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noun
Imagination  n.  
1.
The imagine-making power of the mind; the power to create or reproduce ideally an object of sense previously perceived; the power to call up mental imagines. "Our simple apprehension of corporeal objects, if present, is sense; if absent, is imagination." "Imagination is of three kinds: joined with belief of that which is to come; joined with memory of that which is past; and of things present, or as if they were present."
2.
The representative power; the power to reconstruct or recombine the materials furnished by direct apprehension; the complex faculty usually termed the plastic or creative power; the fancy. "The imagination of common language the productive imagination of philosophers is nothing but the representative process plus the process to which I would give the name of the "comparative."" "The power of the mind to decompose its conceptions, and to recombine the elements of them at its pleasure, is called its faculty of imagination." "The business of conception is to present us with an exact transcript of what we have felt or perceived. But we have moreover a power of modifying our conceptions, by combining the parts of different ones together, so as to form new wholes of our creation. I shall employ the word imagination to express this power."
3.
The power to recombine the materials furnished by experience or memory, for the accomplishment of an elevated purpose; the power of conceiving and expressing the ideal. "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact... The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name."
4.
A mental image formed by the action of the imagination as a faculty; a conception; a notion.
Synonyms: Conception; idea; conceit; fancy; device; origination; invention; scheme; design; purpose; contrivance. Imagination, Fancy. These words have, to a great extent, been interchanged by our best writers, and considered as strictly synonymous. A distinction, however, is now made between them which more fully exhibits their nature. Properly speaking, they are different exercises of the same general power the plastic or creative faculty. Imagination consists in taking parts of our conceptions and combining them into new forms and images more select, more striking, more delightful, more terrible, etc., than those of ordinary nature. It is the higher exercise of the two. It creates by laws more closely connected with the reason; it has strong emotion as its actuating and formative cause; it aims at results of a definite and weighty character. Milton's fiery lake, the debates of his Pandemonium, the exquisite scenes of his Paradise, are all products of the imagination. Fancy moves on a lighter wing; it is governed by laws of association which are more remote, and sometimes arbitrary or capricious. Hence the term fanciful, which exhibits fancy in its wilder flights. It has for its actuating spirit feelings of a lively, gay, and versatile character; it seeks to please by unexpected combinations of thought, startling contrasts, flashes of brilliant imagery, etc. Pope's Rape of the Lock is an exhibition of fancy which has scarcely its equal in the literature of any country. "This, for instance, Wordsworth did in respect of the words 'imagination' and 'fancy.' Before he wrote, it was, I suppose, obscurely felt by most that in 'imagination' there was more of the earnest, in 'fancy' of the play of the spirit; that the first was a loftier faculty and gift than the second; yet for all this words were continually, and not without loss, confounded. He first, in the preface to his Lyrical Ballads, rendered it henceforth impossible that any one, who had read and mastered what he has written on the two words, should remain unconscious any longer of the important difference between them." "The same power, which we should call fancy if employed on a production of a light nature, would be dignified with the title of imagination if shown on a grander scale."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Imagination" Quotes from Famous Books



... his. Helen cared not for it—she knew not its value, she needed it not. Very likely when the wheel should come into her possession, and she examined its mystery, if the legacy were missing, she would believe its history the dream of an excited imagination, and think of it no more. He had never stolen, and it did seem low and ungentlemanlike to steal, but this was more like finding some buried treasure, something cast up from the ocean's bed. It was not so criminal after all as cheating at the gaming-table, which he was in the constant habit of ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz

... know who and what I was, save only that I was a man, and her lover. Beyond that, her imagination had not travelled, and her desires ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman

... snowy plain to the blaze of fading color upon its western rim. It was growing shadowy, the woods were blurred and vague, but its wideness fired her imagination and she felt the exhilaration that was in ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... inference is strictly logical. A Church, however highly respectable and however richly endowed, which came into existence only 1,500 years after Christ, came into existence just 1,500 years too late, and cannot by any intellectual manoeuvring or stretching of the imagination be identified with the one Church established by Christ 1,500 years earlier. Consequently every member of the Anglican community finds himself, nolens volens, impaled on the horns of a truly frightful ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan

... terror. I passed three or four minutes in a kind of swoon, not only motionless but incapable of thinking. As I got back my senses by degrees, I tried to make myself believe that the hand I fancied I had touched was a mere creature of my disordered imagination; and with this idea I stretched out my hand again, and again with the same result. Benumbed with fright, I uttered a piercing cry, and, dropping the hand I held, I drew back my arm, trembling ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... across the far-stretching solitudes of the desert. Somewhere out there, a mile away, ten miles away, twenty miles away, alone, perhaps tortured with thirst, perhaps famishing, perhaps—He shuddered and groaned aloud as he tried in vain to shut out the pictures which his leaping imagination drew for him. And here Garton's quiet voice was telling him that he had responsibilities, that he had work to do, that he, to whom she meant more than success or failure, life or death, must hold ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... wretched mother pick up her bleeding dying infant-boy, whom her husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of sea-eggs! How little can the higher powers of the mind be brought into play: what is there for imagination to picture, for reason to compare, for judgment to decide upon? to knock a limpet from the rock does not require even cunning, that lowest power of the mind. Their skill in some respects may be compared to the instinct ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin

... parts no womankind may be abroad after sundown), she would take part in these debates with as much gusto as we. For though she was not wearied of her life here as we were, yet she was possessed of a very stirring spirit of adventure, and her quick imagination furnished endless visions of lively pleasures and sumptuous living. We agreed that we would live together, and share everything in common as one family, but not in such an outlandish spot as Chislehurst. That estate we would have nothing to do ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett

... continued his discreet and temperate wooing after the plan he had formulated. He strove to interest her perpetually, never left her without having, as he taught himself to believe, impressed himself anew upon her imagination. Watching her as a cat a mouse, he learned to read her by signs so slight that no one who had not the intuition of a woman could have seen them at all. Unfortunately for him, he misinterpreted what he read. The slap-dash Ingram thought all was well; ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... remembered Roy's generous pleasure in the "parrot stunt," he would have been much happier, but instead he allowed his imagination to picture Tom and Roy in the neighboring village, having a couple of sodas—perhaps taking a flyer at ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh

... see you have not a powerful imagination! Perhaps it is as well! Now, I have brought you here to help me with a plot which is to be a great secret. You know it is arranged that dear old nurse is to spend the summer on the Braes of Yarrow with the Laidlaws, and the winter in London with me. So I want you to fit ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne

... frightful mortality of the camp does not strike the imagination so forcibly as does the carnage of the battlefield, and no layman cares to analyze hospital reports and compare the medical with the surgical history of the war. Famine, the twin evil of pestilence, is not so easily forgotten, and the dominant note of Aristophanes, hunger, was the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve

... a Rajah's house. When I was a child, I was quite familiar with the description of the Prince of the fairy story. But my husband's face was not of a kind that one's imagination would place in fairyland. It was dark, even as mine was. The feeling of shrinking, which I had about my own lack of physical beauty, was lifted a little; at the same time a touch of regret was left lingering ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... for creditors; Dissolutions of partnership, with estimates of joint property, or calculations of profit and loss; Insurances and fire-catastrophes; Divisions of capital invested in failing securities, or unlucky speculations; instead of attending to all which in their purely business aspect, my imagination flies off to the dramatic, passionate, human element involved in such accidents, and I think of all manner of plays and novels, instead of "Cash Accounts," to ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... on by the enchanter was Mrs. Gamp, Tom Pinch, Mr. Squeers, or Fagin the Jew. He had the power of projecting himself into shapes and suggestions of his fancy which is one of the marvels of creative imagination, and what he desired to express he became. The assumptions of the theatre have the same method at a lower pitch, depending greatly on personal accident; but the accident as much as the genius favoured Dickens, and another man's conception underwent in his acting the process which in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... descend into the nether-world. He becomes a Mystic. Now he is exposed to the dangers which beset the Mystic on his progress from the lower to the higher degrees of initiation. He comes to the Sirens, who lure the passer-by to death by sweet magic sounds. These are the forms of the lower imagination, which are at first pursued by one who has freed himself from the power of the senses. He has got so far that his spirit acts freely, but is not initiated. He pursues illusions, from the power of which he must break loose. Odysseus ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled, he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken. He may bubble with wit, or expand ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London

... upon which it was being enacted was a platform of planks and spars, rudely united together,—in short, a raft. The dramatis persona were men,—all men; although it might have required some stretch of imagination,—aided by a little acquaintanceship with the circumstances that had placed them upon that raft,—to have been certain that they were human beings. A stranger to them, looking upon them in reality,—or upon a picture, giving a faithful representation of them,— might have doubted ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid

... are the earnings in the tenement industry, for men as well as for women, but for the women it is still more miserable than for the men. In this branch, hours of work are unlimited; when the season is on, they transcend imagination. Furthermore, it is here that the sweating system is generally in vogue, i. e., work given out by middlemen (contractors) who, in recompense for their irksome labor of superintendence, keep to themselves a large ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel

... Matilda now found refuge in abundant tears, and, throwing herself on the bosom of her maternal friend, she shed them freely there; and as the storm of grief subsided, Mrs. Harewood obtained her attention to these words—"My dear Matilda, your vivid imagination, and the quickness of feeling, which even in a good cause is too apt to hurry you away, have led you into unnecessary trouble; it is not your mamma, but a Mrs. Weston, of Jamaica, of whom I spoke. ...
— The Barbadoes Girl - A Tale for Young People • Mrs. Hofland

... deformed, and quite the reverse to that happy state it was formerly in. Herod's own life also was entirely disturbed; and because he could trust nobody, he was sorely punished by the expectation of further misery; for he often fancied in his imagination that his son had fallen upon him, or stood by him with a sword in his hand; and thus was his mind night and day intent upon this thing, and revolved it over and over, no otherwise than if he were under a distraction. And this was the sad ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... a rather retentive memory, and considerable powers of imagination, I was able at times to bring almost all the things of importance which I had met with in my reading, before my mind, and compare them both with each other, and with all that was already in my memory. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... whelk-seller! "Never introduce your donah to a pal." In those seven words is contained the wisdom of the ages. I could read the future so plainly. What but one thing could happen after Mortimer had influenced Betty's imagination with his stories of his friend's romantic career, and added the finishing touch by advertising him as a woman-hater? He might just as well have asked for his ring back at once. My heart bled ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... wild suspicions within me, but up to that moment they had assumed no definite form. I had even endeavoured to keep back such a suspicion, under the vague belief, that by the very imagination of it, I might in some way aid in bringing ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... needs to be told that old soldiers are great story-tellers, drawing upon their imagination for facts. This talent was ...
— Lights and Shadows in Confederate Prisons - A Personal Experience, 1864-5 • Homer B. Sprague

... losses were reported from time to time. There was a certain amount of fighting and scuffling, in which advantage was now on one side, now on the other; but upon the whole it would appear that the novelty of the conditions and ignorance of the ground rather imposed upon the imagination of the enemy, and that their operations against this inside trade were at once less active and less successful than under the more familiar features presented by the coasts of Maine ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan

... Basil also says: "But if through the weakness of sinful nature you cannot pray with attention, restrain your imagination as far as you can, and God will pardon you, inasmuch as it is not from negligence but from weakness that you are unable to occupy yourself ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas

... been almost heart-broken, because he was not satisfied that his victim was really punished by any of those tortures which his imagination invented, and his energy executed. Even when the "pretty little man" was smashed, and was, in truth, smashed of malice prepense by a swinging blow from Neefit's umbrella, Neefit did not feel satisfied ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... consent to waive this. All this occurred to me on hearing of her arrival in the neighborhood—for, be it remembered, I had not yet seen her, except about three years previous, as above mentioned. In a few days we had an interview, and, although I had seen her before, she did not look as my imagination had pictured her. I knew she was over-size, but she now appeared a fair match for Falstaff. I knew she was called an "old maid," and I felt no doubt of the truth of at least half of the appellation, but now, when I beheld her, I could not for ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln

... listened as the footfalls drew in toward them, but not by even the wildest stretch of the imagination could they make out more ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... boundless West, brimful of wit and eloquence, with no reverence for anything, and went abroad to educate the untutored European in the subtleties of the American joke. The world has looked on and applauded while he has broken many images. He has led us in imagination all over the globe. With him as our guide we have traversed alike the Mississippi and the Sea of Galilee. At his bidding we have laughed at a thousand absurdities. By a laborious process of reasoning ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... susceptible one may deem them too red. Alas! the writer is not answerable for this. He but depicts life as it exists on the borderland between Mexico and Texas. Those who doubt its reality, and would deem him drawing upon imagination, should read the Texan newspapers of that time, or those of this very day. In either he will find recorded occurrences as strange, incidents as improbable, episodes as romantic, and tragedies of hue sanguinary as any recorded in this ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid

... director indicated by Calvin Van de Lear sitting in the parlor with Podge Byerly. For the first time Duff Salter noticed that they looked both intimate and confused. He tried to reason himself out of this suspicion. "Pshaw," he said; "it was my uncharitable imagination. I'll go back, as if to get something, ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend

... life around us, drama such as some are inclined to term photographic, deceived by a seeming simplicity into forgetfulness of the old proverb, "Ars est celare artem," and oblivious of the fact that, to be vital, to grip, such drama is in every respect as dependent on imagination, construction, selection, and elimination—the main laws of artistry—as ever was the romantic or rhapsodic play: The question of naturalistic technique will bear, indeed, much more study than has yet been given to it. The aim of the dramatist employing it is ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... circular staircase, the small entry at its foot, and the card-room opening from it. There was no evidence of anything unusual the night before, and had we not ourselves heard the rapping noises, I should have felt that Louise's imagination had run away with her. The outer door was closed and locked, and the staircase curved above us, for all the world like any ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven—in the heaven of my imagination, at all events—she was, of course, a goddess. How she managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one seemed to see it ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne

... my dear Howells, an admirable study of life, and as it was read to me my chief pleasure in listening was in your sympathetic, creative imagination, your insight, your humour, and all your other gifts, which make your stories, I believe, the most faithful representations of actual life that were ever written. Other stories seem unreal after them, and so when we had finished "The Kentons," nothing would ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... task. Hicks was born honest; I, without that incumbrance—so some people said. Hicks saw what he saw, and reported accordingly; I saw more than was visible, and added to it such details as could help. Hicks had no imagination, I had a double supply. He was born calm, I was born excited. No vision could start a rapture in him, and he was constipated as to language, anyway; but if I saw a vision I emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain

... own imagination, Etta,' observed Miss Hamilton coldly. 'Giles would never have found out my chest was delicate if you had not told ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... Bird-catcher, a Franciscan monk, known by his writings under the name Aegidius Aucupis, devoted himself with indefatigable zeal to the study of letters and the sciences. He gave his nights to mathematics and music, which he called the two adorable sisters, the harmonious daughters of Number and Imagination. He was versed in medicine and astrology. He was suspected of practising magic, and it seemed true that he wrought ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... were veritable damsels of romance, undergoing adventures. But, delightful as all this was, she was conscious that the best remained behind, and eagerly watched the door of entrance, in hopes of the appearance of the white steed and the little rider who had so fascinated her imagination in the morning. Papa noticed it, and laughed at her; but, for ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge

... had lunched and was again standing in the same place on the Poklonny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to the boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That speech was full of dignity and greatness as ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... of the Mohawks is to the Five Nations what the flight of Mohammed from Mecca to Medina is to the votaries of Islam. It is the turning point of their history. In embellishing the narrative at this point, their imagination has been allowed a free course. Leaving aside these marvels, however, we need only refer here to a single incident which may well enough have been of actual occurrence. A lake which Hiawatha crossed had shores abounding in small white shells. These ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale

... of them only as savages—wild men of the woods—some of them covered with hair, and whose chief delight and glory are the cutting off men's heads, and not unfrequently feasting on men's flesh! No wonder that, with these facts, or fancies, acting upon their imagination, our travellers set forth upon their journey determined to give a wide berth to everything that bore the shape of a human being. It was a strange commentary on man's superiority to the lower animals, and not very creditable to the former, that he himself was the thing they most feared to ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid

... again. They were all spirited away from the college; the missionary writes, "it makes one's heart sick to think of them, and the hellish means invented to turn them from Christ." These are not the words of sentimental imagination. They are the words of a man who gives evidence as a witness. But even a witness ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A NEW AGE dealing with women were still undrafted, but they had already greatly exercised the doctor's mind. He found now that the case of Sir Richmond had stirred his imagination. He sat with his hands apposed, his head on one side, and an expression of great intellectual contentment on his face while these emancipated ideas gave a sort of ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... thee—come, come!' And in another moment the old man is hurrying with tottering steps and open arms towards his son, and folding him, rags and all, to his bursting heart." It was so real to Abe, and he was so carried away with the picture which was before his vivid imagination, that when he got the lad into the house, he exclaimed, "Put shoes on his hands, and rings on his feet,"—whereupon a brother in the chapel called out, "Nay, nay, Abe lad, thaa mun't put shoes on th' lad's hands, and th' rings on his ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell

... answer on her part. Then she would know at any rate how dearly she was beloved by one who was absent; how in all difficulties or dangers the thought of her would be a polar star, high up in the heavens, and so on, and so on; for with all a lover's quickness of imagination and triteness of fancy, he called her a star, a flower, a nymph, a witch, an angel, or a mermaid, a nightingale, a siren, as one or another of her attributes rose ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... would founder hopelessly, and contrast him with the invisible animalcule, mere gelatinous specks, multitudes of which could in fact dance upon the point of a needle with the same ease as the angels of the schoolman could in imagination;—with these images before our minds, it would be strange if we did not ask what community of form or structure is there between the fungus and the fig-tree, the animalcule and the whale? and, a fortiori, between all four? Notwithstanding these apparent difficulties, a threefold unity—namely, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... deeply thoughtful over the delightful possibilities unfolding to his highly coloured imagination. There was going to be something doing now that would put an edge to this dull life. With what was equivalent to a lining up of forces and an open declaration of hostilities, with Red on the one hand pitted against the trio whom Dart ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... discover our poverty," said he. "Instead, we will creep into the city unobserved, and leave ourselves to the imagination ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... might, I fear, do more harm than good in the case supposed. Perhaps even you yourself will find it most prudent to act without remonstrating, or appearing to be aware of this little anecdote. Julia is very like a certain friend of mine; she has a quick and lively imagination, and keen feelings, which are apt to exaggerate both the good and evil they find in life. She is a charming girl, however, as generous and spirited as she is lovely. I paid her the kiss you sent her with all my heart, and she rapped my fingers ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott

... Lucille's astounding idea, that her father must be "protected," because he was nervous and, being nervous, might incur the enmity of the authorities. He could not take that seriously. And yet the most fruitful imagination in the world could fabricate no motive for Arthur Sloane's killing a young woman he ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay

... Peter, I can't say just at this moment—at all events not tonight. There may be much that is very abnormal about the present conditions—and it is possible there may be nothing abnormal about them at all. It is quite possible it may be merely my imagination. ...
— An Enemy of the People • Henrik Ibsen

... earthly remains, as the first step toward forgetfulness of their memory. To me, the grave of a friend possesses an attraction, which, although tinged with deepest sadness, is wholly distinct from the horror with which the imagination so often invests it. My heart yearns to look upon the last resting-place ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various

... more stiffly—or so Steve thought—while even in the manners of such close friends as Roy and Harry and one or two more he fancied that he could detect a difference. Much of this was probably only imagination on Steve's part, but on the other hand there were doubtless many fellows who for one reason or another chose to believe the story true. Steve was popular amongst a small circle of acquaintances and well enough liked by others who knew him only to speak to, but, naturally enough, ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour

... the Boers as "middel-paadje" (middle-path). As a matter of fact, my men only numbered as many hundreds as the thousands attributed to me by the British. As for cannons, they simply existed in the imagination ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... to slide obscurely and quietly into the grave; but this wish, while it saddened my bosom, never raised my hand against my life. It made me willingly expose my safety to the blasts of pestilence; it made me court disease; but it never set my imagination in search after more certain ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... change in today's world is to reach back to old and proven principles, and to adapt them with imagination and intelligence to the new realities of a ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon

... his love for nature and his power of interpreting her in her varying moods, Dore was a dreamer, and many of his finest achievements were in the realm of the imagination. But he was at home in the actual world also, as witness his designs for "Atala," "London—a Pilgrimage," and many of the scenes in ...
— The Dore Gallery of Bible Illustrations, Complete • Anonymous

... it is not necessarily rare. There are many thousands of people who have most imperfect and valueless books, mostly on theology, or some controversial abominations, and these people spend days wasting their own and booksellers' time in seeking to sell at prices which their own imagination alone has determined is right. Distrust the advertisements of large paper editions. Very few of them are worth purchasing, and very few, indeed, increase in value. Fight against the first-edition craze, which is the maddest craze that ever affected book collecting. Again and again ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys

... life may be in us and for us the daily and hourly expression of the infinite being we call God. We do not see God, but we do feel and know so much that we may fairly believe to be of God that we do not need to see Him face to face. It is something more than imagination to feel that it is the life of God in our lives, so often unrecognized or ignored, that prompts us to all the greatness and the inspiration and the accomplishment of the world. If we could know more clearly the joy of such a ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall

... years ago Casa Guidi was the scene of several dark deeds; and after having wandered through the great rooms, for the most part perpetually in shadow, one's imagination puts full faith in a time-worn story. Whatever may have been the stain left upon the old palace by the Guidi, it has been removed by an alien woman,—by her who sat "By the Fireside," and toiled unceasingly for the good of man and the love, of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... yet I know that I sympathised with my mother's admiration, my young spirit was touched by his noble character, by his generosity, and, above all, by his filial piety and his gratitude to his mother.' He mentions also that 'some traits in the history of Cyrus, which was read to me, seized my imagination, and, next to Joseph in the Old Testament, Cyrus became the favourite of my childhood. My sister and I used to amuse ourselves with playing Cyrus at the court of his grandfather Astyages. At the great Persian feasts, I was, like young Cyrus, to set an example ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth

... return, if he wished it, at the expiration of his period of service; and that persons should be appointed to go with them while on board, and on their landing, to see the due performance of their respective bargains by the masters and the workmen. Lord Melbourne said that Lord Brougham's ardent imagination rendered him an unsafe guide in such matters; but he intimated that the Duke of Wellington's suggestion should receive attention. His grace then said that he thought it unadvisable to divide upon Lord Brougham's motion; and therefore he would ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind's eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years. 'No,' said the old gentleman, shaking his head; 'it must be imagination. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens

... hear now, in imagination, the voices of the deep-mouthed hounds rising and swelling ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various

... this Memoir, which has but just left my hands, I would gladly have let my brain rest for a while. The wide range of thought which belonged to the subject of the Memoir, the occasional mysticism and the frequent tendency toward it, the sweep of imagination and the sparkle of wit which kept his reader's mind on the stretch, the union of prevailing good sense with exceptional extravagances, the modest audacity of a nature that showed itself in its naked truthfulness and was not ashamed, the feeling that I ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... a footman! Distraction! Can I afterwards bear the eyes of my acquaintance? But I can retire from them; retire with one in whom I propose more happiness than the world without him can give me! Retire-to feed continually on beauties which my inflamed imagination sickens with eagerly gazing on; to satisfy every appetite, every desire, with their utmost wish. Ha! and do I doat thus on a footman? I despise, I detest my passion.—Yet why? Is he not generous, gentle, kind?—Kind! to whom? to the meanest ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding

... be discerned in the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... that if any of the children developed an imagination he needn't think he had anything to ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair

... muttered, supporting himself with one hand against the black and crumbling wall near which he stood. "Why should that melody steal away my strength and make me think of things with which I have surely no connection! What tricks my imagination plays me in this city of the Orient—I might as well be hypnotized! What have I to do with dreams of war and triumph and rapine and murder, and what is the ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... which he was determined not to do. The ponies grew in imagination, and became enormous horses capable of consuming any amount of oats. Mr. Prosper was not of a stingy nature, but he had already perceived that his escape, if it were effected, must be made good by means of those ponies. A steady old pair of carriage-horses had been kept by him, and by ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope

... human woe or torture, as expressed in countenance or limb, came before his willing imagination, but he bore it straightway to his easel. In the moments that precede sleep, when the black space before the eyes of the poet teems with lovely faces, or dawns into a spirit-landscape, face after face of suffering, in all varieties of expression, ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... minor figure, but one of the most pathetic in the history of English literature, is that of Thomas Chatterton. While he was a boy in Bristol, Chatterton's imagination was possessed by the medieval buildings of the city, and when some old documents fell into his hands he formed the idea of composing similar works in both verse and prose and passing them off as medieval productions which he had discovered. To his imaginary author he gave the name of Thomas ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... presently he said, as if to himself, "There is too much imagination there. There will be a poet, if ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... was much greater. The injuries which he had inflicted on his friend, the insults which he had heaped on his sister, rushed to his mind. He thought of his own deep treachery, his black ingratitude; and his disordered imagination could only conceive that Henri had chosen the present moment to secure a bloody vengeance. He forgot that he had already been forgiven for what he had done: that his life had been in the hands of those he bad injured, and had then been spared by them, when their resentment ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope

... refused him the contract for the decorative work on the magnificent Capitol in Washington, at last nearing completion. His aspirations were not unreasonable, for his Greek Slave, a beautiful work in marble, had captured the imagination of both American and foreign critics in 1851. Still, Thomas Crawford, his successful competitor, was a sculptor of real gifts, as one may see in his statues of Jefferson and Patrick Henry in Richmond. The work of Allston, Sully, and De Veaux, the painters, ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd

... manicure-girls, from masseurs, and from automobile-makers; and their eyes, usually large, are glossy. None of this is allowed to interfere with business; these are "good business men," and often make large fortunes. They are men of imagination about two things—women and money, and, combining their imaginings about both, usually make a wise first marriage. Later, however, they are apt to imagine too much about some little woman without whom life seems duller ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington

... was her idiosyncrasy that these tailors, furriers, machinists, shirtmakers, by whom she was surrounded in East London, stirred her imagination far more readily than the dwellers in great houses and the wearers of fine raiment had ever stirred it. And Marcella, in the kindled sympathetic state, was always delightful to herself and others. She revelled in the little house and its ugly, druggetted rooms; in the absence of all the usual ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... undoubted egotism. For she was comely and had a taking manner, never troubling herself unless her own personal convenience were threatened. She laughed a good deal, though her sense of humour was none of the finest, and she was far too practical to possess any imagination. In short, as she herself expressed it, she was sensible; and, being so, she had small sympathy with her sister-in-law's foolish sentimentalities, which she considered wholly out of place in the everyday life ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... University of the Future? I have made the foundation of our movement the growing conception of education as a permanent interest of adult life side by side with religion and politics. The change is at best only beginning; it tasks the imagination to conceive all it will imply when it is complete. To me it appears that this expanding view of education is the third of the three great waves of change the succession of which has made up our modern history. There was a time when religion itself was identified ...
— The History Of University Education In Maryland • Bernard Christian Steiner

... were satisfied at the cost of minds and bodies. Labour appeared in the guise of a monster feeding itself on human lives. To every new impression I responded with indiscriminate compassion. It is impossible for the imagination to sustain for more than a moment at a time the terrible fatigue which a new hand like myself is obliged to endure day after day; the disgust at foul smells, the revulsion at miserable food soaked in grease, the misery of a straw mattress, a sheetless bed with blankets ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... place where lay the body of Columbus in Seville, but pretty Latin epitaphs were Castellanos' weakness, and it is to be feared that this one, like others which he dedicated to American explorers, was nothing more than a figment of his poetic imagination. Two writers, Coleti and Alcedo, who almost two centuries later mentioned the same epitaph as marking the grave in Santo Domingo, must have copied ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... instance the size of a nut is exaggerated by the owner or informer unintentionally. They are honest but their imagination gets the better of their judgment. Then their knowledge is often limited to their own trees and those of their neighbors, and the nut they prize may be the best they know of, but when compared with nuts ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... told me, confidentially, in a corner afterwards," said Rock regretfully. "Maybe you told it straight, and maybe you didn't; there's no banking on a man's imagination when he's soused. But the way you told ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower

... telling her that an ancestor of his, who had lived in Soho, had been killed in the thirties of the eighteenth century when fighting a famous duel; this, and the sorry dignity of the Soho houses, was enough to stir her imagination. Night after night, she would elude the men who mostly followed her and walk along the less frequented of the sombre streets. These she would people with the reckless beaux, the headstrong ladies of that bygone time; she ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... above her continent of streets and dwellings to the sky? Couldn't he feel that England, his old enemy and old mother, bowed and stricken and struggling, was opening her arms to him wide? She's a person who hides her tears even from herself; but it seems to me that, with a drop of imagination and half a drop of thought, he might have discovered a year and a half after a few street roughs had insulted him, that they were not all England. With two drops of thought it might even have ultimately struck him that ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister

... a young laborer, Victor Pratteler, who had but recently stepped out of the narrow, securely guarded realm of hand labor into the open and surging world of the iron proletariat. He completely lacked that personal imagination and that subjective instinct toward his material which make the very soul of the locksmith and the blacksmith, so that their grasp becomes the servant of a sixth sense, the sense of form. Pratteler's hand had not groped its way toward this higher sense, so he ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various

... no belief from her when he said that it was not true; to her quick mind the concentrated bitterness with which he described what it would mean to him showed that he believed it and that the thought was no new one; in imagination he had heard the world calling him many times what he now called himself—if the thing were true. She drew her ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... that have been transmitted to us concerning Lady Nelson, there is little to appeal to the imagination, or to impress one strongly with her attractions; but candor to her surely compels the admission that, to await her husband in their own home, to greet him alone, without the observation even of beloved outsiders, was no singular impulse in a tender and reserved woman. ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... a man who'd know the historical background, and you'd need a man with a powerful creative imagination, who is used to using it inside rigorously defined limits. Don't try to get them both in one; a collaboration would really be better. Then you work from the known situation in Europe and in America ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper

... Pilar. Not only did he make love to her without any of the rhetorical nonsense of the caballero, but he was big and strong, and it was evident that he was afraid of nothing, not even of Dona Brigida. The dreams of her silent girlhood swirled in her imagination, but looked vague and shapeless before this vigorous reality. For some moments she forgot everything and was happy. But there was a black spot in her heart, and when Sturges left her for a moment to listen, it ached for the head ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... heavenly gifts which distinguish her from the condition of men, and often raise her above it: pity and enthusiasm. Through pity she sacrifices herself; enthusiasm ennobles her. Self-sacrifice and enthusiasm! What else is there in heroism? Women have more heart and imagination than men. Enthusiasm arises from the imagination, self-sacrifice springs from the heart. They are therefore by ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... as she was told but her imagination strayed to Denver and Chicago, as she tried to picture Barbara and Eleanor Maynard with Anne Stewart, visiting Pebbly Pit that summer. Meantime, Mrs. Brewster considered the pros and cons of the problem. If this Anne Stewart proved to be the sort of wife John ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... their spirit into what I am going to tell, and above all that I could inspire my readers with ever so little of the peculiar interest with which the old town has always been tinted and saddened to my eye. My boyish imagination, perhaps, kindled all the more at the story, by reason of it being a good deal connected with the identical old house in which we three—my dear uncle, my idle self, and the queer old soldier—were then sitting. But wishes are as vain as regrets; ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... grave Hierophant, the imagery, the paintings, the dramatic horrors, the funeral sacrifices, the august mysteries, the solemn silence of the sanctuaries, were none the less impressive, because they were known to be but symbols, that with material shows and images made the imagination to be the teacher ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... answered Griselda, proudly. "They have gone to foreign lands—to France, and Italy, and Germany,"—and then with a daring imagination she added, "and it's like they won't stop short of Asia ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr

... several parts and persons of a drama cohere not only with one another but with the general circumstances wherein they occur. For so in Portia's character the splendour of Italian skies and scenery and art is reproduced; their spirit lives in her imagination, and is complicated with all ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... waiter at breakfast to tell him that there is too much ammonia in the bacon; and another one protest at the amount of glucose in the olive oil; and another that there is too high a percentage of nitrogen in the anchovy. A man of distorted imagination might think this tasting of chemicals in the food a sort of nemesis of fate upon the members. But that would be very foolish, for in every case the head waiter, who is the chief of the Chinese philosophers mentioned above, says that he'll see to it immediately ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... uncommon occurrence to see a Pole kneel down before his lady, take off one of her shoes, and drink out of it. But the women of Poland seem to be endowed with a peculiar power. Their beauty, grace, and bewitching manner inflame the heart and imagination of all that set their eyes on them. How often have they not conquered the conquerors of their country? [FOOTNOTE: The Emperor Nicholas is credited with the saying: "Je pourrais en finir des Polonais si ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... harmless. Far more dangerous, could he have known it, were the invisible but deadly gases from the century-old corruption that rose to meet him and were unconsciously inhaled. Then, as the fumes mounted to his brain, sober reason was ousted from her throne and imagination rioted unchecked, peopling the void with horrors and ineffectual phantoms. From the sashless windows grotesque faces stared down upon him, scowling malignantly, while others, with still more hideous smile, invited him to enter and become one of their dreadful company. Insane ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... something which might again provide him with some genuine excitement. It could be simply his imagination working overtime, but it wasn't going to do any harm to find out. Mind humming with pleased though still highly skeptical speculations, Barney went back to the boat station and inquired when the party boat was due ...
— Gone Fishing • James H. Schmitz

... of his own books. I daresay that few persons have been more interested in mine than I, and if it be a general principle in nature that a lover's love is blind, and that a mother's love is blind, I believe it may be said of an author's attachment to the creatures of his own imagination, that it is a perfect model of constancy and devotion, and is the blindest of all. But the objects and purposes I have had in view are very plain and simple, and may be easily told. I have always had, and always shall have, an earnest and true desire to contribute, as far as in me lies, to the common ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... if it were a mighty something not to be clearly seen, but only to be deeply felt. And felt it has been, too, by the ignorant as well as by the learned, by the simple as well as by the wise: felt as a fire in the blood, as a fever in the brain, and as a phantom in the imagination, rather than as a form of light and beauty in the intelligence. How often have the powers of darkness surrounded its throne, and desolation marked its path! How often from the altars of this unknown idol has the blood of human victims streamed! Even here, in this ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... and I were exacting and unreasonable indeed, if I did not feel abundantly repaid. Alma, since the days when I pored over Thucydides, Plutarch, Rollin and Grote, this spot has beckoned to my imagination with all the uplifted hands of the nine thousand captives; and the longing of years ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... great stretch of imagination we can picture to ourselves this man as belonging to one of the most primitive types of our race, having little occasion to use a vocabulary—save of a most meagre order; and indeed his language would embody only a supply of words just expressive of his ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green

... than from any logical speculation, by Cowper and Rousseau. Each in some degree owed his power—though Rousseau in a far higher degree than Cowper—to his profound sensitiveness to the heavy burden of the time. Each of them felt like a personal grief, and exaggerated in a distempered imagination, the weariness and the forebodings more dimly present to contemporaries. In an age when old forms of government had grown rigid and obsolete, when the stiffened crust of society was beginning to heave with new throes, when ancient faiths had left mere husks of dead formulae ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... the supposition of it rational; for I had nobody to communicate it to that would embark with me - no fellow-slave, no Englishman, Irishman, or Scotchman there but myself; so that for two years, though I often pleased myself with the imagination, yet I never had the least encouraging prospect of ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe

... listening to every word I had been uttering. That I was dumfoundered, goes without saying. It was bad enough in papa, but in Sydney it seemed, and it was, such treachery. He and I have told each other secrets all our lives; it has never entered my imagination, as he very well knows, to play him false, in one jot or tittle; and I have always understood that, in this sort of matter, men pride themselves on their sense of honour being so much keener than women's. I told them some plain truths; and I fancy that I left them ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... particles—the atoms of the inorganic world which combine and come to life for a time, but which return inevitably to the world of lifeless things. This is one of the most fundamental facts of biology. The independence of a living thing like a human being or a crustacean is a product of the imagination. How can we be independent of the environment when we are interlocked in so many ways with inorganic nature? Our very substance with its energies has been wrested from the environment; and as we, like all other living ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... portions of the human body. These are the fifty properties, as declared, that constitute the essence of the five elementary entities.[1106] Patience, reasoning or disputation, remembrance, forgetfulness or error, imagination, endurance, propensity towards good, propensity towards evil, and restlessness,—these are the properties of the mind. Destruction of both good and evil thoughts (i.e., dreamless slumber), perseverance, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... down the stairs and into the room came Mary Marsden. She was twenty-four, and I leave her to your imagination. But I must say this much—youth and health and simplicity and courage and greenish-violet eyes are beautiful, and she had all these. She gave Ives her hand with the sweet cordiality of an ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... vsing nature as a coadiutor, furders her conclusions & many times makes her effectes more absolute and straunge. But for that in our maker or Poet, which restes onely in deuise and issues from an excellent sharpe and quick inuention, holpen by a cleare and bright phantasie and imagination, he is not as the painter to counterfaite the naturall by the like effects and not the same, nor as the gardiner aiding nature to worke both the same and the like, nor as the Carpenter to worke effects vtterly vnlike, but euen as nature her selfe working by her owne ...
— The Arte of English Poesie • George Puttenham

... level-headedness—into these moods she slipped sometimes as a refuge. She could do the most prosy things (though she was wise enough never to stultify herself with such "household arts" as knitting and embroidery), yet immediately afterward pick up a book and let her imagination rove as a formless cloud with the wind. Deepest of all in her personality was the golden radiance that she diffused around her. As an open fire in a dark room throws romance and pathos into the quiet faces at its edge, so she cast her lights and shadows around the rooms that held ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone to his making, and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts concerning evil which seem to have impressed Shakespeare most. The first of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... touchstone. Just as we know that in the world of the senses an imagined bar of iron, however hot, will burn no one's fingers, so does the trained occultist know whether he is passing through a spiritual experience merely in his imagination or whether his awakened spiritual organs of perceptions are impressed by actual facts or beings. The precautions to be taken during schooling, in order that the student may not fall a victim to such delusions will be dealt ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner

... and powerful, without being of the very first order; his penetration strong, though not so acute as a Newton, Bacon, or Locke; and as far as he saw no judgment was ever sounder. It was slow in operation, being little aided by invention or imagination, but sure in conclusion. Hence the common remark of his officers, of the advantage he derived from councils of war, where hearing all suggestions, he selected whatever was best; and certainly no General ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... he sends trophies of game to his friends across the sea—birds that are as toothsome and wild-flavoured as if they had not been hatched under the tyranny of the game-laws. He has a pleasant trick of making them grateful to the imagination as well as to the palate by packing them in heather. I'll warrant that Aaron's rod bore no bonnier blossoms than these stiff little bushes—and none more magical. For every time I take up a handful of them they transport me to the Highlands, and send me tramping once more, with knapsack and ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... true. I never may believe These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact: One sees more devils than vast hell can hold; That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; And as imagination ...
— A Midsummer Night's Dream • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... force de l'imagination, of which a curious illustration was given in Paris during the debauched days of the Second Empire. Before a highly "fashionable" assembly of men appeared a youth in fleshings who sat down upon a stool, bared his pudenda and closed his eyes when, by "force ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... idioms in the language of Petronius in the first century of our era furnishes proof of this fact. A still greater influence must have been felt within the language itself by the stimulus to the imagination which the coming of these foreigners brought, with their new ideas, and their new ways of looking at things, their strange costumes, ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... Daniel Rowlands in the Methodist revival. Professor W.J. Gruffyd writes of him: "It is not enough to say he was a hymnologist—he was much more. He is the National Poet of Wales. He had certainly the loftiest imagination of all the poets of five centuries, and his influence on the Welsh people can be gauged by the fact that a good deal of his idiom or dialect has fixed itself indelibly in modern literary Welsh." The Hymn, "Marchog Jesu!" which represents him was translated by me at the request ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... again, floating alluringly before his eager imagination, like a mirage lake in the desert. Johnny's eyes stared ahead through the shimmering heat waves—stared and saw not the monotonous neutral tints of sand and rock and gray sage and yellow weeds and the rutted, dusty trail that wound away across the desert. But Mary V's face turned expectantly ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower

... excursions that he had promised himself to finish prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain-side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was so moved by her kindness and generosity that I could not speak. I had received money for services performed, and I had obtained it from Nanny as a loan, to be repaid with interest; but so much money, as a gift, had never entered into my imagination. I could not restrain my feelings. I dropped my face on the counter to conceal the ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... of recovery he would still have been in dread. His imagination was diseased by his dream and the after reality. Even surrounded by his soldiers, he feared the cibolero, who appeared able to accomplish any deed and escape its consequences. He did not even feel secure there in his chamber, with guards at the ...
— The White Chief - A Legend of Northern Mexico • Mayne Reid

... comparatively, that is offensive. It is a vigorous and ghastly thought, in that kind of horror which is dependent on scenic effect, perhaps unrivalled, and I shall have occasion to refer to it again in speaking of the powers of imagination. I allude to it here, because the sky of the distance affords a remarkable instance of the power of light at present under discussion. It is formed of flakes of black cloud, with rents and openings of intense and lurid green, ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin

... in the detail of chivalric adventures and anecdotes of the olden times. His memory was so retentive that whatever he had studied indelibly maintained a place in his recollection. In fertility of imagination he surpassed all his contemporaries. As a poet, if he has not the graceful elegance of Campbell, and the fervid energy of Byron, he excels the latter in purity of sentiment, and the former in vigour of conception. His style was well adapted for the composition of lyric poetry; but as he had no ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... witnesses who should certify to the result. Local pride was depended upon to furnish prizes for the county organization, but the most successful boys in every State were to be taken on a trip to Washington, there to shake hands with the Secretary of Agriculture and the President. This appeal to the imagination of ...
— The New South - A Chronicle Of Social And Industrial Evolution • Holland Thompson

... "Imagination goes a long way," retaliated the imprisoned sub., "but you just jump down and put your suggestion to the practical test. I believe I'm being chawn up by white ants, and I'm certain that the jiggers ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... rings of smoke and nodded his head slowly. "He has done some daring things well that may not be great in themselves, but they show imagination. That is the point. He has imagination. Many are the engineers who are accurate, who are trustworthy, but imagination, creative ability, no! You observe the shape of his head, his jaw, his hands—the dreamer, urged into action. And the impudence of his sand-cement idea! In my country ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow



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