Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 17, 2025
For to the mind that sees and thinks in pictures, temptation comes in pictures which the mind makes for itself, or has presented to it and at once lights up pictures horrible and once seen hard to forget and to escape. Are we to call these "visions" the word is ambiguous or are they imaginative presentments of evil, as it thrusts itself on the soul, with all its allurements and all its ugliness?
He lighted a lamp on the table and drew the chair up to it. On the boards of the partition in front of him were pasted many presentments of his favourite screen actress, Beulah Baxter, as she underwent the nerve-racking Hazards of Hortense. The intrepid girl was seen leaping from the seat of her high-powered car to the cab of a passing locomotive, her chagrined pursuers in the distant background.
Forasmuch as, however, in the recovery from delirium a patient may marvel over the incredulity of neighbours who refuse to give credence to the presentments that have been ipso facto to him, so, the nation being sound again, and its constitution hale, I expect little but a laugh for my piety in relating of the following incident; which, nevertheless, is as essential true as that he who shall look through the knot-hole in the plank of a coffin shall acquire the evil eye.
The letter clerk seized a batch of correspondence and sorted it with nimble fingers. The form of the question told him that Spencer was interested in letters stamped for the greater part with bland presentments of bygone Presidents of the United States.
And as, on the one hand, it is so hard to drive away the thought we would fain be rid of; so, upon the other, the pleasant imaginations which we would so gladly retain are, sooner or later, jostled away by the crowd of claimants for birth into the world of consciousness; which hover as a sort of psychical possibilities, or inverse ghosts, the bodily presentments of spiritual phenomena to be, in the limbo of the brain.
It is true that, up to the present, I have not been able to learn that any of those fatal portraits have absolutely been exposed for sale, though I direct my trembling steps almost every day to Regent Street, and search the windows of the Stereoscopic Company with furtive and foreboding eyes, dreading to be confronted with presentments of myself Bedell Gruncher, 'Vitriol, the great critic! lying across a chair in a state of collapse, sucking my thumb in a Gainsborough hat, or bestriding a ridiculous wooden horse with my face towards its tail!
The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty rabbis, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors, by masters who, if younger than they assume to be, must have been quite old enough to know better. Mr. Bultitude was a tall and portly person, of a somewhat pompous and overbearing demeanour; not much over fifty, but looking considerably older.
The act-books teem with such presentments as the following: one Holaway refuses to give to the poor-box, "and is found able by the parish." Thomas Arter will give but a half-penny to the poor. Arter appears and "saithe that he is not of the wealthe that men takithe him to be." The judge commands him to pay a half-penny every week, and dismisses him.
And Pierre was yet more overcome when he began to examine these presentments of humanity, magnified as by the eyes of a visionary, overflowing in mighty sympathetic pages of cyclopean symbolisation. Royal grace and nobility, sovereign peacefulness and power every beauty shone out like natural florescence.
Do not our personal presentments mock each of us individually our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of his dressing-glass, and complacently conceives himself to be a very different appearing person from what he is, forgetting that his right side has become his left, and vice versa?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking