58 Metaphors for descriptions

The only published accounts are those made by Zoellner, and in the absence of notes made at the time, all descriptions of phenomena given now by the other persons present would be valueless, except as indicating the impression made upon them at the time by the occurrences.

Though indeed your supposition that I should have taken the trouble to annoy you, and your description of that good-for-nothing as an unhappy drunkard, are signs of intolerance which I should not have expected in a man so favoured.

The description of the Bukaua practice is the fuller.

"'You did well,' said Richelieu; 'but what description of person is this Radbod?

Description, like this: "What sort of person a miser is; what sort of person a flatterer;" and other things of that sort, by which the nature and life of a man are described.

His general description of Boswell is savage: 'Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye, visible, palpable to the dullest.

Descriptions of drawings are clumsy things at best; the reader must fill up the sketch for himself by the eye of faith.

The pleasantest description is Jefferson's: "His person, you know, was fine, his stature exactly what one would wish, his deportment easy, erect and noble.

But if the characters are unpleasing the craftsmanship of The Magnificent Ambersons is of Mr. BOOTH TARKINGTON'S best, and his description "of the decline and fall of a locally supreme dynasty of plutocrats before the hosts of the Goths and Huns of spawning industrialism is almost a contribution to American social history.

But the geographical description of Africa by Alfred, is so desultory and unarranged as to defy criticism.

Description is the peculiar talent of Thomson; we tremble at his thunder in summer, we shiver with his winter's cold, and we rejoice at the renovation of nature, by the sweet influence of spring.

This description of these Humours, drawn from the knowledge and observation of particular persons, was the peculiar genius and talent of BEN.

The description, for whomsoever intended, is a lifelike portrait of Sir Robert Peel.

A brief description from Thackeray's English Humorists is his best epitaph: A life prosperous and beautiful, a calm death; an immense fame and affection afterwards for his happy and spotless name.

His description of the battle in the straits is a passage of signal power, and is justly celebrated.

The description of the moods and mysteries of the sea is well-nigh incomparable; and not even in the whole of Hugo's works can there be found anything more vivid than Gilliatt's battle with the devil-fish.

"Verbal description is a slow affair compared with action.

It is a spirited poem, full of rush and incident, and the descriptions of the sea are the best in Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Professor Jebb has pointed out, in a recent volume of this series, that the description of the tortures of the Inquisition, which so deeply moved Corporal Trim in the famous Sermon on Conscience, was really the work of Bentley; but Sterne has pilfered more freely from a divine more famous as a preacher than the great scholar whose words he appropriated on that occasion.

For the naturalist the most comprehensive description of things may be the conception of mass-points in motion; or it may be some more recondite conception to which physical analysis points.

One of the first evenings that I enjoyed these scenes of indescribable beauty, I could not help but observe to my companion, that the finest poetical descriptions of a celestial Paradise, were not ideal representations of imaginary pleasures, but true word images of the joys and beauties of the "Elysian Fields" (Champs Ely sees) in Paris.

These descriptions of soups were perfect luxuries, and were taken instead of sweets.

[Footnote 7: The best descriptions of the rice industry are Edmund Ruffin, Agricultural Survey of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C. 1843); and R.F.W. Allston, Essay on Sea Coast Crops (Charleston, 1854), which latter is printed also in DeBow's Review, XVI, 589-615.]

[Transcriber's Note: The brief descriptions often found enclosed in square brackets are "sidenotes", which appeared in the original book in the margins of the paragraph following the "sidenote."

The description of Paradise may be a glittering farrago; the description of the landscape may be full of sweet rural images: the one having a glare of gaslight and Vauxhall splendour; the other having the scent of new-mown hay.

58 Metaphors for  descriptions