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More "Literal" Quotes from Famous Books



... therefore, to enter upon an account of my dreams; for it is a literary sin to bore the reader, and a scientific sin to report the facts of a far country with more regard to point and brevity than to complete and literal truth. The psychologists have trained a pack of theories and facts which they keep in leash, like so many bulldogs, and which they let loose upon us whenever we depart from the straight and narrow ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller

... had not reflected on the nature of war. I merely knew it to be a science, cultivated chiefly by the human race, and that in its practice explosives are largely used. To "blow-up" effectively, whether in a literal or figurative sense, is difficult. To improve this power in war, and in the literal sense, I set myself to work. I invented a torpedo, which seemed to me better than any that had yet been brought out. To test its powers, I made a miniature fortification, ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne

... possess the majority. It was universally felt that this was the real meaning of the double representation, and that there was a logic in it which could not be resisted. The actual power vested in the Commons by the great concession exceeded their literal and legal power, and it was accepted ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... world and preach the gospel to every creature" (Mark 16. 15),—was the parting command of our Blessed Saviour; and it was on the literal reception of this command that the momentous alternative hung of our knowledge, or ignorance of the only Name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved; for "how shall they hear without a preacher, and how shall they preach except they be sent?", still is the order ...
— Christian Devotedness • Anthony Norris Groves

... occasions, and the power that collects them, the mind that contains them, is always and openly Thackeray's; it could not be otherwise. It is no question, for most of the time, of watching a scene at close quarters, where the simple, literal detail, such as anybody might see for himself, would be sufficient. A stretch of time is to be shown in perspective, at a distance; the story-teller must be at hand to work it into a single impression. And thus the general ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock

... township. It would have given them something to think and talk about. Into this still pool Elder Hankins threw the vials, the trumpets, the thunders, the beast with ten horns, the he-goat, and all the other apocalyptic symbols understood in an absurdly literal way. The world was to come to an end in the following August. Here was an excitement, something worth ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston

... literal fact. Take, for example, the great overland route from Europe to Asia. Despite its name, its real highway is on the waters of the Mediterranean and Red Seas. It has three gates,—three alone. They are the narrow strait of Gibraltar, fifteen miles wide, that place where the Mediterranean narrows ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... home with him—a long half-hour on the trolley, then up three flights into "light housekeeping" rooms in the back. There was cold meat on the table, and bread. The janitor's wife, good soul, had made a pot of coffee. "Light housekeeping" is a literal expression, let me tell you, and doctor's bills make it lighter. I followed him into the last room of the three. It looked different from the way I remembered it the afternoon before. When he turned ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray

... and 'diffusion' should receive literal interpretation in accordance with the evident intention of the testator; that such terms being logically distinct, the two purposes mentioned in the bequest were to be kept in view in the organization of the institution; ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... the symptoms of the real change in Mary Coombe. The thing itself lay deeper. Striving to express a subtlety which would not lend itself to words, Esther had more than once told herself that her mother was "not the same woman." Yet it was only to-day, as she stooped to kiss her, that the startling, literal truth of the phrase struck home. The outside changes were nothing—it was the woman ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... she was naturally gentle. In one instant she had gone mad. Mad? Not in the literal interpretation; but figuratively. She sprang back, snapping; her teeth bared, her hair bristled. Her nostrils drawn. With one bound she leaped ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... heart, the seeing eye of the first times, still feels and sees in us of the latest; that the Wise Man stands ever encompassed, and spiritually embraced, by a cloud of witnesses and brothers; and there is a living, literal Communion of Saints, wide as the World itself, and as the History ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... a painter? I am afraid this illustration of a critic's science will not prove what is desired. A painter knows a copy from an original by rules somewhat resembling these by which critics know a translation, which if it be literal, and literal it must be to resemble the copy of a picture, will be easily distinguished. Copies are known from originals, even when the painter copies his own picture; so if an author should literally translate his work, he would lose the manner of ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson

... Billie did not realize that the Japanese language abounds in such ceremonious words and high-sounding phrases and, in order to keep the spirit of the original, translations are generally literal. ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes

... retranslation from his Latin prose version. The argument was that they correspond too closely with the Latin; Baeda's words, "hic est sensus, non autem ordo ipse verborum," being taken to mean that he had given, not a literal translation, but only a free paraphrase. But the form of the sentences in Baeda's prose shows a close adherence to the parallelistic structure of Old English verse, and the alliterating words in the poem are in nearly every case the most obvious and almost the inevitable ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... compare this word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized the word ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... as it was to assist in the formation of a new administration for the Soudan, or to bring back the garrisons, was taken in ample time to ensure the personal safety and rescue of General Gordon. In the literal sense of the charge, history will therefore acquit Mr Gladstone and his colleagues of the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... lived for, his literal daily bread. I suppose what would be prosperity to him would be miserably insufficient for some other people. I wonder how we can help being conscious, in the midst of our comforts and pleasures, of the lives which are being starved to death in ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... going so interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:—Well! he has become like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would go far, in the literal sense, if he might—to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... formulas from Buster Bean's collar; the night he had helped Sport McGinnis smuggle a bottle of beer in for a welsh rabbit and swallowed a full third of the rank stuff. Then there was an appalling record of evasions, turnings and twistings of the exact and literal truth— ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through all ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... There again he boards with friends of his family, if they have any, or in more or less reputable lodgings amidst the same purely Indian surroundings, and his only contact with the Western world is through school-books in a foreign tongue, of which it is difficult enough for him to grasp even the literal meaning, let alone the spirit, which his native teachers have themselves too often only, very partially imbibed and are therefore quite unable to communicate[18]. From the secondary school he passes for his University course, if he gets so far, in precisely the same circumstances into a college ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... did not jounce up and down on the diving board to start. He simply leaped upward, and went ceilingward for easily fifteen feet, and hung stationary for a full breath, and then began to descend in literal slow motion. He fell only two and a half feet the first second, and five feet more the one after, and twelve and a half after that.... It took him over four seconds to drop forty-five feet into the water, and the splash that arose when he ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins

... The language of our text is a description of what befalls the actual branches of the literal vine; but it is made a representation of what befalls the individuals whom these branches represent, by that added clause, 'like a branch.' Look at the mysteriousness of the language. 'They gather them.' Who? 'They cast ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren

... examine I place the work entitled "An Historical Collection of State Papers, and other authentic Documents, intended as Materials for a History of the United States of America," by Ebenezer Hasard. The first volume of this compilation, which was printed at Philadelphia in 1792, contains a literal copy of all the charters granted by the Crown of England to the emigrants, as well as the principal acts of the colonial governments, during the commencement of their existence. Amongst other authentic documents, we here find a great many relating to the affairs of New England and Virginia ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... valley. Great labor and the utmost scrutiny are required in sifting these time-worn papers for desirable data, and especially is a considerable knowledge of conditions and events necessary; but the result of thorough investigation, especially through literal copying by the student, will amply repay the time ...
— Documentary History of the Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; I. Bibliographic Introduction • Adolph Francis Alphonse Bandelier

... other in number and statements, until the spirit of Naboth appeared and turned the scale against Ahab. The spirit of Naboth it had been, too, that had let astray the prophets of Ahab, making them all use the very same words in prophesying a victory at Ramothgilead. This literal unanimity aroused Jehoshaphat's suspicion, and caused him to ask for "a prophet of the Lord," for the rule is: "The same thought is revealed to many prophets, but no two prophets express it in the same words." (42) Jehoshaphat's mistrust was justified by the ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG

... transform sensation; but this is explicable by the fact that the strongest emotions are excited by ideas. Hence, on the hypothesis, the impression radiating downwards to the emotional centres from the cerebral hemispheres, would counteract a sensory impression radiating upwards from them, by a literal interference analogous to that observed in opposing waves of sound. But as the direction of the impression generating emotion coincides with that of the motor impulses, the latter would not be counteracted, ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... Moreover, the Gaboon pagans lodge their idols. Behind each larger establishment there is a dwarf hut, the miniature of a dwelling-place, carefully closed; I thought these were offices, but Hotaloya Andrews taught me otherwise. He called them in his broken English "Compass-houses," a literal translation of "Nago Mbwiri," and, sturdily refusing me admittance, left me as wise as before. The reason afterwards proved to be that "Ologo ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton

... many weary weeks, her courage began to give way, and the burden, magnified tenfold by her nervous weakness, looked heavier than she could bear. How could she stay there, going through each day with the same routine of literal drudgery—drudgery which would not end until the two for whom she made ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes

... followed by Mrs. Shchapoff. Hardly had she shut the door, when I heard, as though from far off, a deep drawn wail. The voice seemed familiar to me. Overcome with an unaccountable horror I rushed to the door, and there in the passage I saw a literal pillar of fire, in the middle of which, draped in flame, stood Mrs. Shchapoff. . . . I rushed to put it out with my hands, but I found it burned them badly, as if they were sticking to burning pitch. A sort of cracking noise came from beneath the floor, which ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang

... vision, their sacred songs, their philosophy, their dreams, and their aspirations. To most of us the Bible has long been a work of profound mystery, cryptical, undecipherable. And largely, I now believe, because we were wont to approach it with the bias of preconceived theories of literal, even verbal, inspiration, and because we could not read into it the record of Israel's changing idea of God, from a wrathful, consuming Lord of human caprice and passions, to the infinite Father of love, whom Jesus revealed as the Christ-principle, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... the early days of the Faith," he said, "You are too literal—too exact in your following of Christian ethics. That sort of thing does not work nowadays. Dogma ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... children, among whom his son Joshua shone conspicuous, by displaying at a very early period a superiority of genius and the rudiments of a correct taste. Unlike other boys, who generally content themselves with giving a literal explanation of their author, regardless of his beauties or his faults, young Reynolds attended to both these, displaying a happy knowledge of what he read, and entering with ardor into the spirit ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... know the truth, the abject, literal truth, he hung his clothes on a hickory limb, as far as going near the water was concerned. He waded in up to his ankles and stood there, shivering, shivering a day like this! Then he trotted back and forth a few times and went back to the bathhouse ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... had been fruitless, or Bonaparte had, at least, only yielded to them in their literal sense. She had said: "I entreat you, do not make yourself a king!" Bonaparte did not make himself king, he made himself emperor. He did not take up the crown that had fallen from the head of the Bourbons; he created a new one for himself—a ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach

... a most firm believer in the truth of the Bible, and I have often thought more inclined to take the greater part as literal than most others. I had often read with fear and trembling the passage, "I will pour out my fury upon the heathen, and upon the families that call not upon my name." To dwell in a Christian land and be considered no better than heathen—what a dreadful ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various

... extraordinary stature and strength existed in the earliest ages cannot be denied, except by those who regard the narrative of Scripture as equally fabulous with the fictions of the poets; although the statements are literal and exact, occur in a variety of incidental notices, and are confirmed by discoveries related by authors ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... recorded; no tokens of love were exchanged. The reserve, the simple and unconscious dignity of Beatrice, distinguish her no less than her beauty, her grace, and her ineffable courtesy. The story, based upon actual experience, is ordered not in literal conformity with fact, but according to the ideal of the imagination; and its reality does not consist in the exactness of its record of events, but in the truth of its poetic conception. Under the narrative lies an allegory of the power of love to transfigure earthly things into the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... qui servent de fondement la religion Chrtienne, Londres (Amsterdam), 1768. Translation of Anthony Collins, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion, London, 1724. Contains also The Scheme of literal Prophecy considered, 1727, also by Collins in answer to the works of Clarke, Sherlock, Chandler, Sykes, and especially to Whiston's Essay towards restoring the text of the Old Testament, one of the thirty-five works directed ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing

... not mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... love my friend. Tell him I think he deserves to be in Rome. Tell him—' Enter Countess Ammiani to reprove her for endangering the hopes of the house by fatiguing herself. Sandra sends a blush at me, and I smile, and the countess kisses her. I send you a literal transcript of one short scene, so that you may ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... facts of history. The facts concerning primitive culture which are to be cited in this paper will show that the case is just the other way. Instead of the expression "Erinys finds the criminal" being originally a metaphor, it was originally a literal statement of what was believed to be fact. The Dawn (not "a portion of time,"(!) but the rosy flush of the morning sky) was originally regarded as a real person. Primitive men, strictly speaking, do not talk in metaphors; they believe in the literal truth of their similes and personifications, from ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... society for the promotion of narrowness. It is a machinery for the purpose of guarding the solitary and sensitive individual from all experience of the bitter and bracing human compromises. It is, in the most literal sense of the words, a society for the prevention ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton

... knows nothing concerning him, or his fortune, character, peace, or daughter. It is and ought to be dead to private feeling. It must consider nothing but the public benefit: nor must it ever condescend to vary from its own plain and literal construction.' ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... Interior, certifies, That the present document is a literal copy of the original, which is deposited in the Secretaryship under his charge; in proof of which he signs it, with the approval of the President of the Revolutionary Government in Bacoor, the 6th ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... I were not so foolishly outspoken!' she thought. 'I always say just what comes into my head. With some people it would not matter—with Michael, for example. He never misunderstands one's meaning. But poor dear Gage is so literal. Clever as she is, she ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... difficulties with all the poets. Homer is too literal, Milton too literary, and there is too much of the whooping savage in Whitman. He seems to think the real poet is yet to appear; a poet on new terms, the reconciler, the poet-priest,—one who shall unite the whiteness and purity of the ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs

... With Literal Translations and their European Equivalents (Diane Tsa Secoana, Le Maele a Sekgooa, Aa Dumalanang ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... stalls listening to the paid performer. But for the musician, music might have been universal. The human voice is still the finest instrument that we possess. We have allowed it to rust, the better to hear clever manipulators blow through tubes and twang wires. The musical world might have been a literal expression. Civilisation has contracted it to designate ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome

... "reconstruction period," and throughout the Tilden-Hayes controversy, had taught him how effectively the national power could assert itself. The others, blind to such dangers, seemed to feel that under Utah's sovereignty the literal "kingdom of God" (as they regard their Church) was to exercise an undisputed authority. Unable, myself, to take their viewpoint, I was conscious of a sense of transgression against the orthodoxy of their religion. I was aware, for the first ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... almost literal translation of a very old and very favourite song among the Westphalian Boors. The turn at the end is the same with one of Mr. Dibdin's excellent songs, and the air to which it is sung by the Boors is remarkably ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... There may have been a want of the form of giving notice; but perhaps this may have been an excuse for the want of that notice—namely, that the resolutions of this day fortnight were proposed by the founder of this Association, as simply and entirely the literal and the sole reiteration of the resolutions upon which he founded this Association. He had no doubt upon the subject. It is a maxim that all pledges and tests are to be taken in the sense and in the spirit ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... to seein' disagreeable things, or folks hurt," answered the literal Susan cheerfully. "But he'll see you all right, when it's over." Her lips came together with ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter

... a word-picture - a 'spoken picture,' to be literal. I took some lessons in it at Bertillon's school when I was in Paris. It's a method of scientific apprehension of criminals, a sort of necessary addition and completion to the methods of scientific identification of them after they are arrested. For instance, ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... confirmed the veracity even of their speculations. I have arranged them, but have not altered them; if they represent nothing else, they do carry with them the fever and spirit of the time. But they do not assume to be literal history: We live too close to the events related to decide positively upon them. As a brochure of the day,—nothing more,—I give these Sketches of a Correspondent to ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend

... never one little grain of imagination, Monsieur John? You are too monstrous literal for our poor jesting age." Then she sobered quickly and added this: "And yet I fear that this ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... give, now that he thought her unattainable and with all her own affection given to another man. And this same heart that loved her so ached and ached over Arethusa's paleness and thinness; but he accepted Miss Eliza's explanation as the literal one, that the winter in Lewisburg had been too much for her, and that all she needed was a tonic. Had Timothy talked a little to Miss Asenath, as in the old and far happier days, he might have formed very different conclusions. Yet ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox

... I, too, come with the STORY OF SIEGFRIED, still another version of the time-honored legend. The story as I shall tell it you is not in all respects a literal rendering of the ancient myth; but I have taken the liberty to change and recast such portions of it as I have deemed advisable. Sometimes I have drawn materials from one version of the story, sometimes from another, and sometimes largely from my own imagination alone. ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin

... published by two Players, Heming and Condell, in 1623, seven years after his decease. They declare that all the other editions were stolen and surreptitious, and affirm theirs to be purged from the errors of the former. This is true as to the literal errors, and no other; for in all respects else it is far worse ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith

... to the French that which they had borrowed of them. Formerly, people did not go to walk on the boulevard, but on the boule-verd, from which the english have made bowling-green, a literal translation. From this word, ...
— Rouen, It's History and Monuments - A Guide to Strangers • Theodore Licquet

... no occasion to explain this to his inquisitor. So he merely said: "I never saw any such letter," which was, in a literal sense, true. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... what a feature he was, with his tales culled from all sorts of passengers, who were never so fluent as when sitting beside him "up in front!" There was a tallow dip or two, and no other light save that of the fire. Who that ever told a story could wish a more inspiring auditor than Jacob Bean, a literal, honest old fellow who took the most vital interest in every detail of the stories told, looking upon their heroes and their villains as personal friends or foes. He always sat in one corner of the fireplace, poker ...
— The Village Watch-Tower • (AKA Kate Douglas Riggs) Kate Douglas Wiggin

... circle, and there was an end. But to tell the truth would be to wound her father, to vex him against Eglington even as he had never yet been vexed. Besides, it was hard, while Eglington was there, to tell what, after all, was the sole affair of her own life. In one literal sense, Eglington was not guilty of deceit. Never in so many words had he said to her: "I love you;" never had he made any promise to her or exacted one; he had done no more than lure her to feel one thing, and then to call ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... with these dull serving folk," she said to those nearest her. "One cannot pay for wit with wages and livery. They can but obey the literal word. Sir John, leaving me in haste this morning, I forgot a question I would have asked, and sent a lacquey ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... therefore, now much more left to myself: everything tended to assist me in my Greek and Latin studies; in one direction, however, and that the one in which it would least have been expected, did my excellent teacher find much to do; namely, in religion. He closely adhered to the literal meaning of the Bible; with this I was acquainted, because from my first entrance in the school I had clearly understood what was said and taught by it. I received gladly, both with feeling and understanding, the doctrine, that God is love: ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... the Government, had refused to print the admirable poem of Petofi entitled Talpra Magyar ("Up, Magyar"), and doing the printing there themselves. The first stanza of this poem, later the war-song of the national movement, runs, in a literal translation, thus: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... practical experience of Eastern life which alone in many cases can supply the true meaning of a troublesome passage or an accurate comment upon it. His aim is to make the book in its English dress not only absolutely literal in text but Oriental in tone and colour. He knows the tales almost by heart, and used to keep the Bedouin tribes in roars of laughter in camp during the long summer nights by reciting them. Sheiks to whom a preternatural ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... hoped Fingers might be of assistance to him. He did not mention Mercer and remained no longer than a couple of minutes, standing outside the cell. In the afternoon Doctor Cardigan came and shook hands warmly with Kent. He had found a tough job waiting for him, he said. Mercer was all cut up, in a literal as well as a mental way. He had five teeth missing, and he had to have seventeen stitches taken in his face. It was Cardigan's opinion that some one had given him a considerable beating—and he grinned at Kent. Then he added in ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood

... they affirm, for instance, that the jaws of a crab are metamorphosed legs, so that one crab has more legs and fewer jaws than another, they are far from meaning that the jaws, either during the life of the individual crab or of its progenitors, were really legs. By our theory this term assumes its literal meaning{460}; and this wonderful fact of the complex jaws of an animal retaining numerous characters, which they would probably have retained if they had really been metamorphosed during many successive generations from true ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of spirit. But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided. And it is in this literal sense that Bishop Gore requires all his clergy to assent to the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... the both, of the ball of the Khedive," he continued in his English, which was, though amazingly fluent and ready, a literal sounding translation of the French, which was in reality his mother tongue. "My sister thinks she can arrange that invitation. You are sure that you will be returned at ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley

... over-literal acceptation of words by certain readers and even Reviewers have recently been manifested in regard to the present book. Many of its readers have been dreadfully, and in all seriousness, shocked to find such an immoral man as Pechorin set before ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... war made by those who hold it and will it to be "not a sport, but a science." There is no sport here. Men killed like this are like men killed by plague or the eruption of a volcano. And, indeed, what else are they? They are victims of a diseased humanity of the eruption—literal and metaphorical—of its hidden fires. And wars will grow more and more like this. What can stop them and banish these scenes? Only the hate of hate, only the love that can redeem even such a sight as this ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers

... it," he wrote, "is that should the Bill, through a literal interpretation of its complicated provisions, fail to secure the object at which it avowedly aims, no one will be able to protest against ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold

... that God created the heavens, earth and all things therein, I understood it to mean a literal creation of each separate thing and creature, as when my father cut down a tree and hewed it into a beam. I would spend hours sitting so immovably among the flowers of our garden that the butterflies would mistake me for a plant and alight on my head and hands, while I strove to conceive the ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... the proudest designation of the German Kaiser. "Little Father" is alike the literal meaning of Attila, the name of the far-famed leader of the "Huns," in the dark ages of Europe, and of batyushka, the affectionate term by which the peasant of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... life, which clears up much that might otherwise have been disputable in his character, the world is indebted solely to Mr. William Lee. Accident put Mr. Lee on the right scent, from which previous biographers had been diverted by too literal and implicit a faith in the arch-deceiver's statements, and too comprehensive an application of his complaint that his name was made the hackney title of the times, upon which all sorts of low scribblers ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... the prudent Barbaro, "take that word in its literal sense, but the wretched man is dead to all honour ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... letters, to turn to those letters of Lockhart's to which Cromwell refers. They quite confirm his words, though they contain expressions, about both the King and the Cardinal, of which Cromwell would not perhaps have sent them literal copies. Thus, in a letter to Thurloe, of June 14, the day before the delivery of Dunkirk to the English, but when all the arrangements for the delivery had been made, Lockhart, speaking of the difficulties he anticipated in so arduous and delicate ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... to evil, then all war is a violation of the faith. The question is not unimportant. It is not a subject which you can toy with, or put aside as having no immediate bearing on life and duty. If the literal application of the teaching of Christ to social and political life be impossible, then the rationalists are right when they urge us to drop a religion which we profess on Sunday and repudiate on Monday. If the fault lies not in the teaching itself but in the feebleness ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... stamped." It occurs nine times in the New Testament, and with the single exception of Acts 17:29, refers every time to the mark of the beast. We are not, of course, to understand in this symbolic prophecy, that a literal mark is intended; but the giving of the literal mark, as practiced in ancient times, is used as a figure to illustrate certain acts that will be performed in the fulfillment of this prophecy. And from the literal mark as formerly employed, we learn something of its meaning as used ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith

... orders, the mess-dish and camp-bread, physical hardships all day and every other day, are for the former, but not for the latter, novelties and, consequently, sufferings. From which it follows that, if literal equality is applied, positive inequality is established, and that by virtue even of the new creed, it is necessary, in the name of true equality as in the name of true liberty, to allow the former, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... collect and preserve such specimens of a rapidly-vanishing language, and that the title-page itself indirectly indicates such an object. I have, however, invariably given with the Gipsy a translation immediately following the text in plain English—at times very plain—in order that the literal meaning of words may be readily apprehended. I call especial attention to this fact, so that no one may accuse me of encumbering my ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... true that the younger Darwin gave the words "natural selection" the importance which of late years they have assumed; he probably adopted them unconsciously from the passage of Mr. Matthew's quoted above, but he ultimately said, {87a} "In the literal sense of the word (sic) no doubt natural selection is a false term," as personifying a fact, making it exercise the conscious choice without which there can be no selection, and generally crediting it with the discharge of functions which can ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... the King of the Netherlands as binding upon neither party, and the two Governments, therefore, are as free in this respect as they were before the reference to that Sovereign was made. The British Government, despairing of the possibility of drawing a line that shall be in literal conformity with the words of the treaty of 1783, has suggested that a conventional boundary should be substituted for the line described by the treaty, and has proposed that in accordance with the principles ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 3: Martin Van Buren • James D. Richardson

... one more remark to make on this matter, and that is that a great flood of light, and of more than light, of encouragement and of stimulus, is cast upon that saving exercise of trust by noticing the literal meaning of the word that is rightly so rendered here. All those words, especially in the Old Testament, that express emotions or acts of the mind, originally applied to corporeal acts or material ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... an honorable place among the great men of his time. He was pre-eminently a profound thinker, a severe critic, a great word-painter,—a man of uncommon original gifts, who aroused and instructed his generation. In the literal sense, he was neither philosopher nor poet nor statesman, but a man of genius, who cast his searching and fearless glance into all creeds, systems, and public movements, denouncing hypocrisies, shams, and lies with such power that he lost friends almost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... them a few of Roger's canvases and set them along the wall. Tears filled her eyes as she looked at them, seeing the tragedy of labor the old man had expended upon them; but she felt the recompense: hard, tight, literal as they were, he had had his moment of joy in each of them before he saw them coldly and knew the truth. And he had been given his years of Paris at last: and had seen "how ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington

... have been a job to carry me up those stairs.' The Doctor was doubting everything, but as the safest attitude he stuck to literal truth so far ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... concluded that no ultimate particle of it—as with matter no atom—is ever added to or removed from the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion, there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... Holy Scripture is so many-sided, and so fathomless in signification, that to dwell on one point more than another might be a wrong to the full impression, and an irreverence in the translation. Thus, as a poet, he sacrificed a good deal to the duty of being literal, but his translation is a real assistance to students, and it is on the whole often somewhat like to Sternhold's, whom he held in much respect for ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... can this possibly apply but to the slave? After directing that the labour of all the household, 'man-servant and maid-servant,' should cease, it then proceeds to the ox and the ass, and the stranger that is within thy gates. Now, gentlemen, this cannot be applied to the stranger in the literal sense of the word, the hospitality of the age forbidding that labour should be required of him. At that time slaves were brought from foreign lands, and were a source of traffic, as may be inferred by the readiness with which the Ishmaelites purchased Joseph of his brethren, ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... electrified the world of imaginative readers, and has become the type of a school of poetry of its own-and, in evident earnest, attributes its success to the few words of commendation with which we had prefaced it in this paper.—It will throw light on his sane character to give a literal copy of the note: ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... out. How jocosely casual we are about our spirits. We tie them into some bondage of eternity for the security of a night's lodging, and then wonder that life grows sour upon our palate. [she smiles over at CHARLES'S bewilderment] Which means, in the literal terms of those who credit reincarnation, that if we married, those things you would have to do to keep your heart up would cause your next showing to degenerate into a slight motion of slime at the base of mountains. Think of the ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... takes advantage of it, and sufferings ensue which would have been prevented by keeping up even the ambiguous thoughts of recovery. Sick people have reflections and feelings which exert an influence upon them beyond our discernment, and which frequently need not our literal interpretations of symptoms, and our exhortations, to make them more effectual. But where there is evidently no preparedness for death, and the patient, we fear, is deceiving himself, no one who has suitable views of Christian duty will fail to impress him with the necessity of ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams

... his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller

... none will be so literal as to suppose I intend to say that no planter can be honest, in the common acceptation of that term. I simply mean that all who ground their arguments in policy, and not in duty and plain truth, are really blind to the highest and best interests ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child

... however, maintain that the term Chora was originally associated with the church in the obvious topographical signification of the word, to denote territory outside the city limits, and that its religious reference came into vogue only when changes in the boundaries of Constantinople made the literal meaning of Chora no longer applicable. According to this opinion the church was, therefore, founded while its site lay beyond the city walls, and consequently before the year 413, after which the site was included within the capital by the ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen

... instruments of wood, his great oak club, thick enough to brain a wild beast, and his staff to lean upon or to touch his sheep, while the ancient shepherd without firearms would surely still more require both. They will comfort me—a very beautiful verb, the literal meaning of which is to help another, choked with grief or fear, to breathe freely, and ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith

... choice between these words was primarily, and still often is, a matter of rhythm [euphony]. The literal meanings, however, or those which seem literal, have become more associated with rise, and the consciously figurative with arise: as, he rose from the chair; the sun rose; the provinces rose in revolt: trouble arose; 'music ...
— Practical Exercises in English • Huber Gray Buehler

... to Plato's Dialogues is not a matter of indifference. They will mean more or less to us, according to our spiritual condition. Much more passed from Plato to his disciples than the literal meaning of his words. The place where he taught his listeners thrilled in the atmosphere of the Mysteries. His words awoke overtones in higher regions, which vibrated with them, but these overtones ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... source of supply of heat and light, we are compelled to look for a philosophy more consistent than any hitherto advanced. Controlled too much by the literal evidence of the senses and the superficial appearance of things, we have ever regarded the sun as ALL ALONE in developing and ...
— New and Original Theories of the Great Physical Forces • Henry Raymond Rogers

... 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's North Pacific Directory, which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in fifteen ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... occasion it was very different—now, for the first time in my life, I felt what the passion for play really was. My success first bewildered, and then, in the most literal meaning of the word, intoxicated me. Incredible as it may appear, it is nevertheless true, that I only lost when I attempted to estimate chances, and played according to previous calculation. If I left everything to luck, and staked without any care or consideration, I was ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... call our voyage an All-Over-the-World affair, the title is considerably exaggerated in the truest and most literal sense; for if we devoted the rest of our natural lives to the work, we could not go everywhere. It is impossible to visit every country on the earth even, and we must use judgment and discretion in determining where we will go. We are travelling by sea, making only such excursions inland as the ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic

... confidential agents, that the interpretation which they had assigned to those decrees, in their communications with the British Ministry, was a base interpretation, and that they really intended to enforce the decrees, to the utmost extent of their possible operation, and, by a literal construction thereof, to encourage rebellion in every state, within the reach of their arms or their principles. Nor have the present government merely forborne to repeal those destructive laws—they have imitated the conduct of their predecessors, have actually put ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady

... The word Survey is not here to be understood in its literal sense. Surveying a place, according to my idea, is taking a geometrical plan of it, in which every place is to have its true situation, which cannot be done in a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... on the contrary, do not injure those that go no further than the apparent meaning. Thus, for instance, they assert that there are punishments and rivers under the earth: and if we adhere to the literal meaning of these we shall not be injured. But they are deficient in this, that as their apparent signification does not injure, we often content ourselves with this, and do not explore the latent truth. We may also ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... which people go to church, but on which (especially in the dwellings of the clergy) there is a better dinner than usual. I never knew man or woman in all my life who on a Fast-day refrained from eating. And quite right, too. The growth of common sense has gradually abolished literal fasting. In a Oriental climate, abstinence from food may give the mind the preeminence over the body, and so leave the mind better fitted for religious duties. In our country, literal fasting would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... and "virgin birth," held equally in regard to Christna centuries before, and also the literal resurrection of the physical body will ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... version of one of these agreeable romances, adopts the tame epithet of "gentle river," from the awkwardness, he says, of the literal translation of "verdant river." He was not aware, it appears, that the Spanish was a proper name. (See Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, (London, 1812,) vol. i. p. 357.) The more faithful version of "green river," however, would have nothing very unpoetical in it; though our ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... be a "fisher of men." That was what the Great Teacher had promised he would make the fishermen who left their boats to follow him. What strange, literal meaning he attached to the terms, we could not tell. In vain we—especially the boys, whose young hearts had gone out in warm affection to the old man—tried to show him that he was, by his efforts to do good and make others better and happier, fulfilling the Lord's directions. He could not understand ...
— Fishin' Jimmy • Annie Trumbull Slosson

... conditions, sick and well, made the Psalms their occupation. These divine canticles were sung by them in all times of joy, in marriages and festivals; by day, and in the night vigils, &c. His eight homilies, On the three first Chapters of Ecclesiastes, are an excellent moral instruction and literal explication of that book. He addressed his fifteen homilies, On the Book of Canticles, which he had preached to his flock, to Olympias, a lady of Constantinople, who, after twenty months' marriage, being left a widow, distributed a great estate to the church and ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... should have for a sister, he was nevertheless her blood kin, and without doubt he had loaded his pistol with a bullet for the man whom he believed would have it in his power to crush that beautiful sister to the earth, even to the point of literal seduction. For judged from the nihilists' standpoint again, they understood Zara to be one who would not hesitate at any sacrifice, in defense ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... that a translation into verse, and especially into rhymed verse, cannot be as literal as a translation into prose; this disadvantage I have used my best pains to minimize. I hope it may be said that nothing of real moment has been omitted from the verses; and where lack of metrical skill has compelled expansion, I have striven ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... nation, when an old orator, chosen by the rest, rose and addressed Ragueneau, as chief of the French, in the following harangue. Ragueneau, who reports it, declares that he has added nothing to it, and the translation is as literal as possible. ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman

... wonder that the heart of a female, unimproved by reason, and untinctured with natural good sense, should flutter at the sight of such a gaudy thing, among the number of her admirers: this impression is enforced by fustian compliments, which her own vanity interprets in a literal sense, and still more confirmed by the assiduous attention of the gallant, who, indeed, has nothing else to mind. A Frenchman in consequence of his mingling with the females from his infancy, not only becomes acquainted with all their customs and humours; but ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... estimate things by a spiritual standard, a man's earthly being may contain more than all the cycles of the material world. From the best point of view, life is not merely a term of years and a span of action; it is a force, a current and depth of being. Indeed, considered in its most literal sense, as the vital spark of our animal organism, it is something more than a measurement of time;—it is a mysterious, informing essence. No man has yet been able to tell us what it is, where it resides, or how it acts. We only know that when we gaze ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin

... have endeavored to describe. Having proceeded thus far, let us pause a moment, as the writer has done, time and again, to survey the beautiful prospect of a field of peanuts in full maturity. There it is, a literal carpet of living green, covering acres on acres of mother earth, and beneath its velvet folds is quietly growing the wealth that is to make its owner independent, and by means of which the planter's family is to secure most of the necessaries and comforts of life. ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones

... destroying the vegetation, shall be seized, utilised, converted into some profitable substance, till the black country shall be black no longer, the streams once more crystal clear, the trees once more luxuriant, and the desert, which man has created in his haste and greed, shall in literal fact once more blossom as the rose. And just so can I conceive a time when by a higher civilisation, formed on a political economy more truly scientific, because more truly according to the will of God, our human refuse shall be utilised like our material refuse; when man as man, down ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... truth in the annals of old Japan, and anything that tends to disclose that background is welcome. It has to be noted, however, that though many learned Japanese commentators have sought to rationalize the events described in the Records and the Chronicles, the great bulk of the nation believes in the literal accuracy of these works as profoundly as the great bulk of Anglo-Saxon people believes in the Bible, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... the most remarkable of all marine creatures. The name zoophyte comes from two Greek words—zooen, an animal, and phyton, a plant—and therefore has the literal ...
— Harper's Young People, April 13, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... reason that Japanese short poems may be said to resemble. Japanese pictures, a full comprehension of them requires an intimate knowledge of the life which they reflect. And this is especially true of the emotional class of such poems,—a literal translation of which, in the majority of cases, would signify almost nothing to the Western mind. Here, for example, is a little verse, pathetic enough to ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... I mean, may have a very literal and terrible significance," pursued Dr. Silence. "Ancient instincts that no one dreamed of, least of all their ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... prehistoric ages, the "Dinkums" became a title for men to be intensely proud of. Men who were through the first fortnight at Pozieres need never be ashamed to compare their experiences with those of any soldiers in the world, for it is the literal truth that there has never in history been a harder battle fought. The "Chocolate Soldiers" became veterans in one terrible struggle. The "War Babies" were old soldiers almost before they had cut their teeth. It is one ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... dictation of a sense of expediency that despaired while it dictated. The noble thing was her capacity to take it, and, amid all that warred in her, to carry it out on the brave high lines of her inspiration. It seemed a literal inspiration, so perfectly calculated that it was hard not to think sometimes, when one saw them together, that Anna had been lulled into a simple resumption of the old relation. Then from the least thing possible—the lift of an eyelid—it flashed upon one that between these two every ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... certain information that Vicksburg surrendered to General Grant on the Fourth of July. Now if General Meade can complete his work, so gloriously prosecuted this far, by the literal or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... them might be advantageously adapted to the modern theatre; and I am more confirmed in this opinion from having witnessed at the Odeon in Paris, some years since, a dramatic piece, entitled "Les Nuees d'Aristophane," which had a great run there. It was not a literal translation from the Greek author, but a kind of melange, drawn from the Clouds and Plutus together. The characters of Socrates and his equestrian son were very well performed; but the scenic accessories I considered very meagre, particularly ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 74, March 29, 1851 • Various

... the same letter he added: "Speak not of South America to anyone out of your family, for there is treason in the very name." What did he mean by that? He spoke of "digging gold in South America," and clearly did not mean it in the strict literal sense. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... years, all religion has perished from the practically active national mind of France and England. No statesman in the senate of either country would dare to use a sentence out of their acceptedly divine Revelation, as having now a literal authority over them for their guidance, or even a suggestive wisdom for their contemplation. England, especially, has cast her Bible full in the face of her former God; and proclaimed, with open challenge ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... at one another, consternation depicted in their faces. Sydney tried to comfort them by explaining that doubtless Harrington was inclined to be very literal under the circumstances and that Rex was not with him because he had ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.

... have here paraphrased, as any literal translation would have been hopelessly obscure to most modern readers. Campion could but hint darkly his comparison of the Elizabethan persecution to the Decian. The Latin runs: Etenim, ut nostrorum illa fuit Epistasis turbulenta, ...
— Ten Reasons Proposed to His Adversaries for Disputation in the Name • Edmund Campion

... caught? Yes,' replied Sir John, 'he will certainly be caught—probably when he commits his next crime. A whole army of bloodhounds, metaphorical and literal, will be on his track the moment he draws blood again. With the whole community against him, he cannot escape, especially when it be remembered that he chooses the quietest hour in the twenty-four to ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... still came to inquire with the solicitude of seeming friendship, but outside that house he was busy breathing life into a scheme of broad and parlous scope, and in all but a literal sense that scheme was a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... translation into verse, and especially into rhymed verse, cannot be as literal as a translation into prose; this disadvantage I have used my best pains to minimize. I hope it may be said that nothing of real moment has been omitted from the verses; and where lack of metrical skill has compelled expansion, I have striven to ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka

... and that "all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn." And of course the universally admitted existence of such a class of passages, in which words are not to be accepted in their rigidly literal meanings, but with certain great modifications, renders the task of determining and distinguishing such passages from others in which the meaning is definite and strict, not only legitimate, but also laudable; and justifies us in inquiring whether those passages descriptive of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... it is often impossible for foreign authors to know the English language title under which a work is being exploited, especially as it is often not a literal translation. She, therefore, asked that a NIE not be invalidated if it gives the literal translation of the foreign title, and later it is determined that the English language title under which the work is exploited is different ...
— Supplementary Copyright Statutes • Library of Congress. Copyright Office.

... caressing, by appealing to the weak or the base in you, will often persuade you what fine and splendid books they are. (Of course, I use the word "true" in a wide and essential significance. I do not necessarily mean true to literal fact; I mean true to the plane of experience in which the book moves. The truthfulness of *Ivanhoe*, for example, cannot be estimated by the same standards as the truthfulness of Stubbs's *Constitutional ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT

... this did George Muller ever resort to the lot: once at a literal parting of the ways when he was led by it to take the wrong fork of the road, and afterward in a far more important matter, but with a like result: in both cases he found he had been misled, and henceforth abandoned all such chance methods of determining the mind of God. ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson

... had been declaiming upon the dangers from Catholic supremacy and the subserviency of the Irish vote to the Church of Rome, and upon the absolute necessity of the supremacy of the Democratic party; upon the Apocalypse and the seven seals. He had been maintaining the literal infallibility of the Scriptures, and the necessity of treating some portions as legendary. It would be hard to say what inconsistent views he had not set forth within the space of the past hour; and all this with the utmost intensity, and yet with the utmost good-humor, ...
— By The Sea - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin

... me always the honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am yours ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... is a [ef]two edged sword, sharp in a literal, and sharp in an allegoricall exposition. Hitherto you haue heard the history, now there remaineth a mistery, nihil enim hic ludicrum aut lubricum saith [eg]Augustine, and therefore [eh]diuines vnderstand ...
— An Exposition of the Last Psalme • John Boys

... patterns of the basketry were reproduced in incised lines. When these peoples came to paint their wares it was natural that the colored patterns native to the basketry should also be reproduced, and many more or less literal transfers by copying are to be found. A fine example of these painted textile designs is shown in Fig. 354. It is executed in a masterly style upon a handsome vase of the white ware of ancient Tusayan. Not only are the details reproduced with all their geometric exactness, but the ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes

... it in an airplane. As a result of the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have given the name "camouflage," which has been developed to an extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians have not made a greater ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... and the mother of the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que in aeternum renatus." (2) "In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M. Robertson, (3) "which grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the literal and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of the lamb' (4); the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram." (5) For the POPULARITY ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter

... at the end of the same letter he added: "Speak not of South America to anyone out of your family, for there is treason in the very name." What did he mean by that? He spoke of "digging gold in South America," and clearly did not mean it in the strict literal sense. ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... way more untruthful. The Latter-day Saints have but one "Bible" and that the Holy Bible of Christendom. They place it foremost amongst the standard works of the Church; they accept its admonitions and its doctrines, and accord thereto a literal significance; it is to them, and ever has been, the word of God, a compilation made by human agency of works by various inspired writers; they accept its teachings in fulness, modifying the meaning in no wise, except in the rare cases of undoubted ...
— The Story of "Mormonism" • James E. Talmage

... in my hearing (said Luther) that he was earnest against the Anabaptists, as contemners of God's word, and also against those which attributed too much to the literal word, for (said he) such do sin against God and his almighty power; as the Jews did in naming the ark, God. But, (said he) whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... difficulty to the Japanese cannot be even faintly imagined by anyone unfamiliar with the construction of the native tongue—a language so different from his own that the very simplest Japanese phrase cannot be intelligibly rendered into English by a literal translation of the words or even the form of the thought. And he must learn all this upon a diet no English boy could live on; and always thinly clad in his poor cotton dress without even a fire in his schoolroom during the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... crimes between the races, Miss Willard said in her annual address that this statement "put an unjust imputation upon half the white race." But as this expression has been misunderstood she desires to declare that she did not intend a literal interpretation to be given to the language used, but employed it to express a tendency that might ensue in public thought as a result of utterances so sweeping as some that have been made by ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett

... accumulated since 1901, when the system was first put in force, a collection of more than two hundred thousand prints. It is all a matter of system, of scientific and literal exactness, and there is no margin of error. A mistake in identification ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot

... his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of description which Balaustion's enthusiasm ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford

... of culture. The vocabulary used is limited. An intelligent observer says: "The vocabulary of the native community is the meagerest I have ever known, except that of the immigrant." There are, however, very few illiterates; none, indeed, in the literal meaning of ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson

... Meinhold's "Amber Witch" has more of the true romantic spirit than Tieck, who was its professional representative. On the contrary, it has less of the romantic spirit, but more of the mediaeval fact. It is a literal, realistic handling of the witch superstition, as Balzac's "Succube," in the "Contes Drolatiques" is a satirical version of similar material. But Tieck's "Maerchen" are the shadows thrown by mediaeval ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... work, and which have a factitious value set upon them by the public, as they are taken to be the signs and passwords of initiation into the new school. But, lying deeper than these, there is a danger to Pre-Raphaelitism from the tendency to insist on too literal an application of its own principles. The best principles will not include all cases. The workings and ways of Nature are infinite, and the principles of Art are finite deductions from these infinite examples. As yet these deductions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... view were from that time abandoned, and he was not only permitted, but assisted to rise and quit what had been, in a literal sense, his couch of confinement. But he was not allowed to leave the hut; for the young Highlander had now rejoined his senior, and one or other was constantly on the watch. Whenever Waverley approached the cottage door, the sentinel upon duty civilly, but resolutely, ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... OF THE NETHERLANDS was translated by Lieut. E. B. Eastwick, and originally published abroad for students' use. But this translation was too strictly literal for general readers. It has been carefully revised, and some portions have been entirely rewritten by the Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, who also has so ably translated the HISTORY ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... from the writings of both poets, which would seem to indicate that Heine had borrowed many of his ideas and even some forms of expression from Byron. Except in the case of the most literal correspondence, this is generally a very unsafe deduction. Such passages as a rule prove nothing more than a similarity, possibly quite independent, in the trend of their pessimistic thought. Compare ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... go to the country for a few days this afternoon, so that it will be unnecessary to send me any more sheets till I return. The Dissertation upon the Origin of Languages is to be printed at the end of the Theory. There are some literal errors in the printed copy of it which I should have been glad to have corrected, but have not the opportunity, as I have no copy by me. They are of no great consequence. In the titles, both of the Theory and Dissertation, call me simply Adam Smith without ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae

... observed however that it often proves a very difficult matter to trace the connexion between the figurative and the literal sense of the stanza. The essentials in the composition of the pantun, for such these little pieces are called, the longer being called dendang, are the rhythmus and the figure, particularly the latter, which they consider as the life and spirit of the poetry. I had a proof of this in an attempt ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of her,—surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love, a love unhampered and untainted by ...
— The Worshipper of the Image • Richard Le Gallienne

... and though they often have ties of family and other stabilizing responsibilities, their lives are subject to periods of unemployment, and these fluctuations serve to feed their innate restlessness. They are, in quite the literal sense of the word, American proletarians. They are more volatile than any European proletarian, for they have learned the lesson of migration, and they retain the socialistic and anarchistic philosophy of ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... him by strategem. He was brought to London, tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered—a literal account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down—and the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England. His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the government of Henry de Tracy for ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... Shakespeare, in his "Julius Caesar," makes a like use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch; the speech of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, to cite the most striking instance among many, is almost a literal transcription of North's version, but subjected ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... mercantile colony Marseilles flourished, and sent forth other colonies, that formed settlements along the Ligurian coast, as a Literal crown from Ampurias and Rhode in Catalonia to the confines of Etruria. Free, rich, protected by the Roman legions, these Greek settlements cultivated the arts and sciences with ardour, as well as carrying on the trade of ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould

... the world of imaginative readers, and has become the type of a school of poetry of its own-and, in evident earnest, attributes its success to the few words of commendation with which we had prefaced it in this paper.—It will throw light on his sane character to give a literal copy of the note: ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... other writers used the word in this its original sense; and Johnson explains it "to cultivate by manual labour," according to its literal derivation. In one passage Shakespeare uses the word somewhat ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe

... June we left central China for Tientsin and further north, sailing by coastwise steamer from Shanghai, again plowing through the turbid waters which give literal exactness to the name Yellow Sea. Our steamer touched at Tsingtao, taking on board a body of German troops, and again at Chefoo, and it was only between these two points that the sea was not strongly turbid. Nor was this all. From early morning of the 10th until we anchored at Tientsin, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King

... old-wives' fables; but observe, he always trembles when he tells his own. But they are all true; there is not one old-wife's fable on the list. Necromancers have had private interviews with visitors who had no right to be seen this side the Styx. The Witch of Endor and the raising of Samuel were literal facts. Above all others, the Nemesis and Eumenides were facts not to be withstood. And, philosophize as we may, ghosts have been seen at dead of night, and not always under the conduct of Mercury;[6] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate particle of it—as with matter no atom—is ever added to or removed from the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion, there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is not this ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... that statutes bristling with difficulties remain unrepealed in the volumes of the law of Russia as well as of other nations. Even we ourselves have our obsolete "blue laws," and their literal enforcement, if such a thing were possible, might to-day subject a Russian of freethinking proclivities, in Maryland or Delaware, to the penalty of having his tongue bored through with a red-hot iron for blasphemy. Happily the spirit of progress is of higher ...
— Notes on the Diplomatic History of the Jewish Question • Lucien Wolf

... amusing part of this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the work ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... autobiographical record[17] marked the commencement of Gissing's reclamation from that worst form of literary slavery—the chain-gang. For he had been virtually chained to the desk, perpetually working, imprisoned in a London lodging, owing to the literal lack of the means of locomotion.[18] His most strenuous work, wrung from him in dismal darkness and wrestling of spirit, was now achieved. Yet it seems to me both ungrateful and unfair to say, as has frequently been done, ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... the aesthetic side of man's nature; in engaging him with the beautiful, the pure, the wonderful, the truly natural; with painting, poetry, music, horticulture, physical science—in all this lies recreation, in the true and literal sense of that word, namely, the recreating and mending of the exhausted mind and feelings, such as no rational man will now neglect, either for himself, his children, or ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... and it became known that he meant to go back in February, and would send nothing to the Salon that year, the studio tore its hair and hugged its content. All but the master, who attempted to dissuade his pupil with literal tears, of which he did not seem in the least ashamed and which annoyed Kendal very much. In fact, it was a dramatic splash of Lucien's which happened to fall upon his coat-sleeve that decided Kendal finally about the impossibility of living ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... inconsistent with facts. Some widows are virgins, but there is not always a father or mother to give them away by the formula of "virgin gift." The women all have a notion, taken from the words of a heroine in the Mahabharata, that a woman can be given but once.[1299] They cling to the literal formula. By the form of first marriage also a woman passes into the kin of her husband for seven births (generations), the limit of degrees of consanguinity. It is irreligious and impossible to change the kin again, because consequences have been entailed which ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... deal with here is why both balloons lift their aeronauts at least three miles into the clouds, while other men who have no balloon to lift them can get no higher than the top of the church steeple. Or to come back to literal fact, our problem must be expressed thus: Let us take the present population of Great Britain or America, and, having noted the wealth at present annually produced by it, ask ourselves what would happen if some duly qualified angel were to pick out and kill, or otherwise make away with, ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock

... these words, and taking them in the literal acceptation, got up in some hurry, and seizing a knife from the side-board, cried, 'Not here, an please your ladyship — It will daub the room — Give him to me, and I'll carry him to the ditch by the roadside' To this ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... ridiculed it, is based on a great, a gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat—all, all, are literal facts. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... therefore a moralist to recommend imperfections? One excellency, however, of our Saviour's rules is, that they are either never mistaken, or never so mistaken as to do harm. I could feign a hundred cases in which the literal application of the rule, "of doing to others as we would that others should do unto us," might mislead us; but I never yet met with the man who was actually misled by it. Notwithstanding that our Lord bade his followers, "not to resist evil," and to "forgive the enemy who should trespass against ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley

... wantonness of summer. These had all been objective experiences, but Joan's untamed and undistracted heart had taken them in deeply and deeply pondered upon them. There was no morality in their teachings, unless it was the morality of complete suspension of any judgment whatsoever, the marvelous literal, "Judge not." She knew that the sun shone on the evil and on the good, but she knew also that frost fell upon the good as well as upon the evil nor was the evil to be readily distinguished. Her father ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt

... living thing—a severe but kindly guide—but as the menacing ghost of the religion he has murdered, and which comes to embitter degradation, not to raise it. The moral life, it is true, will still exist for him, but it will probably, in literal truth, ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock

... is speaking of the lower fauna in the time of Noah. A literal application of her theory toman today is enough to bring it to a reductio ad absurdum. Which sex of Homo sapiens actually does the primping and parading that she describes? Which runs to "beautiful coloring," sartorial, hirsute, facial? Which encases itself in vestments ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... her conceit of self-importance, she stood there, above the battling millions of men, proof against mystery and dread, untouched by the voices of the past, and in the present seeing only common things, though from an odd point of view. Here her senses seemed to make literal the assumption by which her mind had always been directed: that she—Nancy Lord—was the mid point of the universe. No humility awoke in her; she felt the stirring of envies, avidities, unavowable passions, and let ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... out a successful career for himself. Our mother determined to accord him an interview in her own apartment. She longed to converse with him at her ease—to hear his tale from his own lips—to sympathize with and console him. Oh! who could blame her if in so doing she departed from the strict and literal meaning of that vow which had bound her to consider her relations as dead to her? But the fault—if fault it were—was so venial, that to justify it is to invest it with an importance which it would not have possessed save for the frightful results to which it led. You have already heard ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... secession, would take with it all our prosperity and all our power. It would take the Border States and the control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would establish a war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed, perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from our entangled neighborhood—and these would be innumerable—would be determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing which we have heretofore experienced; and at every manifestation of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and his did not agree, so both counted again, getting in each other's way and, as Mr. Winslow expressed it, having a good time generally. And this remark, intended to be facetious, was after all pretty close to the literal truth. Certainly Babbie was enjoying herself, and Jed, where an impatient man would have been frantic, was enjoying her enjoyment. Petunia, perched in lopsided fashion on a heap of ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln

... disturbing geological evidence that the earth could scarcely have been begun and finished in a little under a week, was happily nullified by the suicide of its author; that pistol-shot had been a striking proof of the literal ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ's love for mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find themselves drawn into ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... lucidity, an almost hieratic calm, that he reviewed that recent interview, in which he had so deliberately unburdened himself. It seemed as if, in his great weakness, the ache of his old desire, his fever of longing, bad suddenly left him, giving place (as though the literal wasting away of his body had really given freer access to that pure spirit, its prisoner), to a love now altogether purged of passion, and ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... carefully prepared with far more than the average erudition, because it had been changed throughout by the substitution of bad readings for good, in defiance of MS. authority, with a view of preserving a literal agreement with the Vulgate.[124] Sigonius, another of the Vatican students, was instructed to prepare certain text-books by Cardinal Paleotti. These were an Ecclesiastical History, a treatise on the Hebrew Commonwealth, and an edition of Sulpicius Severus. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... people asked him if this meant what it said. He told them that it did. One of them said he would like to have the table, pointing to it; another asked for a chair, another for the bed, and so on. The missionary was rather startled at such literal taking of his teaching. He told them to come again on the morrow, and he ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... not have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported—appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... say, because I have seen the transition. But it 's very likely. You are, in the literal sense of the word, more civilized. I dare say," added Rowland, "that Miss Garland ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James

... of wood engraving, written mainly by 19th-century practitioners and bibliophiles, have tended to emphasize literal rendition rather than artistic vision. The writers favored wood engraving executed with the burin on the end grain of hard dense wood, such as box or maple, because it could produce finer details than the old woodcut, which made use of knife ...
— John Baptist Jackson - 18th-Century Master of the Color Woodcut • Jacob Kainen

... I cannot say a shopkeeper should be tied down to the literal meaning of his words in the price he asks, or that he is guilty of lying in not adhering stiffly to the letter of his first demand; though, at the same time, I would have every tradesman take as little liberty that way as may be: and if the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... compliment. It is enough to say that a fund was raised for Flanagan's defence, and a threatening notice written to be pasted on the Bodagh Buie's door—of which elegant production the following is a literal copy:— ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... one impatient minute, wished that the children would pay more attention to their elderly and experienced guardian. It was too much to ask her—a professional theory-maker—to adapt her theories to the young and literal. That was the worst of Jay, she was so literal, so unimaginative, so lacking in the simple unpractical quality of poetry. However, not a word to the others. Jay's reputation and Anonyma's dignity might ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson

... a while. His was a literal mind, and he knew nothing of Sally's finances beyond the fact that when he had first met her she had come into a legacy of some kind. Moreover, he had been hugely impressed by Fillmore's ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse

... running parallel to this habit of preaching was a fond love for the water, and it may be said in a literal sense that I was as fond of it as a duck. I am told that when an infant under the care of any person other than my mother, nothing in the world would quiet me except a bowl of water and a sponge to play with. Naturally this liking developed, as you will see. Separated by a thick wall from ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling

... the uselessness of attempting to copy an object exactly, the desire to give the object full expression, are the impulses which drive the artist away from "literal" colouring to purely artistic aims. And that brings us to the question of composition. [Footnote: Here Kandinsky means arrangement of ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky

... us! what an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... is a literal copy of a specimen of this paper money, which varied in value from two shillings ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... generally condemning the rash proceeding, though many deeply sympathized with the purpose of Brown's movement, and his heroic conduct and life caused many to admire him. He was a devout believer in the literal reading of the Holy Bible, and of the special judgments of God, as he interpreted them in the Old Testament. His attack on slavery he regarded as more rational than and as likely to triumph as Joshua's attack ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... moments of leisure, and these moments were evidently subject to abrupt and prolonged interruptions. Many repetitions and trivial incidents have been omitted in this translation; but, in order to express the personality of the Author, the rendering has been as literal as possible, and it shows the strange mixture of sentimentality and ferocity peculiar to ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner

... expositions are mystical. The literal explanation is that which is given Deut. 5:11: "Thou shalt not take the name of . . . thy God in vain," namely, "by swearing on that which is not [*Vulg.: 'for he shall not be unpunished that taketh His name upon ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... fact, but an emanation from self-love, through the association of ideas, it has been fancied that these writers dispute the existence of disinterested benevolence or sympathy. Now, the selfish system, in its literal import, is flatly inconsistent with obvious facts, but this is not the system contended for by the writers in question. Still, this distortion has been laid hold of by the opponents of utility, and ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... should be taken within the curtain, and shewn how the wires are pulled by the master, which produce all the turmoil and strife that before riveted our attention. It is good for him who would arrive at all the improvement of which our nature is capable, at one time to take his place among the literal beholders of the drama, and at another to go behind the scenes, and remark the deceptions in their original elements, and the actors in ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes, sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads, the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... horse-shoe curve around the Snodgrass hill, and did his full share of the desperate fighting which held that part of the field. But he had thus become the subject of a controversy, and the friends of Rosecrans charged him with a too literal obedience, and a failure to use a sound discretion in his action. The result was that whilst Rosecrans was removed from active field service, Wood still found himself under a cloud, and opposed by influences which ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... that her stepson was wonderful, but with quite a literal meaning. She found him a real cause for wonder—this poised, handsome, crippled boy of nineteen, with his tailor, and his tutor, and his groom, and the heavy social responsibilities that bored him so heartily. With the honesty of a naturally brilliant mind cultivated by hard experience, ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... circular was sent around asking for subscriptions to a volume of Pekinese Folklore, published by Baron Vitali, Interpreter at the Italian legation, which, on examination, proved to be exactly what I wanted. He had collected about two hundred and fifty rhymes, had made a literal—not metrical—translation and had issued them ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland

... the English language have been fraught with such stupendous consequences as El Dorado. When the padres attempted to tell the story of the Christ, the natives exclaimed 'El Dorado'—the golden. The ignorant sailors and adventurers seized upon the literal meaning, instead of the spiritual one. The time, being that of Don Quixote and of the Inquisition, accounts for the childish credulity on one side and the unparalleled ferocity on the other. The search for El Dorado, whether it was believed to be a fabulous country of gold, or an inaccessible mountain, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... effected his purpose, and that once Jeanne was disposed of, the legality or illegality of the proceedings would be of small importance. I have thought it right to give to the best of my power a literal translation of these examinations, notwithstanding their great length; as, except in one book, now out of print and very difficult to procure, no such detailed translation,(8) so far as I am aware, exists; and it seems to me that, even at the risk of fatiguing the reader (always capable of skipping ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant

... extracts given above, can it, however, be seriously contended that Barruel or Robison exaggerated the guilt of the Order? Do my literal translations differ materially in sense from the translations and occasional paraphrases given ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... him. Yet at that very time he was on the point of publishing the first volume of "Capital," the result of gigantic researches into industrial history and economic theory. This great work was intended to be, in its literal sense, the Bible of the working class, as indeed it has since become. Certainly, Jaures' tribute to Marx is well deserved and fairly sums up the work accomplished by him in the period 1847-1869. "To Marx belongs the merit," he says, " ... ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... the country is heavily timbered, and the high lands towards the westward were found barren and cold. Mr. Curr was anxious to bring his line as far possible towards the sun; but the governor held him to the literal agreement, under an impression that the grant was already improvident and excessive. The whole scheme was distasteful to Arthur: a powerful company having interests of its own, whose head-quarters were in London, might have been a counterpoise to his influence, had it not been ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West

... himself was so eminently unsatisfactory that it produced a characteristic protest. "I am really distressed by the illustration of Mrs. Pipchin and Paul. It is so frightfully and wildly wide of the mark. Good heaven! in the commonest and most literal construction of the text, it is all wrong! She is described as an old lady, and Paul's 'miniature arm-chair' is mentioned more than once. He ought to be sitting in a little arm-chair down in a corner of the fireplace, staring up at her. I can't say ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt

... the premises at the time, so I can't say; but, be that 'ow it may, there's no denying it's a singler thing the way my words have been fulfilled almost literal.' ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey

... back to the house for dinner, Charles suggested that they might like to come up to his dressing-room and wash their hands before dinner—to which one of them replied, "Grazie, non mi sporco facilmente" (literal translation, "Thanks, I don't dirty myself easily"), and declined the ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington

... fixed by nature herself." On the theory enunciated by Watts-Dunton, everything except the perfect average is absolutely funny, and the perfect average, of course, is generally an incommensurable quantity. Chesterton carefully made it his business to present the eccentricity—I use the word in its literal sense—of most things, and the humour followed in accordance with the above definition. The method was simple. Chesterton invented some grotesque situation, some hypothesis which was glaringly absurd. He then placed it in ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... guilty of interpolating two or three passages. The manuscript was long in possession of the Everards, a distinguished family of that persuasion. (It is hardly necessary to say, unless to some readers of very literal capacity, that Dr. Rochecliffe and his manuscripts ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... At that literal question, put with an air of the most impulsive good faith, John's face slightly changed. The rapt look faded from his eyes, and a reflective smile took its place, as the young man gazed long and earnestly into the bright face ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... of exchange of gallantry between the Baron of Bradwardine and Col. Talbot is a literal fact. [For the real circumstances of the anecdote, we must refer our readers to the "Introduction" itself. It was communicated to Sir Walter ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 10, No. 283, 17 Nov 1827 • Various

... he was the idealist historian of the poet, and that the adventures which he related of him were not to be taken in the literal and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... reproaches! I have informed you that you may write, or still better, telegraph, since the wire is so handy—on business. Well, of course, it is for you to judge whether you will add postscripts of another sort. There, you make me say more than a woman ought, because you are so obtuse and literal. Good afternoon—good-bye! This will ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy

... but the prospective purchaser should remember that the possession of one of these giant pachyderms entails considerable overhead, or rather, internal expense. De Wolf Hopper was telling only the literal truth when he sang in Wang of the tribulations of the peasant who had an elephant on ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... the sake of argument, that there was a servitude in the patriarchal families which was approved by God. But what does this avail in your defence of slavery, unless you show, that that servitude and slavery are essentially alike? The literal terms of the relation of master and servant, under that servitude, are not made known to us; but we can, nevertheless, confidently infer their spirit from facts, which illustrate their practical character; and, if this character be found to be opposite to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... knowledge; and his experience in Congress, during a part of the "reconstruction period," and throughout the Tilden-Hayes controversy, had taught him how effectively the national power could assert itself. The others, blind to such dangers, seemed to feel that under Utah's sovereignty the literal "kingdom of God" (as they regard their Church) was to exercise an undisputed authority. Unable, myself, to take their viewpoint, I was conscious of a sense of transgression against the orthodoxy of their religion. I was aware, for the first time, that in gaining the fraternity ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins

... having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession. This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in practice; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... on the bare, literal fact any more than they can live on bread alone; there is something in every man to feed besides his body. He has been told many times by men of great disinterestedness and ability that he must believe only that ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... above referred to, says, that "in the number of Latin Bibles is also usually ranked the version of the same Pagninus, corrected, or rather rendered literal by {25} Arias Montanus." But in the title-page of my ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 63, January 11, 1851 • Various

... window facing Penrod was filled with a gigantic Eye. Of oyster-white and raw blues and reds, inflamed by the pouring sun, it had held an awful place in the infantile life of Penrod Schofield, for in his tenderer years he accepted it without question as the literal Eye of Deity. He had been informed that the church was the divine dwelling—and there was ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington

... and morals. A mighty fondness, it is true, and attachment, he expresses to his consort, and often professes that he never would embrace any measures which she disapproved: but such declarations of civility and confidence are not always to be taken in a full, literal sense. And so legitimate an affection, avowed by the laws of God and man, may perhaps be excusable towards a woman of beauty and spirit, even though she was ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... Poitevin or the Provencal. The most remarkable development of the "religious" life that the later middle age was to witness had just been worked out in Italy. St. Francis of Assisi had taught the cult of absolute poverty, and his example held up to his followers the ideal of the thorough and literal imitation of Christ's life. Thus arose the early beginnings of the Minorite or Franciscan rule. St. Dominic yielded to the fascination of the Umbrian enthusiast, and inculcated on his Order of Preachers a complete renunciation of worldly goods which made a society, originally little ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout

... modifications of the wedge; such as the knife, the shears (formed of two knives working on a joint), the chisel, and the axe. These, with the primitive hammer, formed the principal stock-in-trade of the early mechanics, who were handicraftsmen in the literal sense of the word. But the work which the early craftsmen in wood, stone, brass, and iron, contrived to execute, sufficed to show how much expertness in the handling of tools will serve to compensate for their mechanical ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles

... proofs taken out of the Old Testament, and urged in the New, being sometimes not to be found in the Old, nor urged in the New, according to the literal and obvious sense, which they appear to bear in their supposed places in the Old, and, therefore, not proofs according to the rules of interpretation established by reason, and acted upon in interpreting every other ancient book— almost all Christian commentators on the Bible, and advocates ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English

... this vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... so," said he thoughtfully, "I hope he'll hab more'n one room for us, rather be mos' anywhar dan in sight ob dat man," and he trudged off with his literal Heaven and ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell

... disposal of the author of a "History of Java." As I have embodied in the text some extracts from Raffles' translations, it may be well to say a word as to the value of these versions. What Vreede says of a particular passage is true of these renderings in general: "They are not literal translations, but the spirit of the work is ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's North Pacific Directory, which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground off the north end of the larger bank in ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

... is to be made voluntarily. The verb ([Hebrew: nador]) translated to vow, in its literal acceptation means to beat out grain from the sheaf on the thrashing-floor: hence, as the corn is thus scattered, it came to signify to scatter, or to be liberal; and thence, finally, to offer willingly and freely. The ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham

... which everybody else knows and does not repeat. He, though he tried to repeat them, did not know them, and could not get on without my prompting. Sotheby was full of his translation of Homer's Iliad, some specimens of which he has already published. It is a complete failure; more literal than that of Pope, but still tainted with the deep radical vice of Pope's version, a thoroughly modern and artificial manner. It bears the same kind of relation to the Iliad that Robertson's narrative bears to the story of Joseph in the ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... expression of man's primary needs, the legislator's duty was to reform the errors of legislation; to complete that which was defective; to harmonize, by superior definitions, those things which seemed to conflict. Instead of that, they halted at the literal meaning of the laws, content to play the subordinate part of commentators and scholiasts. Taking the inspirations of the human mind, at that time necessarily weak and faulty, for axioms of eternal and unquestionable truth,—influenced by public opinion, ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... the Animals and Man. Ancient and medieval representations of the creation of man Literal acceptance of the book of Genesis by the Christian fathers By the Reformers By modern theologians, Catholic and Protestant Theological reasoning as to the divisions of the animal kingdom The Physiologus, the Bestiaries, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... comes the question, What does God do? What does he aim at? And how does he effect his purposes? The answer seems to be that, in a literal, tangible sense, he does nothing. He operates solely in and through the mind of man; and even through the mind of man he does not influence external events. This, it may be said, is impossible, since all those external events which we call human conduct flow from the mind of man. Perhaps it would ...
— God and Mr. Wells - A Critical Examination of 'God the Invisible King' • William Archer

... grounds from those cases, where actual crimes have been perpetrated and deeds committed, which leave numerous traces behind, and which may be proved by the permanent results of which they have been the cause. Technical difficulties without number also exist: the most literal accuracy, which is indispensable—the artful inuendoes, the artistical averments, which are necessary, correctly to shape the charge ere it is submitted to the grand jury, may be well conceived to involve many niceties and refinements, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various

... ordinary common or garden daffodil, charming as it is, but named varieties of every description— white trumpeted Horsefieldi, stately yellow Emperors, Bari Conspicui with its dainty outline of orange; these, and a dozen others were growing in patches, not in dozens or scores, but in literal hundreds, beneath the budding trees. There were violets, too; and white and purple and golden saxifrages peeping out between the stones which bordered the trickling stream—a scene of enchantment, indeed, for City eyes accustomed to gaze only on bricks and mortar. ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... intellectualism, and humanism represent ways in which frightened and disturbed people seek to make themselves secure. Unfortunately, however, their security then is purchased at the price of their freedom. Their lives become locked up in the small closet of their limited concepts. Their literal and rigid understanding of the Christian church and its faith makes them so loveless that their lives have an alienating effect on others, and they themselves fail to ...
— Herein is Love • Reuel L. Howe

... judge's edification the scraps of family history and biography that he could recollect. Adelle, who had come into the room, listened to his story. Tom Clark might be limited in knowledge of his family as he was in education, but he was certainly literal and picturesque. He spared neither himself nor his brothers and sisters, nor his remoter cousins. The one whose career seemed to interest him most was that Stan Clark, the politician, who now represented Fresno County in the State Legislature. There was a curious mixture of pride and contempt in ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick

... are, at the same time, true, in that the material of which they are moulded consists of facts,—facts as precise as painstaking observation and anxious regard for truth can make them. Certain of the stories, of course, are true literally. Literal truth may be attained by stories which treat of a single incident, or of action so restricted as to lie within the scope of a single observation. When, on the other hand, a story follows the career of a wild creature of the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... in countless other places, Mark Twain throws over his ethical suggestion—a suggestion, by contrast, of the very converse of his literal words—the veil of paradox and exaggeration, of incongruity, fantasy, light irony. Yet beneath this outer covering of art there is a serious meaning that, like murder, will out. If demonstration were needed that Mark Twain is sealed of the tribe of moralists, that is amply supplied ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... up the first sheet, and as he compared the constructed renderings with the literal translation, the ghost of a smile stole ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman

... the body is literally burned up by the oxygen; and it is this burning which means the warmth of a living body, its absence giving the stony cold of the dead. "Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" may well be the literal question for each day of our lives; and "pure air" alone can secure genuine life. Breathing bad air reduces all the processes of the body, lessens vitality; and thus, one in poor health will suffer more from bad air than those who have become thoroughly accustomed ...
— The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking - Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes • Helen Campbell

... which his chief work was to be done. This work was an exposition of the parable of "the Rich Man and Lazarus," bearing the horror-striking title, "A Few Sighs from Hell, or the Groans of a Damned Soul." In this work, as its title would suggest, Bunyan, accepting the literal accuracy of the parable as a description of the realities of the world beyond the grave, gives full scope to his vivid imagination in portraying the condition of the lost. It contains some touches of racy humour, especially in the similes, and is written ...
— The Life of John Bunyan • Edmund Venables

... where the translator had misconceived it. For the latter purpose the original was consulted; and it affords great pleasure to bear witness to the general fidelity with which Mr. REEVE has transferred the author's ideas from French into English. He has not been a literal translator, and this has been the cause of the very few errors which have been discovered: but he has been more and better: he has caught the spirit of M. DE TOCQUEVILLE, has understood the sentiment he meant to express, and has clothed it in the language which M. DE TOCQUEVILLE ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al

... was; nay, I should have thought with less danger of my life. But he is a peculiar man; and I repeat it, we have hot heard the last of him. You will find that by serving the King he understands in a very literal sense; and there is a young gentleman(52) who it is believed intends those words shall not have ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... height, and by a person who had himself been a witness of them, and whose "good hap" it had been to "do some little service" in promoting them. The object of the writer is declared to be, that he might be "more capable to assist in lifting up a standard against the infernal enemy." The literal meaning of this expression is, that he might be enabled to get up another witchcraft delusion under his own special management and control. Can any thing be imagined more artful and dishonest than ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... to grow every tree that was pleasant to the sight and good for food; also, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil were in this garden, and a river to water it. It is said that God "walked in the garden in the cool of the day." That was in the day of literal things. We are now in the day of spiritual things, when our bodies have become the temple of God through the Spirit, and our hearts his lovely garden. It is in this garden he dwells; it is there he walks. See 2 Cor. 6:16. ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr

... in that department, equally distinguished for the success with which he has led forward the musical education of New England, trained a corps of buglers to converse with each other by long and short bugle-notes, and thus to carry information with literal accuracy from point to point at any distance within which the tones of a bugle could be heard. It will readily be seen that there are many occasions in military affairs when such means of conversation might prove of inestimable value. Mr. Tuttle, the astronomer, on duty ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale

... the demon and his lake of fire, Sluiskin's portent of hardship proved to be a literal, even a modest, prophecy. At five o'clock in the evening, after eleven hours of struggle with precipices and glaciers, exhausted, chilled, and without food, they faced a night of zero gales upon the summit. The discovery of comforting steam-jets in a neighboring ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... upon him. If, instead of fearing, you will trust in the Lord to put his Spirit upon you when there is need of it, you may overcome Satan as easily as Samson did the lion. Daniel was thrown into the lions' den, but they did not eat him. God put a muzzle on them, not a literal muzzle, but something still more effectual, and they ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor

... judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he shewed every sign ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler

... he thought, evaded the spirit of Mr. Skinner's ultimatum while conforming to its literal terms, Cappy Ricks hurried home leaving his general manager a stunned and horrified man. In this instance, however, Cappy had erred in his strategy. Skinner was calm, cold-blooded, suave, politic and deferential, but in his kind of fight he never bluffed. He never played ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne

... a magnanimous man, in the literal as well as the accepted meaning of the word, he was also, as we have seen, a truly fortunate one. Honorable assistance came to him at critical moments, such as the delicate gift from Humboldt at Paris, which perhaps ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... of doom to those who should lay hands upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would believe in him, and ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... especially out of place. The "AEneid" is rendered with a roughness which might better befit a translation of Ennius. Thus the reader of Mr. Morris's poetical translations has in his hands versions of almost literal closeness, and (what is extremely rare) versions of poetry by a poet. But his acquaintance with Early English and Icelandic has added to the poet a strain of the philologist, and his English in the "Odyssey," ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... the first line of 13, as a closely literal version would scarcely be intelligent to the general reader. The sense is that the evil consequences, that have now overtaken thee, arose even then when the beneficial counsels ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... to have been and still to be the custom of some nations to make sepulchres the repositories of their greatest riches is (I am sure) universally true in a moral sense however it may be thought in the literal there being never a grave but what conceals a treasure though all have not the art to discover it I do not here invite the covetous miser to disturb the dead who can frame no idea of treasure distinct from gold and silver but him who knows that wisdom and virtue are the ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow

... I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of my friend Mrs. A.H. Beddoe) is neither "free" nor literal. It sometimes amplifies a thought, much as a musician might amplify the harmonies upon a master's figured bass. But even this is rarely done, and then only with a view to the youthful reader's pleasure and profit. With that view, further, the social and political ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine

... of GOD by the spirit of holiness. What is flesh, is born of flesh; and what is spirit, is born of Spirit." (p. 82.) Rom. i. 1-3 is quoted in support of this, which I cannot but regard as blasphemy: for if it does not mean that our SAVIOUR was not, in a true and literal sense, the SON of GOD at all, it is hard to see what it can mean.—As for the following account of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, it shall only be said that it sounds like a denial of the Catholic doctrine altogether. "Being, becoming, and animating; or substance, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... Poland, and provided for the education of music teachers for schools, organists for churches, and singers for the stage. Although I try to do my best with the unsatisfactory and often contradictory newspaper reports and dictionary articles from which I have to draw my data, I cannot vouch for the literal correctness of my notes. In making use of Sowinski's work I am constantly reminded of Voltaire's definition of dictionaries: "Immenses archives de mensonges et d'un peu de verite." Happy he who need ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... honesty. There is a great deal to be said for this point of view in the hands of a painter with a large appreciation of form and design. But without these more inspiring qualities it is apt to have the dulness that attends most literal transcriptions. There are many instances of this point of view among early portrait painters, one of the best of which is the work of Holbein. But then, to a very distinguished appreciation of ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed

... astronomical terminology reveals the same relationship to western thought, for Var[a]ha-Mihira (6th century A.D.), a contemporary of [A]ryabha[t.]a, entitled a work of his the B[r.]hat-Sa[m.]hit[a], a literal translation of [Greek: megale suntaxis] of Ptolemy;[306] and in various ways is this interchange of ideas apparent.[307] It could not have been at all unusual for the ancient Greeks to go to India, for Strabo lays down the route, saying that all who make ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... greatness here—and here—and here." With such a man, she felt, the direct and obvious appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... very quietly allayed Mr. Spriggins' fears by convincing him that it was the motto—the principle which governed the working of the institution, and also, gave the literal meaning ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... consequences to the occupants of the garden, stood, had a real existence and geographical site. Now I need hardly remark that the Mosaic narrative unquestionably professes a geographical exactness and a literal existence of the garden, as no fabled locality—no Utopia or garden of the Hesperides. I need only refer to the data afforded to us ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... a wage dispute, which was submitted by both sides to Federal Judge K.M. Landis for arbitration, the award authorized not only a wage reduction but a revision of the "working rules" as well. Most of the unionists refused to abide by the award and the situation developed into literal warfare. In Chicago the employers' side was aggressively upheld by a "citizens' committee" formed to enforce the Landis award. The committee claimed to have imported over 10,000 out-of-town building mechanics to take the places ...
— A History of Trade Unionism in the United States • Selig Perlman

... most incorrectly printed throughout, the editor requested the favour of the late learned professor of oriental languages in the University of Edinburgh, Dr Alexander Murray, to revise and correct this first sentence, which he most readily did, adding the following literal translation: "Presence, [or face.] of the world—protector, salutation to thee: A poor dervish and world-wanderer I am; that I have come from a kingdom far, to-wit, from the kingdom of Ingliz-stan, which historians ancient, relation have made, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr

... Anthropo-Geographie. The German work is difficult reading even for Germans. To most English and American students of geographic environment it is a closed book, a treasure-house bolted and barred. Ratzel himself realized "that any English form could not be a literal translation, but must be adapted to the Anglo-Celtic and especially to the Anglo-American mind." The writer undertook, with Ratzel's approval, to make such an adapted restatement of the principles, with a view to making ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... absence of mind—perhaps in a more literal absence of mind than is usually understood by the phrase—had smelt so hard at a sprig in his hand as to be on the verge of the offence in question. He smiled, said, 'I ask your pardon, my dear,' and threw it out ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... Freeland feel disgust at human flesh, even though the sacrifice be slowly slaughtered inch by inch, limb by limb, without the shedding of blood; to us the gradual destruction of a fellow-man is not less abhorrent than the literal devouring of a man is to you; and it is as impossible for us to exist upon the exploitation of our enslaved fellows as it is for you to share in the feasts of cannibals. I cannot become a princess—I cannot! Do not separate me from Carlo—if you do we shall both die, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... likewise lose their efficiency.—The literal translation of the Sutra is, 'There is likewise non-attachment (to the vidvan) of the other (i.e. of the deeds other than the evil ones, i.e. of good deeds), but on the fall (of the body, i.e. when death takes place).' The last words of the Sutra, 'but on the fall,' are separated by /S/a@nkara ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut

... they may be continued as long as the danger which occasioned their being raised continues? This would be to admit that they might be kept up IN TIME OF PEACE, against threatening or impending danger, which would be at once to deviate from the literal meaning of the prohibition, and to introduce an extensive latitude of construction. Who shall judge of the continuance of the danger? This must undoubtedly be submitted to the national government, and the matter would then be brought to this ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison

... science of language, as taught by Max Mueller; and if these languages must be learned, (and we do not deny that they should,) they can better be studied in their relations to all languages than simply by themselves. And as if to make bad worse, the genial and strictly scientific use of literal translations, advocated by Milton and Locke, and generally employed at the Revival of Letters, and during the days when Europe boasted its greatest classic scholars, is prohibited. 'A college education' suggests ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... of the primitive sect, with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation of Christ's ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that. "The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple. I suppose the young ladies go to church, but ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... behaved like a Christian. He did not forget that his uncle and aunt lived in that old and dilapidated house, and he did his best to keep the peace with them. In the most literal manner he returned good for evil. It is true he could not respect his uncle, or get up a very warm regard for him,—he was too mean, selfish, and unprincipled to win the respect and regard of any decent person,—but he could treat ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic

... "the sons of the universe" could appear in flesh and blood for the satisfaction of any one of their lovers, all other souls in the wide world would lose them as their invisible companions. But although this dilemma cannot in its literal outlines be avoided, it seems that the same inherent nature of love which leads to this dilemma leads also to the vanishing point or gap or lacuna in thought where the solution, although never actually realized, may ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... is often hard to believe that any one of them could do better. A good idea of the rhythm and length of his song may be gained by pronouncing somewhat rapidly the words, "I love, I love, I love you," or, as it sometimes runs, "I love, I love, I love you truly." How literal this translation is I am not scholar enough to determine, but without question it gives ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... plenty of fine weather, with light airs, calms, and squalls. In lat. 28 N., long. 177 W., his water going rotten, and misled by Hoyt's "North Pacific Directory," which informed him there was a coaling station on the island, Captain Trent put in to Midway Island. He found it a literal sandbank, surrounded by a coral reef, mostly submerged. Birds were very plenty, there was good fish in the lagoon, but no firewood; and the water, which could be obtained by digging, brackish. He found good holding-ground ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... material is all his own. He asserted the poet's claim to borrow from all science, and from every phase of nature, the associations and images which he wants; and he showed that those images and associations did not lose their poetry by being expressed with the most literal reality. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... A literal transcript of the talk in progress over the way would have confounded the evil thinking; to illustrate the blameless text with an equally faithful record of Shelby's actions might salt the narrative. He had a lawyer's ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... to the Chilian Government that he refused, on the 4th of August, to pay the squadron. Here is the same assertion, in his own handwriting, on the 9th! During the whole of this time the squadron was in a state of literal destitution; even the provisions necessary for its subsistence being withheld from it, though the Protector had abundant means of supplying them; but his object was to starve both officers and men into desertion—so as to accelerate the dismemberment of the squadron ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald

... moral or religious book, and, instead of understanding each sentence according to the main purpose and intention, interpret every phrase in its literal sense as conveying, and designed to convey, a metaphysical verity, or historical fact:—what a strange medley of doctrines should we not educe? And yet this is the way in which we are constantly in the habit of treating the books ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... customs from his experience of Wang's profession, which he followed for some years,—until he became too large to go in a hat, or be produced from his father's sleeve. The money you left with me has been expended on his education. He has gone through the Tri-literal Classics, but, I think, without much benefit. He knows but little of Confucius, and absolutely nothing of Mencius. Owing to the negligence of his father, he associated, perhaps, too much ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... was quite out of town and almost undiscovered until a comparatively recent time. Its eighteenth-century gravestones are consequently for the most part rustic and primitive. The skull and other bones here depicted, decked with wheat-ears and other vegetation, probably have some literal reference to the agricultural pursuits of the deceased, although of course they may be only poetical allusions to the ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent

... which merely addresses the eye; it does not in any particular exercise the moral sense. And second, painting, in common with all the other arts, implies the dangerous quality of imagination. A man of imagination is never moral; he outsoars literal demarcations and reviews life under too many shifting lights to rest content with the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... in his soul-life - the division which was to give him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within and outside the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... whose inhabitants dwell on the tops of trees like rooks." Thus spake Erasmus; and this literal fact makes Amsterdam a most curious as well ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... after referring to the fulfillment of many prophecies contained in the Old Testament, came to those in the New, and amongst others he spoke of that in which Christ alludes to the destruction of Jerusalem. He said that even in the times of the Apostles, there were persons who, by putting too literal a construction upon the words, were misled into believing that the end of the world was at hand, and that there had never been a time when there were not victims to the ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams

... his equally sensual Heaven. And many Christians have as foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through all ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... honor of your good graces; and believe, my charming Sister, that never brother in the world loved with such tenderness a sister so charming as mine; in short, believe, dear Sister, that without compliments, and in literal truth, I am yours ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... "miracle" could not have been announced at a more opportune time. For some years the scientific world had been agog over the question whether such a form of lightning as that reported—appearing in a clear sky, and hurling literal thunderbolts—had real existence. Such cases had been reported often enough, it is true. The "thunderbolts" themselves were exhibited as sacred relics before many an altar, and those who doubted their authenticity had been chided as having "an evil heart of unbelief." But scientific scepticism had ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... merely in respect of longevity, must be reckoned Lady Louisa Stuart, sister and heir of the last Earl of Traquair. She was a friend and correspondent of Sir Walter Scott, who in describing "Tully Veolan" drew Traquair House with literal exactness, even down to the rampant bears which still guard the locked entrance-gates against all comers until the Royal Stuarts shall return to claim their own. Lady Louisa Stuart lived to be ninety-nine, ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader. This book I brought home with me and had a careful, literal translation made. I submitted this translation to that notable scholar, Zenaide A. Ragozin, with whom I faithfully traversed the ground, word by word and sentence by sentence. This version I have carefully compared with Bryant and rewritten, making the language as simple ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... had understood, to be taken in a literal and positive sense. Under this mild and soothing treatment, Mr. Rushton gradually threw off a portion of the load that oppressed him, and we set off in tolerably cheerful mood for ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... substantial way from the previous decisions of the court in construing and applying this important statute, but they clarify those decisions by further defining the already admitted exceptions to the literal construction of the act. By the decrees, they furnish a useful precedent as to the proper method of dealing with the capital and property of illegal trusts. These decisions suggest the need and wisdom of additional or supplemental legislation to make it easier for the entire ...
— State of the Union Addresses of William H. Taft • William H. Taft

... person, the literal meaning of the overworked phrase, "frozen with amazement." Before him stood the most dangerous man in Europe; a man who had done murder and worse; a man only in name, a demon in nature. His long black eyes ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... musical tendency to obscure the sense, as in "sing-song" rendering; the other is the reactionary effort made by many would-be sensible people to make prose of the poetry by excluding all the music and rhythm in emphasizing the literal meaning. The following rule will be found a safe guide. Use the rhythm and quality pertaining to the full musical expression, modified by the inflection called for by the meaning, having careful reference to the perfect phrasing of the thought. The fulfilment of ...
— Expressive Voice Culture - Including the Emerson System • Jessie Eldridge Southwick

... descendants of a common parent, but of all the related species also. Affinity, relationship, all the terms which naturalists use figuratively to express an underived, unexplained resemblance among species, have a literal meaning upon Darwin's system, which they little suspected, namely, that of inheritance. Varieties are the latest offshoots of the genealogical tree in "an unlineal" order; species, those of an earlier date, but of no definite distinction; genera, more ancient species, and so on. ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... here a Greek Text acknowledged to be one of the best, which Greek scholars will find of importance, while the unlearned have an almost equal chance with those who are acquainted with the original, by having an interlinear, literal, word-for-word English translation. On the right hand of each page there is a column containing a special rendering of the translation, including the labors of many talented critics and translators, and in this column the emphatic signs are noted ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells

... instant she pauses another takes up the burden of her song. The effect some of them produce upon the assembled men is very great; in fact these addresses of the old women are the cause of most of the disturbances which take place. The above translations, without being exactly literal, are as near the original as I could render them. As they are entirely uttered on the spur of the moment there is generally abundant evidence of passion and feeling about them; and although I might have added a great variety, I think that the above ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... perhaps to some seem quite absurd, that the authorities of Harvard in 1791 felt obliged publicly to deny that Gibbon's History was used as a text-book at the University. But with the exception perhaps of Tom Paine, no one in this country had then ventured to assail the literal interpretation of the Scriptures. Probably the masses of the people then believed that "Joshua commanded the sun and moon to stand still, and they obeyed him," that Jonah was swallowed by the whale, ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks

... hero was born in Blantyre, central Scotland. It was an age of great missionary activity, and the literal fulfilment of the spirit of the great commission had led Carey, Judson, Moffat, and scores of others to give their lives to the promulgation of the gospel of the kingdom of God in heathen lands. A dozen missionary societies were then in their youth. Interest in travel and exploration ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... But to tell the truth would be to wound her father, to vex him against Eglington even as he had never yet been vexed. Besides, it was hard, while Eglington was there, to tell what, after all, was the sole affair of her own life. In one literal sense, Eglington was not guilty of deceit. Never in so many words had he said to her: "I love you;" never had he made any promise to her or exacted one; he had done no more than lure her to feel one thing, and then to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... declares that some crabs like to be boiled alive. In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did not mean its ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... an extraordinary case!' gasped Mrs. Bloss, as if she understood the communication in its literal sense, and was astonished at a gentleman without a stomach finding it ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... abrupt and prolonged interruptions. Many repetitions and trivial incidents have been omitted in this translation; but, in order to express the personality of the Author, the rendering has been as literal as possible, and it shows the strange mixture of sentimentality and ferocity peculiar to ...
— The Journal of Submarine Commander von Forstner • Georg-Guenther von Forstner

... entitled The Divine Adventure, which interprets the spirit of Columba. Nature and the spiritual meet in the psychic phase into which Sharp passed, not only in the poetic and native sense, but in a more literal sense than that. For the Green Life continually leads those who are akin to it into opportunities of psychical research among obscure and mysterious forces which are yet very potent. With a nature like his it was inevitable that ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... the beginner where literal descriptions are followed entirely or where illustrations are not drawn to correct proportions or followed closely are as follows. The wings are usually too large, and much too long for the size of the hook, and the tail is most always too long, as are the hackles. ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg

... adduced from the writings of both poets, which would seem to indicate that Heine had borrowed many of his ideas and even some forms of expression from Byron. Except in the case of the most literal correspondence, this is generally a very unsafe deduction. Such passages as a rule prove nothing more than a similarity, possibly quite independent, in the trend of their pessimistic thought. Compare for example Byron's lines in the poem "And wilt thou ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... part, while persistently seeking closer trade relations, sometimes sought this end in unwise ways. Many good people in Canada were still fighting the War of 1812. The desire to use the inshore fishery privileges as a lever to force tariff reductions led to a rigid and literal enforcement of Canadian rights and claims which provoked widespread anger in New England. The policy of discrimination in canal tolls in favor of Canadian as against United States ports was none the ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton

... rich in such words; but in the early Hebrew they seem to have been very scanty. The day, week, month, year, and generation (this last usually implying the time from the birth of a man to that of his son, but possibly in Gen. xv. 16, a century) are all that we find. These in their literal sense were evidently inadequate. Nor could the deficiency be supplied by numerals, even if the general style of the narrative would have admitted their use, for we find in Genesis no numeral beyond the thousand. There ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... any proceeding that he complains of. There may have been a want of the form of giving notice; but perhaps this may have been an excuse for the want of that notice—namely, that the resolutions of this day fortnight were proposed by the founder of this Association, as simply and entirely the literal and the sole reiteration of the resolutions upon which he founded this Association. He had no doubt upon the subject. It is a maxim that all pledges and tests are to be taken in the sense and in the spirit of the person who gives or proposes the tests, otherwise they should be ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke

... story, it is believed, has never yet appeared in English. It is almost a literal translation of a work published in Spanish a few years since, and now rarely to be met with.—El Martirio de la Joven Hachuel, or la Heroina Hebrea. Por D. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... some judicious and wide-minded friend, to correct and supplement the mainly admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early manhood could have augured this result; ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... multiply these selections, which, viewed individually, are certainly absurd and inelegant. They often indicate, however, the exact thought of the Psalmist, and are as well expressed as the desire to be literal as well as poetic will permit them to be. Sternhold's verses compare quite favorably, when looked at either as a whole or with regard to individual lines, with those of other poets of his day, for Chaucer was the only great poet who ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle

... thing is, related, and another thing understood; it is a kind of poetical picture, or hieroglyphick, which by its apt resemblance, conveys instruction to the mind, by an analogy to the senses, and so amuses the fancy while it informs the understanding. Every allegory has therefore two senses, the literal and mystical, the literal sense is like a dream or vision, of which the mystical sense is the true meaning, or interpretation. This will be more clearly apprehended by considering, that as a simile is a more extended metaphor, so an allegory is a kind of continued ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber

... a Department of Aggression," I replied. "Its mottoes are, 'Stop trouble before it starts,' and, 'If we have to fight, let's do it on the other fellow's real estate.' But this situation is just a little too delicate for literal application of those principles. An unprovoked attack on the z'Srauff would set every other non-human race in the galaxy against us.... Would an attack by the z'Srauff on New Texas constitute ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire

... round eyes were sapphire blue, and seemed to radiate a light of their own. This last statement (about the eyes) must not be taken for a conventional exaggeration, such as writers of fiction employ in describing heroines who never existed. On the contrary, it expresses a literal fact; and moreover, as the reader will see further on, this peculiarity of the eyes was shared, in varying degrees, by all these people of Venus, and was connected with the most amazing of all our discoveries on that planet. I should say here that, while the eyes of the inhabitants ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss

... mean for an instant to propose that every one should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact, who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate, although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes a good husband, and may save ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... 4, Paul again dips deep into the promise of God to Abraham and brings forth beautiful teaching which shows that, to him, God's promise to Abraham was spiritual as well as material, that there was to be a spiritual seed as well as literal seed, and that "faith" is as potent as natural birth in making men children of Abraham. Also in these verses Abraham is made the "father of us all," even of Gentiles, which of course could not be true except in ...
— Adventures in the Land of Canaan • Robert Lee Berry

... Dickens, Thackeray, Hugo, Hawthorne, Irving, and a score of other great writers of my time and all time, I understood her meaning. She had indeed made good her promise in a sense compared with which its literal fulfillment would have been a disappointment. She had introduced me to a circle of friends whom the century that had elapsed since last I communed with them had aged as little as it had myself. Their spirit was as high, their wit as keen, their laughter and their tears as contagious, as when their ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... the accepted political doctrine had been that kings held office by Divine-right, but now orators of the day harangued mobs proclaiming the literal belief that the voice of the people is the voice ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel

... Great indeed was his inheritance, for he came into possession of the wonderful sword Angurvadel, on the blade of which were mystic runes [Footnote: Runes, letters or characters of ancient Scandinavian alphabets. The literal meaning of rune, a secret or mystery, is explained by the fact that at first these symbols could be read only by a few.] dull in times of peace, but fiery red in war; the magic ring or armlet made by Vaulund the smith, and the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... this little fracas is the denial of his Lordship, as to pilfering the thoughts and fancies of others; for it so happens, that the first passage of The Bride of Abydos, the poem in question, is almost a literal and unacknowledged translation from Goethe, which was pointed out in some of the periodicals soon after the work ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... thought the other was going to look foolish at hearing his own words thus reproduced in such literal fashion, she never made a ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... cottage when it's launched," said the Captain, pointing to a building in process of erection, which stood so close to the edge of the Thames that its being launched seemed as much a literal allusion as a metaphor. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne

... am. That's where the shoe pinches. Ha! and by way of literal illustration, speaking of the mal-adjustments of life, witness ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... an exceptionally good temper this morning. Everything had turned out as he had hoped for and anticipated, and the literal kicking-out of Henson the previous evening was still fresh and sweet in his memory. It would be something to boast ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... has its origin in the Lat. accentus, which in its turn is a literal translation of the Gr. prosodia. The early Greek grammarians used this term for the musical accent which characterized their own language, but later the term became specialized for quantity in metre, whence comes the Eng. prosody. Besides various later developments of usage it is important ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... pupils of the new college. The Pope honoured the ceremony with his presence; and, for a wonder, a very full account of the proceedings was published in the Giornale di Roma; the quotations I make are literal ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey

... by flight. But Grey completely surprised Baylor's troops and killed, wounded, or took the greater part of them. Colonel Baylor was wounded and made prisoner. The slaughter on that occasion which as at the Paoli, was a literal massacre of surprised and defenseless men excited much indignation and was the subject of loud complaints throughout the ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing

... wish cordially to thank the French and the German translators of the Dvoryanskoe Gnyezdo for the assistance their versions rendered me while I was preparing the present translation of that story. The German version, by M. Paul Fuchs,[A] is wonderfully literal. The French version, by Count Sollogub and M.A. de Calonne, which originally appeared in the Revue Contemporaine, without being quite so close, ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev

... his old friend, Dr. John Brown (the beloved chronicler of Rab and his Friends), he was introduced by Dr. John to some lion-hunting American visitors as "our Marco Polo." The visitors evidently took the statement in a literal sense, and ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... Reason Rational Revenge Vindictive Rule Regular Speech Loquacious, garrulous, eloquent Smell Olfactory Sight Visual, optic, perspicuous, conspicuous Side Lateral, collateral Skin Cutaneous Spittle Salivial Shoulder Humeral Shepherd Pastoral Sea Marine, maritime Share Literal Sun Solar Star Astral, sideral, stellar Sunday Dominical Spring Vernal Summer Estival Seed Seminal Ship Naval, nautical Shell Testaceous Sleep Soporiferous Strength Robust Sweat Sudorific Step Gradual Sole Venal ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch

... gigantic truth. Paradise, the summer land of fruits, the serpent, the fire from heaven, the expulsion, the waving sword, the "fall of man," the "darkness on the face of the deep," the age of toil and sweat—all, all, are literal facts. ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... gates'? To whom can this possibly apply but to the slave? After directing that the labour of all the household, 'man-servant and maid-servant,' should cease, it then proceeds to the ox and the ass, and the stranger that is within thy gates. Now, gentlemen, this cannot be applied to the stranger in the literal sense of the word, the hospitality of the age forbidding that labour should be required of him. At that time slaves were brought from foreign lands, and were a source of traffic, as may be inferred by the readiness with which the Ishmaelites purchased Joseph of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... was embarrassed; he sat in silence. But Beaumaroy seemed quite at his ease. He began with a statement which was, in its literal form, no falsehood; but that was about all that could be said for it on the score of veracity. "Before you came in, sir, we were just speaking of uniforms. Do you remember seeing our blue Air Force uniform when we were in town last week? I remember that you expressed ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony

... we are reminded that he was a millennarian. The Chiliastic teaching of his work is the subject of severe comment with Eusebius, who accuses him of misinterpreting figurative sayings in the Apostolic writings and assigning to them a literal sense. This tendency appears also in the one passage which Irenaeus quotes from Papias. But the answer to this is decisive. Chiliasm is the rule, not the exception, with the Christian writers of the second century; and it appears combined with views the very opposite of Ebionite. ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot

... a very unpoetical, if not unphilosophical, mode of viewing antiquities. Your philosophy is too literal for our imperfect vision. We cannot look directly into the nature of things; we can only catch glimpses of the mighty shadow in the camera obscura of transcendental intelligence. These six and eighteen are only ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock

... much in his class-room tone. He was all brown like a leaf with Valley dust and sun and rain. The old cadet cap was older yet, the ancient boots as grotesquely large, the curious lift of his hand to Heaven no less curious than it had always been. He was as awkward, as hypochondriac, as literal, as strict as ever. Moreover, there should have hung about him the cloud of disfavour and hostility raised by that icy march to Romney less than three months ago. And yet—and yet! What had happened since then? Not much, indeed. The return of the Stonewall ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... of subdued humour in narrative, adhering in the most literal manner to facts, and yet contriving to bring them out by that graphic literalness under their most ludicrous aspect, what can equal St. Luke's description of the riot at Ephesus? The picture of the narrow trade selfishness of Demetrius—of polytheism reduced into a matter ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... indeed true that the younger Darwin gave the words "natural selection" the importance which of late years they have assumed; he probably adopted them unconsciously from the passage of Mr. Matthew's quoted above, but he ultimately said, {87a} "In the literal sense of the word (sic) no doubt natural selection is a false term," as personifying a fact, making it exercise the conscious choice without which there can be no selection, and generally crediting it with the discharge ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... take with it all our prosperity and all our power. It would take the Border States and the control of the Mississippi, and worse than this, it would establish a war which would rage without intermission until we should be crushed, perhaps into literal tribute and vassalage. Every dispute arising from our entangled neighborhood—and these would be innumerable—would be determined with an insolence and a cruelty far surpassing any thing which we ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... to describe what follows, I shall offer a literal prose translation of some parts of the concluding scene, asking you to supply by your imagination, as best you may, the power and harmony of Goethe's ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... dull head and Monday "blues" do not fairly represent school or college leisure. Good times that interfere with good work have no place in ideally free hours. But, indeed, the odours from the chafing-dishes do suggest that some of the girls are trying to put into literal execution the wish of a great German professor in Oxford. The professor, eager to try a dish he saw on the hotel bill of fare, but with his English and German verbs not quite disentangled, said to the waiter, "Hereafter I vish to become a Velsh Rabbit." ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks

... the literal underworld of the great city? What of the babes who cry in fetid cellars for the light and are denied it? What of the Subway track-walker, purblind from gloom; the coal-stoker, whose fiery tomb is the boiler-room of a skyscraper; ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... curiosity of thought, or spiritual aspiration. I was moved and governed by my sensations, which continually changed, and passed away—to come again, and deposit vague ideas which ignorantly haunted me. The literal images of all things which I saw were impressed on my shapeless mind, to be reproduced afterward by faculties then latent. But what satisfaction was that? Doubtless the ideal faculty was active in Veronica from the beginning; in me it was developed by the experience of years. No remembrance ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... study for hours and years. If a few pages disgust, what must be the effect of volumes in the same style! and what sort of writing can we expect from pupils who are condemned to such reading? The analogy of ancient and modern languages, differs so materially, that a literal translation of any ancient author, can scarcely be tolerated. Yet, in general, young scholars are under a necessity of rendering their Latin lessons into English word for word, faithful to the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... of any literal angel to shut the mouths of the lions to save Daniel; the awful holiness of the prophet was enough. There was so much of God in him that the savage creatures submitted to him as they did to unsinning Adam. Man's dominion over nature was broken by sin, but in the golden age to come it will be restored. ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald

... the editor's hand warmly—even in its literal significance of imparting a good deal of his own earnest caloric to the editor's fingers—and left the room. His footfall echoed along the passage and died out, and with it, I fear, all impression of his visit from ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte

... full value. But I did pick up a smattering of Latin at school; and from time to time since I left school I have endeavoured to gain some little knowledge of the most popular Latin poets; chiefly, I own to my shame, by the help of literal ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and her ears hear all that passes. If there is one thing that pushes me nearer to the verge of distraction than another it is to have my own words quoted to me when I have forgotten that I ever uttered them. And she—literal little bore!—is always pretending to take all that I say in earnest. If I were to tell her to go to Guinea, it is my belief she would put on her bonnet, cloak, and gloves, pocket a biscuit for luncheon and a story-book to read by the way, and set ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... of this divergent interpretation of an article, the literal meaning of which seems to be quite clear? The divergence is due to the different mode of interpretation of statutes resorted to by continental Courts, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, ...
— The League of Nations and its Problems - Three Lectures • Lassa Oppenheim

... not show how Shakespeare did it, and in the second place, if it does, it will show that he did not do it by analysis. In the third place,—to say nothing of not doing it by analysis,—if he had analysed it before he did it, he could not have analysed it afterward in the literal and modern sense. In the fourth place, even if Shakespeare were able to do his work by analysing it before he did it, it does not ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee

... "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed." His disciples, likewise, prone here as so often to make a literal and material interpretation of his statements, said one to another: "This is a hard saying; who can hear him?" Or according to our idiom—who can understand him? Jesus asked them squarely if what he had just said caused them to stumble, ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... no need to be so literal," returned Mrs. Challoner, reprovingly; for she was a gentlewoman of the old school, and nothing grieved her more than slipshod English or any idiom or idiotcy of modern parlance in the mouths of her bright young daughters: to speak of any young man except Dick without the ceremonious prefix was ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... died of his wounds, he would not have been in a position to feel either joy or sorrow, or to be conscious that he was not dining at Ancester. The General fished up a wandering eyeglass to look at him, and said:—"Quite correct!" Miss Smith-Dickenson remarked upon the dangers attendant on over-literal interpretations. The Hon. Mr. Pellew perceived in this that Miss Dickenson had a sort ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... than the person and valor of his only son, Don Luis Perez Dasmarinas, sending with him the best captains of this camp and Sargento-mayor Juan Xuares Gallinato. He was moved by the reasons given in the first chapter of the relation of this conquest, the literal copy of which accompanies these conditions, as it is believed that no advice can be given his Majesty or your Highness that will be as forcible as this. The importance of the matter is superlative; and it is all the more advisable to undertake it, as that was done by a ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various

... access betwixt the High Street and the southern suburbs.] turned thy brain for eight days. Thou wert once caught if I remember rightly, with a single glance of a single matchless eye, which, when the fair owner withdrew her veil, proved to be single in the literal sense of the word. And, besides, were you not another time enamoured of a voice—a mere voice, that mingled in the psalmody at the Old Greyfriars' Church—until you discovered the proprietor of that dulcet organ to be Miss Dolly MacIzzard, ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... generally accepted division of language into literal and figurative. Language that is literal uses words in their accepted and accurate meaning. Figurative language employs words with meanings not strictly literal, but varying ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... we are aware of readers who prefer Bunyan to Spenser, others who place Sterne, Voltaire, and Byron before both, and not a few who have emerged with profit and without pollution from the perusal of the labours of Rabelais and Aretino. There is a literal deluge of moral and colourless works, on the contrary, from which even the average modern reader comes away only with an uncomfortable sense of waste ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... of the Reformed Dutch Church had accompanied the Boers in their Trek. They therefore formed themselves into a separate reformed Church, whose members called themselves "doppers" (round-heads). They allow no liberty of thought; they believe in literal inspiration. If they had ever heard of Galileo, they would have looked upon him as an impostor. They place the authority of the Old Testament above that of the New. There are three contending sects in the Transvaal, whose hostility ...
— Boer Politics • Yves Guyot

... which have guided me on the present occasion are the same as those followed in the translation of Schiller's complete Poems that was published by me in 1851, namely, as literal a rendering of the original as is consistent with good English, and also a very strict adherence to the metre of the original. Although translators usually allow themselves great license in both these points, it appears to me that by so doing ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe

... that postulated the brotherhood of man. But the reverend speaker touched such a subject warily. It seemed to Dave he would gladly have gone further, but was held in restraint by a sense of the orthodoxy of his congregation. Too literal an interpretation of the brotherhood of man might carry the taint of Socialism, and the congregation represented the wealth of the city. It was safer to preach learnedly on abstractions ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... to mean a person making a voyage by the sea or the ocean, The literal meaning seems to be 'a person making a long or ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... own friend, I am quite well now, or next to it—but this is how it was,—I have gone out a great deal of late, and my head took to ringing such a literal alarum that I wondered what was to come of it; and at last, a few evenings ago, as I was dressing for a dinner somewhere, I got really bad of a sudden, and kept at home to my friend's heartrending disappointment. Next morning I was no better—and it struck ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... the only secret I held over the Peters family, who never quite knew what to make of me. They were not troubled with imaginations. Julia was a little older than Tom and had a sharp tongue, but over him I exercised a distinct fascination, and I knew it. Literal himself, good-natured and warm-hearted, the gift I had of tingeing life with romance (to put the thing optimistically), of creating kingdoms out of back yards—at which Julia and Russell sniffed—held his ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... extraordinary event having really taken place, or the unquestionable light which it will cast upon the character of the person by whom it was frankly believed. And to deal with Greek religion honestly, you must at once understand that this literal belief was, in the mind of the general people, as deeply rooted as ours in the legends of our own sacred book; and that a basis of unmiraculous event was as little suspected, and an explanatory symbolism as rarely traced, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin

... nature—gives, after all, a kind of crude synthesis of the natural and the spiritual, by which it is possible to live; it is, for many persons, an indispensable bridge between the world of phenomena and the world of spirit. But when the heavy-handed dogmatist requires a categorical assent to the literal truth of the miraculous, in exactly the same sense in which physical facts are true, a tension between faith and reason cannot be avoided. And it is in this literal sense that Bishop Gore requires all his clergy to assent to the miracles in ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... twenty-six marginal changes, a very large proportion, quite one-half, and we should think more, are mere insignificant literal changes or additions, such as an editor in supervising manuscript, or an author in reading proof, passes over, and leaves to the proof-readers of the printing-office, by whom they are called "literals," we believe. Such are the change of "Whon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... her elevation, literal and metaphorical, supplemented all this by the creditable statements that Nate had turned twenty-one, had cast his vote, and had a right to ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... was far from giving a literal meaning to the information. "It looks a rotten old thing," he continued; "the key is in the house, no doubt, but I don't want to have the trouble of going ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow

... to be placed in the forefront of all Christian teaching that Christ's mission on earth was to give men Life. "I am come," He said, "that ye might have Life, and that ye might have it more abundantly." And that He meant literal Life, literal spiritual and Eternal Life, is clear from the whole course of His teaching and acting. Natural Law, ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond

... to Mrs. Procter. What was it Suzanna had once said? "Mrs. Procter cuddles all children in her heart." And Suzanna and Maizie stood watching her, asking a literal translation of a principle laid down for ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... of questioning would elicit literal response, and on the whole this relieved him. To hear Godwin Peak using the language of a fervent curate would have excited in him something more than disgust. It did not seem impossible that a nature ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... just now of a very different work—the work of creation. If any one does not know the difference between create and make, let him turn to his dictionary, and Webster will inform him that the primary literal meaning of create is, "To produce; to bring into being from nothing; to cause to exist." The example he gives to illustrate his definition is this verse, "In the beginning God created the heavens ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... consciousness. And if the fugitive elements want to venture forth they must be correspondingly disguised, in order to pass the censor. Freud calls this disguising or paraphrasing process the dream disfigurement. The literal is thereby displaced by the figurative, an allusion intimated through a nebulous atmosphere. Thus, in the following example, an unconscious death wish is exhibited. In the examination of a lady's dream it struck me that the motive of a dead child occurred repeatedly, generally in connection ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... shall become a thousand." Isa. xxii. 24. "All vessels of SMALL quantity." Ps. cxv. 13. "He will bless them that fear the Lord both SMALL and great." Ex. xviii. 22. "But every SMALL matter they shall judge." It would be a literal rendering of Gen. ix. 24, if it were translated thus. "When Noah knew what his little son[A], or grandson (Beno Hakkatan) had done unto him, he said cursed be Canaan," &c. Further, even if the Africans were the descendants of Canaan, the assumption that their ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... rule of education, which is not to make too easy the tasks which have for their aim the mastering of a difficulty. Their main object was to make their pupils into honourable men. Their lessons of goodness and morality, which impressed me as being the literal embodiments of virtue and high feeling, were part and parcel of the dogma which they taught. The historical education they had given me consisted solely in reading Rollin. Of criticism, the natural sciences, and ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... appeal of Rose Stribling would be victorious. He could discern pink and white and blue and gold; but the indeterminate shades, the subtleties and mysteries of charm were enigmatical to him. His emotions would be as literal as his convictions or his oratory. Yet there must be some faculty in him which did not appear on the surface, some primitive grasp of realities in his understanding of men. Why should the influence of this sanguine, loud-talking ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow

... matter do I cut to the quick.] as those who establish specially subtle distinctions, [Footnote: The Stoics of the more rigid type, who maintained that the wise man alone is good, but denied that the truly wise man had yet made his appearance on the earth.] with literal truth it may be, but with little benefit to the common mind; for they will not admit that any man who is not wise is a good man. This may indeed be true. But they understand by wisdom a state which no mortal has yet attained; ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis

... And shall not reason, assisted with the motives of religion, teach us that unity among Christians may enable them to enterprise greater things for Christ? Would not this make Satan fall from heaven like lightning? For as unity built literal Babel, it is unity that must pull down mystical Babel. And, on the other hand, where divisions are, there is confusion; by this means, a Babel hath been built in every age. It hath been observed by a learned man, and I wish I could not say truly observed, that there is most of Babel and confusion ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... till 130 B.C. by the translation of the rest, the whole being in reality the achievement of several independent workmen, who executed their parts, some with greater some with less ability and success; it is often literal to a painful degree, and it swarms with such pronounced Hebraisms, that a pure Greek would often fail to understand it. It was the version current everywhere at the time of the planting of the Christian Church, and ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... address—mail reaches me from time to time, by aforesaid vessel—is P.O. Box 14, Blue Harbor, Me. ME stands for Mid Equator, but the abbreviation is sufficient. Blue Harbor is my own literal translation of the native Bluar Boor. Box 14 refers to the native system of delivering messages. P.O. has, I think, something to do with the P. & O. steamers, which, however, do not very often ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price

... vividness his alternate moods of infinite enjoyment and unmitigated despair. For instance, the only two triolets which have survived from his "Trente deux Triolets joyeux and tristes" are an example of his twofold temperament. They run thus in the literal and exact translations of them ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring

... hand, you ought not to exact from us the literal performance of the stipulation when you know that we cannot perform it without conscious culpability. A true solution of the difficulty seems to be attainable by regarding it as a simple case where a contract, from changed circumstances, ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden

... nearly two hours, no words of it are known except the opening phrases, reported by Napoleon himself. "Sire," remarked the Czar, "I shall second you against the English." "In that case," was the reply, "everything can be arranged, and peace is made." Some doubt has been cast on the literal truth of this momentous dialogue, since it rests on a single authority. For a century it has not been denied, and the cup of bitterness which England had held to Alexander's lips was certainly brimming. Since ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... same chapter (which he dedicated to Philip II. and Pope Gregory VIII.), observes, that the accusation has its origin in the misunderstanding of the sense of all those passages in the New Testament which refer to the Agapes. These verses have been taken by the uninitiated in their literal sense. ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore

... this word with its literal translation, "tail-horn-hoofed Satan," and be shy of compound epithets, the components of which are indebted for their union exclusively to the printer's hyphen. Henry More, indeed, would have naturalized the word without hesitation, and 'cercoceronychous' would have shared the astonishment ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... conversations with strange men had been confined to such things as, "Will you please tell me the nearest way to—?" but preposterously enough—she could not for the life of her have told why—frowning upon this huge American—fat was the literal word—who stood there with puckered-up face swinging the flaming hose would seem in the same shameful class with snubbing the little boy who confidently asked her what kind of ribbon to buy ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell

... in the passions of men; in the follies of love, its entanglements, its mischiefs, its foulness. In one shape or another it meets us at every turn; it is never absent; it is the motive and stimulant of the whole activity of the poem. The picture of life held up before us is the literal ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... end, "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," was his own comment, and is perhaps the most tenderly beautiful line he ever wrote. These two books, Adam's Diary and Eve's—amusing and sometimes absurd as they are, and so far removed from the literal—are as autobiographic as anything he has done, and one of them as lovely in its truth. Like the first Maker of men, Mark Twain created Adam in his own image; and his rare Eve is no less the companion with whom, half a lifetime before, he had begun the marriage journey. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... now proceed to the solution of our proper problem. There are no general reasons, either against the figurative, or against the literal interpretation; neither of them has any unfavourable prejudice which can be urged against it. A devastation by real locusts is threatened, in the Pentateuch, against the transgressors of the law, Deut. xxviii. 38, 39; against the Egyptians, the Lord actually made use ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... Nuremberg, {1} and intensified the vivid description of a mastersingers' meeting which the curious may read in August Hagen's novel "Norica." His studies have been marvellously exact and careful, and he has put Wagenseil's book under literal and liberal contribution, as will appear after a while. Now it seems best to tell the story of the ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... David, Elijah, who were obedient to the commandments of God. He did not speak of patriotism, although an intense lover of his country. He exhorted his sons to be simply obedient to the Law,—not, probably, in the restricted and literal sense of the word, but in the idea of being faithful to God, even as Abraham was obedient before the Law was given. The glory which he assured them they would thus win was not the eclat of victory, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord

... Mussulman had his equally sensual Heaven. And many Christians have as foolish notions as any one else. Some think that they win Heaven by believing something with their minds about our Lord's atonement. Some think they go to Heaven by soaring up through the air. Some of them, taking in its literal meaning the glorious imagery of the Apocalypse, picture to themselves streets of beaten gold and walls of flashing emerald and jasper, and the wearing of crowns and the singing of Psalms over and over again through ...
— The Gospel of the Hereafter • J. Paterson-Smyth

... that some crabs like to be boiled alive. In the same way he thought and spoke as if the people liked being kept in superstition; only he meant this in a literal sense, whereas the cookery book did ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... parabolarum J. C. indole poetica com. Men have good cause to suspect the accuracy of their artificial rules, when the application of them works such havoc. Better that we should have no critical rules, than adopt such as separate on superficial literal grounds, things that the judgment of the Church and the common sense of men have in all ages joined together as ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot

... much excited by the fact that he had received a despatch from Berlin in which the German Government—which, of course, means the Emperor—had strongly and finally declared against everything like an arbitration tribunal. He was clearly disconcerted by this too literal acceptance of his own earlier views, and said that he had sent to M. de Staal insisting that the meeting of the subcommittee on arbitration, which had been appointed for this day (Friday), should be ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... the operation begins: you are cheated, at best, of all the money in your pocket, and if you stay late, very probably robbed of your watch and snuff-box, possibly murdered for greater security. This I can assure you, is not an exaggerated, but a literal description of what happens every day to some raw and inexperienced stranger at Paris. Remember to receive all these civil gentlemen, who take such a fancy to you at first sight, very coldly, and take care always to be previously ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield

... to Beard, The Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 119, "It was a mediaeval maxim, which no one thought of questioning, that the language of the Bible had four senses—the literal, the allegorical, the tropological, and the anagogical, of which the last three were mystical or spiritual, in contradistinction to the first." The learned Erasmus, who lived and died a devout Roman Catholic, ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens

... was in an exceptionally good temper this morning. Everything had turned out as he had hoped for and anticipated, and the literal kicking-out of Henson the previous evening was still fresh and sweet in his memory. It would be something to boast of in his ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... is one of those autobiographical novels that were popular throughout the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. It was published in 1970, and one must understand Wander Jahre rather in a spiritual and intellectual than in a literal sense. It is indeed an allusive title, carrying the world back to the Wilhelm Meister of Goethe, a century and a ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells

... well be questioned whether any arbitrary and literal translation, even though practicable, of a highly complex, intensely mobile art, unfolding in time, as does music, into a correspondent light and color expression, is the best approach to a new art of mobile color. ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... from that view. So far as Poetry attempts to improve on truth in that way, so far it abandons truth, and is false to itself. Even literal facts, exactly as they were, a great poet will prefer whenever he can get them. Shakespeare in the historical plays is studious, wherever possible, to give the very words which he finds to have been used; and it shows how wisely he was guided in this, that those magnificent ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude

... This literal quotation from the frank Mr. Calvin caused a sensation. Captain Dan struggled to find words. His daughter laid a hand ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln

... at the question,—it was a literal translation of his own thought at that moment. He checked the enthusiasm that rose to his lip, and calmly ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... siege and the imminent danger of famine and attack for many weeks. It sent its echoes down into the south-west part of the territories where the warlike Blackfeet confederacy had its centre. At each of these points, as at Prince Albert, the few Mounted Police that were on duty became a literal tower of strength. At Battleford, Inspector Morris, with his few men, organizing also a home guard, guarded nearly 400 women and children who sought refuge inside the stockade. And Constable Storer, riding out alone from that stockade, when all the wires were cut, ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth

... vision foreshadows the conquest of the air, its significance is symbolic rather than literal, and, like Pindar checking the steeds of his song, Hugo ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury

... sunrise every person should stand at the door of his dwelling, and after observing for a period, compare among themselves the details of their thoughts. By this means he hoped to achieve his imperial purpose, but although the literal part of the enactment is scrupulously maintained, especially by the slothful and defamatory, who may be seen standing at their doors and conversing together even to this day, from some unforeseen imperfection the intellectual capacity of the ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah

... copious facility than Crassus; as sufficiently appeared upon many other occasions, but particularly in the cause of M. Curius, which was tried before the Centum Viri. For he urged a great variety of arguments in the defence of right and equity, against the literal jubeat of the law; and supported them by such a numerous series of precedents, that he overpowered Q. Scaevola (a man of uncommon penetration, and the ablest Civilian of his time) though the case before them was only a matter of legal right. But the cause was so ably managed ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... corrected the literal-minded Gershom. "They do not last forever. They come and go out, just as we do. Only they take longer. Consider the Dipper up there, for instance. A hundred thousand years from now that Dipper will be perceptibly altered, for we know the lateral movement ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has been found necessary to screen certain of the roads not only on both sides but above, so that in places the traffic passes for miles through literal tunnels of matting. This road masking is a simple form of the art of concealment to which the French have given the name "camouflage," which has been developed to an extraordinary degree on the Western Front. That the Italians ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... simply a pledge to believers of their redemption." But Luther saw, in every attempt to exhibit the symbolical import of the supper, only the danger of weakening the authority of Scripture, which was his stronghold, and became exceedingly tenacious on that point; carried his views to the extreme of literal interpretation, and never could emancipate himself from the doctrines of Rome respecting the eucharist. Carlstadt, finding himself persecuted at Wittemberg left the city, and, as soon as he was released from the presence of Luther, began to revive ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... are a sect of religious mendicants in Bengal, unlettered and unconventional, whose songs are loved and sung by the people. The literal meaning of the word ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore

... useful to studious men, though superfluous as far as I myself was concerned. For I have translated the most illustrious orations of the two most eloquent of the Attic orators, spoken in opposition to one another: Aeschines and Demosthenes. And I have not translated them as a literal interpreter, but as an orator giving the same ideas in the same form and mould as it were, in words conformable to our manners; in doing which I did not consider it necessary to give word for word, but I have preserved the character ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero

... but the inside works were all right." And so thought its jolly patrons. Seated at tables, well supplied with piles of gold and silver, where numerous disciples of that ancient trickster Pharaoh, being dubious perhaps of the propriety of adopting the literal orthography of his name, ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs

... Hebrew poetry; that peculiarity consisting of the repetition of clauses, containing either the same proposition in a slightly different form, or its antithesis; a rhyme of thoughts, if we may so say, instead of a rhyme of sounds, and consequently capable of being preserved by a literal translation. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various

... the most debraille of my crew, a hashshash, {48} but a singer and a good fellow. The translation is not free, though the sentiments are. I merely rhymed Omar's literal word-for-word interpretation. The songs are all in a similar strain, except one funny one abusing the 'Sheykh el-Beled, may the fleas bite him.' Horrid imprecation! as I know to my cost, for after visiting the Coptic ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... a different rendering is required from that suggested in the note on 3, 25. What is it? Notice that it is necessary to know the literal significance of the Latin words, but that the translation must often be something quite different if it is to be acceptable English. The rule for translation is: Discover the exact meaning of the original; then express ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.

... vested beneficial interest" in them, whereas the trustees had no such interest at stake. But, said he, the case is within the words of the rule, and "must be within its operation likewise, unless there be something in the literal construction" obviously at war with the spirit of the Constitution, which was far from the fact. For, he continued, "it requires no very critical examination of the human mind to enable us to determine that one great inducement to these gifts is the conviction felt by the giver that ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin

... are unincorporated voluntary societies. In our modern nomenclature the name "inn" may seem a strange one for an institution of learning; but the term is a literal rendering of the ancient title hospitia applied to them in the Latin records, as ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... men very much wished to overtake our game, for the big peccary is a murderous foe of dogs (and is sometimes dangerous to men). One of their number frankly refused to come or to let his dogs come, explaining that the fierce wild swine were "very badly brought up" (a literal translation of his words) and that respectable dogs and men ought not to go near them. The other fazendeiros merely feared for their dogs; a groundless fear, I believe, as I do not think that the dogs could by any ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... her thoughts. View the case in any of the lights which shone into her mind, she could not discover an aspect that gave her real comfort. It is true she was free from all legal obligations to her former husband, and that was something gained. But what of that husband's position under the literal reading of the divine law? No doubt he contemplated marriage. But could he marry, conscience clear? Had not her false vows cursed both their lives?—imposed on each almost ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur

... he say so? Very stupid of him. One can't be too literal in dealing with the War Office, that notorious fount ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various

... of science and the wide world; Dante, despite his cramped outlook; Milton, in spite of his perverse theologizing—these and their like are, and will always be, literature. No matter if Carlyle's French Revolution be in reality as far from the literal truth as the work of Froude, yet Carlyle and Froude are literature, along with Herodotus and Livy and Froissart, while the most scrupulously exact of chronicles may ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker

... answered the rich young man and said for him to give to the poor all he possessed or he could not gain everlasting life, He did not mean it in the literal sense. My interpretation of His words is that we should part with what comes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... in my hearing, said Luther, that he was earnest against the sectaries, as contemners of God's Word, and also against those who attributed too much to the literal Word; for, said he, such do sin against God and his almighty power, as the Jews did in naming the ark "God." But, said he, whoso holdeth a mean between both, the same is taught what is the right use of the ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther

... often heard Gladstone say that, in the nature of things, a speech cannot be adequately reported. You may get the words with literal precision, but the loss of gesture, voice, and intonation, will inevitably obscure the meaning and impede the effect. Of no one's speaking is this more true than of his own. Here and there, in the enormous mass of his reported eloquence, you will come upon a fine peroration, a ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... his wife about the singular trial and about the impression which Jesus had made upon his mind. When he left her, she had fallen asleep and dreamed about it; for, though our version makes her say, "This night I have dreamed about Him," the literal translation is "this day"; and of course there might be many causes why a lady should fall asleep in the daytime. Her dream had been such as to fill her with a vague sense of alarm, and her message to her husband ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker

... swirling snow which sifted past the glare of his headlights, he could discern a sign which told him he had reached the summit, that he now stood at the literal ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... valves which, when open, flood the ballast tanks with water and secure the submergence of the boat. Most of the underwater boats to-day sink rapidly on an even keel. The old method of depressing the nose of the boat so as to make a literal dive has been abandoned, partly because of the inconvenience it caused to the men within who suddenly found the floor on which they were standing tilted at a sharp angle, and partly because the diving position proved to be a ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... and sufferings ensue which would have been prevented by keeping up even the ambiguous thoughts of recovery. Sick people have reflections and feelings which exert an influence upon them beyond our discernment, and which frequently need not our literal interpretations of symptoms, and our exhortations, to make them more effectual. But where there is evidently no preparedness for death, and the patient, we fear, is deceiving himself, no one who has suitable views of Christian duty will fail to impress him with the necessity of ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams

... nothing of other improbabilities and incongruities. Every thing of this kind was now awakened; while, in order to master the Hebrew, I occupied myself exclusively with the Old Testament, and studied it, though no longer in Luther's translation, but in the literal version of Sebastian Schmid, printed under the text, which my father had procured for me. Here, I am sorry to say, our lessons began to be defective in regard to practice in the language. Reading, interpreting, grammar, transcribing, and the repetition of words, seldom lasted a full half-hour; ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... its literal meaning, means an infusion of intelligence that lifts up the minds of man, and it is generally so accepted by the world at large, but education, as far as Catholicism goes, means only a rehearsal of abominations, which have been practiced upon the followers of this creed for centuries ...
— Thirty Years In Hell - Or, From Darkness to Light • Bernard Fresenborg

... answered, "I if we are to be literal. You walked on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... take the form of a literal battle between two individuals, or of the individual with inclemency of climate or other destructive agents. More usually it is a competition, no more noticeable and no less real than that between merchants or manufacturers in the ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... of northern realization can be matched in the south, when the southerns choose. There are two pieces of animal drawing in the Sistine Chapel unrivaled for literal veracity. The sheep at the well in front of Zipporah; and afterwards, when she is going away, leading her children, her eldest boy, like every one else, has taken his chief treasure with him, and this treasure is his pet dog. It is a little sharp-nosed white fox-terrier, ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin

... The translation is literal, and affords one of many instances in which the Greek ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... taken as a more or less poetical account under the metaphor of motion. These "leanings" are literal in the sense that one note does imply another as its natural complement and satisfaction and we seek to reach or make it. The striving is an intrinsic element, not a by-product for ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer

... our duty, when we have the desires of the people before us, to pursue them, not in the spirit of literal obedience, which may militate with their very principle,—much less to treat them with a peevish and contentious litigation, as if we were adverse parties in a suit. It would, Sir, be most dishonorable for a faithful representative of the Commons to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... to this hereafter, and to show that we at least are not guilty of exaggeration, we subjoin the passage in the original Italian, from which it will be seen that our translation is as literal as possible. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... gather and eat the buds of the basswood, and then bring an apronfull home to her family. In one neighbourhood a beef bone passed from house to house, and was boiled again and again in order to extract some nutriment from it. This is no fiction, but a literal fact. Many other equally uninviting bills of fare might be given, but these no doubt will suffice. Sufficient has been said to show that our fathers and mothers did not repose upon rose-beds, nor did they fold their hands in despair, but ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight

... could not ride, or lead in war. She resisted the voice with all her energy. She asserted that she knew the Dauphin, on their first meeting, by aid of her voices.** She declared that the Dauphin himself 'multas habuit revelationes et apparitiones pulchras.' In its literal sense, there is no evidence for this, but rather the reverse. She may mean 'revelations' through herself, or may refer to some circumstance unknown. 'Those of my party saw and knew that voice,' she said, but later would only accept ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... translation is fairly literal, and Malleson (a clergyman) has taken pains with the scientific portions of the work and added the chapter headings, he has made some unfortunate emendations mainly concerning biblical references, and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... interminably, one hardly knows whether to or from battle with the English and the Austrians, from victory or defeat:—Well! he has become like one of our family. "He will go far!" my father declares. He would go far, in the literal sense, if he might—to Paris, to Rome. It must be admitted that our Valenciennes is a quiet, nay! a sleepy place; sleepier than ever since it became French, and ceased to be so near the frontier. The grass is growing deep on ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater

... Jesus comfort his friends who are left? As we read over the story of the sorrow of the Bethany home we find the answer to our question. You say, "He brought back their dead, thus comforting them with the literal undoing of the work of death and grief. If only he would do this now, in every case where love cries to him, that would be comfort indeed." But we must remember that the return of Lazarus to his home was only a temporary restoration. He came ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller

... speedy justice in a very literal sense, and allowing only fifteen days for the examination of this important affair, she sent a citation to Lenox, requiring him to appear in court, and prove his charge against Bothwell.[*] This nobleman, meanwhile, and all ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... illustrates the difficulty which the alchemists themselves had in understanding what they meant by the term Mercury; yet there is perhaps no word more often used by them than that. Some of them evidently took it to mean the substance then, and now, called mercury; the results of this literal interpretation were disastrous; others thought of mercury as a substance which could be obtained, or, at any rate, might be obtained, by repeatedly distilling ordinary mercury, both alone and when mixed with other substances; others used the word to mean a hypothetical something which was liquid ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir

... sacrificing qualities that a brother should have for a sister, he was nevertheless her blood kin, and without doubt he had loaded his pistol with a bullet for the man whom he believed would have it in his power to crush that beautiful sister to the earth, even to the point of literal seduction. For judged from the nihilists' standpoint again, they understood Zara to be one who would not hesitate at any sacrifice, in defense ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... extinct in their old haunts and homes. I have heard one of the members for Cape Breton speak in high terms of that portion of his constituency; and I believe I am correct in saying that Mr. Le Visconte, the late Finance Minister of Nova Scotia, was, in the literal sense of the term, an Acadian. Mr. Cozzans, of New York, who wrote a very readable little book the other day about Nova Scotia, describes the French residents near the basin of Minas, and he says, especially of the women, 'they might have stepped out of Normandy ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin

... when our bread-dust was of real service to them, and they were always particularly desirous of obtaining it for their younger children. They distinguished this kind of food by the name of kanibroot, and biscuit or soft bread by that of shegalak, the literal meaning of which terms we never could discover, but supposed them to have some reference to their ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... believed, have taught himself to acquiesce, had he seen any chance of happiness before her; but the picture he drew of her prospects justified his misery, at being only able to goad her on, instead of drawing her back. He was absolutely amazed at himself. He had spoken only the literal truth, when he said that he had been unconscious of the true nature of the feelings that always drew him towards her, though only to assert his independence, and make experiments by teasing in his ironically ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... four men and dog-teams at the former place by December 20th, ready to carry us on to Penzhina and Anadyrsk. We engaged an old and experienced Cossack named Gregorie Zinovief as guide and Chukchi interpreter, hired a young Russian called Yagor as cook and aid-de-camp (in the literal sense), packed our stores on our sledges and secured them with lashings of sealskin thongs, and by December 13th were ready to take the field. That evening the Major delivered to us our instructions. They were simply to ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... to judge the quality of literature, distinguishing with ease between what is literal and what is imaginative, or figurative, or humorous. When they read that the rope with which the powerful Fenris-Wolf was bound was "made out of such things as the sound of a cat's footsteps, the roots of the mountains, the breath of a fish and the sinews of a bear, and nothing could break ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry

... Saxe punningly puts it; but more of a leveler was this old coach, for there was of necessity the forceful putting of people of the most heterogeneous character together in the most homogeneous manner as the omnibus (most literal word here), made up its hashy load at the hand and command of the driver, whose word was unappealable law as complete as that of another captain on the high seas. Prodigal, profligate, and pure, maiden or Magdalene, millionaire or Lazarus, all were crowded together as the needs ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... not Life only, but all the garniture and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this, however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... the gods in the literal sense; the gods were supposed to dwell in them, their spirits having entered into the graven images or blocks of stone. It is probable that like the Ancient Egyptians they believed a god had as many spirits as he had attributes. The gods, as we have said, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie

... soul-life - the division which was to give him, on the one hand, an abstract experience of his own self, divorced from the outer world, and on the other a mere onlooker's experience of that outer world. As a result of these endeavours, concepts were formed which in their literal meaning seemed to apply merely to outwardly perceptible substances, while in truth they stood for the spiritual functions represented by those substances, both within and outside the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... upon its having for object either to state a true thing, or adorn a serviceable one. The two functions of art in Italy, in this entirely liberal and virescent phase of it,—virgin art, we may call it, retaining the most literal sense of the words virga and virgo,—are to manifest the doctrines of a religion which now, for the first time, men had soul enough to understand; and to adorn edifices or dress, with which the completed politeness of daily life might be invested, its convenience ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... "Familiar Phrases," most of which appear to be old friends with new faces, Senhor Carolino's literal cribs from the French become more and more apparent, in spite of his boast in the Preface of being "clean of gallicisms and despoiled phrases." "Apply you at the study during that you are young" is doubtless an excellent precept, and as he remarks further on "How do you can it to deny"; but ...
— English as she is spoke - or, A jest in sober earnest • Jose da Fonseca

... has followed the Genevan or Puritan version. It was a favourite version with our pilgrim forefathers, and is in many texts more faithful than our authorized translation; but, in this passage, our present version is more literal. The same Hebrew word, to 'break' or 'bruise,' is used as to Satan's head ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... fair to say, that, just as music must have all these, so conversation must have its partial truths, its embellished truths, its exaggerated truths. It is in its higher forms an artistic product, and admits the ideal element as much as pictures or statues. One man who is a little too literal can spoil the talk of a whole tableful of men of esprit.— "Yes," you say, "but who wants to hear fanciful people's nonsense? Put the facts to it, and then see where it is!"—Certainly, if a man is too fond of paradox,—if he is flighty and empty,—if, instead of striking those fifths ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... was plunged in all the most appropriate emotions—shedding floods of tears over my lost childhood and my misspent youth. Don't you like to have a good cry now and then? Oh, I don't mean literal tears, of course; only spiritual ones. For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... church had given her fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound passion as it was with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed—half automatically—at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal God had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal God. The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall

... that point very quick. People take the figurative language of the Bible and the allegories for literal, and the first thing they ask for when they get here is a halo and a harp, and so on. Nothing that's harmless and reasonable is refused a body here, if he asks it in the right spirit. So they are outfitted with these things without a word. They go and sing and play just about one ...
— Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven • Mark Twain

... of Herakles, Theseus, Perseus, and so forth, in the reader succeeding the primer, and the stories of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as we commonly call him, following as a third book, answering to our second or third reader. This book I brought home with me and had a careful, literal translation made. I submitted this translation to that notable scholar, Zenaide A. Ragozin, with whom I faithfully traversed the ground, word by word and sentence by sentence. This version I have carefully compared with ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... is the earth, and the sisters are the tribes that dwell thereon. The little book was conceived in a happy hour; its pictures are so real and so graphic, so warm and so human, that the most literal and the most imaginative of children must find in them, not only something to charm, but also to mould pleasant associations for maturer years. THOMAS ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold

... last of the great school of American poets that made the last quarter of a century brilliant, asked me in the White Mountains, one morning after prayers, in which I had given out Cowper's famous hymn about "The Fountain Filled with Blood," "Do you really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ to the soul?" My negative reply then is my negative reply now. The Bible statement agrees with all physicians, and all physiologists, and all scientists, in saying that the blood is the life, and in the ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... how far the gospels are original, and how far they consist of Greek and Chinese interpolations. The record that Jesus said certain things is not invalidated by a demonstration that Confucius said them before him. Those who claim a literal divine paternity for him cannot be silenced by the discovery that the same claim was made for Alexander and Augustus. And I am not just now concerned with the credibility of the gospels as records ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... Grant even went so far as to give them a grudging professional tribute. They held a canker of doubt, too, which it was difficult to dissect. Their veiled threats were perplexing. While their effect, as apart from literal significance, was fresh in his mind, he made a few ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... Quakers amongst us, whose system of religion, first founded upon enthusiasm, hath been many years growing into a craft, held it an unlawful action to take an oath to a magistrate. This doctrine was taught them by the author of their sect, from a literal application of the text, "Swear not at all;" but being a body of people, wholly turned to trade and commerce of all kinds, they found themselves on many occasions deprived of the benefit of the law, as well as of voting at elections, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift

... crime. He found there something akin to his own imaginative mood, something which he alone could fully comprehend and interpret. From the superficial narratives of writers like Bandello he extracted a spiritual essence which was, if not the literal, at least the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... a city, whose inhabitants dwell on the tops of trees like rooks." Thus spake Erasmus; and this literal fact makes Amsterdam a most curious as well as a ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes

... a literal obedience, too. There were great joints of corned beef, red and savory; pots of cabbage, and huge mounds of boiled potatoes. Pots of mustard were scattered along the table, and each man had a pitcher ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the March - Bessie King's Test of Friendship • Jane L. Stewart

... been poor, at least within modern memory—a literal, actual poverty when often there has not been enough to eat in the family pot to go around. She has had a difficult time in the economic race for bread and butter for her children. There is neither sufficient land easily cultivable nor manufacturing resources to ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... preferred seeing him exhibit his uniform in the drawing-rooms of London, had purchased the step into his present corps from a cavalry regiment at home. Not that we mean, however, to assert he was not a feather-bed soldier in its more literal sense: no man that ever glittered in gold and scarlet was fonder of a feather-bed than the young baronet; and, in fact, his own observations, recorded in the early part of this volume, sufficiently prove his predilection ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... criticisms. Of course she had been reminded of something—of the strictures which a certain Provincial Editor had passed on the household arrangements of a certain Minor Canon; a libel action had ensued, and the jury had been beguiled into finding for the defendant on a bare literal construction of words which to anybody acquainted with local circumstances bore another and much blacker meaning. This Mrs. Baxter called a pettifogging trick, and she pursued her parallel till the same terms were obviously indicated ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... hereafter be confined to those bodies to which its literal meaning refers—fat, unctuous, inodorous (when pure), greasy substances—and can no longer be applied to those odoriferous materials which possess qualities diametrically opposite to oil. We have grappled with "spirit," and fixed its meaning in a chemical sense; we have no longer "spirit" ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse

... and general readers, the writer submits it to the public, chiefly as the result of antiquarian research, and actual observation during a period of nearly forty years. The writer does not attempt to define what superstition is, either in its broadest or most literal sense; but, as he desires the expression to be understood, it may be considered to imply a fear of the Evil One and his emissaries, a trust in benign spirits and saints, a faith in occult science, and a belief that a conjunction of certain planets or other inanimate bodies is capable of producing ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... had a high-school course in Latin can experiment with Virgil, turning it either into couplets like Pope's Iliad or into the more appropriate meter used by Longfellow in his Evangeline. With a dictionary and a literal translation it is easy enough to puzzle out Horace, who is more modern in his thought and who is, in a way, the ancestor of our present vers-de-societe writers. There is also this advantage in the translation of Horace: One finds a chance to compare ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... quite twenty shillings in the pound. What say you to the assets? The statue will not be forth coming—but will you have the model, after which the undug block was to have been chiseled? Shall I send you the literal truth which I had intended to drape with imagination—tell the facts of real life which I had designed to weave into a story. I shall thus, at least, clear yourself of the non-fulfillment of the promise of your pre-advertised contents, and (engaging to send you a story properly completed for the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various

... knock on the eye against his gun, which he was carrying before him; and after a minute's rueful look he joined heartily in the shouts of laughter of his father and brother at his expense, "Ah, Charley, brag is a good dog, but holdfast is a better. I never saw a more literal proof of the saying. There, jump up again, and I need not say ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty

... saying that "a negro has no rights which a white man is bound to respect." This was certainly a distortion of his exact words and meaning; yet the exaggeration was more than half excusable, in view of the literal and unbending rigor with which he proclaimed the constitutional disability of the entire African race in the United States, and denied their birthright in the Declaration of Independence. His unmerciful logic made the black before the law less than a slave; it reduced him ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... early part of the eighteenth century that music began to be cultivated as an art in America.[391:1] Up to that time "the service of song in the house of the Lord" had consisted, in most worshiping assemblies on this continent, in the singing of rude literal versifications of the Psalms and other Scriptures to some eight or ten old tunes handed down by tradition, and variously sung in various congregations, as modified by local practice. The coming in of "singing by rule" was nearly ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... told with the simplicity and sprightliness of which the French language is so peculiarly capable, but which a literal translation would render not only ...
— Think Before You Speak - The Three Wishes • Catherine Dorset

... followed by their English equivalents. Literal translations have been followed, excepting a few instances where preference is shown for a clearer or more comprehensive ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac

... and anomaly in the mind and heart of man. Again, what would become of the Posthaec meminisse juvabit of the poet, if a principle of fluctuation and reaction is not inherent in the very constitution of our nature, or if all moral truth is a mere literal truism? We are not, then, so much to inquire what certain things are abstractedly or in themselves, as how they affect the mind, and to approve or condemn them accordingly. The same object seen near strikes us more powerfully ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... place; and he was so loved and trusted by the firemen of his district, that no mayor, however beset by applicants for office, had ever dreamed of removing him. In all of Uncle Ith's limited relations with the world, he was esteemed an honest man; and his word would have possessed the literal novelty of being as good as his note, had necessity ever required him to borrow money. But Uncle Ith was frugal, and made his small salary suffice for himself and a ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... opinion of Mr. Watling, of modern lawyers in general. More than once a wave of self-congratulation surged through me that I had possessed the foresight and initiative to get out of the wholesale grocery business while there was yet time. I looked at Willie, still freckled, still literal, still a plodder, at Walter Kinley, and I thought of the drabness of their lives; at Cousin Robert himself as he sat smoking his cigar in the bay-window on that dark February day, and suddenly I pitied him. The suspicion struck me that he had not prospered of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill









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