Free Translator Free Translator
Translators Dictionaries Courses Other
Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Personification   /pərsˌɑnəfəkˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Personification

noun
1.
A person who represents an abstract quality.
2.
Representing an abstract quality or idea as a person or creature.  Synonym: prosopopoeia.
3.
The act of attributing human characteristics to abstract ideas etc..  Synonym: incarnation.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Personification" Quotes from Famous Books



... the sign of his shop, but also as his Mark; J.Gueffier had the "Amateur Divin" as his sign, and an allegorical interpretation of the device, "Fert tacitus, vivit, vincit divinus amator," as a Mark; Guillaume Julian, or Julien, had "Amitie" as his sign, and a personification of this (Typus Amiciti) as his Mark, with the motto "Nil Deus hac nobis majus concessit in usus"; Abel L'Angelier (and his widow after his death) adopted the sacrifice of Abel as the subject of his Sign and Mark, with the motto "Sacrum pinque dabo nec macrum sacrificabo"; ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts

... soul and spirit; possibly another part was the procuration of fresh victims for that long-drawn-out holocaust. That this latter object explained the disappearance of Miss Lindon I felt persuaded. That she was designed by the personification of evil who was her captor, to suffer all the horrors at which the stories pointed, and then to be burned alive, amidst the triumphant yells of the attendant demons, I was certain. That the wretch, aware that the pursuit was in full cry, was tearing, twisting, doubling, and would stick at ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... under the form of Satan warring with the Eternal Father. But this religious formula and the innumerable aspects of divinity that have sprung from it are surely crimes against the Majesty Divine. What other term can we apply to the belief which sets up as a rival to God a personification of Evil, striving eternally against the Omnipotent Mind without the possibility of ultimate triumph? Your statics declare that two Forces thus pitted against each other are ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have stepped out of ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... substituted a many-headed being called "Emperor, Crown Prince, Hindenburg, Ludendorff"—and just as little as England would treat with Napoleon would she have any dealings with the individual who to her was the personification of the lust for conquest and the policy ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin

... be eating his supper now, at what hour can he possibly have dined! A second solid mass of rump-steak has disappeared, and he eat the first in four minutes and three quarters, by the clock over the window. Was there ever such a personification of Falstaff! Mark the air with which he gloats over that Stilton, as he removes the napkin which has been placed beneath his chin to catch the superfluous gravy of the steak, and with what gusto he imbibes the porter which ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens

... God, in His opinion, who had afflicted this woman; it was Satan, the personification of all evil. But in order that such references should not be misunderstood He had said of Satan, only a short time before, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King

... cities, would figure in the procession of riches, would have opened to her doors which she had always found closed, and she would pass through them leaning on the arm of a man who had ever seemed to her the personification of ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... personification the poem might be compared to a painting of Boecklin. Like Venus of yore, the night rises from the sea and at midnight sees the golden balance of time (the heavenly bodies) rest in equilibrium. The springs try to lull the night, their mother, to sleep with a song of the beauty ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various

... He was unable to imagine how a woman of her manner and presence had ever ventured upon such an enterprise, and he contrasted her—with poor results for the unknown—with Helen Harley, who was to him the personification of all that was delicate ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... dignity, her easy changes from servility to insolence, her sensuality, her inimitably distorted vocabulary, which Sheridan borrowed for Mrs. Malaprop, and Dickens modified for Mrs. Gamp, are all peculiarities which make up a personification of the richest humour and the most life-like reality. Mr. Peter Pounce, too, with his "scoundrel maxims," as disclosed in that remarkable dialogue which is said to be "better worth reading than all the Works of Colley Cibber," and in which charity is defined as ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... angular, with a certain nobility and haughtiness of carriage inherited from her fisherman father. Her sallow skin, sombre grey eyes and heavy mouth, looked the personification of night beside the sunny beauty of Blaisette's blue eyes and yellow hair. The girl of the cottage was an excellent foil to the girl of Colomberie Farm. Did Blaisette realize, all unconsciously, the use of this to her as she went forward triumphantly in her victorious ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin

... Modern Satanism is not intended to signify the development of some new aspect of old doctrine concerning demonology, or some new argument for the personification of the evil principle in universal nature. It is intended to signify the alleged revival, or, at least, the reappearance to some extent in public, of a cultus diabolicus, or formal religion of the ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... "De Wardes is there, who is determination itself, while Manicamp is the very personification ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... marriage above want, he became noted for his profound learning and persuasive eloquence. At times he was almost electrical in his utterances; his reasoning was logical and luminous, and his remarks always gave evidence of careful study. As a politician Mr. Everett was not successful. The personification of self-discipline and dignity, he was too much like an intellectual icicle to find favor with the masses, and he was deficient in courage when any bold step ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... lips over their long white fangs, the napes of their necks bristled, and they showed each other the vicious whites of their eyes, while they drew in their breaths with prolonged and rasping snarls. Each dog seemed to be the personification of fury and unsatisfied hate. They began to circle about each other with infinite slowness, walking stiffed-legged and upon the very points of their feet. Then they wheeled about and began to circle in the opposite direction. Twice they repeated this motion, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... pathless jungle; weird tribal customs linger unchanged in barbarous campongs, where strange gods are worshipped with the immemorial rites of an ageless past, rude carvings and weird symbols showing the personification of those natural phenomena deified by primeval tribes. Sumatra, with her wealth of mines and forests and her important geographical position, remains as yet an almost undiscovered country, and though her ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... all the other classes of society. As royalists, they relapsed into their old antagonism into the struggle for the overlordship of either landed property or of money; and the highest expression of this antagonism, its personification, were the two kings themselves, their dynasties. Hence the resistance of the party of Order to the recall of ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... this MS. is one of the most graceful personifications ever painted, that of Night, with her veil of gauze studded with stars floating overhead. The seven pictures from the Life of David are among the best ever put into a MS. But personification is carried to an extreme. Thus the Red Sea, the Jordan, Rivers, Mountains, Night, Dawn, etc., are all represented as persons. The drawings are really beautiful and the illuminated initials and general ornament in ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley

... with Katharine, and, grateful for the interruption, she accordingly laid her hand lightly and affectionately on the shoulder of the Honorable Giles Montagu, aged thirteen, one of the youngest and smallest middies in the ship; but he stood very straight and rigid, the personification of dignity, and endeavored ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... was enduring their tortures in one apartment, the queen was suffering indignities and outrages equally atrocious in another. Maria Antoinette was, in the eyes of the populace, the personification of every thing to be hated. They believed her to be infamous as a wife; proud, tyrannical, and treacherous; that, as an Austrian, she hated France; that she was doing all in her power to induce foreign armies to invade the French empire with fire and sword; and that she had ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott

... principle of motion, the irrational soul which was in matter. When he speaks of the place occupied by the ideal world, it is to designate the divine intelligence, which is its cause. Finally, in no part of his writings do we find a true personification of the pretended beings of which he is said to have formed a trinity: and if this personification existed, it would equally apply to many other notions, of which might be formed many different trinities. This error, into which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon

... at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London. They were the enemy, they had ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... her aunt Camilla with a strange sense of comradeship, and yet with awe. "If you can ever be as much of a lady as your aunt Camilla, I shall be glad," her mother often told her. Camilla was to Lucina the personification of the gentle and the genteel. She was her ideal, the model upon which she was to ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... delighted to watch every movement of the deft fingers, to study every expression of the beautiful eyes and mobile mouth. He revelled in her beauty, because to him she was the personification of all that was lovely and noble and great. Her character he would have loved just as much had she been plain instead of beautiful, for his ideal was the inward, not the outward beauty, except as the two blended into one, as they ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... brings me to the pregnant meaning of the whole. The ancient mythology is in general symbolical, although not allegorical; for the two are certainly distinct. Allegory is the personification of an idea, a poetic story invented solely with such a view; but that is symbolical which, created by the imagination for other purposes, or possessing an independent reality of its own, is at the same time easily susceptible of an emblematical ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... without the circumstances to which she owed her knowledge of this masterpiece, it would probably have struck her by the peculiar power which we must call the brio—the go—of great works; and the girl herself might in Italy have been taken as a model for the personification of Brio. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... well, in clear sentences, whose mold was set by precise thought, which brought with it the eloquence that gains its point. It was more than personality, in this instance, that had appeal. He was the personification of a ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... him the ostensible hero of the tale, would have suited neither the modesty of his feelings nor the humbleness of my own expectation of telling it as I wished. I therefore took a younger and less pretending agent, in the personification of a descendant ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... court dress, a bridal costume, or a ball gown; a pair of small satin slippers, once white; a rusty crepe, a "topper of a manifestly early vintage, or what not, all may be found here. One might almost fancy that Pride, in some material personification, might indeed be found buried beneath the mass of dross, or having shuffled off its last vestiges of respectability, its corse might at least be found to have left its shroud behind; and such these tattered habiliments really are. Rag Fair to-day is still the great graveyard of Fashion; ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... from the highest sky on fish swimming on the surface of the water and carries them up, the eagle, classed in Leviticus and Deuteronomy with the unclean beasts, is transformed, as being a bird of prey, into a personification of the Devil snatching away souls to gnaw and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... embraces, groans, laments, and all the enginery of pathetic affection in the last gasping throes of separation,—to the doleful tearing of hair and the rending of their fantastic garments. It is the personification of legalized rowdyism; and if young men would but confine themselves to such rowdyism as may be looked at and laughed at by their mothers and sisters, they would find life just as amusing and a thousand times more pure ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Arjuna is taught the occult philosophy by Krishna (personification of the universal Divine Principle); and the less mythological view of Orpheus presents him to us as "a divine bard or priest in the service of Zagreus .... founder of the Mysteries .... the inventor of everything, in fact, that was supposed to have ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... and situations of the drama, and introduces the motives which Wagner ever after used so freely,—among them the curse resting upon the Dutchman, the restless motion of the sea, the message of the Angel of Mercy personified in Senta, the personification of the Dutchman, and the song of Daland's crew. The first act opens with an introduction representing a storm, and a characteristic sailors' chorus, followed by an exquisite love-song for tenor ("Mit Gewitter und Sturm"), and a grand scena of the Dutchman ("Die Frist ist um"), which lead up to ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton

... translation of Beltramo Bergamasco, i.e. a native of the town and province of Bergamo, in the north of Italy. Compare "Comasco." Harlequin ... was a Bergamasc, and the personification of the manners, accent, and jargon of the inhabitants of the Val Brembana.—Handbook: ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron

... in his usual state of comparative nudity. Beholding this personification of poverty in the middle of this luxurious dining-room, the cost of one panel of which would have been a fortune to the bare-legged, bare-breasted, and bare-headed child, it was impossible not to be moved by an impulse of charity. The boy's eyes, like blazing coals, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... Temple, the gods made obeisance to him, and took up their positions on each side of him, and informed him that they awaited his words. Addressing Nu, the personification of the World- ocean, Ra bade them to take notice of the fact that the men and women whom his Eye had created were murmuring against him. He then asked them to consider the matter and to devise a plan of action for ...
— Legends Of The Gods - The Egyptian Texts, edited with Translations • E. A. Wallis Budge

... his poems, and is likely to publish them if he meets with encouragement in England, I suppose. They are full of imagery, encompassed with poetical atmosphere, and very melodious. On the other hand, there is vagueness and too much personification. It's the smell of a rose rather than a rose—very sweet, notwithstanding. His poems are far superior to Charles Tennyson's, bear in mind. As for the poet, we quite love him, Robert and I do. What Swedenborg calls 'selfhood,' the proprium, is not ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... something sacred in sex; in fact, it was the only sacred thing. In woman and her beauty I saw something divine, because the most important function of existence—the continuation of the species—is her vocation. To me woman represented a personification of nature, Isis, and man was her priest, her slave. In contrast to him she was cruel like nature herself who tosses aside whatever has served her purposes as soon as she no longer has need for it. To him her cruelties, even death itself, ...
— Venus in Furs • Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

... was to be held in the little court-room presided over by Judge Garford, who had been a figure at Vigilante trials in early days and who was a unique personification of kindliness and firmness. Both prisoners had refused counsel, nor had any confession materialized, as Tom Redmond had prophesied. McFann had spent most of his time cursing all who had been concerned in his arrest. Talpers ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... in India, of bad acts committed when he was absent, nay, of bad acts which he had manfully opposed and severely punished. The very abuses against which he had waged an honest, resolute, and successful war were laid to his account. He was, in fact, regarded as the personification of all the vices and weaknesses which the public, with or without reason, ascribed to the English adventurers in Asia. We have ourselves heard old men, who knew nothing of his history, but who still retained the prejudices conceived in their youth, talk of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of romances. This is composed of many stories, the precursors of the novel and "short story" of the present age. We are indebted to this cycle for several well-known works of fiction, such as the tale of patient Griseldis, the gentle and meek-spirited heroine who has become the personification of long-suffering and charity. After the mediaeval writers had made much use of this tale, it was taken up in turn by Boccaccio and Chaucer, who have ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... the world's history are acts, of injustice; and it is certain that if mankind does not relinquish at once, and for ever, its vain, mad, and fatal dream of justice, the world will lapse into barbarism. England was great and glorious, because England was unjust, and England's greatest son was the personification of injustice—Cromwell. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... soldier who so long ago perished there in battle. In Cathedral and Parthenon, under the dome of the Invalides, in the sequestered parish church or the rural cemetery, what image so accords with the sad reality and the serene hope of humanity, as the adequate marble personification on sarcophagus and beneath shrine, in mausoleum ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... elysium; and when one allows the dirt, heat, and discomfort to wither all power of endurance, the Soudan becomes a horror and anathema, particularly in the summer time. Now, the camel is to me the personification of animal wretchedness, a fit creature for the wilderness. The Arabs have a legend that the Archangel Michael, anxious to try his skill at creative work, received permission to make an attempt, and the camel was the issue of his bungling handiwork. Poor brute, his capacity for ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... Morote, against whom I urge nothing as a man, he has always been a bugbear to me, the personification of dullness, of vulgarity, of everything that lacks interest and charm. I can conceive nothing lower than an article ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja

... some people discriminate," she whispered back. "You think because he wrote about rough people he must be rough; and when one writes about people of culture and elegance you think straightway that he is the personification of those ideas. You forget, you see, that the world is full to the brim with hypocrisy; and it is easier to be perfect on paper than it is anywhere else ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... that, beside every instrument an operator was waiting to receive a message. Then a young operator sent this message from the key: "Greeting and thanks to the telegraph fraternity throughout the world. Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace, good-will to men." Then the venerable inventor, the personification of dignity, simplicity and kindliness, bent above the key, and sent out, "S. F. B. Morse." A storm of enthusiasm swept over the audience, and the scene will never be forgotten by any who took part in it. The proudest ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... most varied, the most erroneous opinions have been expressed with regard to the famous individual commonly known as Bluebeard. None, perhaps, was less tenable than that which made of this gentleman a personification of the Sun. For this is what a certain school of comparative mythology set itself to do, some forty years ago. It informed the world that the seven wives of Bluebeard were the Dawns, and that his two brothers-in-law were the ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France

... his calm scrutiny, the young lady stood with flushed cheeks, and with long black lashes dropped to hide a pair of very shamed eyes, the personification, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... Poem the cause of the Rooks had again been advocated, in the Newcastle Chronicle. L.] wood-scenery, the melody of birds, cows milking, and the operations of the dairy, occupy the chief part of this Season: which is clos'd by a beautiful Personification of the Spring and her attendants, and an admirable delineation of the sportive ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield

... conclusion of the Napoleonic wars. It was inspired with a traditional hostility to the American republic. The hereditary devotion to the British Crown, of which Victoria to the passing generations appeared to be the permanent and unchanging personification, threw into eclipse the corresponding sentiment in England. English-speaking Canadians were more British than the British; they were more loyal than the Queen. One can get an admirable idea of the state of Ontario feeling in the addresses at the various ...
— Laurier: A Study in Canadian Politics • J. W. Dafoe

... 10.—The President of the Government is the personification of the Philippine people, and as such he cannot be held responsible for any act whilst he holds that position. His position is irrevocable until the Revolution shall triumph, unless extraordinary circumstances should compel him to tender his resignation to Congress, in which case ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... animate beings, the sex of which for the time being is indeterminable, such as fish, mouse, bird, etc. Sometimes things which are without life as we conceive it and which, properly speaking, belong to the neuter gender, are, by a figure of speech called Personification, changed into either the masculine or feminine gender, as, for instance, we say of the sun, He is rising; of ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin

... high class. It is true that, unless Buckhurst and Spenser had gone before him, he could not have written as he has done; yet he is an inventor very distinct from both. He calls his odes descriptive and allegorical; and this characterises them truly, but too generally. The personification of abstract qualities had never been so happily executed before; the pure spirituality of the conception, the elegance and force of the language, the harmony and variety of the numbers, were all executed with a felicity which none before or since have ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins

... the figures of speech, one must be struck at once with the delicacy and the vigor of Lanier's imagination. The poet's fancy personifies what at first blush seems to us incapable of personification. Thus at one time*1* he likens men to clover-leaves and the Course-of-things to the browsing ox, which makes way with the clover-heads; while at another he addresses an old red hill of Georgia as "Thou gashed and hairy Lear Whom the divine Cordelia of the year, E'en pitying Spring, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... phase of nothingness. Christian Science despoils the kingdom of evil, and pre-eminently 103:1 promotes affection and virtue in families and therefore in the community. The Apostle Paul refers to the 103:3 personification of evil as "the god of this world," and further defines it as dishonesty and craftiness. Sin was the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... (treating of Kreisler), inserted at frequent intervals between those which carry on the life and adventures of Murr. The third volume, which was all ready and completed in the author's head, and only wanted writing down, never came to the birth. The first two volumes present to us a personification of Hoffmann's humoristic self, and the third was to culminate in Kreisler's insanity, a result brought about by the disappointments and baffling experiences he encountered in life—Hoffmann's own career, that is; and the whole was to conclude with the Lichte ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... moralists defended her; but gentler hearts throughout all the world regarded her as a marble-hearted monster of correctness and morality, a personification of the law ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... slippers, but Finn was not like that. Tara was a matron getting on in years, and her matronhood had cost her dear in illness from which it had been thought she could never recover. Finn, on the other hand, was the very personification of lusty youth and tireless virility. The Mistress of the Kennels would take him out behind her bicycle, while Tara lay dreaming at home, and it may be that the Mistress fancied her gentle ten and twelve mile runs tired Finn. She never saw him when he would set off upon his hunting expeditions, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... quieted down to a smooth, rhythmic motion, slowly swaying from side to side, sometimes whirling around, but with feet always flat on the floor, often turning on her heels. All the time her arms were extended and her fingers snapping, and snapping also were the black eyes. She was the personification of grace, but the dance was weird—made the more so by the setting of bright evening dresses and glittering uniforms. One never sees a dance of this sort these days, even in the South, any more than one sees the bright-colored turban. Both have ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... kept the celestial register of the words and deeds of men, he was regarded by many generations of Egyptians as the "Recording Angel." He was the inventor of physical and moral Law and became the personification of JUSTICE; and as the Companies of the Gods of Heaven, and Earth, and the Other World appointed him to "weigh the words and deeds" of men, and his verdicts were unalterable, he became more powerful in the Other World than Osiris himself. Osiris ...
— The Book of the Dead • E. A. Wallis Budge

... occupies a position intermediate between Hellenism and Hinduism, agrees with the latter in recognizing the essential evil of the cosmos; but differs from both in its intensely anthropomorphic personification of the two antagonistic principles, to the one of which it ascribes all the good; and, to the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... gray November light—Zora's carefully chosen curtains and blinds had not been drawn—Sypher, pink and shiny, his silk hat (which he wore) a resplendent miracle of valetry, looked an urban yet roseate personification of Dawn. He seemed as eager as Septimus ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... and then his whole person, with his countenance and his eyes, exhibited one of the justest pantomimic representations of laziness which it is possible to conceive. After he had a moment dwelt upon this personification, which his fancy suggested to him, he made an expressive transition to the looks and manners of a person filled with that dread and abhorrence which the idea of laziness ...
— Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb • W. R. Roe

... Angelo, his poetry reflected that highest beauty which is revealed in the endless variety of creation, and must there be discovered by the artist and the poet. In Schiller's early works every character was the personification of an idea. In his "Wallenstein" we meet for the first time with real men and real life. In his "Don Carlos," Schiller, under various disguises more or less transparent, acts every part himself. In "Wallenstein" the heroes of the "Thirty Years' War" ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... now is, and when its ruins may be preserved by the sanctifying influence of some new and unknown faith; when, perhaps, the statue of Jupiter, which at present receives the kiss of the devotee, as the image of St. Peter, may be employed for another holy use, as the personification of a future saint or divinity; and when the monuments of the papal magnificence shall be mixed with the same dust as that which now covers the tombs of the Caesars. Such, I am sorry to say, is the general history of all the works and institutions belonging to humanity. They rise, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... Chaumette, a leader in the convention, came before the president "leading a courtesan with a troop of her associates." He lifted her veil, and said, "Mortals! recognize no other divinity than Reason, of which I present to you the loveliest and purest personification." The president bowed and rendered devout adoration. The same scene was reenacted in the cathedral of Notre Dame, with increased outrages upon God and common-sense. Wrong was reputed right, and the distinction between vice and virtue ...
— The Christian Foundation, May, 1880

... it," I answered, "I have some vague impression that the mystery is connected with some incident which occurred in that country. I am sure, however, that your fears would vanish if you saw Ram Singh. He is the very personification of wisdom and benevolence. He was shocked at the idea of our killing a sheep, or even a fish for his benefit—said he would rather die than have a hand in taking the life ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Codman, all in their best "Sunday-go-to-meetings," with their little daughter Polly, named after the mother, pretty as a picture and a great friend of Masie—most distinguished people were the Codmans, he looking like an alderman and his wife the personification of good humor, her rosy cheeks matching the tint ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith

... This personification of the passion of Love, by Peyre Vidal, has been referred to as a proof of how little the Provencal poets were indebted to the authors of Greece and Rome for ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... development of the belief in water's life-giving attributes, and their personification in the gods Osiris, Ea, Soma [Haoma] and Varuna, prepared the way for the elucidation of the history of "Dragons and Rain Gods" in my next lecture (Chapter II). What played a large part in directing my thoughts dragon-wards was the discussion of certain representations ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... endurance and energy and will power and courage and chivalry than any amount of money. He shudders at the thought of causing suffering to an innocent woman or child. He would sacrifice his life for the girl whom he regards as the personification of loveliness and purity. If we will but deal with him fairly and honestly, he will see in birth an ever-recurring miracle; he will regard his body as a sacred temple; he will see in sex power a source of richer and fuller life; he will respect women; he will regard marriage as the most sacred ...
— The Social Emergency - Studies in Sex Hygiene and Morals • Various

... perfumes, and sendest thy messengers far off, sendest them down into hell." The apostacy from the Lord their God is manifested not only in idolatry, but also in their not leaving untried any means to [Pg 178] procure for themselves human helpers, in their courting human aid. The personification of Israel as a woman, which took place in the preceding verses, is here continued. She leaves no means untried to heighten her charms; she makes every effort to please the mighty kings. The king is an ideal person comprehending a real plurality within himself A parallel passage, in which ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg

... Provencal Courts of Love, was the allegorical personification of the husband; and Disdain suitably represents the lover's corresponding difficulty from the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... redden; but, without any notion of shame at the words she listened to, she felt herself falling lower and lower the more her spirit clung to Mr. Pericles: yet he alone was her visible personification of hope, and she could not turn from him. If he cast her off, it seemed to her that her voice was condemned. She stood there still, and the cold-eyed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... tell how hard it was for me to believe this of Jim Hosley, that great, lumbering fellow, handsome and manly, the personification of comfortable, attractive indolence and ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... character in Beaumarchais' Marriage de Figaro, representative of one of the old noblesse of France, recalling all their manners and vices, who is duped by his valet Figaro, a personification of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Southern gentleman, the very personification of honesty," replied Calhoun. "It may interest you, Lieutenant, to know that recovering my horse did me little good, for he went so lame I had to ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn

... literature of the subject, read M. Male's "Art Religieux du XIIIe Siecle en France," and use it for a guide-book. Here you need only note how symbolic and how simple the sculpture is, on the portals and porches. Even what seems a grotesque or an abstract idea is no more than the simplest child's personification. On the walls you may have noticed the Ane qui vielle,—the ass playing the lyre; and on all the old churches you can see "bestiaries," as they were called, of fabulous animals, symbolic or not; but the symbolism is as simple as the realism of the oxen at Laon. It gave play to ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams

... an age, and a nation's fortune; and with which he was more than happy to say Hamerica had been blessed—would that his conscience and love of truth would permit him to say as much of his own country! He saw the personification and embodiment of America's great minds in the countenance of his much esteemed friend General Flum, whom his very soul joyed at recognizing present. (We will here add, by way of parenthesis, that the knowing ones of New York had a less exalted opinion of Flum's talent, ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton

... at Barcola, the finest of which is a male torso with the greater part of the legs, prehistoric objects, coins, a personification of Istria, things found at Pirano, and three splendid large Chinese bronzes. The copies of the mosaics of the Apostles from S. Giusto are on the ceiling of the upper room. A seal of the city of the fourteenth century bears three towers and the inscription: "Sistilianum . publica . ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... was once conversing with one who was formerly very popular with the democrats, but who was likely to be outset by another demagogue, who "went the whole hog," down to the Agrarian system. "Captain," said he, with his fist clenched, "I'm the very personification of democracy, but I'm out-Heroded by this fellow. The emigrants are a pack of visionaries, who don't know what they want. The born Americans I can deal with, but with these newcomers democracy is not sufficient; ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... from Mrs. Harrison's inspiring little book, entitled, "A Study of Child Nature." "A mother came to me in utter discouragement, saying: 'What shall I do with my five-year-old boy? He is simply the personification of the word won't.' After the conversation I walked home with her. A beautiful child, with golden curls and great, dancing, black eyes, came running out to meet us, and with all the impulsive joy of childhood threw his ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... feet, and stood the personification of haughty displeasure as the poor man, who dared his anger, walked composedly up the path. He now ...
— The Young Bank Messenger • Horatio Alger

... appear, water is shown flowing from the breasts (30b) of the female figure or from the mouth (32b). The woman thus represented in connection with the water is god I, the water goddess of Schellhas. She is, as he notes (1904, p. 31) usually the figure of an old woman. "Evidently, we have here the personification of water in its quality of destroyer, a goddess of floods and cloud-bursts." We are not at all sure that we have here a distinct god as similar female figures with serpent head-dresses occur frequently in the Dresden Codex with no ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen

... thought much of his talents, or perceived anything remarkable about him. He returned home in 1816, full of health and vigour, the personification of happiness; and his conscientious mother immediately set to work to repair the deficiencies of his former education, and sent him to lectures at the Sorbonne, where he heard extempore speeches from such men ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars

... morning, was the youngest daughter of Hyperion and Theia, or, according to some, of Titan and Terra. Orpheus calls her the harbinger of Titan, for she is the personification of that light which precedes the appearance of the sun. The poets describe this goddess as rising out of the ocean in a saffron robe, seated in a flame-colored car, drawn by two or four horses, expanding with her rosy fingers ...
— Roman Antiquities, and Ancient Mythology - For Classical Schools (2nd ed) • Charles K. Dillaway

... of a true festival than most men experience even in the longest life time. The major with his Greek instinct of drama was a splendid personification of poetic quality; in fact he was himself almost a lyric. From time to time he glanced back at Coleman with eyes half dimmed with appreciation. The people gathered flowers, great blossoms of purple and corn colour. They sprinkled them over the ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... is placed under the bier, professedly in conversation with the deceased. He asks, what person killed you? If the corpse say no one, the inquest ceases; but if it states that some person has, the bier moves round, the corpse is said to produce the motion, influenced by kuingo (a fabulous personification of death). If the alleged murderer be present, the bier is carried round by this influence, and one of the branches made to touch him. Upon this a battle is sure to ensue either immediately, or in the course ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... especially, in her white holland gown, with a great bunch of heather stuck in her belt, and a faint healthy glow in her cheeks, looked as only an English country girl of good birth can look—the very personification of ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... definition of the functions of the First Sea Lord which will confine his sphere to the distribution and movement of ships and the strategical and tactical training of officers, so as to compel him to become the embodiment or personification of the best possible theory or system of naval warfare. That definition adopted and enforced, there is no need to lay down regulations giving the strategist control over his colleagues who administer materiel ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson

... him the clouds were torn asunder, and through a transparent veil of light golden mist, a face of surpassing beauty was seen—a face on which youth, health, hope, love, and ecstatic joy all shone with ineffable radiance. It was the personification of Life—not life as we know it, brief and full of care—but Life Immortal and Love Triumphant. Often and often I found myself standing before this masterpiece of Cellini's genius, gazing at it, not only with admiration, but with a sense of actual comfort. One afternoon, while resting in my favourite ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... Bartolinian and the Aldus, and many other early authorities, here put the word Vede in place of Rende, giving a variation which for its poetic worth well deserves to be marked, if not to be introduced into the received text. "Until the branch sees all its spoils upon the earth" is a personification quite in Dante's manner. A confirmation of the value of this reading is given by the fact that Tasso preferred it to the more common one, and in his treatise on the "Art of Poetry" praises it as full ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... granted; and ever afterwards, when the crew was piped to stow away hammocks, Reuben James sauntered about the decks with his hands in his pockets, the very personification of elegant leisure. ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... the great masters, especially of the Italian schools, are genuine allegories. Amongst the classics, the multitude of their gods either precluded allegory altogether, or else made every thing allegory, as in the Hesiodic Theogonia; for you can scarcely distinguish between power and the personification of power. The 'Cupid and Psyche' of, or found in, Apuleius, is a phenomenon. It is the Platonic mode of accounting for the fall of man. The 'Battle of the Soul' [1] by Prudentius is an early instance ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... the chief she noticed he looked all cruelty, lust, and hateful self-indulgence. Now that he paced up and down warily in front of that sacred floor, peering around him with keen suspicion, he seemed rather the personification of watchfulness, fear, and a certain slavish bodily terror. Especially, she observed, he cast upon Felix, as he went, a glance of angry hate; and yet he did not attempt to hurt or molest him in any way, defenceless as they both were before ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... neighbor of how he had pleasantly reminded her of Timothy; just who Timothy was, and all about him. Mr. Watts was the personification of absorbed interest. Timothy sounded to him as if he might be a "human being," he declared, and ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox

... which was published in 1833, during an eventful period in its author's life. The character of Lelia was drawn from George Sand herself as a personification of human nature at war with itself. The original of Stenio was Alfred de Musset, whose intimate friendship with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... elder-wood, in a room, or used for a cradle, is apt to work evil for children. In some parts of England, it is believed that boys beaten with an elder stick will be retarded in their growth; in Sweden, women who are about to become mothers kiss the elder. In Germany, a somewhat similar personification of the juniper, "Frau Wachholder," exists. And here we come into touch with the dryads and forest-sprites of all ages, familiar to us in the myths of classic antiquity and the tales ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... dialogue is a perfect piece of dialectic, in which granting the 'common principle,' there is no escaping from the conclusion. It is anticipated at the beginning by the dream of Socrates and the parody of Homer. The personification of the Laws, and of their brethren the Laws in the world below, is one of the noblest and boldest figures of ...
— Crito • Plato

... singers from the public theatres chant hymns to the accompaniment of the organ and a numerous orchestra. Enough has been said to enable the reader to perceive the strict analogy that exists between the worship of saints and true idolatry; but still, Spaniards have carried the personification of these fragile works of men's hands far beyond the idolatries of ancient and modern times. Not content with addressing words to them, as if they possessed intelligence and the sense of hearing, they kiss ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous

... very much in evidence in all these classes. He is a striking personality. With his hard, shrewd, red face, his wonderfully thin legs, light-coloured breeches, beautifully-cut tunic and high hat cocked over his left ear, he looked the personification of the cavalry officer as we read about him in novels. It would seem as though these cavalry officers had been fashioned by nature to sit on a horse. I suppose it is heredity. Certainly they are all ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... up by a succession of proceedings which should be recorded for the instruction of all who seek for help from the race of boys. Such a loser of all tools, great and small; such an invariable leaver-open of all gates, and letter-down of bars; such a personification of all manner of anarchy and ill luck, had never before been seen on the estate. His time, while I was gone to the city, was agreeably diversified with roosting on the fence, swinging on the gates, making poplar whistles for the children, hunting eggs, and eating ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... loveliness on the early coins of Syracuse and Leontium, it gradually became the received sign of all conquest, and the so-called 'Victory' of later times; which, little by little, loses its truth, and is accepted by the moderns only as a personification of victory itself,—not as an actual picture of the living Angel who led to victory. There is a wide difference between these two conceptions,—all the difference between insincere poetry, and sincere religion. This I have also endeavoured farther to illustrate in the tenth Lecture; there is however ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... his attitude a hair. He will always remain with me, I suppose; his figure never grows vague in my memory. Whenever I read of Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and misfortunes, he comes before me. He becomes a personification, and stands for India in trouble. And for untold ages India in trouble has been pursued with the very remark which I was going to utter but didn't, because its meaning had slipped me: ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... slowly back, plunged in thought, but not of those who passed and touched their hats and to whom he was the personification of power. There was in his mind the talk he had with Wimperley, a few months before. "We're in your hands," he had said, "but there's a limit to what we can raise. Push on with work ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... lad, a pleasure even more intense and substantial than his lonely games in the garret was a visit to his godfather's home; to his childish eyes, this godparent, the lawyer, Don Carmelo Labarta, was the personification of the ideal life, of glory, of poesy. The notary was wont to speak of him with enthusiasm, yet pitying him at the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... to the end. He was not quite so talented as some of his great associates in the Confederate army, but he was a tremendous fighter when occasion offered. During that last period of our cadet life, Colonel Robert E. Lee was superintendent of the academy; he was the personification of dignity, justice, and kindness, and he was respected and admired as the ideal of a commanding officer. Colonel Robert S. Garnett was commandant of cadets; he was a thorough soldier who meted out impartial justice with both hands. At our ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield

... certain time and place appointed, in the neighbourhood of the Exchange. The borrower, on the day and near the hour fixed upon, was in the area of the Royal Exchange, when there crossed over a wretched looking being, the very personification of misery. The gentleman, unsolicited, gave the poor object a shilling. On going to the appointed rendezvous, how great was his astonishment to find in the person of the wealthy monied man the identical receiver of his bounty!—"Ha, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... earth, its swinging, definite motion, its strength, its attack, and its salt burning, seemed to provoke her to a pitch of madness, tantalizing her with vast suggestions of fulfilment. And then, for personification, would come Skrebensky, Skrebensky, whom she knew, whom she was fond of, who was attractive, but whose soul could not contain her in its waves of strength, nor his breast compel her ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... which drove them to it as the form of government best suited to them? This arrangement is not the product of reflection. Everywhere one man is king, and for the most part his dignity is hereditary. He is, as it were, the personification, the monogram, of the whole people, which attains an individuality in him. In this sense he can rightly say: l'etat c'est moi. It is precisely for this reason that in Shakespeare's historical plays the kings of England and France ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... however obscured, has animated him through all these struggles. And having found this sublime home he is sure as the heavens themselves. He remains still, filled with all knowledge and power. The outer man, the adoring, the acting, the living personification, goes its own way hand in hand with Nature, and shows all the superb strength of the savage growth of the earth, lit by that instinct which contains knowledge. For in the inmost sanctuary, in the ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... Arcadia with those flowers of conceit, those sugared fancies which his contemporaries loved, but which the taste of a severer {84} age finds insipid. This splendid vice of the Elisabethan writers appears in Sidney, chiefly in the form of an excessive personification. If he describes a field full of roses, he makes "the roses add such a ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty." If he describes ladies bathing in a stream, he makes the water break into twenty bubbles, as "not ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... breast, believed her to be the priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of Osiris before his resurrection and ascent to Heaven to be the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... the personification of obstinacy and unreasonableness?" and she held out her hand to her brother-in-law. But he did not take it. Her second refusal but the week before was still fresh in his mind, and he turned ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... every man must be a little in love with every pretty woman he sees. And Danvers at once gave Ellen Fortescue her due. She sat silent beside her mother, looking the personification of innocence, purity and poetry. Her mother continued subtly to poison Danvers against Marian, to make him feel that she had not appreciated him, that she had trifled with him, that she had not treated him as his dignity and importance merited. When she and Mrs. Carnarvon appeared, he joined them ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)

... Deprived by death of her guardians, she finds herself at this early age alone and unprotected in the streets of Paris. She seeks the counsel of a kindly priest, who refers her to a rich and apparently respectable man, but in reality the personification of hypocrisy. Of his character study of M. de Climal, Marivaux was justly proud. Few, if any, however, will justify him in rating it superior to Moliere's Tartuffe.[86] Throughout her trials and temptations ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux

... Socialists had been obliged to employ when they fought against the tyranny of autocracy. Returning to their villages, the peasants bore with them the greatest hate for the Bolsheviki, whom they considered the personification of tyranny and violence. And they took with them also a firm resolution to fight against ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... English Game which hight long Laurence. To play at Laurence to do just nothing at all; to laze. Laurence is the personification of idleness. There are many dialect uses of the name, e.g., N.W. Devon 'Lazy's Laurence', and Cornish 'He's as lazy as Lawrence', vide Wright, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn

... his long hair and blew it about his face till he became an equestrian personification of the frenzied muse. I had become acquainted with his trick of setting words to the music of quaint rhymes; but Father Holland was ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... me your arm," interrupted Foedora carelessly, "we are already very late. But then, it is all your own fault; how is it that you, the personification of exactitude, did not proclaim the ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... habitual gloom. And this too produced a like effect upon Ella; who, mounted upon a fine spirited, noble animal, and displaying all the ease and grace of an accomplished rider, with her flushed cheek and sparkling eyes, seemed the personification of loveliness. Her dress was exceedingly neat, of the fashion and quality worn in the east—being one she had brought with her on her removal hither. A neat hood, to which was attached a green veil, now thrown carelessly back and floating down behind, covered ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett

... provide him with the elixir of life. But comparison with some of the legends of other countries suggests that Re has usurped the place previously occupied by Horus and originally by Osiris, who as the real personification of the life-giving power of water is obviously the appropriate person to be slain when his virility begins to fail. Dr. C. G. Seligman's account of the Dinka rain-maker Lerpiu, which I have already quoted (p. 113) from Sir James Frazer's "Dying God," suggests that ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... table promptly stood up, awaiting no second invitation to that look of Blenham's. Were one staging a morality play and in search of the personification of impertinence, he need look no farther than this cocksure youth. He was just at that age when one is determined that there shall be no mistake about his status in the matters of age and worldly experience; in short, something over twenty-one, ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... vindicate him from falsehood in not making a better distinction, I should feel the less inclined to deny his being a savage, while I behold him wantoning with the wounded feelings of a forlorn, hopeless and unhappy parent. If his personification had embraced the meeting merely, he ought to have known that even the dead are not always unavenged, and that its ghost at least, would have arisen from the tomb to flutter round and haunt the unhappy county of Saratoga on the eve of the next nomination, in the form of a book; ...
— A Review and Exposition, of the Falsehoods and Misrepresentations, of a Pamphlet Addressed to the Republicans of the County of Saratoga, Signed, "A Citizen" • An Elector

... more to us than a railroad well engineered through a difficult country. {7} No reasoned sequence is thrust upon our attention: we seem to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification, always poetically orthodox, and attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our eyes. We remember, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Marvels attended his birth, and miracles followed him in life and in death. And the appearance of the miraculous has even been heightened by the style of the chroniclers in telling us of his mental conflicts: by the personification of evil in the spirit Man, and of desire in ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... attempt must be made, if only for fashion sake, so that no adventitious help may be wanting to him, or more probably to her, who may care to form for herself a personification of Mary Lawrie. She was a tall, thin, staid girl, who never put herself forward in any of those walks of life in which such a young lady as she is called upon to show herself. She was silent and reserved, and sometimes ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope

... reality of its hypothesis; if it has worshipped the inconceivable object; if, after being apprehended in this act of faith, it persists knowingly, but no longer voluntarily, in this opinion of a sovereign being which it knows to be only a personification of its own thought; if it is on the point of again beginning its magic invocations,—we must believe that so astonishing an hallucination conceals some mystery, which deserves to ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... Amritam, "ambrosia draught that renders immortal." The Haoma and its sacred juice is also called "that which keeps off death," in the ninth chapter of the Yacna of the Zoroastrians. It is for this reason that, both with the Indians and the Iranians, the personification of the sacred plant and its juice, the god Soma, or Haoma, prototype of the Greek Dionysius, becomes a lunar divinity, inasmuch as he is the guardian of the ambrosia stored by the gods in the moon. And here we have another similarity ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various

... precepts of religion—these are the principles and consolations of patriotism:—these remain when all is lost—and of these is composed the spirit of independence—the spirit embodied in that beautiful personification of the poet, which may each of you, my countrymen, to the last hour of ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward

... consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian "note"—the special form of the maladie du siecle which, as we have ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... flags bearing the device of Surya. Salutations to thee that art the Lord of spirits and ghosts, to thee that art bull-necked, and that art armed with the bow; to thee that crushest all foes, to thee that art the personification of chastisement, and to thee that art clad in leaves (of trees) and rags. Salutations to thee that bearest gold in thy stomach, to thee that art cased in golden mail, to thee that art gold-crested, to thee that art the lord ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... nearly drove him mad. It was always put by that horrid young lynx-eyed new commissioner, who sat there with his hair brushed high from off his forehead, peering out of his capacious, excellently-washed shirt-collars, a personification of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... answer questions put to him. His great sorrow was yet too new and too poignant to be laid aside even momentarily. Always he pined for Momaya—shrewish, hideous, repulsive, perhaps, she would have been to you or me, but to Tibo she was mamma, the personification of that one great love which knows no selfishness and which does not consume ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... bibliomania five hundred years ago! and does not the reader behold in it the very type and personification of its existence now? does he not see in Richard de Bury the prototype of a much honored and agreeable bibliophile of our own time? Nor has the renowned "Maister Dibdin" described his book-hunting tours with more enthusiasm or delight; with what a thrill of rapture would that ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... second ternary is commended, I think, beyond its merit. The personification is indistinct. Thirst and Hunger are not alike; and their features, to make the imagery perfect, should have been discriminated. We are told, in the same stanza, how 'towers are fed.' But I will no longer look for particular faults; yet let it be observed ...
— Select Poems of Thomas Gray • Thomas Gray

... struggle that would seem to have been present at all stages of civilisation, but always most active in periods of transition. One out of many examples is all that I can give. In Hawaii, worship is given to the goddess Pele, the personification of the volcano Kilauea, and the god Tamapua, the personification of the sea, or rather, of the storm which lashes the sea and hurls wave after wave upon the land. The myth tells that Tamapua wooed Pele, who rejected his suit, whereupon he flooded the crater ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley

... give to a painted harlot a thousand pounds for a loathsome embrace, and to a player or buffoon a hundred for a trumpery pun, but would refuse a penny to the widow or orphan of an old Royalist soldier. He was the personification of selfishness; and as he loved and cared for no one, so did no one love or care for him. So little had he gained the respect or affection of those who surrounded him, that after his body had undergone an after-death examination, parts of it were thrown down ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... unbreathing beauty. Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha is the humorous soliloquy of an imaginary organist over a fugue in F minor by an imaginary composer, named in the title. It is a mingling of music and moralising. The famous description of a fugue, and the personification of its five voices, is a brilliantly ingenious tour de force; and the rough humour is quite in keeping with the dramatis persona. In complete contrast to Master Hugues is A Toccata of Galuppi's,[31] one of the daintiest, most musical, most witching and haunting ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons



Words linked to "Personification" :   figure of speech, prosopopoeia, personify, somebody, figure, someone, person, trope, individual, soul, embodiment, queen, avatar, mortal, image



Copyright © 2024 Free-Translator.com