My dear friend, I wish you would abandon this vain chimera of your imagination, and let common sense and reason convince you of the folly of this mad rebellion.' "'And what then?

Let us open the door to madness, then; let us accept as possible the most absurd chimeras, let us live in the realm of nightmare, outside of laws and facts.

Your Eastern manners, garb, and face Appear a strange chimera; None, none but you can now be styled Romantic, picturesque, and wild, In this prosaic era.

The like effects almost are to be seen in such as are awake: how many chimeras, antics, golden mountains and castles in the air do they build unto themselves?

And, moreover, the startling event of which I am to write has (to borrow again from the sage Montaigne) created in me "so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without design or order, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make them ashamed of themselves."

I recollected myself before I had disclosed the grotesque and infernal chimera that haunts me.

And there can be no doubt that he has dispelled the horrible chimera, that the same man can be thoroughly malignant or mean in his moral nature and thoroughly beneficent or exalted in his intellectual nature.

One is never too old to find that chimera.

(Melanelius e Galeno, Ruffo, Aetio,) and dare not be alone in the dark for fear of hobgoblins and devils: he suspects everything he hears or sees to be a devil, or enchanted, and imagineth a thousand chimeras and visions, which to his thinking he certainly sees, bugbears, talks with black men, ghosts, goblins, &c., Omnes se terrent aurae, sonus excitat omnis.

To speak in a word, there is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible, incredible, so monstrous a chimera, so prodigious and strange, such as painters and poets durst not attempt, which they will not really fear, feign, suspect and imagine unto themselves: and that which Lod.

He also purchased a chimera of polychrome clay; it brandished its mane of hair, and its sides resembled a pair of bellows.

This infinite succession of combinations of atoms is, as I showed before, a more absurd chimera than all the absurdities some men would explain by that false principle.

I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret; but melancholy shrinks from communication, and I never found a man before, to whom I could impart my troubles, though I had been certain of relief.