"Vividness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... children as they were murdered and tortured by the savages; the lurid glare of the burning cabins; the Indians dancing and yelling in horrid mirth: his active brain was filled with such remembrances. In the stillness and loneliness of night, in that cabin, these awful scenes came up with appalling vividness, and weird and demon faces seemed to peep and mutter at him from the corners of the room. Once he fancied that he heard the cellar stairs creak under a heavy tread. And while Bub slept peacefully in childish unconsciousness ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... word or two (leaving many points of interest untouched) upon the manner in which Mrs. Fremont has treated her subject. It is novel, but not ineffective. Zagonyi tells much of the story in his own words; and we are sure that it loses nothing of vividness from his terse and vigorous, though not always strictly grammatical language. "Zagonyi's English," says some one who has heard it, "is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... failed her so utterly, the courage with which she had taken the absent father's place with the son whom she idolized. He understood now her intolerant hatred of Japan and the Japanese, an intolerance for which—in his ignorance—he had often teased her. One memory came to him with striking vividness—a winter evening, in the dawn of his early manhood, when they had been sitting after dinner in the library at Craven Towers—his mother lying on the sofa that had been rolled up before the fire, and himself sprawled on the hearthrug at her feet. Already tall ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... years before he wrote the book Scott had been thinking of Napoleon as a "tyrannical monster,"[416] a "singular emanation of the Evil Principle,"[417] "the arch-enemy of mankind,"[418]—phrases which, in spite of their vividness, hardly seem to promise a life-like portrayal ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was. It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist disregards the truth of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... next few days, in moments snatched whenever there was opportunity, Philip's acquaintance with the journalist increased. Thorpe Athelny was a good talker. He did not say brilliant things, but he talked inspiringly, with an eager vividness which fired the imagination; Philip, living so much in a world of make-believe, found his fancy teeming with new pictures. Athelny had very good manners. He knew much more than Philip, both of the world and of books; he was a much older ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... thought—why did she ever leave home for the West? Her solicitude for Bo had been forgotten. Nevertheless, any marked change in the topography of the country was registered, perhaps photographed on her memory by the torturing vividness of her experience. ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... laboured at it as much as—he was going to say three months; but upon closer examination it shrunk to a month, then to a week, then to a day, then to nothing. Yes, he remembered now, and with unwelcome vividness, that Goodson had told him to go to thunder and mind his own business—HE wasn't hankering to follow ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... by Lincoln's friends and associates, such as Lamon and Herndon, make up in vividness and the intimate personal touch what they necessarily lack in perspective. Arnold's Life deals chiefly with the executive and legislative history of Lincoln's administration. The Life by the novelist J. G. Holland deals popularly with his hero's personality. The memoirs by Barrett, Abbott, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... spent the day writing and in gazing at the vivid view of the hillside, the forest, and the distant miniature prospect before us. Finally we discovered what made it in essence so strangely familiar. In vividness and clarity—even in the crudity of its tones—it was exactly like ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... experience the feelings of a man pursued, he attained his desire. It is not pleasant to be shot at. Severne entertained sensations of varied coherence, but one and all of a vividness which was of the greatest literary value. Only he was not in a mood to appreciate literary values. He attended strictly to business, which was to lift the excellent animal on which he was mounted as rapidly as possible over the ground. In this he attained a moderate success. Venturing ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... remembered, as she now remembered with a kind of sickening vividness, the last time they had been together in this room—for it was here, in the dining-room of Old Place, that they had spent their last miserable, heart-broken moment together, a moment when all the angry bitterness had been merged in ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... imagined they could appeal to an introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them; as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation respectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... could know his thoughts during those long days and nights of weariness and pain. The restlessness of body did not equal the restlessness of soul, and the past came back with a startling vividness. The wasted years, the misused talents, and above all, the fast-closed heart against its rightful Owner, now seemed to stand up in judgment against him. Often in his wretchedness would he groan aloud, and wish for unconsciousness to come to his aid ...
— Probable Sons • Amy Le Feuvre
... the milk of human kindness which, presumably, flowed in Mrs. Pantin's breast stopped—congealed—froze up tight. Her blue eyes, whose vividness was accentuated as usual by the robin's egg blue dress she wore, had the warm genial glow radiating from a polar berg. It was, however, only a moment before she recovered herself and was able to say with ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... mind with sudden vividness the last letter Patrick Lovell had ever written her—the one which he had left in the Chippendale bureau for her to receive after his death. He had applied almost those identical words to the Malincourt temperament, of which ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... on his verandah in the expectation of being kept for the rest of his life that his rescuer has forced upon him. It was true that she was an excellent shorthand-typist, but she vexed the decent grey by her vividness. The sight of her through an open door, sitting at her typewriter in her blue linen overall, dispersed one's thoughts; it was as if a wireless found its waves jammed by another instrument. Often he found himself compelled to abandon his train of ideas and apprehend her experiences: to feel ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... flooding from its windows. Indignantly he would shake himself back into sanity, and the delectable visions would vanish. But while they lasted they were confusing, and presently when he aroused himself from one that was of particularly heart-breaking vividness, he found that he had let his rifle drop! It was gone hopelessly. The shock steadied him for some minutes. Well, he had his knife. After all, that was the more important of the two. He ploughed onward, once more keenly awake, ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... strict sense of the word in this particular reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original Pickwick Papers Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man; but he was very decidedly ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... experienced a shock as of a galvanic battery, the sense of weight, of volition, of substance, returned. I became my original self, and bent my steps eagerly homeward—but the past had not lost the vividness of the real—and not now, even for an instant, can I compel my understanding to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... in Canton as many workshops of the different artists as I could. My first visit was to the most celebrated painters, and I must frankly own, that the vividness and splendour of their colouring struck me exceedingly. These qualities are generally ascribed to the rice paper on which they paint, and which is of the greatest possible fineness, and as ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the more distinctly emphasized; although, in course of time, the original incentive to righteousness supplied by Paul was more and more subordinated to the comparatively degrading incentive involved in the fear of damnation. There can hardly be a doubt that the definiteness and vividness of the Pauline theory of a future life contributed very largely to the rapid spread of the Christian religion; nor can it be doubted that to the desire to be holy like Jesus, in order to escape death and live with Jesus, is due ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... a story, is replete with Oriental charm and richness, and the character drawing is marvelous. No other novel ever written has portrayed with such vividness the events that convulsed Rome and destroyed Jerusalem in the early ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... Lowder's part had determined it. Such as the idea was—and that it suited Kate's own book she openly professed—he had only to see how things were turning out to feel it strikingly justified. Densher's reply to all this vividness was that of course Aunt Maud's intervention hadn't been occult, even for his vividness, from the moment she had written him, with characteristic concentration, that if he should see his way to come to Venice for a fortnight she should ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... benignant smile on his old face, yet his powerful shoulders drooped as if weighted down with a heavy load. Hamilton was aware when he entered, and instantly the scene of their conflict came into his memory with awful vividness, and he saw Alice lying outstretched, stark and, cold, the shining strand of hair fluttering across her pallid cheek. Her ghost ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... than sleepless. Every nerve in his body demanded action, and his brain was fired by strange thoughts until their vividness seemed to bring him face to face with a reality that set his blood stirring with an irresistible thrill. He believed he had made a discovery, that St. Pierre had betrayed himself. What he had visioned, the conclusion he had arrived ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... gasp which came from behind the portieres dividing the study and the living-room. The gasp had followed the invisible knife-thrusts of these confidences. The woman behind those portieres swayed and caught blindly at the jamb. With cruel vividness she saw in this terrible moment all that to which she had never given more than a passing thought. No reproaches; only a simple declaration of what had burned in this boy's heart. And she had almost forgotten this son. A species of paralysis laid hold of ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... in the living room. Janet Raymond, flushing so that her sunburned face outdid her red hair for vividness, was slowly leaving the room also. Through a window opening upon the wide front porch Dundee saw the girl take her position against a pillar, then—a thing she had not done before very probably—press her handkerchief ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... am, in effect, living my life over again. Most of the scenes I witnessed left such an impression upon my mind, that it requires only the touch of the caduceus of the witching power of memory, to call them all up again with a vividness scarcely less than that by which they were formerly presented to me. There is only this difference, that my remembered experiences, now invested with a species of borrowed light, seem like scenery which ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... he took her in his arms; she still felt the roughness of his beard pressing on her mouth. Her heart seemed to grow larger in her breast, and she caught for breath as she threw back her head as if to receive his lips again. A shudder ran through her from the vividness ...
— Liza of Lambeth • W. Somerset Maugham
... gave her to retrace the scenes, and begged her to desist till time should have, in some degree, assuaged the poignancy of her feelings. 'That,' cried she, embracing me, I can never be! Never, never will that horrid circumstance of my life lose its vividness in my recollection. What agony, to have seen those faithful servants tied before us on the carriage, like common criminals! All, all may be attributed to the King's goodness of heart, which produces want of courage, nay, even timidity, in the most trying scenes. As poor King Charles the First, when ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... generally with a power which makes it at once as painful to the calmer reader as alluring to those who are struggling with the same temptations as the poet. Now and then, his trick drags him down into sheer fustian and bombast; but not always. There is a terrible Dantean vividness of imagination about him, perhaps unequalled in England, in his generation. His poems are like his countenance, coarse and ungoverned, yet with an intensity of eye, a rugged massiveness of feature, which would be grand but for the seeming deficiency of love and of humour—love's ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... employed the secular power to obstruct the progress of knowledge and crush out the spirit of investigation. While there is not in his book a word of disrespect for things sacred, he writes with a directness of speech, and a vividness of characterization and an unflinching fidelity to the facts, which show him to be in thorough earnest with his work. The 'History of the Conflict between Religion and Science' is a fitting sequel ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... in the air, glitters in the sun, but we wait in vain to hear of its arrival in the destined harbour. Mr. Godwin, with less variety and vividness, with less subtlety and susceptibility both of thought and feeling, has had firmer nerves, a more determined purpose, a more comprehensive grasp of his subject, and the results are as we find them. Each has met with his reward: ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... and finish which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... the remembrance of her former dream returned to her with singular vividness and remarkable force, and she felt her lonely isolation greatly. Accordingly, having at once lighted a lamp on the hall table—during which act the loud knock was repeated with vigour—she took the precaution ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... in the sudden clarity of the silent hour thoughts flowed through her with wonderful vividness. She saw Renault's face and manner, his sharp eyes, his air of dictation, arrogant and at the same time kindly,—yes, there was a power in the man! As Margaret had put it,—a religious power. The word set loose numberless thoughts, distasteful ones, ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... back ten years. "The Moreau Horrors!" The phrase drifted loose in my mind for a moment, and then I saw it in red lettering on a little buff-coloured pamphlet, to read which made one shiver and creep. Then I remembered distinctly all about it. That long-forgotten pamphlet came back with startling vividness to my mind. I had been a mere lad then, and Moreau was, I suppose, about fifty,—a prominent and masterful physiologist, well-known in scientific circles for his extraordinary imagination and his brutal ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... hit on it. The strange occurrences of the night, the blasphemous words, the mocking laughter, at the worst they might not import a mastery over her. He shuddered as he recalled them, they rang in his ears and brain, the vividness of his memory of them was remarkable. But they might ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... began to alarm her, and in the beginning of May, having consulted a local physician without being satisfied, she went to see a specialist in a northern suburb in whose judgement she had great confidence. This occasion I recollect with extreme vividness. I had been put to bed by my Father, in itself a noteworthy event. My crib stood near a window overlooking the street; my parents' ancient four-poster, a relic of the eighteenth century, hid me from the door, but I could see the rest ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy that ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... shut her eyes, drawing in the perfumed tonic. The altitude had intoxicated her. Her heart was beating fast, her blood tingling, her brain electrified. Every sense seemed to be sharpened. She saw and smelt and heard with abnormal vividness. ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... from Falmouth to Lisbon he has described with terrifying vividness; {185a} how the engines broke down and the vessel was being driven on to Cape Finisterre; how all hope had been abandoned, and the Captain had told the passengers of their impending fate; how the wind suddenly "VEERED RIGHT ABOUT, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... realized for the first time how indulgent his father had been; he had denied his son no reasonable wish, simply asking in return that the boy express his gratitude by studiousness and obedience. Van flushed as with vividness it came to his consciousness that he had repaid his father's goodness with neither of these things. He had studied just as little as was possible, and in place of appreciation he had rendered nothing ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... richly through the greenery. Overhead was a tunefully unflecked sky and into the shadows crept a richness of furtively underlying color and echoes of color. It was all vivid and beautiful and the girl standing there seemed to dominate its vividness and its beauty. But her eyes were grave, even when a shaft of the radiance struck her delicately blossoming cheeks and played upon the escaping locks with which the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... by all that the Homeric characters are drawn, each in its way, by a master's hand. "The most pervading merit of the Iliad," says one, "is its fidelity and vividness as a mirror of man, and of the visible sphere in which he lived, with its infinitely varied imagery, both actual and ideal; and the task which the great poet set for himself was perfectly accomplished." "The mind of Homer," says another, "is like an AEolian harp, so finely strung that it answers ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... feeding, and cosseting the creature who was at the point of death from starvation and fatigue—put all thought of revealing what I had beheld in the haunted chamber out of my head, until, when I recalled it in all its vividness, I simply could not speak of it? It was all like a swift, bad dream, the telling of which might revive the unpleasant sensation it created in passing. I do not pretend to explain a child's reserve on subjects which have gone very far into the deeps of a consciousness that never lets them ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... only too soon, as often happens with the face we best love and have reason chiefly to remember. Others will rise unbidden with the vividness of a photograph, but the one face eludes us more and more, till no effort of the mind will call it up ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... stood in inverse relation to the vigor of his body. When he was well, his too darkly stained past life troubled him little; but when he was unmanned by weakness, he was incapable of fighting the ghastly demon that forced upon his memory in painful vividness those very deeds which he would most willingly have forgotten. In such hours he must need remember his friend, his benefactor, and superior officer, the Tribune Servianus, whose fair young wife he had tempted with a thousand arts to forsake her husband and child, and fly with him into the wide ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... his walk and was standing before Mrs. Talcott looking down at her; and while Mrs. Talcott fixed the intense blue of her eyes upon him he became aware of an impression almost physical in its vividness. It was as if Mrs. Talcott were the most wise, most skilful, most benevolent of doctors who, by some miraculous modern invention, were pumping blood into his veins from her own superabundance. It seemed to find its way along hardened ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... from books. The laboratory has as its function in respect to facts, some very vital things: as, making clear certain classes of facts which the student cannot visualize without concrete demonstration; giving vividness to facts in general; gaining of enough facts at first hand to enable him to hold in solution the great mass of facts which he must take second hand; to give him skill and accuracy in observation and in recording discoveries; to give appreciation ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Garstang, whence, however, in 1662 he was ejected with the two thousand ministers who refused to conform. His after years were passed among old friends and in quiet meditation at Preston. He died of apoplexy about the 20th of January 1663/4. As a religious writer Ambrose has a vividness and freshness of imagination possessed by scarcely any of the Puritan Nonconformists. Many who have no love for Puritan doctrine, nor sympathy with Puritan experience, have appreciated the pathos and beauty of his writings, and his Looking ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as attention was directed solely to the extremes in varieties of color and of form, and to the vividness of the first impression of the senses, the observer was naturally disposed to regard races rather as originally different species than as mere varieties. The permanence of certain types* in the midst of the most hostile influences, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... You may go about among our critics on the brightest day with the largest lantern and find nothing more brilliant itself than the "Congreve" article, where the spice of injustice will, again, deceive nobody but a fool. The vividness of the "Addison and Steele" presentation is miraculous. He redresses Johnson on Prior as he had redressed Macaulay on Steele; and he is not unjust, as we might have feared that he would be, to Pope. "Hogarth, Smollett, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he has drawn them all from the same model, as painters say. They are, every one of them, descended from Clarissa Harlowe. And returning continually, as he did, to the same idea of woman, how could he do otherwise than produce a single type, varied only by degrees of vividness in the coloring? Woman brings confusion into Society through passion. Passion gives infinite possibilities. Therefore depict passion; you have one great resource open to you, foregone by the great genius for the sake of providing family reading for prudish England. In ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... me to instant vividness of thought. Till this moment I had almost forgotten Amante; now I planned with feverish rapidity how I could give her a warning not to return; or rather, I should say, I tried to plan, for all my projects were utterly ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... stood there was a wet, glistening heap of fallen logs and rafters, charred and twisted. The lightning flash had revealed more to the rider than the desolation of the burned and abandoned homestead. He saw with instant vividness the wrecked framework of his own plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength to carry him through to a ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... much engaged in watching its effect upon me. Her lustreless pupils continued to attach themselves to my countenance, and it was only her air of belonging to another century that kept them from being importunate. She seemed to look at me across the ages, and the interval of time diminished the vividness of the performance. It was as if she knew in a general way that her brother must be talking very well, but she herself was so rich in ideas that she had no need to pick them up, and was at liberty to see what would become ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... repeatedly in the course of this work, are received as undisputed opinions. They are fulfilled again when the relics of these opinions, and the memories of the mythical events believed in accordance with such opinions, are still operative in the mind, though no longer with the vividness of primitive times; when some of them still hold together, but for the most part they are decaying and falling to pieces, and are only like the faded rags of a once splendid robe which a child may gather round its puny form and make believe ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... impossibilities to improbable possibilities, for by a logical fallacy even an irrational premise in an action may seem probable provided that the conclusion is logical and made to seem real.[24] For instance, the irrational elements in the Odyssey "are presented to the imagination with such vividness and coherence that the impossible becomes plausible; the fiction looks like truth."[25] Such a result occurs only when the characters and action are made real. We believe that which we see, even though we know in our hearts ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... never seen, and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon—their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight—a map-like distinctness of trace—and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.—I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells—my highest Alps,—but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... the Florida Reef, appeared in 1848, and is one of the best of the sea stories. The chief character is a woman, deserted by a half smuggler, half buccaneer, whom she joins in the disguise of a sailor, and accompanies undiscovered during a cruise. In vividness of painting and dramatic interest it has rank with the Red ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... to sleep at last, to dream, strangely enough and with astonishing vividness, of the cabin among the great cedars with the snow banked white outside the door. He saw himself sitting beside the fireplace poring over one of Doris Cleveland's books. And he was no longer lonely, because ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... of that memorable day were then renewed with such vividness that, on a sudden, writhing and dismayed, he hurried forward in the vain hope, it might seem, of flying from the anguish ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... of human affections, and undoubtedly exceeds that even of the child for the mother to whom he owes every benefit and blessing under heaven. We may be fervently grateful to persons whom we have never seen; but there cannot be much vividness in our love for them. Love to God, whom we have not seen, needs to be kindled, renewed, and sustained by gratitude for the incessant flow of benefits from Him, and by the promise—contingent on ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... shoulder, I saw the door close; the bar of yellow light was there no longer in the darkness of the passage. I thought at that instant that I heard a heavy sigh. I looked sharply round. No one was there. No door was open, yet I fancied, and fancied with a wonderful vividness, that I did hear an actual sigh breathed not far off, and plainly distinguishable from the groan of the sycamore branches as the wind tossed them to and fro in the outer blackness. If ever a mortal's good angel had cause to sigh for sorrow, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... begun to think of him as a controversialist, acute, keen, and persevering, occupied with his personal wrongs and schemes of attack and defence. They were startled from this estimate of his character by the moral duty of that glorious work—I must so call it; by the vividness and force of its delineations, by the unspoiled love of nature apparent in every page, and by the fresh and warm emotions which everywhere gave life to the narrative and the dialogue. Cooper was now in his fifty-first year, but nothing which he had produced in the earlier part of his literary life ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... pictured Tennessee mountains and the mountain people in striking colors and with dramatic vividness, but goes back to the time of the struggles of the French and English in the early eighteenth century for possession of the Cherokee territory. The story abounds in adventure, ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... very mercifully awoke, and lay, for a while, blinking in the ghostly radiance of the moon, which was flooding in at the window directly upon me. Now whether it was owing to the vividness of my dream, I know not, but as I lay, there leapt up within me a sudden conviction that somebody was indeed standing outside in the lane, staring up at my window. So firmly was I convinced of this that, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... should we seek to reduce this universal practice of symbolism, necessary, indeed, since the mind often needs the excitement of the imagination to rouse it into activity, to one monotonous standard of formal propriety? Only let the image duly perform its task, and bring the divine idea with vividness and truth before the mental eye; if this be effected, whether by the art of Phidias, the poetry of Homer, the Egyptian Hieroglyph, or the Persian element, we need not cavil at external differences, or lament the seeming fertility of unfamiliar creeds, so long as the great ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... not to be so easily consoled. He lay awake that night, a prey to poignant self-disgust, remembering in turn his happy childhood at the Mission, his love for the Sitt Hilda, and his recent frowardness, each with a vividness that hurt his brain. Even the patronage of a great Emir seemed nothing worth as compared with the affection of those who had brought him up. The Emir spoke lightly of religion; he despised the missionaries; it might well be he was ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... spots, where the skin had been torn, continued bright with a slight scintillation, whilst the uninjured parts were obscured. When the insect was decapitated the rings remained uninterruptedly bright, but not so brilliant as before: local irritation with a needle always increased the vividness of the light. The rings in one instance retained their luminous property nearly twenty-four hours after the death of the insect. From these facts it would appear probable, that the animal has only the ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... bereaved man had been given, and Bud's heart had given a flop when he read it. The details of the theft had not been told, but Bud never noticed their absence. His memory supplied all that for him with sufficient vividness. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... reproduced at intervals in the bloody Colonel, and the unscrupulous Judge—wise old Uncle Venner—and inappeasable Ned Higgins—are all made to occupy the place on the canvas which shows the lights and shades of their character in the most impressive contrast, and contributes to the wonderful vividness and harmony of the grand historical picture. On the whole, we regard "The House of the Seven Gables," though it exhibits no single scenes that may not be matched in depth and pathos by some of Mr. Hawthorne's previous creations, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... as she met Brent at the door, was pale with the waxen softness of a magnolia petal and though the vividness of her lips and eyes were emphasized by contrast, suffering seemed to have endowed her remarkable beauty with a sort of nobility—an exquisite delicacy that was a paradox for one so tall ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... embroidered and forgotten; tunes that had been silent for years; thoughts and feelings long buried; Philaemon's smile; the serene countenance of Philothea; the death-bed of Phidias; and a thousand other images of the past, came before her with all the vividness of present reality. Exhausted in mind and body, she could not long endure this tide of recollection. Covering her face with her hands, she sobbed convulsively, as she murmured, "Oh, Philothea! why didst thou leave me? My guide, my only ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... philosopher, and reposes with an air that says, "Even this last indignity of being weighed against my will cannot perturb my soaring spirit." But the other two sitting up, look as apprehensive as old ladies in a rocking express, expectant of an accident. The vividness of the colors in this temple is quite wonderful. And much of its great attraction comes rather from its position, and from them, than essentially from itself. At Deir-el-Bahari, what the long shell contains—its happy murmur ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... and confounded the one with the other, yet never touching, would afford a fair representation of this bicephalic life which I lived. Despite the strange character of my condition, I do not believe that I ever inclined, even for a moment, to madness. I always retained with extreme vividness all the perceptions of my two lives. Only there was one absurd fact which I could not explain to myself—namely, that the consciousness of the same individuality existed in two men so opposite ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... into which the surface was divided. Sometimes the colours are distributed according to a scale of rhythm, or symmetry, balancing and counterbalancing each other. Sometimes one special tint predominates, thus determining the general tone and subordinating every other hue. The vividness of the final effect is always calculated according to the quality and quantity of light by which the picture is destined to be seen. In very dark halls the force of colour is carried as far as it will go, because it would ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... unrivaled, giving us, without leaving his own garden, the fine fruit of foreign lands. In reading his poems of the East, it is difficult to believe that he never saw Palestine, nor Ceylon, nor India; and the wonder is no less when he writes of our own wide country. Indeed, the vividness of his poems about the slaves at St. Helena's Island and elsewhere make them among the finest of all his local poems. One called "The Pass of the Sierra" may easily bear the palm among ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... common condition of contemporaneity, or (what I deem a more appropriate and philosophical term) of continuity. But the will itself by confining and intensifying [25] the attention may arbitrarily give vividness or distinctness to any object whatsoever; and from hence we may deduce the uselessness, if not the absurdity, of certain recent schemes which promise an artificial memory, but which in reality can only produce a confusion and debasement of the fancy. Sound logic, ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... individually, were sick and tired of all motion pictures that did not portray with vividness the beauty or the talents of themselves, or the faults of their acquaintances. No Acme people, save Lenore Honiwell and Tracy Gray Joyce and a phlegmatic character woman, were in this picture at all. The camera man who took it did not think highly of ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... unusual state of excitement, which of course justifies and demands a correspondent difference of language, as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in DONNE or DRYDEN is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... He rose from her knee, and Marguerite did not try to prevent him. He was profoundly shocked. With desolating vividness he recalled the Sunday afternoon when he had carried upstairs the plump, living woman now dead. He had always liked Mrs. Lob—it was as Mrs. Lob that he thought of her. He had seen not much of her. Only on that Sunday afternoon had he and she reached a sort of intimacy—unspoken ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Europe. For each chapter of his text he furnishes from twenty to thirty pages of extracts, mainly from vivid, first-hand accounts of the persons, events, and institutions discussed in his manual. In this way the statements in the text-book may be amplified and given added interest and vividness. He has drawn upon the greatest variety of material, much of which has never before ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... road, talking and laughing. The bare-footed women stepped with great active strides, bearing themselves with energy. They carried heavy baskets from the market town, but were not conscious of their weight. The carded-wool petticoats, dyed a robust red, brought a patch of vividness to the landscape. The white "bauneens" and soft black hats of the men afforded a contrast. The Rector's eyes gazed upon the group with a schooled detachment. It was the look of a man who stood outside of their lives, who did not expect to be recognised, and who ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... America, found the port side of the ship unpleasant, because of the sun's brilliance. From every tiny facet of the water, which a brisk breeze crinkled, the light flashed at her eyes with the quick vividness of electric sparks, and almost blinded her. Not even her graceful, slender, and (surprising on that steerage-deck) beautifully white hand, now curved against her brow, could so shade her vision as to enable her to look upon the sea in search of the far sail ...
— The Old Flute-Player - A Romance of To-day • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... given to Literature in entirety and trueness. WORDSWORTH had a morbid dislike of writing letters, his weak eyes throughout rendering all penmanship painful; but the present Editor, while conceding that his letters lack the charm of style of COWPER'S, and the vividness and passion of BYRON'S, finds in them, even the hastiest, matter of rarest biographic and interpretative value. He was not a great sentencemaker; in a way prided himself that his letters were so (intentionally) ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Muse du departement' (The Departmental Muse). Of these 'Eugenie Grandet' is of course easily first in interest, pathos, and power. The character of old Grandet, the miserly father, is presented to us with Shakespearean vividness, although Eugenie herself has, less than the Shakespearean charm. Any lesser artist would have made the tyrant himself and his yielding wife and daughters seem caricatures rather than living people. It is only the Shakespeares and Balzacs who are able to make their ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the Britania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened head, "I really did not expect to have it begin at forty-two." Having made this concession to his acceptance ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... and with increased vividness, the pale blue light playing about in the horizon, and displaying the shapes of the great heavy clouds that overhung ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... contain translations of the first two of these works. The "Germany," the full title of which is "Concerning the situation, manners and inhabitants of Germany," contains little of value from a historical standpoint. It describes with vividness the fierce and independent spirit of the German nations, with many suggestions as to the dangers in which the empire stood of these people. The "Agricola" is a biographical sketch of the writer's father-in-law, who, as ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... the moral force, all this will go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once more dead level—still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled, will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice and virtue will be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... Loti is the nom-de-plume of a well-known French writer. His real name is Louis Marie Julien Viaud, and he is an officer in the French army. His work is particularly celebrated for the vividness and brilliancy of his descriptions. He has described scenes in Africa, India, China, and on the ocean. One of his best books is ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... was, our little master was there, and a captive. True, that since our last glimpse of him, where perched he sat on the topmost rail of the corn-field fence back yonder, he had taken many a pitiful, heart-broken cry, whenever the loved faces and familiar sights of home had risen with sudden vividness before his remembrance. But just at this moment, having followed up a sound night's sleep with a hearty breakfast of venison, he seemed, like the healthy, stout-hearted urchin he was, to have made up his mind not ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... spectacle was fine; turreted gray walls and towers, and streaming bright flags, and jets of red fire and gushes of white smoke in long rows, all standing out with sharp vividness against the deep leaden background of the sky; and then the whizzing missiles began to knock up the dirt all around us, and I felt no more interest in the scenery. There was one English gun that was getting our position ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Hungarian novel, in which the extraordinary dramatic and descriptive powers of the great Magyar writer have full play. As a picture of feudal life in Hungary it has never been surpassed for fidelity and vividness. The translation is exceedingly ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... and from the background of my life a bygone moment rose, one of those memories that linger in the hearts of women with such fidelity and vividness that they lack not a scent, a sound, a line, a word, ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... blood, coming of a different family, was obliterated, carried along in her husband's emphasis of declaration, and his whirl of patriotism. He was indeed a brave man, but no bravery could quite have equalled the vividness of his talk. He worked very hard, till nothing lived in him but his eyes. And Lydia, as if drugged, followed him like a shadow, serving, echoing. Sometimes she had her two children, sometimes ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... with amazing vividness. And in the dreams there was always the feeling that he knew ...It was a very queer, very exciting sensation. He had spoken of it to no one but his mother and Tara; except once at Marlborough, when he had been moved to try whether ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... light fell full upon her face; its warmth seemed suddenly to paint the glow of life upon her pallid skin. He gazed at her intently. Out of the past there came to him with startling vividness the face of the Rachel Carter he had known. Despite the fact that she was now an old woman,—he knew that she must be at least forty-six or -seven,—she was still remarkably handsome. She was very tall, deep-chested, and as straight ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... years later (1857), praised his descriptions "as accurate as they are picturesque. They abound in dramatic and delicate strokes of nature, of which no extracts give an adequate idea, and are painted with a force that brings men, events and prospects before the eye with the vividness of reality. In this power of verbal delineation Mr. Borrow has never been outdone. . . . His descriptions of scenery have a peculiar sublimity and grace." A little later, W. Bodham Donne, a Norfolk man and acute critic, said, "We all read Mr. Borrow's books," but lamented his "plunge into the ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... may possibly be accused, with the purpose of adding a syllable of unnecessary length to the narrative, but for the sake of vividness in presenting the idea of the personnel of the Southern leaders, soon to be known only as historical characters, and of scrupulous accuracy in representing their sentiments, to which, in this case, a notice of time, place, and manner seems as necessary as that of matter, the writer ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... incongruous bookshelves, at their degenerate descendant. And these did but give place, amid strange creaking and contortions of the decaying walls, to spectres more intimate, whose reprobation moved him more: the faces of many persons whom he had known forming themselves, with extraordinary vividness, out of the darkness, and in the red embers of the fire, and each adding its item of particular scorn to the round accusation of futility brought by the rest. They were part of his introspection, all those—he was not sick enough ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... of the oceans and the life that is lived on them—a knowledge and appreciation born in him through a long line of seafaring ancestry and fostered by his own love for the sea—he has a powerful style of writing. Vividness is perhaps its distinguishing characteristic, though fluency and a peculiar feeling for ...
— Sight to the Blind • Lucy Furman
... shadowy hopes of continuous life into a solid certainty of resurrection life. The former is vague and powerless. It is impossible to conceive of the future with vividness unless as a bodily life. And this is the strength of the Christian conception of the future life, that corporeity is the end and goal of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... the days of miracles," I thought to myself, and wondered to hear her talk so. She went on directing her conversation to the past, and seeming to recall its incidents, scenes, and personages, with singular vividness." ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... light in the light of this terrible truth. Chief among these is the Ninety-first. Quite likely it grew up out of the experience of Israel at the last before leaving Egypt. It, of course, has its practical use in one's daily life. But the vividness and intensity of its meaning will probably never be realized as during the coming tribulation days. Nor will the exultant note running through the nine Psalms immediately following it be appreciated as by those experiencing ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... process of decomposition goes on so rapidly, that, unless the specimens are attended to at once, they are lost; and the paintings must be made while they are quite fresh, in order to give any idea of their vividness of tint. We therefore left Mr. Agassiz busy with the preparation of his collections, and Mr. Bourkhardt painting, while we went up the lake through a strange, half-aquatic, half-terrestrial region, where the land seemed hardly redeemed from the water. Groups of trees rose directly from the lake, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... pewter ink-pot, and tried nervously to blacken the letters with the tip of a quill, to make them, if possible, rather less obtrusive than they were. All in vain; they only stood out with more startling vividness when picked out in black upon the brown-stained deal. He felt very like a conscience-stricken murderer trying to hide a corpse that wouldn't be buried. He gave it up at last, having only made a terrible mess with ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... days at the church and in the surrounding woods, nor did any one describe the murder with the vividness he achieved in his description of it. The minister's narrative was pale and colorless by comparison, and those who came from a distance went away convinced that they had talked with an eyewitness to the tragedy and esteemed themselves fortunate. In short, he imposed himself on the situation ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... added fuel to the fire of my unrest. My wearied body and overstrained mind awakened all my imagination into preternatural activity. Ideas, visions, almost inspirations, floated before it with startling vividness. Most of them were grotesque enough, some were ghastly, some recalled thoughts and sensations that had for years been buried in the debris of my past life. But, behind and above them all, hovered ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... the same process applied to that idea of Omnipresence as was applied in the former clause to the idea of Eternity. That thought, so hard to grasp with vividness, and not altogether a glad one to a sinful soul, is all softened and glorified, as some solemn Alpine cliff of bare rock is when the tender morning light glows on it, when it is thought of as the Omnipresence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... yet disturbs this space, though the thin turf has been somewhat picked away by desultory sod-diggers. There is nothing save this squalid, lonely desolation to commemorate the fact that such unhappy and needless deaths were here endured. It is enough. Mere human sympathy takes us back with awful vividness to that time when the poor victims looked their last from this, upon the bleak boundary-hills of the inland horizon and that hopeless semicircle of the sea on the other side. A terrible and fitting place ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... beams and slabs and flooring boards wrested from Nature amid merrymaking and philosophical discourses are not as other beams and slabs and flooring boards. They are old friends and fellow-adventurers, with many a good tale to tell, recalling comical situations in their reminiscences with a vividness that ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... cobwebs in my estimate—compared to the ecstasy of such revenge—for all this flashed through my brain with the swift vividness of lightning, and in less than thirty seconds after his last remark this matter was matured. The woman prevailed over ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... history of the world makes it clear to us that when the art of a country turns to over-elaboration of detail and mechanical dexterity, when there is a general tendency toward vividness of impression rather than poignancy and vitality of expression, then we have the invariable sign of that decadence which inevitably drifts into revolution of one kind or another. Lasus (500 B.C.), who, as previously mentioned, was a great flute and lyre player as well as poet, betrays this ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... But, without this, the mere aspect of such persons is wonderfully imposing. If the pure spirit of Christianity finds a bright comment and illustration in the Madonnas and Cherubim of Raffaelle, it seems to shine out in still more truthful vividness from the brow of a young person rapt in religious ecstasy. The hands clasped in prayer,—the upturned eyes,—the expression of humble confidence and seraphic hope, (displayed, let me suggest, on a beautiful face,) constitute a picture of which, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... and fresh American type. David Harum is a character whose qualities of mind and heart, eccentricities, and dry humor will win for his creator noble distinction. Buoyancy, life, and cheerfulness are dominant notes. In its vividness and force the story is a strong, fresh picture of American life. Original and true, it is worth the same distinction which is accorded the genre pictures of peculiar types and places sketched by ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... Senses and the Intellect,' 2nd edit. 1864, p. 332. Prof. Huxley remarks ('Elementary Lessons in Physiology,' 5th edit. 1872, p. 306), "It may be laid down as a rule, that, if any two mental states be called up together, or in succession, with due frequency and vividness, the subsequent production of the one of them will suffice to call up the other, and that whether we ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... Thorwaldsen's bas-relief of "Morning" having been previously placed in the instrument, Edwards now removed the cap, and the beautiful flying female figure, with the infant in her arms, shone out upon the side of the house with marvelous vividness. ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... Donne, in "Tait's Edinburgh Magazine," explained how "Lavengro" was "not exactly what the public had been expecting." Another friend, Whitwell Elwin, in the "Quarterly Review," reviewing "Lavengro" and its continuation, "The Romany Rye," not only praised the truth and vividness of the descriptions, but said that "various portions of the history are known to be a faithful narrative of Mr. Borrow's career, while we ourselves can testify, as to many other parts of his volumes, ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... been similarly foreshadowed: they amply justified the faith of the artist.... To-day the war pictures continue to multiply; but they have changed character. The inexorable truth of the photograph, and the sketches of the war correspondent, now bring all the vividness and violence of fact to help the artist's imagination. There was something na[:i]ve and theatrical in the drawings of anticipation; but the pictures of the hour represent the most tragic reality,—always becoming more terrible. At this writing, Japan has yet lost no single battle; ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Paulina was one of the strangest episodes of the whole strange experience. Things she had said during our extraordinary talk, things I had hardly heard at the time, came back to me with singular vividness and a fuller meaning. I hadn't any longer the cold consolation of believing in my own perspicacity: I saw that her insight had been deeper ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... tribute in passing to the Californian women. And they are beautiful. In that climate which produces bigness in everything, they grow to heroic size. And as a result of a life, inevitably open-air in an atmosphere always fog-touched, they have eyes of a notable limpidity and complexions of a striking vividness. To walk through that limited area which is the city's heart—especially when the theatres are letting out—is to come on beauty not in one pretty girl at a time, nor in pairs and trios, nor by scores and dozens; it is to see it in battalias and acres, and all of them meeting your eyes ...
— The Californiacs • Inez Haynes Irwin
... is profound. A passing glimpse of this kind is caught, say, by Anna in her hungry desperation, by Levin as he wanders and speculates; and immediately their experience is the fuller by an eloquent memory. The vividness of the small scene becomes a part of them, for us who read; it is something added to our impression of their reality. And so the half-page is not a diversion or an interlude; it speeds the story by augmenting the ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... over garden walls, and vines were yellowing beneath the autumn sky. Her sensitive perception of beauty and grandeur was so much greater than her power of grasping and comprehending them, that her poor little mind became oppressed and bewildered by the disproportion between the vividness with which she received new impressions, and her ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... reconstruct those hideous scenes I marvel that I should preserve so confused, so inchoate a recollection of it all, though from the picture certain episodes stand out in all their original and terrifying vividness. ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... literature no work of man has answered that question with greater vividness of imagery, intensity of concentration, beauty of description—all based in a large measure on the teachings of Christianity—than has Dante in his Divine Comedy. Devised as a love offering to the memory of his beloved Beatrice who in the ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... been a nursemaid, the children under her care would never have been sufficiently bored to become tiresome or intractable, and they also would have gained character to which would have been added an undeniable vividness of outlook. She could not have left them alone, so to speak. In obeying the mere laws of her being, she would have stimulated them. Unconsciously she had stimulated her fellow pupils at school; when she was his companion, her father ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me, I always think: If I were to undertake to write these books today, now that I am aware of their defects, I should never write them. Nevertheless, I continue to write others with the same old faults. Shall I ever attain that mellowness of soul in which all the vividness of impression remains, yet in which it has become possible to perfect the expression? I fear not. Most likely, when I reach the stage of refining the expression, I shall have nothing to say, ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... these?—which are questions, we confess, that we and the public have often asked, with regard to Turner's late pictures—we do not acknowledge a naturalness—the license has been abused—not "sumpta pudenter." It is not because the vividness of "a blade of grass or a scarlet flower" shall be beyond the power of pigment, that a general glare and obtrusion of such colours throughout a picture can be justified. We are astonished that any man with eyes should see the unnaturalness ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... say that in his tramps through the winding alleys of Canton, of Peking, of Shanghai, Peter Moore had encountered many Chinese women of her type. There was a sharp vividness to her features which meant the inbreeding of high caste. She was unusual—startling! She looked into the street furtively, held up a heavily jeweled hand—an imperial order for him to stop—and withdrew. He lounged into the doorway of an ivory ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... comes to those dismal scenes of the wreck, relating all with a strange vividness; living over again, as it were, that fearful episode, till his brain whirled, his self-possession was lost, and he broke out into a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... something to measure the changes by. A shoal of yellow leaves whispers to me of seasons long ago, and the old past days, with their own intimate character that nothing ever repeats, flash before me again with the vividness of yesterday; and a flight of birds—ah! if I could express what they recall! The dead years pass again in a great procession, a motley company—some like emperors, crowned and richly dowered, with the sound of trumpets and the tramping of many obsequious feet; and others like beggars, despoiled ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... Satire. By——? This is a remarkable and interesting story of Modern Life in London Society. It is a powerful work, written with striking vividness. The plot is fascinating, the incidents exciting, and the dialogue epigrammatic and brilliant. "Shams" is written by one of the most popular novelists of the day. Crown 8vo, art cloth, gilt, ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... Roland possessed nevertheless a very real gift of art. He worked on a large scale with a bold confidence. Discarding absolutely the aids of ornament and the rhetorical elaboration of words, he has succeeded in evoking with an extraordinary, naked vividness the scenes of strife and heroism which he describes. At his best—in the lines of farewell between Roland and Oliver, and the well-known account of Roland's death—he rises to a restrained and severe pathos which is truly sublime. This great work—bleak, bare, gaunt, majestic—stands out, to the ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... audience witnessed the leap and flight of the asassin when a woman's shriek pierced through the theatre, recalling all eyes to the President's box. The scene that ensued is described with singular vividness by the poet Walt Whitman, who was present: "A moment's hush—a scream—the cry of murder—Mrs. Lincoln leaning out of the box, with ashy cheeks and lips, with involuntary cry, pointing to the retreating figure, 'He has killed the President!' And still ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... of human nature. At least it was not specially Voltaire's nature. But M. France read M. France's nature into Joan of Arc—all the cold kindness, all the homeless sentimental sin of the modern literary man. There is one book that it recalled to me with startling vividness, though I have not seen the matter mentioned anywhere; Renan's "Vie de Jesus." It has just the same general intention: that if you do not attack Christianity, you can at least patronise it. My own instinct, apart from my opinions, would be quite the other way. If I disbelieved in Christianity, ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... moment, he was undeceived, and ordered off to a new life, from which every instinct of his being shrank afraid. He was cursed with an imagination in excess of his brains, and in the haze of the future he saw two pictures with uncanny vividness—himself in bleak lodgings raising his head from Virgil, to wonder what they were doing at home to-night; and, contrasted with that loneliness, the others, his cronies, laughing along the country roads beneath the glimmer of the stars. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... who always looks on nature with the eye of a true painter and the imagination of a true poet, has represented with delightful force and vividness some of those accidents of light and shade that diversify an ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... becomes the mind itself. The past rises up in spite of ourselves, and overshadows the present. Whether its scenes have been prosperous or afflictive, but especially if they have been shameful, do they present themselves with all the vividness of the objects before us and the passing hour, and infinitely increase our pains. We in vain attempt to escape. We are prisoners in the hands of a giant. To forget is not in our power. The will is impotent. The effort to forget is often ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... convenient purposes. Sylvie went back and forth, and shared the day-watching, beside entertaining Mrs. Lawrence. The two dropped insensibly into their olden positions. Sylvie listened patiently to the death, the loss of fortune, the changes, which Mrs. Lawrence dwelt upon with the exaggerating vividness of a nature completely ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... the legacy to Mavis—the cursed money that he hated, that threw him back into the earlier distress concerning his wife's shame, that restored vividness to the thoughts which had faded in presence of the one overpowering thought of his own ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... some minuteness the account given us by the Greek historian of this mountain march of Theodoric, because it brings before us with more than usual vividness the conditions under which the campaigns of the barbarians were conducted. It will have been noticed that the Gothic army is not only an army but a nation, and that the campaign is also a migration. The ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... its glare backward, and its funeral light showed many a past long since forgotten, but now revealed with new and distorting vividness. Helen remembered the baby which had lived but long enough to open its eyes with a smile that seemed of recognition, and then faded back into the unknown whence it had come. A throb of tenderness for the dead father moved the mother's heart as she thought of her baby, so little ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... over. As she stood motionless before the fireplace, the scene which was about to be enacted flashed before her eyes: Juliette was already there; Henri entered and surprised her. She knew the room; she could see the scene in its minutest details with terrible vividness. And still affected by Monsieur Rambaud's awful story she felt a mighty shudder rise from her limbs to her face. A voice cried out within her that what she had done—the writing of that letter, that cowardly denunciation—was a crime. The truth came to ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... of Mount Horai,[33] which has never been beheld by mortal eye, or of some raging monstrous fish in a rough sea, or of a wild animal of some far-off country, or of the imaginary face of the demon, are often drawn with such striking vividness that people are startled at the sight of them. These pictures, however, are neither real nor true. On the other hand, ordinary scenery, of familiar mountains, of calm streams of water, and of dwellings just before our eyes, may be sketched with an irregularity ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... less than for the neighborhoods through which I got to it, and which were looking their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and richest among the low trees of Highbury Fields, where, when we ascended to them from our tubular station, the lawns were of an electric green in their vividness. In fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the prevailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon rows of humble brick dwellings in ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the time, there was one which struck me with prodigious force, which has remained on my recollection to this hour, and which still survives with undiminished vividness. It was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... still fared well; but we chose the best—a glittering victoria and an animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse's headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city; because, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... of the Arch of the Setting Sun are two long, colorful panels by Frank Vincent Du Mond, inspired by the historical background of the West. They have refreshing vividness of color, clear precision of draughtsmanship and a bright enthusiasm for their subject. With a narrative quality unusual in a mural they commemorate the adventurous spirit that led a stable civilization ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... to hate readily, yet wrathful gleams would be emitted at times even from her blue eyes, as her aunt inveighed in her hard monotone against the "monstrous wrong of the North." They saw their side with such downright sincerity and vividness that the offenders appeared to be beyond the pale of humanity. Few men, even though the frosts of many winters had cooled their blood and ripened their judgment, could reason dispassionately in those days, much less women, whose hearts were kept on the rack of torture ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... silver balls—a mere intricate child's play had it not been for the greatness of the prize—saw themselves closed within the chamber from which they might not issue forth until there was again a prince in Venice; with what vividness a Giustinian foresaw his own stern visage stamped on the coin of Venice in that moment when his name appeared on the first folded paper drawn from the fateful urn; with what dignity he concealed his baffled hope and watched, ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... afflatus of this exquisite little play. It may be well enough to say that such a situation is far-fetched and not very typical—that outside of "The Heavenly Twins," et id omne genus, wives who insist upon remaining maidens are not very frequent; but, in spite of this drawback, the vividness and emotional force of the dialogue and the beautiful characterization (particularly of the old governor and his wife) set certain sweet chords in vibration, and carry the play ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and was certainly not a comet. Moreover, like the other fixed stars, it kept its place unchanged, showing unmistakably that it belonged to the star-depths, not to nearer regions. 'It was exactly like one of the stars, except that in the vividness of its lustre, and the quickness of its sparkling, it exceeded anything that he had ever seen before. It was every moment changing into some of the colours of the rainbow, as yellow, orange, purple, and red; though it ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor |
