"Fable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... everywhere, as in the old fable of the man with the overcoat, must not such sun-like gentleness be more powerful in compelling deference than all the stormy strength of ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... fable of the wheel and the fly. I am afraid the wheel rolls on the same. But if I am absent from my parish, I am still in the company of one who does me honour as an old parishioner. You remember Leonard Fairfield, your antagonist in the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the kind of psychological assumptions upon which such arguments could proceed. From the rather copious use of allegory and metaphor, as civilizing instruments, Ogilvie traces the rise of the religious fable as part of the inevitable sequence of imaginative development. To account, therefore, for the irregularity of the ode, for the "enthusiasm, obscurity and exuberance" (p. xxiv) which continue to characterize it, he refers to its anciently established character, a character not susceptible ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... twenty-nine, returned to his old work in Berlin. Again he translated, edited, criticised. He wrote a tragedy, "Philotas," and began a "Faust." He especially employed his critical power in "Letters upon the Latest Literature," known as his Literatur briefe. Dissertations upon fable, led also to Lessing's "Fables," produced in this ...
— Nathan the Wise • Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
... learned discussion with my lord of Montacute and Master Sandy as to the origin of the snapdragon, which he, with his customary assumption of deep learning, declared was "but a modern paraphrase, my lord, of the fable which telleth how Dan Hercules did kill the flaming dragon of Hesperia and did then, with the apple of that famous orchard, make a fiery dish of burning apple brandy which ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... child), called me up to read to her, and opened the book at the alphabet. Deeply injured, I informed her that I knew my letters, and could read over in 'An old man found a rude boy in one of his apple-trees,'—a fable that all familiar with ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... order; and the slave goes out to execute it.) I have been in Britain—that western land of romance—the last piece of earth on the edge of the ocean that surrounds the world. I went there in search of its famous pearls. The British pearl was a fable; but in searching for it I found the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... journalism, the art of repeating a name again and again with some ridiculous or evil association. The preparation had begun after the first performance of 'The Shadow of the Glen,' Synge's first play, with an assertion made in ignorance but repeated in dishonesty, that he had taken his fable and his characters, not from his own mind nor that profound knowledge of cot and curragh he was admitted to possess, but 'from a writer of the Roman decadence.' Some spontaneous dislike had been but natural, for genius like his can but slowly, amid what it has of harsh ...
— Synge And The Ireland Of His Time • William Butler Yeats
... had no knowledge; but going about half a league into the land, I found the footsteps of so many kind of beasts, and such great flocks of pianets[291] as was wonderful. All these tracks came till they set their feet in the sea, and they occupied, the greatest part of the field. I believe the fable of the Satyrs to have arisen from thence, and that they were said to inhabit these hills and mountains. It is to be noted that in the channel of four leagues from the harbour of Shabak to this island, the water ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook, these stones rolled down its side and became the present shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable does not in any respect conflict with the account of that ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here. As for the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... as about 1855 there comes to the writer a vision of a pedlar, muddled with drink, riding home in his little square box cart and the faithful dog drawing the cart and the man as well, and also a faint echo of "shame" from some bystanders. Verily the fable must in those days have been true, that when the goddess Fidelity was lost among men, after long searching, she ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... And the first explanation sent forth by the Government on the 24th was to the effect that the old feud between the Houses of Guise and of Chatillon had broken out with a fury which it was impossible to quell. This fable lasted only for a single day. On the 25th Charles writes that he has begun to discover traces of a Huguenot conspiracy;[62] and on the following day this was publicly substituted for the original story. Neither the vendetta of the Guises nor the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... view to satisfy myself more positively on the subject, I availed myself of the first time I was alone with the king, to lead the conversation to this story. At the mention of the "Iron Mask," Louis XV started. "And do you really credit such a fable?" asked he. "Is it then entirely untrue?" inquired I. "Certainly not," he replied; "all that has been said on the matter is destitute of even common sense." "Well," cried I, "what your majesty says only confirms what ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... but this first desire of the heart is imperious. I remember, just at his age, how deep in love I was with a Grecian statue which our good king, then Henry IV., gave my father, insomuch that I was mad with grief when they told me that the story of Pygmalion was nothing but a fable." ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... its authors. I know their names, adds he, but shall not mention them (lib. 2). Cicero, however, has positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of Pythagoras. Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16. Now admitting that this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for Solomon's treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before Pherecydes. 'Who knoweth,' said he, 'the spirit of a man that it goeth upwards? I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... remarkable passage in Plut., 'de plac. Philos.', ii., 13, runs thus: "Anaxagoras teaches that the surrounding ether is a fiety substance, which, by the power of its rotation, tears rocks from the earth, inflames them, and converts them into stars." Applying an ancient fable to illustrate a physical dogma, the Clazomenian appears to have ascribed the fall of the Nem¾an Lion to the Peloponnesus from the Moon to such a rotatory or centrifugal force. (®lian., xii., 7; Plut., 'de Facie in Orge Lun¾' c. 24; Schol. ex Cod. Paris., in 'Apoll. Argon.', ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... "Friends, call him not a knight, but rather a fisherman." Upon this it pleased God that he should fall asleep, and in his sleep Santiago appeared to him with a good and cheerful countenance, holding in his hand a bunch of keys, and said unto him, "Thou thinkest it a fable that they should call me a knight, and sayest that I am not so: for this reason am I come unto thee that thou never more mayest doubt concerning my knighthood; for a knight of Jesus Christ I am, and a helper of the Christians ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... by the sea, are Ossa and Pelion, celebrated in fable as the mountains which the giants, in their war against the gods, piled one upon another, in ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... yet was bidden, and on the morrow departed from thence, thinking more than I did say, and being glad that I was out of the court, where many men, as I did both hear and perceive, did wonder at me. And here shall be an end for this time of this fable. ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... will step across to your bookshelf and take down that volume of Pope's miscellaneous works, you will find the fable of Lodona, and the words which I borrow for a heading. The little man so wrote of the River Loddon, which he quite correctly described also as slow. The Loddon is scarcely a river of itself to inspire a poem, being without cataracts going down ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... little for glory I care; Sure ambition is only a fable; I'd as soon be myself as Lord Mayor, With lashings of drink on the table. I like to lie down in the sun And drame, when my faytures is scorchin' That when I'm too ould for more fun, Why, I'll marry ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the French aristocracy of the old regime. The very chair on the back of which his hand rested seemed a part of the type—one of those beautiful white chairs of the period, on which, on snowy, glittering tapestry, was woven a Fable of Lafontaine in ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... cease? Doth the Innocent, forbeare the calling of them, Iuridically to aunswere him, according to the rigour of the Lawes: and will they despise his Charitable pacience? As they, against him, by name, do forge, fable, rage, and raise slaunder, by Worde & Print: Will they prouoke him, by worde and Print, likewise, to Note their Names to the World: with their particular deuises, fables, beastly Imaginations, and vnchristen-like slaunders? ...
— The Mathematicall Praeface to Elements of Geometrie of Euclid of Megara • John Dee
... shouts close by told that Hank and his cronies were engaged in their favorite practice of having "fun." This generally partook of the nature of the old fable concerning boys who were stoning frogs, which was "great fun for the boys, ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts Snowbound - A Tour on Skates and Iceboats • George A. Warren
... a gold and silver branch as he thought would satisfy the Princess as having come from the wonderful tree growing on Mount Horai. Every one whom he had asked declared that Mount Horai belonged to the land of fable and not to fact. ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... of the twelve sorts known to the ancients, (Goguet, Origine des Loix, &c., part ii. l. ii. c. 2, art. 3.) In this war the Huns got, or at least Perozes lost, the finest pearl in the world, of which Procopius relates a ridiculous fable.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... who had been long entombed, and who was incapable of resuming the healthy glow and hue of life. He was not particularly tall, but extremely well made, and, like the men of the south, had small hands and feet. But what astonished Franz, who had treated Gaetano's description as a fable, was the splendor of the apartment in which he found himself. The entire chamber was lined with crimson brocade, worked with flowers of gold. In a recess was a kind of divan, surmounted with a stand of Arabian swords in silver scabbards, and the handles resplendent ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... stories, of fable and fairy-tale flavour, with the wild things of the woodland for their heroes. In the heart of each some nature secret is revealed. ...
— Woodland Tales • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... of Gwalchmai.—This is a reference to a fable entitled "Einion and the Lady of the Greenwood," where the bard is led astray by "a graceful, slender lady of elegant growth and delicate feature, her complexion surpassing every red and every white in early dawn, the snow-flake on the mountain-side, ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... great chest of money, went one day to look at it, and found that his hard cash had changed to withered leaves. Precisely such a transformation had overtaken that eight thousand pounds, at the moment when it had fallen from the hands of a man who might have made an honest use of it. The fable was, and was not, true, so far as he remembered, and his fancy dwelt curiously about the history. There was no possibility of turning back the withered leaves to gold, and making them jingle and glitter again as only one's own ready money can jingle ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... the nature of Addison and Goldsmith at least was too genial to allow of any approach to it. But, with all their difference of temperament, the method of the earlier critics is hardly to be distinguished from that of Johnson. There is the same orderliness of treatment—first the fable, then the characters, lastly the sentiment and the diction; the same persistency in applying general rules to a matter which, above all others, is a law to itself; the same invincible faith in "the indispensable ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... for it; he therefore attributed it to his household gods, to whom he made an immediate supplication for assistance, or rather for forbearance of further affliction: this disposition in man has been finely pourtrayed by Aesop in his fable of "the Waggoner and Hercules." The motion which in despight of himself was excited in his machine, his diseases, his troubles, his passions, his inquietude, the painful alterations his frame underwent, without his being able to fathom the true causes; at ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 2 • Baron D'Holbach
... the strange characters of the Zend is the legend of an ark (as it were) prepared against the snow. It may be that it is the dim memory of a glacial epoch. In this deep coombe, amid the dark oaks and snow, was the fable of Zoroaster. For the coming of Ormuzd, the Light and Life Bringer, the leaf slept folded, the butterfly was hidden, the germ concealed, while the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... you to follow me in spirit to the very home and birth-place of freedom, to the land where we need not myth or fable to add aught to the fresh and gladdening feeling with which we for the first time tread the soil and drink the air of the immemorial democracy of Uri. It is one of the opening days of May: it is the morning of Sunday; for men then deem that the better ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... resounds In fable or romance of Uther's son Begirt with British and Armoric knights; And all who since, baptised or infidel, Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, or Trebisond, Or whom Biserta sent from Afric ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... vehement spirit—those famous rages, and the occasions of them—the great fortunes, and misfortunes, of men's strife of old. What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Dust [206] and ashes indeed; a fable, a mythus, or not so much as that. Yes! keep those before thine eyes who took this or that, the like of which happeneth to thee, so hardly; were so querulous, so agitated. And where again are they? Wouldst thou have it ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... these sources—from the Jatakas, from the Bidpai, and from the more recent collections—I have selected those stories which throw most light on the origin of fable and folk-tales, and at the same time are most likely ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... indeed, no subject can be of universal, hardly can it be of general concern: but there are events and characters so popularly known in those countries where our art is in request, that they may be considered as sufficiently general for all our purposes. Such are the great events of Greek and Roman fable and history, which early education and the usual course of reading have made familiar and interesting to all Europe, without being degraded by the vulgarism of ordinary life in any country. Such, too, are the capital subjects of Scripture history, ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... awe, and he gazed upon me with a kindly smile. Then he commenced examining me about my studies, and finally he drew a volume of La Fontaine's 'Fables' from his pocket, opened the book and asked me to translate the fable on the page he showed me. I did so—but when he afterward was going to praise me for the skill with which I had rendered it, I told him it was but yesterday that I had translated the same fable under the supervision of my teacher. A gentle smile ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... Philistine lords and ladies. This proceeds from no dislike, real or affected, to the aristocracy of these realms. But they have their place, and I have mine; and, like the iron and earthen vessels in the old fable, we can scarce come into collision without my being the sufferer in every sense. It may be otherwise with the sheets which I am now writing. These may be opened and laid aside at pleasure; by amusing themselves with the perusal, the great will excite no false hopes; by neglecting ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... youth departed From the half-hearted Riccardi's bride; For, saith your fable, Great Love is able To slip the ...
— More Songs From Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... informant sobered up and realized what he had done, he hung around day after day, beseeching me not to let any one know what he had done, from which fact I inferred that he thought he had told me the truth, and not a fable invented ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... general plaudits speak the fable o'er, Which mute attention had approv'd before; Though under spirits love th' accustomed jest, Which chases sorrow from the vulgar breast; Still hearts refin'd their sadden'd tints retain— The sigh gives pleasure and the jest is pain: Scarce have they smiles to honour grace or wit, Though ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... my little fable, He that runs may read: Most can raise the flower now, For all have got ...
— Conversion of a High Priest into a Christian Worker • Meletios Golden
... should you know anything about it? The young mouse in the fable thought the cat was a very fine gentleman. Con—found him!' said Mr. Falkirk, stopping short, 'how did he know? Was he at the garden party ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... ascending bank, with a douse border of trees, green, yellow, red, russet, all bright colors, brightened by the mild brilliancy of the descending sun; it was strange to recognize the sober old friends of spring and summer in this new dress. By the by, a pretty riddle or fable might be made out of the changes in apparel of the familiar trees round a house, adapted for children. But in the lake, beneath the aforesaid border of trees,—the water being, not rippled, but its glassy surface somewhat moved and shaken by the remote agitation of a breeze that was breathing ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... empirically and hence directed the pastoral away from the classical tradition. (On these two schools see J.E. Congleton, "Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1717," SP, XLI, 1944, pp. 544-575.) Although Purney adopted a modification of Aristotle's critical divisions into Fable, Character, Sentiment, and Diction, and took for granted the doctrine of the distinction of genres, he otherwise rejected traditional formulae and critical tenets, and began with the premise that man is most delighted by the imaginative perception of the states of life for which he would willingly ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney
... to borrow something from its splendour. "The Masque, as it attained its highest degree of excellence, admitted of dialogue, singing, and dancing; these were not independent of one another, but combined, by the introduction of some ingenious fable, into an harmonious whole. When the plan was formed, the aid of the sister-arts was called in; for the essence of the Masque was pomp and glory. Moveable scenery of the most costly and splendid kind was lavished on the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the butt and by-word of the entire school. He was nicknamed "The Poet," and laughed at for his formless efforts. The director of the school, M. Mareschal, told him a fable, with the charitable intent of turning him aside from his ambitions. There was once upon a time a young linnet in a soft and downy nest; but the young linnet longed for the free and open air and the blue sky. ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... For shame!' and brandishing a handkerchief, which could hardly be an efficient instrument of correction, I succeeded in driving away the two puppies, who after all meant nothing more than play, although it was somewhat rough, and rather too much in the style of the old fable of the boys and the frogs. May is gone after them, perhaps to scold them: for she has been as grave as a judge during the whole proceeding, keeping ostentatiously close to me, and taking no part ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... With life and mystical predominance; Since likewise for the stricken heart of Love This visible nature, and this common world, 115 Is all too narrow: yea, a deeper import Lurks in the legend told my infant years Than lies upon that truth, we live to learn. For fable is Love's world, his home, his birth-place; Delightedly dwells he 'mong fays and talismans, 120 And spirits; and delightedly believes Divinities, being himself divine. The intelligible forms of ancient poets, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... merely groups of actual and potential reactions on our own part, that is to say of expectations which experience has linked together in more or less stable groups. The practical man and the man of science in my fable, were both of them dealing with Things: passing from one group of potential reaction to another, hurrying here, dallying there, till of the actual aspect of the landscape there remained nothing in their thoughts, trams and ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... the powers of government, and having begun to pocket the public money at a great rate, the people grew discontented. They began to think that they had done wrong in driving King James away. In a pretty little fable-book, there is a fable which says that the frogs, who had a log of wood for king, prayed to Jupiter to send them something more active. He sent them a stork, or heron, which gobbled them up alive by scores! ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... THE ancient fable of two antagonistic spirits imprisoned in one body, equally powerful and having the complete mastery by turns-of one man, that is to say, inhabited by both a devil and an angel seems to have been realized, if all we hear is true, in the character of the extraordinary ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... you wish for it—Would incline to the suspicion that your friend, Brother Jarrum, deceived you. That he invented the fable of the white donkey to keep you quiet while he and the rest ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... Maine, rose to be the royal governor of Massachusetts, and the story of whose wonderful adventures in raising the freight of a Spanish treasure ship, sunk on a reef near Port de la Plata, reads less like sober fact than like some ancient fable, with talk of the Spanish main, bullion, and plate and jewels and "pieces ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... and has the characteristic property of boys; it can talk, but it cannot generate; for it is fruitful of controversies but barren of works. So that the state of learning as it now is appears to be represented to the life in the old fable of Scylla, who had the head and face of a virgin, but her womb was hung round with barking monsters, from which she could not be delivered. For in like manner the sciences to which we are accustomed have certain general positions which are specious ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... destruction of covert renders Tosari immune from this past peril, and the tragic tiger stories related round the hearthstone of the communal house are becoming oral traditions of a forgotten day, gathering round themselves the moss and lichen of fable and myth. ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... the west of Yamuna (the Jumna), bearing in her hand a book. Presently she entered the sandy country, when on a sudden a great press of frightful demons uprose, and so terrified her that in the absence of other refuge she sank into the earth. Here she reappears. So the Hindus fable." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... the healthier man, though of a less determined will than Ariosto, and perhaps, on the whole, less robust. You find in Boiardo almost which Ariosto perfected,—chivalry, battles, combats, loves and graces, passions, enchantments, classical and romantic fable, eulogy, satire, mirth, pathos, philosophy. It is like the first sketch of a great picture, not the worse in some respects for being a sketch; free and light, though not so grandly coloured. It is the morning before the sun ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... course," the dignified stranger answered at once, descending from his perch as he spoke, with a light spring more like a boy's than a mature man's. "You must surely know those famous lines in 'Lycidas' about 'The fable of Bellerus old, Where the Great Vision of the guarded mount Looks towards Namancos and Bayona's hold; Look homeward, angel, now, and ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... could revive, they would be able to reconnoitre the events of their own times, as transmitted to us by ignorance and misrepresentation. All very ancient history, except that of the illuminated Jews, is a perfect fable. It was written by priests, or collected from their reports; and calculated solely to raise lofty ideas of the origin of each nation. Gods and demi-gods were the principal actors; and truth is seldom ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole
... student suppressed a strong natural turn towards drawing, although he was repeatedly complimented upon the few sketches which he made, by some whose judgment was generally admitted. It was, however, this neglected talent, which, like the swift feet of the stag in the fable, was fated to render him a service which he might in vain have expected from his ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... of the order and awe of lower and loftier animal life, first clearly taught in the myth of Chiron, and in his bringing up of Jason, AEsculapius, and Achilles, but most perfectly by Homer, in the fable of the horses of Achilles, and the part assigned to them, in relation to the death of his friend, and in prophecy of his own. There is, perhaps, in all the "Iliad," nothing more deep in significance—there is nothing in all literature more perfect in ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... acquaintance between us. He took great notice of me, called on me often to converse on those subjects, carried me to the Horns, a pale alehouse in——Lane, Cheapside, and introduced me to Dr. Mandeville, author of the "Fable of the Bees," who had a club there, of which he was the soul, being a most facetious, entertaining companion. Lyons, too, introduced me to Dr. Pemberton, at Batson's Coffee-house, who promis'd to give me an opportunity, sometime or other, of seeing Sir Isaac Newton, of which I was extreamly ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... are slung astride a long pole set over the fire, the wood crackles, the flames shoot up wrapping the pots around. And now the camp is all astir. The black objects are twice as numerous as before, moving about with increased animation. You imagine Little Antietam to be the Acheron of fable, and all these to be poor ghosts, strangely clad in the mortal habiliments of woe, crowding the banks of the fateful river, and waiting, sick with hope deferred, their turn to cross; and your eyes wander curiously along the swollen, dashing stream ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood
... revealed to me somehow, which for three-and-twenty months the reader has been pleased to follow. As I write the last line with a rather sad heart, Pendennis and Laura, and Ethel and Clive, fade away into Fable-land. I hardly know whether they are not true: whether they do not live near us somewhere. They were alive, and I heard their voices, but five minutes since was touched by their grief. And have we parted with them here on a sudden, and without so much as a shake of the hand? Is yonder line (——) ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master—the rest fades off into mist—mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can. Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... during his tour in the Holy Land, and could be ransomed only by an enormous sum. The extensive travels of the Duke probably originated this tale. The people at large still preserve that traditional fable-loving train of ideas which is so pleasantly shown in their "Duke Ernest." The narrator of this news was a tailor, a neat little youth, but so thin that the stars might have shone through him as through Ossian's misty ghosts. Altogether, he was made up of that eccentric ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... thou, fair world, no more? Return, thou virgin-bloom on Nature's face; Ah, only on the Minstrel's magic shore, Can we the footstep of sweet Fable trace! The meadows mourn for the old hallowing life; Vainly we search the earth of gods bereft; Where once the warm and living shapes were rife, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the thought of overproduction. The "avalanch of nuts" is an old wife's fable. Do not talk to us about overproduction, when the food problem is giving the gravest concern to the master minds of the world. With population increasing and food supply diminishing the gaunt specter of famine is creeping closer ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... provide such things. The third generation begins to think of Earth as a legend and the methods necessary to survive on the new planet conflict with those the first settlers imported. By the fourth generation, Earth is no longer a legend but a fable ..." ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... till you reach Orleans," replied La Renaudie. "Leave him at the entrance of the faubourg Bannier; for the gates are well guarded, and you must not excite suspicion. It is for you, friend, to play your part intelligently. You must invent whatever fable seems to you best to reach the third house to the left on entering Orleans; it belongs to a certain Tourillon, glove-maker. Strike three blows on the door, and call out: 'On service from Messieurs de Guise!' The man ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... To the child we owe the celebrity of the Cigale, of whose misfortunes he has babbled during his first lessons in recitation. It is he who will preserve for future generations the absurd nonsense of which the body of the fable is constructed; the Cigale will always be hungry when the cold comes, although there were never Cigales in winter; she will always beg alms in the shape of a few grains of wheat, a diet absolutely incompatible with her delicate capillary "tongue"; and in desperation she will ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... his hearers with tales of the adventures of giants and dwarfs, and the conflicts of Manito with Manito, fairies and enchanters, monsters and demons, he also throws in some few grains of instruction, in the form of allegory and fable, which enable us to perceive glimpses of the heart and ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... The fable of Time devouring his children, and then reproducing them, evidently means the vicissitudes of customs and the departure and return of fashions. Whatever is born must die; but what has been will be again. That Eros, Love, should be at the origin of things from chaos, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... words of Form and Civility, that they use upon occasion. When they come to another mans house, he asks them what they come for, which is his civility, and they answer Nicamava, I come for nothing, which is their ordinary reply, tho they do come for something. And upon this they have a Fable. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... workman among master builders. But she could offer her victory over herself, and ask her country to take back and use a character hewn and shaped in accordance with its traditions. Her husband's citizenship had become a legal fable. She would take it and weld it with her own, and, content never to know the outcome, lay them both together upon the altar of Rome's ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... a Greek fable I remember reading as a boy at school, of the ground being sown with teeth, and out of it coming armed men. I cannot help thinking that we must have looked very much like those ready-made heroes, as I and my companions struggled ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... given their names to this Educational League, take part, without knowing it, in a Masonic institution, and in building up this new state of society, from which religion is to be banished. Well may the Bishop of Metz say: 'These persons forget that, like Proteus in the fable, Freemasonry knows how to multiply ad infinitum its transformations and its names. Yesterday it called itself 'Les Solidaires,' or 'morality independent of religion,' or 'freedom of thought'; to-day it takes the title of an 'Educational ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... give adequate recognition to, any of these facts. Nor does Dr. Rendel Harris suggest why it is so dangerous an operation to dig up the mandrake which he identifies with the goddess, or why it is essential to secure the assistance of a dog[248] in the process. The explanation of this fantastic fable gives an ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... is race. The Romans, we are told, were by nature a peculiarly warlike race. "They were the wolves of Italy," says Mr. Merivale, who may be taken to represent fairly the state of opinion on this subject. We are presented in short with the old fable of the Twins suckled by the She-wolf in a slightly rationalized form. It was more likely to be true, if anything, in its original form, for in mythology nothing is so irrational as rationalization. That unfortunate She-wolf with her Twins has now been long discarded by criticism as a historical ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... o'er many a fable And longed for the bright-capped elves, The faery folk who are able To make ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... a few persons, from time to time, has established forever what we agree to call masterpieces. But this discussion is immaterial, since these supreme examples of literary excellence exist in all kinds of composition,—poetry, fable, romance, ethical teaching, prophecy, interpretation, history, humor, satire, devotional flight into the spiritual and supernatural, everything in which the human mind has exercised itself,—from the days of the Egyptian moralist and the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... new Way"), embodying and including a lot of legendary matter, and issued with the authority of "the Church." This was in 1881-2; and comparing this with the original record (called The point of Kaf) we get a luminous view of the growth of fable in those thirty brief years which had elapsed since the Bab's death. Meanwhile it became very necessary of course to withdraw from circulation as far as possible all copies of the original record, lest they should give the lie to the later 'Gospel'; and this apparently was done very effectively—so ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... parrots were more plentiful than eagles, and it was his own fault for uncovering his eyes; the falconers always keeping their young birds hooded six weeks, till they are quite tamed. He offered to train it, if Fritz would part with it; but this Fritz indignantly refused. I told them the fable of the dog in the manger, which abashed Fritz; and he then besought his brother to teach him the means of training this noble bird, and promised to ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized. Bradley, in short, repeats the fable of the dog, the bone, and its image in the water. With a world of particulars, given in loveliest union, in conjunction definitely various, and variously definite, the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... slumber, his busy pen was warning the statesmen of the country that unless Congress were invested with adequate powers, or should assume them as matter of right, we should become but thirteen states, pursuing local interests, until annihilated in a general crash—the cause would be lost—and the fable of the bundle of ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... appear to extend beyond the period of the flood, and from these the "dark idolater of chance," who would rejoice to prove that "Book of Books" a splendid fable, draws his deductions. But how he fails. The learned men of China, those held in the greatest repute amongst a people where such a reputation is not easily obtained, themselves admit, that the history of their empire ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... loose skin over the ribs, which they can open or fold at pleasure. These bat-like wings will not support them in the air, but serve to steady their bodies when leaping from branch to branch of a tree. From these lilliputian representatives of the monster of fable, the visitor's attention will most probably be called by an important-looking lizard, of which Mr. Allan Cunningham brought the first specimens to this country, from Port Nelson, Australia. We allude to the lizard with ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... the reverse of sentimental. Here is no introspection, morbid or other, no pathos or complaint, no melodious informing of the public what dreadful emotions you labor under: here, in rapid prompt form, indicating that it is truth and not fable, are generous aspirations for the world and yourself, generous pride, disdain of the ignoble, of the dark, mendacious;—here, in short, is a swift-handed, valiant, STEEL-bright kind of soul; very likely for a King's, if other things answer, and not likely ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... read Darwin?" he demanded. "If you had, you'd know they're our ancestors, you'd know we came from them instead of Adam and Eve. That there's a fable." ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I think party differences in the Church, and even the variations between Christian sects are concerned, both being different ways of viewing the same truth. These may, like the knights in the old fable, find that both were right about the shield, both have the same foundation. But where the foundation is not the same, the results of the teaching will ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hate and fury was scraped away. Curses and growling roars made a repulsive mess of sound over that repulsive mess of unmasked, half-drunken, wholly infuriated brutes. There is shrewd, sly wisdom snugly tucked away under the fable of the cat changed into a queen and how she sprang from her throne at sight of a mouse to pursue it on all fours. The best of us are, after all, animals changed into men by the spell of reason; and in some circumstances, it doesn't ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... Pitre and Straparola, and as it is also the subject of an Old-French fabliau, it may have been borrowed from the French, or, what is more likely, both French and Italians took it from a common source.[10] The fable of "The Ass, the Ox, and the Peasant," which the Vizier relates to prevent his daughter becoming the Sultan's wife, is found in Pitre (No. 282) under the title of "The Curious Wife," and is also in Straparola.[11] ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... convenient fiction, and simply stood for the general sense of the women-folk, or something of the sort. It was perhaps stupid of me, but the story of Mistrelde, who died young, leaving only eight children, I had regarded as a mere legend or fable of antiquity. ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... Origine and Use of Satire. The Excellency of Epic Satire above others, as adding Example to Precept, and animating by Fable and sensible Images. Epic Satire compar'd with Epic Poem, and wherein they differ: Of their Extent, Action, Unities, Episodes, and the Nature of their Morals. Of Parody: Of the Style, Figures, and Wit proper to this Sort of Poem, and the superior Talents requisite ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... agree with the majority. But, as the question cannot be ignored, I should like to say that I hold firmly the conviction that all trade should be carried on for the mutual advantage of the parties engaged. The old fable of AEsop may be quoted, which relates to a quarrel between the different members of the body. Every one of us can be, and should be, helpful to every other, independent of nation, country, and creed. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... thy bosom, gentle Earth From all its painful memories of guilt? The whelming flood, or the renewing fire, Or the slow change of time? that so, at last, The horrid tale of perjury and strife, Murder and spoil, which men call history, May seem a fable, like the inventions told By poets of the gods of Greece. O thou, Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep, Among the sources of thy glorious streams, My native Land of Groves! a newer page In the great record ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... taste would license: by nature, he easily falls into the half-hearted poetry of rhymed prose, for which the rich assonances of his language predispose. His own learning was further cultivated by his early contact with Persian literature; through which the fable and the wisdom of India spoken from the mouths of dumb animals reached him. In this more frivolous form of inculcating wisdom, the Prophet scented danger to his strait-laced demands: "men who bring sportive legends, to lead astray from God's ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Grecian fable of fountains running wine, Of hags with snaky tresses, and sailors turned to swine: On yonder teeming island, under the noon day sun, In sight of many people, these strange, dark deeds ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... said I, "that you will say and do nothing to occasion any reproach. Certainly, there are two sides to every question. If you manifest any surprise at finding that there is another side to the Liberty question, I fear that some will quote to you the fable of the mouse who was born ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... next production (1703), is one of the most pleasing tragedies on the stage, where it still keeps its turns of appearing, and probably will long keep them, for there is scarcely any work of any poet at once so interesting by the fable, and so delightful by the language. The story is domestic, and therefore easily received by the imagination, and assimilated to common life; the diction is exquisitely harmonious, and soft or ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... will be enough to show how the same idea repeats itself in different ways among various peoples who have come from the same stock: for the ancient Hindu legend of Urvasi and Pururavas, the Greek fable of Eros and Psyche, the Norse story of the Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the Teutonic story of the Soaring Lark, and the Celtic story of the Battle of the Birds, are all one and the same in their general character, their origin, and their meaning; and ...
— Fairy Tales; Their Origin and Meaning • John Thackray Bunce
... Group appear sitting round in a restless attitude. In one corner of the room is discovered a small cabinet of books, for the use of the studious and contemplative; containing, Hobbs's Leviathan, Sipthorp's Sermons, Hutchinson's History, Fable of the Bees, Philalethes on Philanthropy, with an appendix by Massachusettensis, Hoyl on Whist, Lives of the Stuarts, Statutes of Henry the Eighth, and William the Conqueror, Wedderburne's speeches, and acts of ...
— The Group - A Farce • Mercy Warren
... in which East and West were strangely mingled: much of the familiar with the unfamiliar. Here in Korea, on the contrary, I have found the real East, the Asia of romance, of tradition and of fable, almost untouched by {62} Western influences—dirty, squalid, unprogressive, and yet with a fascination all its own. Great bare mountains look down on the capital city, the old city-wall climbing their steep sides, and the historic Han flows through ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe
... the world among the hoi polloi from the circle of initiated priests, the Hierophants of the sanctum sanctorum of the old temples, under the guise of religious fables, it may not be amiss to search for universal truths even under the patches of fiction's harlequinade. This fable about the Pleiades, the seven Sisters, Atlas, and Hercules exists identical in subject, though under other names, in the sacred Hindu books, and has likewise the same occult meaning. But then like the Ramayana "borrowed from ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... here, my dear boys, and I'll tell you a fable, Which you may believe as much as you're able; It isn't all true, nor all false, I'll be bound— Of the tree that bears ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... which this poem appears, were published in 1700. The word fable as here used by Dryden holds its original meaning of story or tale. Besides the Palamon and Arcite, he paraphrased from Chaucer the Cock and the Fox, the Flower and the Leaf, the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Character of the Good Parson. From Boccaccio he gave us ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... life of Abraham Lincoln savors more of romance than reality. It is more like a fable of the ancient days than a story of a plain American of the nineteenth century. The singular vicissitudes in the life of our martyred President surround him with an interest which attaches to few men in history. He sprang from that ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... doing of their leaders. It is the masters, the ruling aristocracies—emblazoned or capitalist—who have created and maintained for centuries all the pompous and sacred raiment, sanctimonious or fanatical, in which national separation is clothed, along with the fable of national interests—those enemies of the multitudes. The primeval centralization of individuals isolated in the inhabited spaces was in agreement with the moral law; it was the precise embodiment of progress; it was of benefit to all. But the decreed division, peremptory and stern, which ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... persons she had herself seen and talked to; and her way of talking was not like that of many grown-up people who make children covetous and envious. That was not grandmamma's way; she was like the eagle in the fable, always trying to encourage her eaglets to fly upwards; and she did this so pleasantly that her grandchildren were never tired of hearing her talk. One of grandmamma's stories is so interesting that we will ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... that the picture of male carnality that such women conjure up belongs almost wholly to fable, as I have already observed in dealing with the sophistries of Dr. Eliza Burt Gamble, a paralogist on a somewhat higher plane. As they depict him in their fevered treatises on illegitimacy, white-slave trading and ophthalmia neonatorum, the ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... but favour, our Country pastime made is. We are a few of those collected here, That ruder Tongues distinguish villager; And to say veritie, and not to fable, We are a merry rout, or else a rable, Or company, or, by a figure, Choris, That fore thy dignitie will dance a Morris. And I, that am the rectifier of all, By title Pedagogus, that let fall The Birch upon the breeches ...
— The Two Noble Kinsmen • William Shakespeare and John Fletcher [Apocrypha]
... which he was painting in his larger works at the end of the century. Soon after 1501 Bellini entered into relations with Isabela d'Este, Marchioness of Gonzaga. That distinguished collector and connoisseur writes through her agent to get the promise of a picture, "a story or fable of antiquity," to be placed in position with the allegories which Mantegna had contributed to her "Paradiso." Bellini agreed to supply this, and received twenty-five ducats on account. He seems, however, to have felt that he would be at a disadvantage in competing with Mantegna on his own ground, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... through which men pass and in which they may learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and ...
— Progress and History • Various
... whether thou to our moist views denied, Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded mount Looks ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... of the lamb to the wolf, in the fable, and the N'Yaarker retorted with a simulated storm of passion, and a ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... matter, determined that the poor man's money should be put between two empty dishes, and the cook should be recompensed with the jingling of the poor man's money, as he was satisfied with the smell of the cook's meat." This is affirmed by credible writers as no fable, but an undoubted truth.—FULLER'S Holy State, lib. iii. c. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... say, that which I preach to you of Christ and of His coming, this Gospel that we preach, we have not devised or yet imagined, nor taken it from cunning fabulists who know how to speak brilliantly of all things (such as at that very time the Greeks were), for it is mere fable, and fancy, and idle babbling that they cunningly give forth, and wherein they would be wise,—such we have not listened to, nor have we followed them; that is, we preach not what is from the hands ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther
... "Fable indeed!" was the exclamation that greeted him on two sides, on the one from her ladyship, on the other from the neat little maid, the latter crying out how much she had been frightened; that she was still all of a tremble; the former turned back her sleeve ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... interrogation, utter the monosyllable "So!"? He would not be so much occupied in trying to parry the blunder gracefully as in thinking of its cause, with that love of sifting which involuntarily exhibits itself even in little things, or with that tendency to take even jokes gravely which originated the fable of Pope Joan, and led a learned commentator, in his annotations on Thucydides, to cite, with all the ponderous clang of a critical Latin note, the factions "of the Long Pipes and the Short Pipes, mentioned by Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker in his History of New York," as a grave historic parallel ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Volume 15, No. 89, May, 1875 • Various
... who had heard everything, and saw clearly the arrow that the earl had shot at the queen. "Princess Elizabeth, her true and dear friend, who never leaves her side. Besides, her maids of honor, who, like the dragon in the fable, keep watch over ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... came from a great distance, and whose country was unknown," established washing-places on the spot. They disappeared during the night, after having collected a great quantity of gold. It would be needless to show that this is a fable. Pyrites dispersed in quartzose veins, crossing the mica-slate, are often auriferous, no doubt; but no analogous fact leads to the supposition that the sulphuretted iron which is found in the schistose marls of the alpine limestone, contains gold. Some direct experiments, made ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... child in the popular fable, every one of whose tears was a pearl. Ah! the world, that cruel step-mother, beats the poor child the harder to make him shed more ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... Leyden in his Paper on the Languages and Literature of the Indo-Chinese Nations, recently published in Volume 10 of the Asiatic Researches. The substance of the information conveyed by them is as follows; and I trust it will not be thought that the mixture of a portion of mythological fable in accounts of this nature invalidates what might otherwise have credit as historical fact. The utmost indeed we can pretend to ascertain is what the natives themselves believe to have been their ancient history; and it is proper to remark that in the present question there can be no suspicion ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... in the services, and elsewhere, that greater privileges grow out of larger responsibilities, and that the latter justifies the former. This is part truth and part fable. ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... Don't look like that, Aunt Sarah. It is true;—it is, indeed." She had now dragged her chair close to her aunt's seat upon the sofa, so that she could put her hands upon her aunt's knees. "All that about Miss Brownlow has been a fable." ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... afterwards Aristarchus came to see Socrates, and related the whole matter to him with great content, and told him the women began to complain that none but he was idle. "Why do you not put them in mind," said Socrates, "of the fable of the dog? For, in the days when beasts could speak, according to the fable, the sheep said to her master, 'You are a strange man; we yield you wool, lambs, and cheeses, and yet you give us nothing but what we can get upon the ground; and the dog, who brings you in no profit, is kindly ...
— The Memorable Thoughts of Socrates • Xenophon
... time, the Presidential nomination impending, Mr. Madison had made up his mind what to do. He was not exactly a wolf; neither was Great Britain a lamb; but the argument he used was the argument of the fable. Instead of advising—Bassano having declared the decrees still in force—a repeal of the non-importation act, as Great Britain claimed was in justice and comity her due, he recommended a war measure. But Barlow evidently felt himself to be under some ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... again,' said he, gazing up at the huge boulder-strewn hill-side above us. 'One wonders at that sight, whether the fable of the giants be not true after all,—and that "Vale of Rocks," hanging five hundred feet in air, with all its crag-castles, and tottering battlements, and colossal crumbling idols, and great blocks, which hang sloping, caught in act to fall, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... I returned home, the prefect not only blamed me for having presumed to travel in Switzerland, but made it the greatest proof of his indulgence to keep silence on the crime I had committed, in setting my foot on the territory of the French empire. I might have said, in the words of Lafontaine's fable: ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein
... Michaelis only fell in with the accustomed current when, in his early life, he wrote a work in their defence. The theory that errors of transcription might possibly have crept into the text, was totally rejected. No such thing could, by any contingency, occur. The fable of Aristeas was still considered worthy a place in the canon. The sanctity of the Hebrew language, and other Rabbinical notions, were defended. Christ was discovered in every book of the Old Testament; the perfect purity of the Greek ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... they were, or sailors they never would have been; and here was the very stuff to set them all ears, like children about a bogey. Nor will I deny that Dolly Venn's tale was marvellous enough to make a fable. Had it been told to me under any other circumstances, my reply would have been: "Dolly, my lad, since when have you taken to sleep-walking?" But I said nothing of the kind, for I had that in my pocket which ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights the world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when it is applied, in COLONEL JACK, to the management of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely similar ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fable that tells of a young prince who brought to his father a nutshell, which, when opened with a spring, contained a little tent of such ingenious construction, that when spread in the nursery the children could play under its folds; when opened ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... wagged a melancholy head, "you've got the Golden Bride! Keep her if you can. That's a pretty fable of your father's. I gave him the idea, though. Austin filches a great many of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... only remains to us to consider the way in which modern poets have apprehended the idea of the Faust-fable. None of the German dramas and operas which the seventeenth century produced, though they never failed to draw large audiences, could be compared, in poetical value, to Marlowe's tragedy. The German stage of that period was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... on himself; and he was well advanced in it before he was sixteen years of age. His memory and his imagination must both have served him well; for he not only acquired a style fit for narrative, exposition, or argument, but also learned to use the fable, parable, paraphrase, proverb, and dialogue. The third element in his education was writing for publication; he began very early, while he was still a young boy, to put all he had learned to use in writing for the press. When ...
— Four American Leaders • Charles William Eliot
... set afloat, grew in wonder and magnitude through pure love of the marvellous or wild expansion of the fanciful tales of the Indians. Far inland, built on a lofty hill, so the fable ran, was a mighty city, whose very street watering-troughs were made of solid gold and silver, while "billets of gold lay about in heaps, as if they were logs of wood marked out ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... were misinformed as to the merits of the quarrel, it was proposed that they be interviewed. To do that was to cross the line and enter the enemy's territory. It was not unlike the query of the rats in the fable, Who shall bell the cat? I was solicited, and, learning I had friends in the company, consented to go. Going south on Center Street to cross the line by a circuitous route, I reached Rock Street, and nearly the rendezvous. ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... banged faintly, and in the great room rose the busy silence of those minutes which precede repasts. Suddenly the four men by the breakfast fable stood back. Lord Valleys had ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... RATS—A FABLE BY LILLIE DEVEREUX BLAKE.—Once some gray old rats built a ship of State to save themselves from drowning. It carried them safely for awhile until they grew eager for more passengers, and so took on board all manner of rats that had run away ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... yet occasionally, at the cross-roads of creation, coming into contact with us, and influencing us not greatly, perhaps, yet strangely and notably. Not once did the real brownie occur to him—the small, naked Gibbie, far more marvellous and admirable than any brownie of legendary fable or fact, whether celebrated in rude old Scots ballad for his taeless feet, or designated in noble English poem of perfect art, as lubber fiend ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald |
