of subjects to a king. They acknowledge his benevolence, deprecate his anger, and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the open door, while Mr. Farge, in an ungovernable paroxysm of humour—levelled at the departing housemaid—effectually covered his retreat by cake-walking, with very high knee action, the length of the landing, playing appropriate dance-music, the while, upon an imaginary banjo in the shape of Worthington's new crook-handled ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... a bunch. Oh, you poor child! Mrs. Slater, she doesn't know how!" Miss Forsythe was deeply moved and illustrated by picking imaginary daisies on the porch. Ardelia's quick eye followed her gestures, and stooping, she scooped the heads from three daisies and started back with ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... already happened among the negroes of New Amsterdam; and the whites lived in constant anticipation of trouble and danger from them. Rumors of an intended insurrection real or imaginary, would circulate, as in the negro plot of 1712, and the whole city be thrown into a state of alarm. Whether there was any real danger on these occasions, cannot now be known. But the result was always ...
— Peter Stuyvesant, the Last Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam • John S. C. Abbott
... can there pretend any right. How many worthy men have we known to survive their own reputation, who have seen and suffered the honour and glory most justly acquired in their youth, extinguished in their own presence? And for three years of this fantastic and imaginary life we must go and throw away our true and essential life, and engage ourselves in a perpetual death! The sages propose to themselves a nobler and more just end in so ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... reports given by the daily press, my assertion of radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate the speculative intellect ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... was becoming more arrogant and more irascible in proportion as his right to be so diminished. Secretly disgusted with himself, and deeply humiliated by the shameful intrigue to which he had stooped, he took a secret satisfaction in crushing his accomplice with his imaginary superiority and lordly disdain. According as his humor was good or bad, he called him "my dear extortioner," "Mons. Fortunat," or "Master Twenty-per-cent." But though these sneers and insults drove the obsequious smile from M. Fortunat's lips, he ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... experience but four kinds of waiters the world over. First, the thin, nervous waiter, with a set smile, who is always brushing away imaginary crumbs, adjusting the glasses—an inch this way, an inch that way, and then back again to their first position, talking all the time, whether spoken to or not, and losing interest the moment you pay him his fee. Then the stolid, half-asleep ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to this plant and to all the water-lily family are purely imaginary. Its juice being slightly bitter and astringent is used in decoction as an injection in gonorrhoea. It possesses mild narcotic properties, for which some use the juice of the whole plant, rubbing the forehead and temples with ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... party to spread a belief prejudicial to the patriotism of the Reformers were laughed to scorn. So also was the attempt of the Lieutenant-Governor to imbue the inhabitants with a belief in the probability of a foreign invasion. Upon the promulgation of the challenge to the imaginary invader, a number of the Toronto Reformers, with Mr. Hincks at their head, amused themselves by perpetrating a practical joke. Having taken counsel together, they formed themselves into a deputation, and called upon his Excellency in a state of well-assumed perturbation. In a formal address ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... feel better when he knew that Damon Crowley was securely lodged under lock and key; but such was not the case. The knowledge of this only seemed to press some real or imaginary burden closer to him. Then he imagined that he would perhaps feel at peace with the world and himself when white-robed justice had had her perfect course, and the victim of a nation's sin had been hung by the neck until dead. ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock
... Secrets of a Princess The Government Clerks Pierrette A Study of Woman Scenes from a Courtesan's Life Honorine The Seamy Side of History The Magic Skin A Second Home A Prince of Bohemia Letters of Two Brides The Muse of the Department The Imaginary Mistress The Middle Classes Cousin Betty The Country Parson In addition, M. Bianchon narrated the following: Another Study of ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... a series of bird-tactics, each partially advancing and pretending to retreat as if to draw on his antagonist, pecking the while at imaginary kernels of corn on the ground. In the mean time the audience almost held its breath in anticipation of the cunningly deferred onset. Presently the two birds, as if by one impulse, rushed towards each other, ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... it, Mr. Fogg, although a little nervous and excited, concluded to try it again. Turning on the imaginary mutton, he began. Only sixty-four sheep had slid over the fence, when Fogg's aunt knocked at the door and asked if he was awake. When she learned that he was, she said she believed he had forgotten to close ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... but the very language in which he meant to offer them. As he formed sentences, almost for the first time, his courage and his fancy alike warmed: his sanguine spirit sympathised with the nobility of the imaginary scene, and inspirited the intonations of ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... Sensation, Emotion, Thought, and Volition. By thought is meant all that we are internally conscious of when we think; e.g. the idea of the sun, and not the sun itself, is a thought; and so, not even an imaginary thing like a ghost, but only the idea of it, is a thought. In like manner, a sensation differs both from the object causing it, and the attribute ascribed to the object. Yet language (except in the case of the sensations of hearing) has seldom provided the sensations with separate names; so ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... his old comic entrance, tripping his right toe over his left heel, and turning to shake his fist at an imaginary enemy. The boys, determined to be pleased, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity. Therefore, putting on one side imaginary things concerning a prince, and discussing those which are real, I say that all men when they are spoken of, and chiefly princes for being more highly placed, are remarkable for some of those qualities which bring them either blame or praise; and thus it is that one is reputed liberal, another ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... given a footing as a distinct, separate, and independent nation among all other great nations of the earth. That the South would no longer be looked upon as an "Insurrectionary Faction," "Erring Sisters," or "Rebellious Children." Our ports had been ordered closed by the North, and an imaginary blockade, a nominal fleet, stood out in front of our harbors. Our people thought the world's desire for the South's cotton would so influence the commercial and laboring people of Europe that the powers would ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... of love which were current at that time,—the mediaeval and monkish conception, based upon a sensual idea which regarded women as the root of all evil and the source of all sin, and the modern or secular idea, which is spiritual and may become holy. In an imaginary conversation with Saint Augustine which Petrarch wrote to furnish a vehicle for the discussion of these matters, the poet exclaims that it is the soul—the inborn and celestial goodness—that he loves, and that he owes all to her who ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... actual but the ideal—not only the present but the past—placing before our eyes at once the fullest and completest views of the existing ruins, and also restorations of the ancient structures, some of them warm with color and gilding, which, though to a certain extent imaginary, probably give to a modern the best notion that it is now possible to form ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... and, immediately afterward, we would hear him dancing down the corridor singing, "Safe in the Arms of Jesus." If he had given heed to one-half we said to him, he would have been safer in our hands than in those of his imaginary protector. He turned out a thief, an unmitigated liar, a dancing dervish, and, through all our experiences of six weeks with him, his chief reading was his Bible and Sunday-school books. The experience, however, was not lost on Theodore—he has never suggested a boy ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... citing Mary Wardour's pronunciations, and ways of doing sums. Indeed, she had more lively conversation with her French master, who was a very good-natured old man, than with anyone else, except Josephine; and she liked writing French letters for him to correct, making them be from the imaginary little girls whom she was so fond of drawing, and sending ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... greater velocities the square-root becomes imaginary. From this we conclude that in the theory of relativity the velocity c plays the part of a limiting velocity, which can neither be reached nor exceeded by ...
— Relativity: The Special and General Theory • Albert Einstein
... being carried off to Hell on the Devil's back. Much of the old custom in these two personages is amusingly set forth in Ben Jonson's Staple of News, where, at the end of each Act, we have some imaginary spectators commenting on the performance. At the end of the first Act, one of them expressing a fear that the play has no Fool in it, as the Vice was often called, Gossip Tattle delivers herself thus: "My husband, Timothy Tattle, God rest ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... who, in Burton's phrase, "taught boys not to be ashamed of being called good," [48] and he always revered the memory of his tutor, the Rev. Thomas Short. [49] Burton naturally made enemies as well as friends, but the most bitter was that imaginary person, Mrs. Grundy. This lady, whom he always pictured as an exceedingly stout and square-looking body with capacious skirts, and a look of austere piety, had, he tells us, "just begun to reign" when he was at Oxford, although forty years had elapsed since ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... age of yours. There—go and judge for yourself. You are a father. I can't look upon my blasted hopes, and my withered flower. Go and see my blue-eyed, fair-haired darling—clay, hastening to the tomb; and you will trouble me no more with your imaginary griefs." He flung himself down with his head on ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... all that has been said about the native oratory, we are in a very inadequate position to judge of it correctly, and this because we have no accurate reports in the original tongues of their speeches. Translations, more or less loose, more or less imaginary, we have in abundance; but, for critical purposes, ...
— Aboriginal American Authors • Daniel G. Brinton
... the press, and took his place, by almost immediate and universal recognition, in the first rank of contemporary writers. The book is an essay supporting and illustrating the doctrine that moral approbation and disapprobation are in the last analysis expressions of sympathy with the feelings of an imaginary and impartial spectator, and its substance had already been given from year to year in his ordinary lectures to his students, though after the publication he thought it no longer necessary to dwell at the same length ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... busy trying to shield the imaginary painting with one of the pillows, and began in a quavering voice to sing Longfellow's "Rainy Day." Her mother pressed her lips to the hot cheek, but she seemed unconscious of the caress, and weeping bitterly Mrs. Palma left ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... same direction will! To much that went on there History, busied elsewhere, would not specially give heed: to troubles of Uzez, troubles of Nismes, Protestant and Catholic, Patriot and Aristocrat; to troubles of Marseilles, Montpelier, Arles; to Aristocrat Camp of Jales, that wondrous real-imaginary Entity, now fading pale-dim, then always again glowing forth deep-hued (in the Imagination mainly);—ominous magical, 'an Aristocrat picture of war done naturally!' All this was a tragical deadly combustion, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... wits at home to govern the doings of his arms, legs, and tongue. A large half is occupied with his fancy, in all the wanderings of that creature, dreamy, flimsy, anchoring with gossamer, climbing the sky with steps of fog, cast into abysms (as great writers call it) by imaginary demons, and even at its best in a queer condition, pitiful, yet exceeding proud. A quarter of the mental power is employed in wanting to know what the other people think; an eighth part ought to be dwelling upon the fair distracting object; and only a small eighth ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... the practice of the War Department to present to the army every five years a comprehensive military problem involving an imaginary attack upon this country by a powerful foreign foe, and the proper line of defense. The competition was open to both officers and men. A medal was given to the successful contestant, and much distinction came ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... hated sums. All arithmetical difficulties had confused and sickened him. But now he worked with indefatigable industry on an imaginary slate; put his postulate, counted probabilities, allowed for chances, added, deducted, multiplied, and unknowingly performed algebraic feats, till his brows were stiff with frowning, and his brain ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... unjustifiable, save in so far as the author has it at heart not only (or chiefly) to adorn the tale, but also (and first of all) to point the moral. The novelist, in other words, should so mould the characters and shape the plot of his imaginary drama as to vindicate the wisdom and integrity of the Decalogue: if he fail to do this, or if he do the opposite of this, he deserves not the countenance of virtuous ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... began when he had made her comfortable with a small cushion behind her shoulders and another for her pretty feet. "You don't act a bit like Miss Jane." As he spoke he leaned forward and flicked an imaginary something from her bare wrist with that air which always characterized his ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... walls, entered the monasteries burned their invaluable libraries, and invaded the nunneries. The streets were filled with monks and nuns, running this way and that, shrieking and fluttering, to escape the claws of fiendish Calvinists. The terror was imaginary, for not the least remarkable feature in these transactions was that neither insult nor injury was offered to man or woman, and that not a farthing's value of the immense amount of property was appropriated. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... further explained, moving his glittering glance about the circle, "and if he could not find the right man, he must take such man as he could. The chief is the biggest man, and he comes where Godin has him. 'My father is avenged at last,' he says, and bang!"—Zavier levelled an imaginary engine of destruction at the shadows—"it is done and Godin gets ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... The most essential service, I presume, that authors could render to society, would be to promote inquiry and discussion, instead of making those dogmatical assertions which only appear calculated to gird the human mind round with imaginary circles, like the paper globe which represents the ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... so insistent to tell him. It was none of his business, he had said to her uneasily. He wasn't no politician, and all he asked of anybody was to be let alone; and with that he had tried to put the matter by as something imaginary and disquieting, which, if boldly ignored, would disappear ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... someone to talk with; and when his work was done he would walk out upon the mountain side in the bright winter sunlight of those great heights and hold an imaginary conversation with his wife or little son, and come home ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... groups do not now occupy the positions in which they were observed by the early astronomers, because the revolving earth is rocking like a top, with the result that the pole does not always keep pointing at the same spot in the heavens. Each year the meeting-place of the imaginary lines of the ecliptic and equator is moving westward at the rate of about fifty seconds. In time—ages hence—the pole will circle round to the point it spun at when the constellations were named by the Babylonians. It is by calculating the period occupied by this world-curve ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... beginning, we must go far back into past ages—almost to the time when our Savior was upon earth. At that period the whole northern portion of Europe was inhabited by wild and barbarous tribes who had never heard of Christ, but were Pagans and worshiped imaginary gods, of whom Woden was chief. Among these races were the Saxons, a fair-haired, fair-complexioned people, of great size and strength, who inhabited that portion of country now known as north Germany. They have ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... exist both in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland. Of course the mining population must furnish its contingent of legends and fables to this mythological repertory. If the fields are peopled with imaginary beings, either good or bad, with much more reason must the dark mines be haunted to their lowest depths. Who shakes the seam during tempestuous nights? who puts the miners on the track of an as yet unworked vein? who lights ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... and amusing character called "Teddy," who was forever snapping his teeth, shouting "Bully!" or rushing at everybody, flourishing a big stick. This continued for years and was taken for truth by a great many people. To this day, this imaginary person is believed in by thousands. And in the meantime, the genuine man, a brave high-minded American, loving his country ardently, and serving her to the utmost of his great strength and ability, was engaged in his work, known by all who had personal contact ...
— Theodore Roosevelt • Edmund Lester Pearson
... life these thoughtless realms display; 255 Thus idly busy rolls their world away;[31] Theirs are those arts that mind to mind endear, For honor forms the social temper here. Honor, that praise which real merit gains, Or even imaginary worth obtains, 260 Here passes current: paid from hand to hand, It shifts in splendid traffic round the land; From courts to camps, to cottages, it strays, And all are taught an avarice of praise. They please, are pleased; they give to get esteem; 265 Till, seeming ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... red hair as she wound it round her throat fascinated Heine with its grim suggestion of blood. There had been his cousin Amalie, whose marriage to another is said to have been the secret spring of sorrow by which Heine's laughter was fed. And there had been others, whose names—imaginary, maybe, in that they were doubtless the imaginary names of real women—are familiar to all readers of Heines poetry: Seraphine, Angelique, Diane, Hortense, Clarisse, ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... theft, a suspicion which is actually without foundation. In the latter case it is a young officer who is accused without grounds of having abstracted a silver spoon, which is recovered later on. Thus the base element is reduced in this case to a purely imaginary thing, a mere suspicion, and this suffices nevertheless to do an irreparable injury, in our aesthetical appreciation, to the hero of the piece, in spite of his innocence. This is because a man who is supposed capable of a base action did not apparently enjoy a very solid reputation for morality, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... would be a Traitor; yet, if he had left one single brothel standing—say, in the Sandwich Islands—for the accommodation of any of Her Majesty's well-affected subjects, then the high treason was not high—high enough and up to the mark, that is, my fore-quarter could not be legally stuck up on the imaginary gates of Ballaarat. ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... street from the window, spoons and all. I tried this: the shutters were not even closed, and the sash moving noiselessly, I had no difficulty in raising it. I stepped out into the balcony, and looked over. Nothing was to be seen but a black and yawning gulf beneath, guarded by the imaginary spikes of an invisible railing. Jack would have laughed at this difficulty; but then he had more experience in the craft than I, and was provided with all necessary appliances. As for me, I had stupidly forgotten even my ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... bud, leaving an inch and a half of wood above. Or this last form is modified by making a long sloping cut from the bud to the upper end, thereby exposing the maximum amount of cambium. Advantages are claimed for each form, but these are mostly imaginary, and the cutting may be made to suit the fancy of the propagator if a ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... to knock out his pipe and to reflect that, as he had made up his mind, there was nothing to gain by pitying himself or by growing angry with imaginary disputants. Sir Francis and Sybil came into the library to begin the day's work; his mother rustled to and fro, giving her orders. All that he had to do was to find an unoccupied table and settle down to work. The intimacy was over. In time he might care to think about it, he might ...
— The Education of Eric Lane • Stephen McKenna
... my own story, and employed myself in imaginary adventures. I figured to myself every situation in which I could be placed, and conceived the conduct to be observed in each. Thus scenes of insult and danger, of tenderness and oppression, became familiar to me. In fancy I often passed the awful hour of dissolving ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... On an imaginary cone of conical form and with scales of equal size throughout, there must be more scales about the base than about the apex of the cone. The phyllotactic conditions must differ, and the obvious spirals, in passing from base to apex, must undergo readjustment. If ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... manner either advantageous or prejudicial both to himself and to others. Man, at his birth, brings with him into the world nothing but the necessity of conserving himself, of rendering his existence happy: instruction, example, the customs of the world, present him with the means, either real or imaginary, of achieving it; habit procures for him the facility of employing these means: he attaches himself strongly to those he judges best calculated, most proper to secure to him the possession of those objects which ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... the picture of the ichthysauria romping in the mesozoic sea, that commonly accompanies a text-book of geology. Any such picture, and all such pictures, with their coloring and their temporal and spacial perspective, are imaginary. No such special and exclusive manifolds can be defined as having been then and there realized. But we have a geological knowledge of this period, that fulfils the formal demands of natural science, in so far as we can ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... my constitution was fortified and fixed; and my disorders, instead of growing with my growth and strengthening with my strength, most wonderfully vanished. I have never possessed or abused the insolence of health: but since that time few persons have been more exempt from real or imaginary ills; and, till I am admonished by the gout, the reader will no more be troubled with the history of my bodily complaints. My unexpected recovery again encouraged the hope of my education; and I was placed at Esher, in Surrey, in the house of the Reverend Mr. Philip Francis, in a ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... to find it, and read an imaginary entry to this effect: "After what she has already done, Helena is capable of marrying in defiance of my wishes and commands. This must be considered and provided against." So far, I had succeeded in flattering him. But when (thinking ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... of the creator, he is thus absorbed with his coming creation; he already anticipates and enjoys living in his imaginary edifice. "General," said Madame de Clermont-Tonnerre to him, one day, "you are building behind a scaffolding which you will take down when you have done with it." "Yes, Madame, that's it," replied Bonaparte; "you are right. I am always living two ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... three scrambled for imaginary life-preservers, and vigorously put them on, when, with a terrific ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... says (Gen. ad lit. xii, 32) that, as the soul, when the body lies senseless, yet not quite dead, sees some things by imaginary vision; so also when by death the soul is quite separate from the body. But the imagination is a power of the sensitive part. Therefore the power of the sensitive part remains in the separate soul; and consequently all the ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I (Prima Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... it founded on fact, to use the common phrase. It is not the history of any individual mind among the recent converts to the Catholic Church. The principal characters are imaginary; and the writer wishes to disclaim personal allusion in any. It is with this view that he has feigned ecclesiastical bodies and places, to avoid the chance, which might otherwise occur, of unintentionally ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... used a device to tie together many isolated familiar facts. I have never found that six-year-old children did not readily discriminate the actual from the imaginary. ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... I am good," said Don Quixote, "but I can safely say I am not 'the Bad;' and to prove it, let me tell you, Senor Don Alvaro Tarfe, I have never in my life been in Saragossa; so far from that, when it was told me that this imaginary Don Quixote had been present at the jousts in that city, I declined to enter it, in order to drag his falsehood before the face of the world; and so I went on straight to Barcelona, the treasure-house ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... wakening dreams were more frequent, we should be happier; yes, and better than we are; we should be shamed out of much baseness—for nothing so purifies and exalts the soul as the actual or imaginary companionship of the pure and exalted; no man who purposed to create a noble picture would choose an imperfect model; no one who seeks virtue and cherishes honor and honorable things, will endure the degradation of ignoble ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... forms have probably been modified during the lapse of ages. But I shall try to tell you when they have diverged noticeably from the structure of the primitive ancestor of the corresponding stage. It is much safer for us to study concrete, actual forms than imaginary ones, however real may have been the former existence of the latter. And, after all, their lateral divergence is of small account compared with the great upward and onward march of life, to the right and left of which they have remained stationary or retrograded somewhat, ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... see no one. But the cave stretched straight forward, and downward, and at the far end was a glow of light. Jurgen went on and on, and so came presently to a centaur: and this surprised him not a little, because Jurgen knew that centaurs were imaginary creatures. ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... to her irritation. It was that imaginary young lady of Ernest Breslaw's. Had she been a man, ere this she would have plunged into vigorous attempt to dislodge that or any other rival, no matter how assured his position, but being a woman and compelled to await "The idiot Chance ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... been impossible for political economists long to have endured the error spoken of in the text,[18] had they not been confused by an idea, in part well founded, that the energies and refinements, as well as the riches of civilised life, arose from imaginary wants. It is quite true, that the savage who knows no needs but those of food, shelter, and sleep, and after he has snared his venison and patched the rents of his hut, passes the rest of his time in animal repose, is in a lower state than the man ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... of a proud and somewhat exacting temper, he actively felt the mortifying consequences of his poverty. The want of what he felt ought to have been his position and influence in the county in which he resided, fretted and galled him; and he cherished a resentful and bitter sense of every slight, imaginary or real, to which the same fruitful source of annoyance and humiliation had exposed him. He held, therefore, but little intercourse with the surrounding gentry, and that little not of the pleasantest possible ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... was a strange form of disease, went to a specialist of skin diseases, who had the man brought to a hospital in order to watch his disease. Rumors of this reaching the newspapers, the reporters thought it a good opportunity to make a story about leprosy, giving the number and street of an imaginary laundry in the heart of the city. Instantly the patronage of the Chinese laundries stopped. My Chinese friend was in the greatest distress about it, and particularly about me, lest I should think he had brought the contagious disease to my house. I could hardly persuade him to enter, ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... gentleman than by giving his own envoi to the most considerable of his books:—"Thus, gentle Reader, having acquainted thee with my long, costly, and laborious collections, not written at Adventure, or by an imaginary conceit in a Scholler's private studie, but wrung out of the earth, by the painfull hand of experience: and having also given thee a touch of Nature, whom no man as yet ever durst send naked into ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... cooing for hours and hours, as if all life to them was an interminable honeymoon. There is also a great white parrot, who, perched in a brass ring, mutters and mutters to himself for hours, and hums snatches of tunes, and calls imaginary dogs and visionary cats; and when he sees a certain manly form coming up the garden-walk is wont to cry out in a miserable mockery of tenderness, "Oh, my darling! I'm so glad to see you!" and then smack his bill as near like a kiss as he can, and chuckle and laugh and turn ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... at side, and party bantered party. Here the blue and white of Company "A" flaunted audaciously on the breeze beside the very seats over which the crimson and gray of "B" were flying, and these in their turn nodded defiance over the imaginary barrier between themselves ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... day and night he went through passages and up and down staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet—to pass along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an imaginary bell and offering airy muffins of your own make to a bustling thronging crowd of your own creation—there were points about the game, it cannot be denied, though it seemed scarce in harmony with this radiant ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... than slime," said Miller. "I am with the biologists in this campaign. Let us have the truth, no matter how unpalatable it may be. If these phenomena exist, they are in the domain of natural law and can be weighed and measured. If they are imaginary, they should be swept away, like other dreams ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... romantic appeals in their behalf, by concealing the truth, or by warping the truth until it becomes falsehood. In the following pages he has depicted the Gypsies as he has found them, neither aggravating their crimes nor gilding them with imaginary virtues. He has not expatiated on 'their gratitude towards good people, who treat them kindly and take an interest in their welfare'; for he believes that of all beings in the world they are the least susceptible of such a feeling. Nor ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... single year the bishop of Geneva burned 500 witches, the bishop of Bamberg 600, the bishop of Wuerzburg 900. About 800 were condemned to death in a single batch by the Senate of Savoy. In the year 1586 the archbishop of Treves burned 118 women and two men for this imaginary crime. Even these figures give but an imperfect notion of the extent of the midsummer madness. The number of victims must be reckoned by ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Discovering that the child possessed the right to be amused, the imagination of poets and artists addressed itself at last to the most appreciative of all audiences, a world of newcomers, with insatiable appetites for wonders real and imaginary. ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... reference to the uses for which the property is suitable, having regard to the existing business and wants of the community, or such as may be reasonably expected in the immediate future,' * * * [but] 'mere possible or imaginary uses, or the speculative schemes of its proprietor, are to be excluded.'"[656] Damages are measured by the loss to the owner, not by the gain to the taker;[657] and attorneys' fees and expenses are not embraced therein.[658] "When the public faith and ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... and the close of the Conference. The misgivings of other delegates turned upon a matter which at first sight may appear so far removed from any of the pressing issues of the twentieth century as to seem wholly imaginary. They feared that a religious—some would call it racial—bias lay at the root of Mr. Wilson's policy. It may seem amazing to some readers, but it is none the less a fact that a considerable number of delegates believed that the real influences behind the Anglo-Saxon ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... early volumes it will be seen that this imaginary Prete Jani, Prester John, or the Christian Priest-king, had been sought for in vain among the wandering tribes of eastern Tartary. The Portuguese now absurdly gave that appellation to the Negus of Habesh, or ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... little Paraguay tea or boiled maize. Only her mother or grandmother has access to her; nobody else approaches or speaks to her. If she is obliged to leave the hammock for a little, her friends take great care to prevent her from touching the Boyrusu, which is an imaginary serpent that would swallow her up. She must also be very careful not to set foot on the droppings of fowls or animals, else she would suffer from sores on the throat and breast. On the third day they let her down from the hammock, cut her hair, and make her sit ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... a purely imaginary speech of Cromwell's; but it is an accurate expression of several months of English history. The shrewdest of men at all times, and also the most sincere, he was yet always the most tempestuous when the fit time came, and it was the characteristic of his life that ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... relative to your brother's death—which served to estrange him from you. Whatever they may be, whether existent or fanciful, you are in no way responsible. He has gone to Naples to obtain proofs of his suspicions, or knowledge. He will come back to terrorise you, perhaps to seek revenge for imaginary wrongs. Therefore, I say, do not meet him half-way by sitting here, blanched and fearful, until it pleases him to return. Compel him to seek you. Let him find you at least outwardly happy and contented, careless of his neglect, and more pleased than otherwise ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... search. When we assault and conquer it there it disappears. It has only retreated to the next row of outworks where for a time it appears not to our sight, and we imagine it killed, while it is laughing at our imaginary conquests and security. Soon again we find it and conquer again, only to have it again retreat. So we must follow it up if we wish to grasp it at last in its final stand just near the "kernel of the heart." There it has become "an iron bar that holds down the heart," ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... power of such characters to operate them. At the same time the rules of probability must even there be observed. Nor is it amiss to be very sparing and reserved in the composition of those dances, grounded on the introduction of purely imaginary beings, such as the allegorical impersonation of the moral Beings, whether the Virtues or the Vices. Unless the invention is very interesting indeed, the characters distinctly marked, and the application very just and obvious; their effect is rarely answerable to expectation, especially ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... head and made grimaces expressive of disgust. He informed me that the slaves employed on the sugar plantations, when beaten by their masters, in order to obtain an indirect revenge, spat in the syrup, and committed other filthy things as an imaginary punishment upon the whites. I frequently saw Sambo in Toronto, and many times he expressed thankfulness to me for his deliverance. I may here mention that shortly after the arrival of Sambo on board the Rose of Milton at Erie, two suspicious-looking men, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... left Peterhouse, owing to some real or imaginary offence, and removed to Pembroke Hall, where he was surrounded by his old and intimate friends. The next year he carried his two Odes to London, as carefully as if they had been two Epics. Walpole says that he "snatched ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... boys to remind themselves that here they were precisely on the equator, so positively chilly was it. And yet they were. It was the third time which they had touched that imaginary girdle of the earth in the past week or so; and it was to be their last crossing. How inspiring the thought that they were now within one hop of their goal; that sometime on the morrow they would probably reach Panama well within their time limit of ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... of plantation life, some of them folk-lore stories, which we found to be in general circulation among the colored people; some of them tales of real life as Julius had seen it in the old slave days; but the most striking were, we suspected, purely imaginary, or so colored by old Julius's fancy as to make us speculate at times upon how many original minds, which might have added to the world's wealth of literature and art, had been buried in the ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... recollection; but it is better for me to remember it, lest I should fancy myself better than I am. Every word she said in that gentle and persuasive tone was engraved upon my heart, even as she spoke. She easily and fully convinced me of my sinfulness in thus permitting imaginary evils to make me so miserable: for that they were but imaginary it was easy to discover. Not a single blessing could I say I had lost. All I loved were around me, in health and happiness—every comfort of life ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... life, its example and inspiration, which was the real object of the descent of this high spirit on to our planet. If the human race had earnestly centred upon that instead of losing itself in vain dreams of vicarious sacrifices and imaginary falls, with all the mystical and contentious philosophy which has centred round the subject, how very different the level of human culture and happiness would be to-day! Such theories, with their absolute ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... capering backward with a bounce, and an air, and a grace, she came with a sort of a courtesy, and a smart bump, and a shock against the stately Miss Rebecca; and whisking round with a little scream and a look of terrified innocence, and with her fingers to her heart, to suppress an imaginary palpitation, dropped a low ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and the working of his mouth show that he is infected with the general excitement; but he bridles himself savagely. Redbrook, trained to affect indifference, grins cynically; winks at Brassbound; and finally relieves himself by assuming the character of a circus ringmaster, flourishing an imaginary whip and egging on the rest to wilder exertions. A climax is reached when Drinkwater, let loose without a stain on his character for the second time, is rapt by belief in his star into an ecstasy in which, scorning all partnership, he becomes as it were a whirling dervish, and executes so ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... physician, was another of his chosen impersonations. Roger represented the honest, vain, empty man purchasing an ounce of tea by stratagem to astonish a favoured guest; he portrayed him on the summit of a narrow, winding, and very steep staircase, contemplating in airy security the imaginary approach of duns. This worthy doctor on one occasion, when watching Sarratt, the great chess-player, turned suddenly to Hazlitt, and said, 'I think I could dance. I'm sure I could; aye, I could dance like Vestris.' Such were the odd people ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Celestials, their prototypes, have ensconced themselves. The Chinese speak of outsiders as "barbarians." The French ladies refer to such unfortunates as being "beyond the pale." Almost all that has been written is arrant nonsense; that imaginary barrier exists to-day on as firm a foundation, and is guarded by sentinels as vigilant as when, forty years ago, Napoleon (third of the name) and his Spanish ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... styles, Mr. Colvin puts side by side passages from "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," with passages, treating similar themes, from Landor's "Gebir" and "Imaginary Conversations." The contrast might be even more clearly established by a study of such a piece as Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where the romantic form is applied to classical content; or by a comparison of Tennyson's "Ulysses" ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... fidgety and restless that I felt I worried the old couple. I could settle to nothing. I could not read, although I had always been a greedy reader. I was living my own love-story too keenly to be put off with imaginary ones. Music held me for a little while; but through it I was listening—listening for his coming, or for the telegram that should announce the arrival of his boat at Southampton. I used to look across at the lighted table by the fire where my grandparents ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... painfully supported, I now find inadequate to recompense me for the sacrifice which its preservation requires. I part with it, I own, with regret that the surrender is necessary; yet is it rather an imaginary than an actual evil, and though a deep wound to pride, ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... three times the thickness of the web. In many modern engines the force acting at the end of the beam is more than 18 lbs. per circular inch of the piston, but the above rules are still applicable by taking an imaginary cylinder with an area larger in the proportion of the ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... other. In order to judge of this definition let us consider, that since equality is a relation, it is not, strictly speaking, a property in the figures themselves, but arises merely from the comparison, which the mind makes betwixt them. If it consists, therefore, in this imaginary application and mutual contact of parts, we must at least have a distinct notion of these parts, and must conceive their contact. Now it is plain, that in this conception we would run up these parts to the greatest minuteness, which can possibly be conceived; since the contact of ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... to your princess before you had made her suffer! So far you have not made her suffer at all. I had become quite excited over this idea —though perhaps I had no right to. I suppose it is all right, because she is an imaginary person, and you can endow her with all the perfections you please. She is triumphant and thrilling, and worthy of love—whereas I am just little Corydon, whom you have known all your life, and who is stupid and helpless, and impossible to ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... figured upon the journey much as a provost-marshal leading his brother to prison.[936] Now the imaginary resemblance was turned into a sad reality. On Thursday, the thirty-first of October, the Bourbons reached Orleans.[937] Their reception soon convinced them that they had placed their heads in the jaws of the lion. None of the courtiers save the cardinal, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... church. As the Doctor poured forth his petitions he made the most extraordinary movements with his right hand. He waved it up and down rapidly. He opened his eyes for an instant as if to find somebody. He seemed to be closing imaginary windows—and so he was. It leaked out the next day at Mr. Gray's that Dr. Peewee was telegraphing the sexton at random—for he did not know where to look for him—to close the windows. Nobody better understood the danger of draughts ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... pauldron. Mallory mounted—not gracefully, it is true, but at least without the aid of the winch he would have needed if his armor had been manufactured in the sixth century—and inserted the red pommel of his spear in the stirrup socket. Then, activating the Yore's lock, he rode across the imaginary drawbridge that spanned the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest. As the "portcullis" closed behind him, symbolically bringing phase one of Operation Sangraal to a close, he thought ...
— A Knyght Ther Was • Robert F. Young
... she entered, Graciosa presented her with the ball of thread in perfect order, so that she had no fault to find, and could only pretend to discover that it was soiled, for which imaginary fault she gave Graciosa a blow on each cheek, that made her white and pink skin turn green and yellow. And then she sent her back to be locked ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... account, observed that there was no reference whatever to quadrilles of various nationalities—Egyptian or otherwise; and she rather wondered at the omission. But it did not occur to her to suppose that this portion of the entertainment had been entirely imaginary—a lurid figment of Harry's vivid fancy and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... When two young people are standing very close with clasped hands and love-lit eyes in the dim fragrance of an old garden, even a dog of a chaperon knows that it is time to interfere! With great presence of mind he discovered an imaginary squirrel in the hedge directly beside them, and set up such a furious barking that Miss Lady looked around and laughed. For a second she stood, her head thrown back, a teasing, half-shy, half- ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the attention of posterity is likely to rest, not on his verses, but upon a sprightly hodgepodge of imaginary table-talk, called "The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table"—a warm-hearted, kindly book, which still ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... faith in human nature. Was there ever such ingratitude known before? The most curious thing is that Mr. Lee, who has brought all these facts to light, seems to share Defoe's ingenuous astonishment at this "strange instance of ungrateful violence," and conjectures that it must have proceeded from imaginary wrong of a very grievous nature, such as a suspicion that Defoe had instigated the Government to prosecute him. It is perhaps as well that it should have fallen to so loyal an admirer to exhume Defoe's secret services and public protestations; ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... he called the Scottish Avengers. With them he would retire into valleys far away from the village, where none would mark what they were doing, and there they practised with club and stake instead of broadsword and pike, defended narrow passes against an imaginary enemy, and, divided into two parties, did battle with ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... to recompose herself. But the instant she again saw that expression of mute and dazed despair the tears fought for release. The effort to suppress outward signs of pity made her plain fat face grotesque. She could not speak. With a corner of her apron she wiped imaginary dust from the glass bells that protected the artificial flowers. The poor child! And all for no fault of hers—and because she had been born out of wedlock. But then, the old woman reflected, was it not one of the most ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... permanent progress and in always higher development: that mind vanquishes matter. The first new thing which meets us in the development of the globe, is the organic and life; the second, sensation and consciousness; the third, self-consciousness and free-will. Now let us once suppose imaginary human spectators of every first appearance of these phenomena. Would he who thus far had only known inorganic phenomena and processes, have dared, before the appearance of life, to utter the proposition: matter can also become living and live? And who would ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... became familiar with shapeless forms and fearful powers. The sorrows of death, and the pains of hell, got hold upon him. His internal conflict was truly horrible, as one who thought himself under the power of demons; they whispered in his ears—pulled his clothes; he madly fought, striking at imaginary shades with his hands, and stamping with his feet at the destroyer. Thoughts of the unpardonable sin beset him, his powerful bodily frame became convulsed with agony, as if his breast bone would split, and he burst asunder like Judas. He possessed a most prolific ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... there is no subtilising upon far-fetched conceits, no wire-drawing of exquisite sentimentalism, although he celebrates in this, as in his other sonnets, a lady for whom he appears to have entertained no more than a Platonic or imaginary passion. Surrey was a great experimentalist in metre. Besides the sonnet, he introduced into England blank verse, which he borrowed from the Italian versi sciolti, fixing that decasyllable iambic rhythm ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... through it to the North Sea, or to Baffin's or Hudson's Bay. Perhaps, too, it would have been marked, on future maps of the world, with greater precision, and more, certain signs of reality, than the invisible, because imaginary, Straits of de Fuca and de Fonte. In describing the inlet, our commander had left a blank which was not filled up with any particular name; and, therefore, the Earl of Sandwich directed, with the greatest propriety, that it should ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... Thomas Pury, jun., Esq., with the help of Mr Sheppard, Captain Hemming, and others, made this library at considerable expense, and, as Sir Robert Atkyns quaintly observed, "encouraged literature to assist reason, in the midst of times deluded with imaginary inspiration." ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Gloucester [2nd ed.] • H. J. L. J. Masse
... comedies could be termed Surprises de l'amour, although some of his best come within that category. There is a whole series of plays, to which Larroumet[112] calls attention, in which Marivaux has left the real for the imaginary world. There are times when we are almost inclined to admit with Lemaitre "that fancy's wing, which bears so high and so far the poet of A Midsummer Night's Dream, has at least grazed the powdered brow of ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... imagination, and the world was invited to realise them, of societies in which all were workers on equal terms, and groups of fraternal citizens, separated no longer by the egoisms of the private home, dwelt together in palaces called "phalansteries," which appear to have been imaginary anticipations of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Here lapped in luxury, they were to feast at common tables; and between meals the men were to work in the fields singing, while a lady accompanied their voices on a grand piano under ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... they had taken to their burrows like rabbits. Evan's heart was with her, wherever she was. He had not the same anxious solicitude for her that one would have for an ordinary woman hunted in the dark woods, for he was well assured that Corinna was not a prey to imaginary terrors. She would be no less at home in the woods at night than he was. Still no sound came from her. He was not at all sure that she would summon him if hard pressed, but they could not take her without his ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... with the Colonel's firey harangue? Although there is no foundation for such incendiary language the reader will soon see just how much misery it wrought upon a defenseless people. Fanned into fury by the rehearsing of imaginary wrongs by gifted tongues, the mob when once started astonished its leaders, who quailed and looked aghast at the ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... made out of the idea of an imaginary museum, containing such articles as Aaron's rod, the petticoat of General Harrison, the pistol with which Benton shot Jackson,—and then a diorama, consisting of political or other scenes, or done in wax-work. The idea to be wrought ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of his adventures, in some Eastern country now, and less connectedly. These adventures, real or imaginary, had quite a savour of the Arabian Nights, and did not by any means make it easier for me to keep my hold on reality. The lightest weight will affect the balance under such circumstances, and in this case the weight ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... intimacy of all with all, without regard to personal tastes or affinities. Quite a number of Kenloe's subjects worked themselves up to a frenzy, protesting against the intolerable effects of such a requirement. Of course, they were fighting imaginary foes. There was nothing under the old social order which compelled men to associate merely because their bank accounts or incomes were the same, and there was nothing under the new order that would any more do so. While the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... he knew that this offer had been accepted without hesitation; and thenceforth, accordingly, he threw his daily letters to his wife into the form of communications meant for an imaginary group, consisting of a spinster sister, a statistical laird, a rural clergyman of the Presbyterian Kirk, and a brother, a veteran officer on half-pay. The rank of this last personage corresponded, however, exactly with that of his own elder brother, John Scott, who also, like ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... of what is best in the long run. The man who is controlled by an arbitrary system without reference to conditions, is ineffective. He becomes a crank, a fanatic, a man whose aims are out of all proportion to results. This is because he is dealing with an imaginary world, not with the world as it is. We may admire the valiant knight who displays a noble chivalry in fighting wind-mills, but we do not call on a wind-mill warrior when we have some plain, real work to accomplish. All progress, large ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan
... only on the general principles by which the teacher is actuated, but also on the tone and manner in which, in cases of discipline, he addresses his pupils, I shall describe particular cases, real and imaginary, because by this method, I can better illustrate the course to be pursued. I shall also present and illustrate the various principles which I consider important, and in the order in which they occur ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... that this letter was written by the last great English writer, by the author of "Imaginary Portraits," the most beautiful of all prose books. I should like to break off and tell of my delight in reading "Imaginary Portraits," but I have told my delight elsewhere; go, seek out what I have said in the pages ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... insight into Mr. Browning's mode of work; it is also very significant of the small place which love had hitherto occupied in his life. It was evident, from his appeal to Miss Haworth's 'notion' on the subject, that he had as yet no experience, even imaginary, of a genuine passion, whether in woman or man. The experience was still distant from him in point of time. In circumstance he was nearer to it than he knew; for it was in 1839 that he ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... servant shut up with him. It imposed upon him some duties, it was true; and was, in so far, a good; but it also imposed most painful restraints. He had a strong persuasion that Bonaparte had not given up the pursuit of his supposed treasures, or the hope of mastering all his designs, real or imaginary; and he suspected that Mars Plaisir would be left long enough with him to receive the overflowings of his confidence (so hard to restrain in such circumstances as theirs!) and would then be tampered with ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... Geoffrey Rudel, who "died for the charms of an imaginary mistress." He fell in love with the Countess of Tripoli, never having seen her. He loved the very fame of her beauty. He set sail for the East, and endured the agonies of travel of those days. Whether anticipation was better ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... this Sonnet wholly imaginary, or was there some unfortunate story which, for sufficient reasons, his biographers have suppressed? It is true, that in his letters, written at a much later period, he speaks of marriage in a manner not to be reconciled with the idea that he was then suffering from recollections of that description; ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... On this slight foundation, a huge superstructure of fable was gradually reared, by the bards and the monks; two orders of men, who equally abused the privilege of fiction. The Scottish nation, with mistaken pride, adopted their Irish genealogy; and the annals of a long line of imaginary kings have been adorned by the fancy of Boethius, and the classic elegance ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... there is, which (for the use and benefit which these and the like exotics afford us) I would take hold of, as upon all occasions I do in this work: Namely, to encourage all imaginary industry of such as travel foreign countries, and especially gentlemen who have concerns in our American plantations, to promote the culture of such plants and trees (especially timber) as may yet add to those we find ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... reality, a kindred origin. That thought was, wherefore should my life be solitary? Why should I stand apart and alone from my race, relying on myself only, and depriving myself, for the sake of a perhaps imaginary independence, of all the endearments of social life, all the ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... commons. He never ends a suit, but prunes it that it may grow the faster and yield a greater increase of strife. The wisdom of the law is to admit of all the petty, mean, real injustices in the world, to avoid imaginary possible great ones that may perhaps fall out. His client finds the Scripture fulfilled in him, that it is better to part with a coat too than go to law for a cloak; for, as the best laws are made of the worst manners, even so are the best lawyers of the worst men. He hums about Westminster ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... soul. Until the present time we women, as he told you, have figured chiefly in religion, poetry, and romance. We have been that part of the imaginations of men which creates creeds, poetry, windmills, and fiction. We have no reputation for any other form of existence. We have been purely imaginary beings living in physical bodies for just men. Our character is a legend invented by men; it could never fit a real human being. Yet we have accepted it, and tried to believe in it. You have indeed kept us, but we have not ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... be willing to resign the oars before a half hour had gone by. Under the circumstances he did not quite like to ask Sherm to relieve him. Sherm seemed to be oblivious to the fact that it required energy to propel the boat. He was strumming an imaginary banjo as an accompaniment to the familiar melodies the girls were softly singing, occasionally joining in himself. Katy did not fail to observe that Ernest dropped one of his oars to regard a blister ruefully, and she did her ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... modern sentiment and circumstances might easily tire; a Comic History of England, for instance, is stiffer reading to-day than GARDNER or GREEN. Sometimes, however, Mr. BARING seems to carry to extreme lengths his conscientious avoidance of efforts to be funny; and in the imaginary records of one or two of his subjects there is little more to laugh at than the unaided fancy of the student has long ago perceived. Tristram loved two Iseults, and JOHN MILTON was an exasperating husband; ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various
... more realistic, and its origin understood at a glance when we examine the old hand brace of turned and carved boxwood, dated 1642, in that collection. The part where the bit is fitted is literally a hand, carved out of solid wood, and the curious crank indicates an imaginary twist in the arm, perhaps suggested by some carpenter who was able to manipulate his tools in a way not commonly understood, thus giving to future ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... was rather indifference and imaginary superiority. But I have read and thought much of late, and see more clearly. If I thought of this rite of Confirmation at all, it was only as a means of impressing young minds. I now see every evidence that it is the completion of Baptismal ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... over his brow, dazed beyond the power of speech. His gaze rested on Putnam Jones. Suddenly something seemed to have struck him between the eyes. He almost staggered under the imaginary impact. Jones! Was Jones a party to this—He started forward, an oath on his lips, prepared to leap upon the man and throttle the truth out of him. As abruptly he checked himself. The cunning that inspired the actions of every one of these people had communicated itself to him. ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... subjoined extract from the separate essay ["Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy"] previously referred to will give some assistance in following the course of the phenomena. It is adapted to the imaginary case used for illustration throughout that essay, the case of a trade between England and Germany in cloth ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... bravely? If it is clear that they miss a rich development of their susceptibilities, a reason why is no less clear. I have just hinted at it. The ample explanation is in the fact that they have hardly any imaginary or non-existent subjects upon which to exercise emotional sensibility for its own sake, so that it may grow strong and fine by frequent practice; but they have to wait for some real thing to move them—some distressful occurrence in the valley itself, like ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... within the other, or about poles, and contained circles which were to be brought into the position of the ecliptic, and of a plane passing through the sun and the poles of the ecliptic"—an instrument, therefore, which represented, as by a model, the relative positions of certain imaginary lines and planes in the heavens; which was adjusted by putting these representative lines and planes into parallelism and coincidence with the celestial ones; and which depended for its use upon the perception that the relations between these ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... would tolerate any enormity he might concoct. This was the actual comfort President Wilson's message gave Germany. The negative result was felt among the Allied nations which, struggling against the German Monster like Laocoon in the coils of the Python, took Mr. Wilson's praise of Germany's imaginary love of justice and humanity as a death-warrant for themselves. They could not believe that he who wrote such words, or the American people who swallowed them, could ever be roused to give succor to the Allies in ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... In our early volumes it will be seen that this imaginary Prete Jani, Prester John, or the Christian Priest-king, had been sought for in vain among the wandering tribes of eastern Tartary. The Portuguese now absurdly gave that appellation to the Negus of Habesh, or Emperor ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... evil of war.... It appeared as clear as daylight that we had always been right, and that the warlike spirit, that deepest and purest joy of the great heart of our people, was unshaken and unchanged. The warlike spirit, the love of war and the craving for battle, was no imaginary characteristic of our people—no, and a thousand times no!—K.A. KUHN, W.U.W., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... recollection that I both whistled and sang as I worked. The idea that I was in any danger of losing my life quite forsook me, and all the hardships through which I had been passing appeared to have been only imaginary—a chimera of my brain, or, at most, only ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid
... Hindu and is grinding his brown face into the dust. In both England and India are organizations of good people who have conceived it to be their mission to defend and protect the natives from real or imaginary wrongs they are suffering, while there are numerous societies and associations whose business is to see that the Englishman gets his ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... come across a prettier collection of tales. These charming stories of boys and girls of olden days are no mere fictitious or imaginary sketches, but are real and actual records of their sayings and doings. The illustrations are in Gordon ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... yet hushed, above. They looked upon the living and intense stars, and felt palpably at their hearts that spell—wild, but mute—which nothing on or of earth can inspire; that pining of the imprisoned soul, that longing after the immortality on high, which is perhaps no imaginary type of the immortality ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sneering 26,448 who stand above untumbled. The happy simp prefers a 4 per cent that pays to a 15 per cent investment that returns only engraved prospectuses. He stands on that street corner looking for an imaginary angel parachuting down, and enjoys himself more than the Mephistopheles who is laughing ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... indeed of all heathen religions, that its golden age should be in the past. It instinctively clings to the memory of a former happier time, and shrinks from the unknown future. Its piety ever looks backward, and aspires to present safety or enjoyment by a faithful imitation of an imaginary past. It is always "returning on the old well-worn path to the paradise of its childhood," and contrasting the gloom that overhangs the present with the radiance that shone on the morning lands. In every crisis of terror or disaster it turns with ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... be our magnet, and let n represent a particle of north magnetism placed exactly opposite the middle of the magnet. Of course this is an imaginary case, as you can never in reality thus detach your north magnetism from its neighbour. But supposing us to have done so, what would be the action of the two poles of the magnet on n? Your reply will of course be that the pole S attracts n while the pole N repels it. Let ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... be done by the cultivation of the mind— only through intelligence—because we are fighting only the monsters of the mind. The phantoms whom we are endeavoring to destroy do not exist; they are all imaginary. They live in that undeveloped or unexplored part of the mind that belongs ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... be admitted that neither was he mistaken in saying that the adventures of Crusoes, real or imaginary, were all copied ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... it would have been a happy time of quiet, rustic peace, beauty, and relief from city life. With me it was restless vanity amounting to madness. In every relation, action, or possible event in which I figured or might figure in the future, I always instantaneously called up an imaginary audience. And then this imaginary audience admired everything I did or might do, and put the most heroic, gallant, and romantic construction on my acts, appearance, lineage, and breeding. Suppose I saw a pretty girl on a bush road. Instead ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... feeling—and stood pale but quiet opposite to the infuriated old man. His grey eyes seemed to give out sparks of fire. His hair bristled up on his head like the coat of a wild animal enraged. He went up and down on the hearth-rug like the same animal in a cage, shaking his fist at some imaginary culprit. ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... essentially dramatic and given to throwing future interviews into an imaginary dramatic shape, thought over and over what he would say to Veronica and what she might be expected to say to him. But he was terribly exhausted and harassed, and by degrees as the stimulant of recent comfort lost its cheering warmth within him, he silently grew despondent again within himself, and ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... far edge of the field was a fringe of stunted cedars, like an abatis, partly concealing the old barricade where, in the golden days of their youth, he had played with Shirley at storming the fort; and Shirley, in these fierce assaults, had usually tumbled over upon the imaginary ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... a person in real life with a character in fiction is not uncommon, but it is more conducive to solidity of judgment to compare the living with the living, and the imaginary with the imaginary. The chief difficulty, however, in Hamlet's case, is that he only appears before us as a person acting in an abnormal mental condition. The mysterious death of his father, the suspicion of his mother's complicity in crime, which takes the form of an apparition from beyond ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... have an opposite character to portray,—the elegant Don Giovanni, for example"; and drawing himself up and wrapping an imaginary cloak about him, with the old well-remembered courtly gesture, his face and manner were instantly transformed at the thought of his favorite character. He turned and smiled on us, his strong features ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... for us to consider hypotheses made in problems, which sometimes involve impossibilities. (2) For instance, when we say - let us assume that this burning candle is not burning, or, let us assume that it burns in some imaginary space, or where there are no physical objects. (3) Such assumptions are freely made, though the last is clearly seen to be impossible. (4) But, though this be so, there is no fiction in the case. (57:5) For, in the first case, I have merely recalled to memory, [x] another ...
— On the Improvement of the Understanding • Baruch Spinoza [Benedict de Spinoza]
... streets of Nice were crowded with thousands of both sexes, who knew not from what or to whom they fled; and some hours elapsed before the firmness of the military officers could relieve the city from this imaginary foe. But the ambition of Holagou and his successors was fortunately diverted by the conquest of Bagdad, and a long vicissitude of Syrian wars; their hostility to the Moslems inclined them to unite with the Greeks and Franks; [37] and their generosity ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... the same materials, it must be expected they will supply from invention the want of intelligence; and that under the title of "The Life of Savage," they will publish only a novel, filled with romantick adventures, and imaginary amours. You may therefore, perhaps, gratify the lovers of truth and wit, by giving me leave to inform them in your Magazine, that my account will be published in 8vo. ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... that the evil which would arise from a general enlightenment of the people would outweigh any benefit that they could derive from the discovery. The system had, as his colleagues said, worked well; and the fact that the people worshiped as actual deities imaginary beings who were really but the representatives of the attributes of the infinite God, could not be said to have done them any actual harm. At any rate, he alone and unaided could do nothing. Only with the general consent of the higher priesthood could the circle of ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... corresponding rights to get rid of her husband. These, and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins." Nothing is allowed to stand in his path. For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning of Greek words. But {52} there is not a hint ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... an aspect as benign as the summer sky overhead; Prue ran to and fro pouring forth a stream of counsels, warnings, and predictions; men and maids gathered on the lawn or hung out of upper windows; and even old Hecate, the cat, was seen chasing imaginary rats and mice in the grass till her yellow eyes glared with excitement. "All in," was announced at last, and as the carriage rolled away its occupants looked at one another with faces of blithe satisfaction that their ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... Felton found that the more culpable of the two men which formed the character of Buckingham was the one of whom the public knew not the life. This was because his love, so strange, so new, and so ardent, made him view the infamous and imaginary accusations of Milady de Winter as, through a magnifying glass, one views as frightful monsters atoms in reality imperceptible by ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hand, instances of pregnancy with imaginary symptoms and preparations for birth are sometimes noticed, and many cases are on record. In fact, nearly every text-book on obstetrics gives some space to the subject of pseudocyesis. Suppression of the menses, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... questioned as to circumstances that might possibly be used in his defence, he always wandered off to accounts of previous outrages committed by the press-gang, or to passionate abuse of the trick by which men had been lured from their homes on the night in question to assist in putting out an imaginary fire, and then seized and carried off. Some of this very natural indignation might possibly have some effect on the jury; and this seemed the only ground of hope, and was indeed a slight one, as the judge was likely to warn the jury ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. II • Elizabeth Gaskell
... would have gained a lover without losing a friend: but Madame de P—— is too accomplished a politician to go the simple straight road to her object. I now perfectly comprehend why she took such pains to persuade me that an imperial lover was alone worthy of my charms. She was alarmed by an imaginary danger. Believe me, I am incapable of disputing with any one les ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... mothers and the rest, looking gloomy enough, while, over there in her bit of a brown house in the village, Mrs. Lee sat in very much the same frame of mind, trying to relieve her feelings by smoothing imaginary wrinkles out of her boy's best clothes, and planning for him any number of bright red neck-ties, if he would only come back ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... But, once upon a time, a certain rich miser conceived the design of spunging upon this Abernethy for a medical opinion. Getting up, for this purpose, an ordinary conversation in a private company, he insinuated his case to the physician, as that of an imaginary individual. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... bathing-place, was the scene of the burial of Prince William, son of Henry I., who was drowned off Barfleur, to his father's lasting sorrow; the supposition being that Gyllyng was a corruption of William. This seems purely imaginary; there is nothing to show that William's body was ever recovered, and if it had been brought to England his father would certainly not have let it be buried in this far-distant and lonely spot. We must probably go to the Celtic for the derivation of Gyllyngvase. One of the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... go to Egypt. I should like to go to Egypt.' Then she went on playing with the necklace and talking to the imaginary child. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... pull them down again immediately, and that is a source of grief. We should be still more on our guard against distressing our hearts by depicting possible misfortunes. If these were misfortunes of a purely imaginary kind, or very remote and unlikely, we should at once see, on awaking from our dream, that the whole thing was mere illusion; we should rejoice all the more in a reality better than our dreams, or at most, be warned against misfortunes which, though very remote, ...
— Counsels and Maxims - From The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... country—had equal civil and religious rights been freely and at once extended to the people of the lesser kingdom—there is no reason to doubt that the measure would have become popular in time, and the vices of the old system be better remembered than its benefits, real or imaginary. But the Union was never utilized for Ireland; it proved in reality what Samuel Johnson had predicted, when spoken of in his day: "Do not unite with us, sir," said the gruff old moralist to an Irish acquaintance; "it would ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... the Town and Castle, immediately repair'd to the Grates of the Nunnery, toss'd over their Handkercheifs, Nosegays, and other pretty Things; all which were, doubtless, very graciously received by those imaginary Recluses. Thence came it to pass, that in the space of a Month or less, you could hardly fall into Comany of any one of our younger Officers, of either sort, but the Discourse, if it might deserve the Name, was concerning these ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... over to herself little imaginary speeches about the homestead and old associations, and "Daisy's great love and reverence for all that touched the memory of her uncle, to whom she certainly owed everything;" about the journey to New York, and the few days they had to give there to Mr. ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Minister was practically driven out of office by Prussian interference. Why? What had he done? He had done nothing which a minister of an independent state had not the most absolute right to do. He had crossed the imaginary line drawn in French territory by Prussian despotism, and he had to leave. Europe, after enduring this for generations, made up its mind at last that the Hindenburg line must be drawn along the legitimate frontiers ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... Toledo also make glistening glazed tiles. Some of these show scenes from the lives of favorite Spanish heroes, real and imaginary. There are some Toledo tiles that will tell you about Don Quixote of La Mancha, a hero invented 350 years ago by ...
— Getting to know Spain • Dee Day
... contemptuously, even treating him as an ignoramus in ecclesiastical matters."—Napoleon met him with open arms and embraced him, calling him his father. (Thiers, XV., 295.)—It is probable that the best literary portrayal of these tete-a-tete conversations is the imaginary scene in "Grandeurs et Servitudes Militaires," by Alfred ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Channels, through which several Philosophers teach, that the Sea discharges it self into the Rivers, are not only imaginary, but useless, in regard 'tis impossible for the water to rise from the Subterraneous places up to the Mountains, where commonly the Sources of ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... have had my conscience pretty well inflicted with culinary meditations, for, without intending to do so, I says, out loud, to the imaginary waiter, 'Cut it thick and have it rare, with the French fried, and six, ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... "seeking the victim"; foolish, because we had to suppose that the nuns, whose gentleness and kindness we worshipped, were practicing horrible tortures upon some one; heroic, because we risked our lives every day to deliver an imaginary creature, who was the object of our most generous thought ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... I had read the Twenty-seventh and Twenty-eighth Chapters of Guy Mannering to them in the original, it was remarkable with what accuracy of detail Sweetheart wrapped a plaid about her and played the witch, Meg Merrilies, singing wild dirges over an imaginary dead body, while Hugh John hid among the straw till Sir Toady and Maid Margaret rushed in with incredible hubbub and sat down to carouse like a real gang of the most ...
— Red Cap Tales - Stolen from the Treasure Chest of the Wizard of the North • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... without a hitch. Without waiting for the bed-bell they one and all presented themselves to the dormitory dame, and requested permission to turn in, pleading severe fatigue (which was by no means imaginary) as the reason for this unwonted haste. So smartly was the retirement effected, that no one was aware of their return to their house until half an hour later. When the dormitory filled up, their five noses were discernible peeping ...
— The Cock-House at Fellsgarth • Talbot Baines Reed
... and of the subsequent proceedings. The report of the latter may well be generally correct inasmuch as there were Spanish witnesses present, but the account of this oration, delivered prior to the arrival of the Spanish invaders, is clearly open to a suspicion that it may be more or less imaginary. But the historian continues: "Upon this he took a Box full of Gold and valuable Jewels which he had with him, and exposing it to their view: Here is (said he) the God of the Spaniards, whom we must honor with ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... disproportion between the unit who commands and the numbers who obey, the greater the chance of mutiny. Sedition is the progeny of assembly. Even where grievances may be real, if there is no contact and no discussion, there will be no insubordination; but imaginary grievances, canvassed and discussed in assembly, swell into disaffection and mutiny. When, therefore, numbers are collected together, as in the vessels of the East India service, martial law becomes indispensable; and the proof of it ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... their tribulation almost with joy. That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go, and you may be sure there was nothing unwelcome in a circumstance that carried me back to Edinburgh and Flora. From that hour I began to indulge myself with the making of imaginary scenes and interviews, in which I confounded the aunt, flattered Ronald, and now in the witty, now in the sentimental manner, declared my love and received the assurance of its return. By means of this exercise my resolution daily grew stronger, until ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attention, especially in these climates, where strong liquors so fatally and so frequently produce those very distresses they are designed to remedy; and if I am not misinformed, even among the ladies themselves, who are truly much to be pitied. Their condition of life makes them a prey to imaginary woes, which never fail to grow up in minds unexercised and unemployed. To get rid of these, it is said, there are who betake themselves to distilled spirits. And it is not improbable they are led gradually to the use of those poisons by a certain ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare {cruncha ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... such digressions, quite irreducible into 1-1/5 column of a paper, that I was perfectly ashamed to show it you. However, it is become a serious matter that I should convince you I neither slunk from the task through a wilful deserting neglect, or through any (most imaginary on your part) distaste of Chaucer; and I will try my hand again, I hope with better luck. My health is bad and my time taken up, but all I can spare between this and Sunday shall be employed for you, since you desire it: and if I bring you a crude, wretched paper on Sunday, you must ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... That gray, mottled purple of his face showed again. Plutina wondered, if, indeed, this same memory had been in his thoughts the night before. But, if so, it only made the thing the more inexplicable. Why should a hanging, long-past, thus haunt him? He was no nervous weakling, to be tortured by imaginary fears. Yet, now, he displayed unmistakable signs of terror, in his voice, his eyes, his whole mien, in the shaking haste that spilled the half of ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... quickly replaced the cloying and messy candybar. We made no profit, but we suffered no loss and the factory was in actual operation so that no snoopers could ever accuse us of selling stock in an enterprise with a purely imaginary existence. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... time of their occurrence they do not make so deep and vital an impression upon you. If not recorded as they occur, they can seldom be recalled in the original form. Even though you attempt to write these imaginary ideas as you think them, you can and do change and modify them as you go along. This lack of clearness and permanent form, while it seems to give greater freedom, carries with it disadvantages. In the first place ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... fear Lena is under more excitement now than is good for her." Then turning to Mrs. Rush, he added, "There is little use in expecting her to make rapid progress while she is fretting herself, as she is evidently doing, over some real or imaginary evil. Do you think it possible," an idea occurring to him, "that she is troubled about losing the chance ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... sources of information which this country affords; and though, of course, there must be in these volumes, as in all historical accounts, more or less of imperfection and error, there is no intentional embellishment. Nothing is stated, not even the most minute and apparently imaginary details, without what was deemed good historical authority. The readers, therefore, may rely upon the record as the truth, and nothing but the truth, so far as an honest purpose and a careful examination have been effectual in ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... plays with life. In his autobiography Goethe describes the door in the wall of a certain garden in Frankfort within which many marvellous things happened; a true romance of incident and adventure which became as real to the romancer as to his eager and credulous listeners. De Quincey created an imaginary kingdom, peopled with imaginary beings whom he ruled with benignant wisdom, amid universal prosperity and peace, until, in an unlucky hour, he admitted his brother into a partnership of authority; and that brother, unable to withstand the temptation of absolute power, became ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... first solicited without my knowledge; but, when I was told that you were pleased to honour me with your patronage, I did not expect to hear of a refusal; yet, as I have had no long time to brood hope, and have not rioted in imaginary opulence, this cold reception has been scarce a disappointment; and, from your Lordship's kindness, I have received a benefit, which only men like you are able to bestow. I shall now live mihi carior, with a higher opinion of my ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... been prepared for Johnnie—which she was sure could at least do no harm, and she could give some advice. Perhaps she mingled it with too many excuses and lamentations at being forced to stay at home; at least, Theodora thought her fanciful, rejoicing in the self-importance of imaginary ill-health. ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the room to a tune from down-stairs, her arms outstretched to an imaginary partner, the cigarette waving in ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... my waggish comrade, throwing his head back and performing an imaginary air by briskly drawing one arm across the other, "who knows that I may not fiddle myself into her majesty's good graces so as to became a sort of Rizzio ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... giddy elevation to which such an imaginary achievement raised his dreams, there was but one higher step, and his colossal egotism immediately mounted to occupy it. On August 9, just two weeks after his arrival in ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... long will he miss the spirit of the performance, which is, nevertheless, caught easily by one who sees it from the front. May he not, then, for once in a way, be allowed to change his standpoint? True, he came not to see the representation of an imaginary world; he is in search of the actual; but surely it must help him to a comprehension of the dramatic apparatus itself, and of the manner in which it is worked, if he were to view its action from in front as well as from behind, or at least allow himself ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... peninsula railways and canals, postal and telegraph systems, a code of laws which is far in advance of our own. Profound peace broods over the empire, famine and pestilence are fought with the weapons of science. It would be easy to pile up items on the debit side of our imaginary cash-book. Free trade has destroyed indigenous crafts wholesale, and quartered the castes who pursued them on an over-taxed soil. Incalculable is the waste of human life and inherited skill caused by the shifting ...
— Tales of Bengal • S. B. Banerjea
... and Customary Estates. It's a wonderfully powerful situation. It appears—but I won't spoil it for you. Mind you don't skip to see how it all comes out in the end!" Sir Mallaby suspended conversation while he addressed an imaginary ball with the mashie which he had taken out of his golf-bag. For this was the day when he went down to Walton Heath for his weekly foursome with three old friends. His tubby form was clad in tweed of a violent nature, ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... Hradschin, imposing from its massiveness and its imperial situation, and with the dome and minarets of the cathedral clustering behind them, the eye swept across the fertile valley, through which the rapid, yellow Moldau courses, to the opposite line of cliffs crested with the half imaginary fortress-palaces of the Wyscherad. There, in the mythical legendary past of Bohemia had dwelt the shadowy Libuscha, daughter of Krok, wife of King Premysl, foundress of Prague, who, when wearied of her lovers, was accustomed to toss them from those heights into the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... for the swallow, sir?" touching an imaginary cap. "Shall I say that 'Dark and true and tender is the North,' and 'Fierce and false and fickle is the South,' or ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was removed—or, as the delicate military phrase went, "temporarily relieved"—from the command of the Department of the South, there was a report current in those parts of a conversation, perhaps imaginary, between President Lincoln and the relieved General, on his arrival at Washington. The gossip ran, that on General Hunter's inquiring the cause of his removal, the good-natured President could only say that "Horace Greeley said he had found a man who could do the job." ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... man, with a gentlemanly style, take of foolscap paper a few quires; stuff them well with high-sounding titles—dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, ad libitum. Then open the peerage at random, pick a supposititious author out of one page of it, and fix the imaginary characters upon some of the rest; mix it all up with quantum suff. of puff, and the book is in a second edition before ninety-nine readers out of a hundred have found out the one is as little likely to have written, as the others to have done what ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction - Vol. X, No. 289., Saturday, December 22, 1827 • Various
... the branches were bare a fine outlook was to be had all over the neighborhood, and you saw how big houses and little houses stood sociably side by side, while an old gray church kept guard at one corner. Here Bess and Louise romanced over an imaginary family known as "The Carletons," or played dolls with Helen, and here Carl arranged his stamp album and made signals to Ikey across the street. Sometimes their father and uncle would drop in and pretend they were boys once more. Then what delight it was to listen to ...
— The Story of the Big Front Door • Mary Finley Leonard
... complete the settlement of Europe. She observed, that some persons had been so malicious as to insinuate that the protestant succession, in the house of Hanover, was in danger under her government; but that those who endeavoured to distract the minds of men with imaginary dangers, could only mean to disturb the public tranquillity. She said, that after all she had done to secure the religion and liberties of her people, she could not mention such proceedings without some degree of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... let the body of the aeroplane be horizontal, and the sustaining planes B disposed at the same angle, which we will assume to be 15 degrees, this being the imaginary angle for illustrative purposes, with the power of the machine to drive it along horizontally, as ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... flowery plains, by pleasant rivulets, where all was peace and harmony, and over which the spirit of heaven itself seemed to brood and watch; and that of drunkenness, in which all the miseries and tortures of the imaginary hell were concentrated in a living death; of blighted hopes, of wasted life, of ruined homes, of broken hearts, of a conscience goaded to an insanity—to a madness—to fairly wallow in the Lethean draft, that memory might be robbed of its poignant goadings; that ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson
... members of the kingdom of the devil. Neither, indeed, are we dreaming of a Platonic state, as some wickedly charge, but we say that this Church exists, namely, the truly believing and righteous men scattered throughout the whole world [We are speaking not of an imaginary Church, which is to be found nowhere; but we say and know certainly that this Church, wherein saints live, is and abides truly upon earth; namely, that some of God's children are here and there in all the world, in various kingdoms, islands, lands, and ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... subject by an imaginary example. A venerable gentleman, one Mr. Smith, who had long been regarded as a pattern of moral excellence, was warming his aged blood with a glass or two of generous wine. His children being gone forth about their worldly business, ...
— Fancy's Show-Box (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... then, my mind running on the end of de Barral, on the irresistible pressure of imaginary griefs, crushing conscience, scruples, prudence, under their ever-expanding volume; on the sombre and venomous irony in the obsession which had mastered ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... believe that Deronda, poor devil, who he had no doubt was his cousin by the father's side, inwardly winced under their mutual position; wherefore the presence of that less lucky person was more agreeable to him than it would otherwise have been. An imaginary envy, the idea that others feel their comparative deficiency, is the ordinary cortege of egoism; and his pet dogs were not the only beings that Grandcourt liked to feel his power over in making them jealous. Hence he was civil enough to exchange several words with Deronda on the terrace ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... not even this is sufficient, for we are forbidden to return evil for evil. It may cause us grief and pain, but should not incite us to anger, hatred and revenge. What poor excuses would therefore be accidental or slight injuries, just penalties for our wrongdoings and imaginary grievances! The less excusable is our wrath, the more serious is our delinquency. Our guilt is double-dyed when the deed and the cause of the deed are ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... answered gently. "But you were not describing an imaginary paragon. Hadn't you Millicent ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... is known as Celtic design. The original and essential features of this system consisted in the use of spirals and interlacing strapwork, but later on this type was developed by transforming the geometrical fret into a scheme of imaginary or nondescript animals, portions of which, such as the tails and ears, were prolonged and woven in exquisite fancy through the border. The artistic features of Celtic book decoration consist chiefly of initial letters of this nature embellished with color. Amongst the ancient ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... possibility of witchcraft, even in our own days, though I think it of very unlikely occurrence; but I would determinately resist giving credit to any tales told by the superstitious vulgar, who, naturally prone to cruelty, have so many motives for revenging imaginary wrongs. It is placing a dreadful weapon in their hands, of which they have cunning enough to know the use, but neither mercy nor justice enough to restrain them from using it. Better let one guilty person ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... going and coming. The meals are long,—so long that there is literally no end to them; they are eternal. It is customary to mark certain points in the endless route of appetite with mile-stones named breakfast, dinner, and supper; but these points have no more positive existence than the imaginary lines and angles of the geometrician. Breakfast runs entirely through dinner into supper, and dinner ends with coffee, the beginning of breakfast. Estimating the duration of dinner by the speed of an ordinary railroad-train, it is twenty miles from soup ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... We can recall the beauty of the rose, the perfume of the mignonette, the flavor of the orange, or we can imagine new combinations of these delights. We feel joy or grief through reading vivid descriptions, or we can ourselves create imaginary scenes in which we are actors, ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... nature of Brahman. Death doth not devour creatures like a tiger; its form itself is unascertainable. Besides this, some imagine Yama to be Death. This, however, is due to the weakness of the mind. The pursuit of Brahman or self-knowledge is immortality. That (imaginary) god (Yama) holdeth his sway in the region of the Pitris, being the source of bliss to the virtuous and of woe to the sinful. It is at his command that death in the form of wrath, ignorance, and covetousness, occurreth among men. Swayed by pride, men always walk in unrighteous path. None amongst ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... was erected By the Author of Waverley To the memory of Helen Walker Who died in the year of God 1791. This humble individual practised in real life the virtues with which fiction has invested the imaginary character of Jeanie Deans. Refusing the slightest departure from veracity even to save the life of a sister, she neverthless showed her kindness and fortitude by rescuing her from the severity of ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... soothe the gigantic, choleric doctor. Lady Isabella and her friend Anne Harrison figure in one of the most graphic and remarkable chapters of "John Inglesant," in which the author has also drawn largely from these memoirs for a foundation to one of his imaginary episodes. The girl of eighteen, full of life and enthusiasm, was doubtless flattered at being taken up by the fashionable Court beauty, and may have allowed herself to be led into rather dangerous frolics, till Richard Fanshawe, ...
— Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe • Lady Fanshawe
... receive gifts and graces: I am very well satisfied to owe them to your own delicacy of imagination, which represents to you the idea of a fine lady, and you have good nature enough to fancy I am she. All this is mighty well, but you do not stop there; imagination is boundless. After giving me imaginary wit and beauty, you give me imaginary passions, and you tell me I'm in love: if I am, 'tis a perfect sin of ignorance, for I don't so much as know the man's name: I have been studying these three hours, and cannot guess ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... its own despite its hostile critics, is their debtor. Their closeness to nature, their picturesque life in the past, their mythical religion, social system and fateful history have begot one of the wide world's "legends," an ideal not wholly imaginary, which, as a counterpoise to Realism, our literature needs, and probably ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... to see. I suppose there isn't much shooting to be had except rabbits." He swung an imaginary gun to his shoulder and sighted it at a quarry which seemed to Isabel to be equally imaginary. "See him? Under that heap of stones left of the beech ring." Isabel's vision was both keen and practised, but she saw ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... to fish. You throw in your hook with such blissful certainty that no fish can possibly resist the temptation you are dangling before its eyes. There is suppressed excitement all over you. You are all on the alert, feeling for imaginary nibbles, for bites that are not there. Sometimes, of course, the dreams come true, and the bites are realities; but these occasions are sadly outnumbered by the times when you keep on feeling and bobbing your line vainly, while ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... to shiver at an imaginary picture before an exclamation from Ron attracted her attention. There it stood! the little white inn, nestled beneath the shelter of a rock, so near to the head of the glen that the road came to an abrupt ending but a few yards farther on. A door in the middle; two small-paned windows ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... towards the source of life as the flower turns to the sun. The eyes are lifted to the Creator's with a wistful yearning. It is the look we sometimes see in the eyes of a woodland creature appealing for mercy. It is such a look as might belong to that imaginary being of the Greek mythology, the faun, half beast, half human. Thus Adam, still but half created, begins to feel the thrill of life in his members, and is aroused to action. He lifts his hand to meet the Creator's outstretched finger. The current of life is established, ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... have puzzled herself to explain. It was not to worship, not to repent of her heinous sin: she neither repented nor desired to repent. But it seemed pleasant to play at repentance and put on imaginary sackcloth. ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... could. She was a housewifely little creature, and helped Hannah keep home neat and comfortable for the workers, never thinking of any reward but to be loved. Long, quiet days she spent, not lonely nor idle, for her little world was peopled with imaginary friends, and she was by nature a busy bee. There were six dolls to be taken up and dressed every morning, for Beth was a child still and loved her pets as well as ever. Not one whole or handsome one among ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... writes Dr. COCKE, "to resist this state or bring it on at will. Many of them describe beautiful scenes from Nature, or some mighty cathedral with its lofty dome, or the faces of imaginary beings." This writer's own first experience of self-hypnotism was very remarkable. He had been told by a hypnotizer to keep the number twenty-six in his mind. He did so, and after hearing a ringing in his ears and then a strange roaring he felt that spirits were all ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... from one end of the room to the other on all fours, Sandy applauding with enthusiasm; I walked upright and growled and snapped and snarled; I stood on my head, I flung handsprings, I danced a lubberly dance with my paws bent and my imaginary snout sniffing from side to side; I did everything a bear could do, and many things which no bear could ever do and no bear with any dignity would want to do, anyway; and of course I never suspected that I was making a spectacle of myself to any one but Sandy. At last, standing on ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... habitable on account of the cold," to the cinnamon country (Somaliland), "the most southerly point of the habitable earth." From west to east it stretches from the Pillars of Hercules right "through the middle of Our Sea" to the shores of Asia Minor, then across Asia by an imaginary chain of mountains to an imaginary spot where the Ganges, lately discovered, emptied its waters into the ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... to the lady—that I am wholly unacquainted even with the person of your friend—that the idea of intentional injury on my part, therefore, is ridiculous; and let me add, for the benefit of your friend, that to expect an apology for imaginary injuries, would be the most ridiculous part of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... had reduced them to great misery, and a dozen of them were willing enough to undertake the voyage under the guidance of Christian, whose education had given him a kind of ascendancy to which he had no other claim, for the chieftainship, with which Bailey chose to invest him, was purely imaginary. Christian was a natural actor. Bailey understood perfectly what would suit the popular idea of an Indian chief, and the story which he intended to tell, so that, together, they succeeded admirably. They made a profitable tour, and their success culminated ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... Hicks, to an imaginary bellboy, "Show this gentleman to Number 2323! Are you alone, sir, or just by yourself? I think you will like the room-it faces on the coal-chute, and has hot and cold folding-doors, and running water when the roof leaks! The bed is made once a ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of Nish for the scene of his oratory of conquest. His vainglorious words may well prove in their environment the prelude of a compulsory confession of failure, which is likely to come at a far briefer interval than the eighteen months which separate the imaginary hope of Paris from the slender ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... ceremony of that sort. He was so decidedly of the black-sheep type that the people who assumed management of the affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to present to Harboro's mind's eye. Her father (she said) was not very well and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was fearfully ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... Welsh peasantry; the men dressed in women's clothing, blackened their faces, and fell in armed crowds upon the toll-gates, destroyed them amidst great rejoicing and firing of guns, demolished the toll-keepers' houses, wrote threatening letters in the name of the imaginary "Rebecca," and once went so far as to storm the workhouse of Carmarthen. Later, when the militia was called out and the police strengthened, the peasants drew them off with wonderful skill upon false scents, demolished toll-gates at one point while the militia, lured by false ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... an imaginary place, except in name. It exists within a hundred miles of New York. The house is a palace, the grounds are a park. There is not only a long wing of magnificent guest rooms in the house, occupied by young girls or important older people, but there is also a guest annex, a separate ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... need to send for a doctor. And Janetta saw at once that she could not be spared from home. The wretched woman had found a solace from her woes, real and imaginary, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
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