"Unvexed" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Some drug of poppies white!—But Peace will come? O ashen savourless alternative, Quietude of the blind and deaf and dumb That all swift motions must alike assuage,— When we are exiled from youth's golden hosts To pace the calm cold terraces of age, With unvexed senses, being but houseled ghosts, Wise, with the uncoloured wisdom of the souls With whom great passions have no more to do, Serene, since ours the dusty arles Death doles, Oblivions dim of all there is to rue!— Peace comes to hearts of whom proud Love has tired; Beyond ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... from, all the more, That gazers pressed in to adore! 'Shall I be judged by only these?' If such his soul's capacities, Even while he trod the earth,—think, now, What pomp in Buonarroti's brow, With its new palace-brain where dwells Superb the soul, unvexed by cells That crumbled with the transient clay! What visions will his right hand's sway Still turn to forms, as still they burst Upon him? How will he quench thirst, Titanically infantine, Laid at the breast of the Divine? Does it confound ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... lives, and such brief records of these as to delight, and console and encourage us all. They bequeath to us the spectacle of a real triumph far beyond the petty gains of money or of applause, the spectacle of lives made happy by literature, unvexed by notoriety, unfretted by envy. What we call success could never have yielded them so much, for the ways of authorship are dusty and stony, and the stones are only too handy for throwing at the few that, deservedly or undeservedly, ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... Governor of the State of New York, with its five millions; and of the Mayors of the two cities, aggregating over two millions of inhabitants? In the place of stillness and solitude, the footsteps of these millions of human beings; instead of the smooth waters "unvexed by any keel," highways of commerce ablaze with the flags of all the nations; and where once was the green monotony of forested hills, the piled and towering splendors of a vast metropolis, the countless homes of industry, the echoing ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... These lads are as lithe and lean as the ponies they bestride. Across the bay, the Sierras of Santa Cruz lift their virgin crests (plumed with giant redwoods) to the brightest skies on earth. Flashing brooks wander to the sea unvexed by mill, unbridged in Nature's unviolated freedom. Far to north and south the foot-hills stand shining with their golden coats of wild oats, a memorial of the seeds cast over these fruitful mesas by Governor Caspar de Portala. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... steady herself. Because already she knew what her decision must be—what her love for him had always meant in the days when that love had been as innocent as friendship. And even now there was little in it except innocence; little yet of passion. It was still only a confused, heavenly surprise, unvexed, and, alas! unterrified. The involuntary glimpse of any future for it or for her left her gaze dreamy, curious, but unalarmed. The future he had offered her she would never accept; no other ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... If she hated him so intensely that she would rather write that note on the blackboard than sit with him, what use was it to sigh like a furnace longer for her? Mr. Perkins had blighted love's young dream for Cyrus with a killing frost. Thenceforth sweet Cecily kept the noiseless tenor of her way unvexed by the ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Coleridge's poems expressions of this conviction as deep as Wordsworth's. But Coleridge could never have abandoned himself to the dream, the vision, as Wordsworth did, because the first condition of such abandonment must be an unvexed quietness of heart. No one can read the Lines composed above Tintern without feeling how potent the physical element was among the conditions of Wordsworth's genius—"felt in the blood ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... moves the heart, Thou art in the quiet air; Here, unvexed of code or creed, Man may breathe his bitter need; Nor with impious lips declare ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... wielded his sword in fight, And he gave his life in the cause of right! When his hope was high, and his youthful dream As warm as the sunlight on yonder stream; His heart unvexed by sorrow or sigh;— Yet,'tis ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... a Dies Irae, When full of misery And torments worse than fiery He crams for his degree; And hitherto unvexed books, Dry lectures, abstracts, text-books, Perplexing and perplexed books, ...
— The Scarlet Gown - being verses by a St. Andrews Man • R. F. Murray
... been in the hall she had forgotten him, but now he had come back to torture her untiringly, as he had done all that week. It had been all very well for her to run through the darkness so happily that evening, unvexed by the accusation of her boldness because she was not bold, for she had not then known the might of cruelty. Indeed, she had not believed that anybody had ever hurt anybody deliberately, except long-dead soldiers ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... Massacre." It was a massacre all right, but did not terminate as the Indians intended. Riddle told me that about ninety Indians were killed in this fight. It broke the war power of the Modoc Indians as a tribe for all time, and from that day the white man could pass unvexed through the country of the Modocs. There were probably isolated cases of murder, but nothing approaching war ever again existed in ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... western hills, then fly like a gull from shore to shore, catching the moonlight on her topsails, but showing no lanterns, they made to windward and dropped anchor, unless their craft were stanch and their pilot's brains unvexed with liquor. On summer nights, when falls that curious silence which is ominous of tempest, the storm ship is not only seen spinning across the mirror surface of the river, but the voices of the crew are heard as they chant at the braces and halyards in words devoid of ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... happy in Argos, a smile on her lips, a gift in her hands, as we met her in Troy, beautiful, adored despite her guilt, as sweet in her repentance as in her unvexed Argive home. Women seldom mention her, in the epic, but with horror and anger; men never address her but in gentle courtesy. What is her secret? How did she leave her home with Paris—beguiled by love, by magic, or driven by the implacable Aphrodite? Homer ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... privileges which should be treated with deference. The reader who studies every line should not fleer at him who studies not at all. Have we not a right to read a play of Shakespeare's through in two short hours, surrendering ourselves, unvexed by logic or grammar, to the enchantment which scenes and phrases and words conjure up as they glide through our minds? When all the atmosphere is tremulous with airs from heaven or blasts from hell, must we, forsooth! stop ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... of the thoughts of the composer), and with the Reformation in the sixteenth century, the noble art of music began a new, unimpeded, and brilliant career among the civilized nations of the world. Dating from thence, the steps in the progress of this delightful science can be plainly traced. Unvexed and unfettered by the obscurities that attach to its antique history, we can contemplate with pleasure and profit the wonderful creations and achievements of ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... Loud from the trump of Fame my name is blown; Best gift of heaven it is, in glory's hour, To think thereon with soberness: and thou? Bethink thee of the adage, Call none blest Till peaceful death have crowned a life of weal. 'Tis said: I fain would fare unvexed by fear. ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... east a great wild country lay open before them, where they could lead that solitary and half-nomadic life which they loved, preserve their old customs, and deal with the natives as they pleased, unvexed by the meddlesome English. Accordingly, many resolved to quit the Colony altogether and go out into the wilderness. They were the more disposed to this course, because they knew that the wars and conquests of Tshaka, the ferocious Zulu king, had exterminated the Kafir population ...
— Impressions of South Africa • James Bryce
... was good or ill I could not then have told; but I could well have told that a victorious secret is to him who strives after earnestness of heart, unvexed by the clamour of his own rebellious ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... for any wider sway: By all the questions of the world unvexed, Supremely loving and superbly sexed, She passed upon her way - Her feminine ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... have been praying over Vicksburg also, and believe our Heavenly Father is going to give us victory there, too, because we need it, in order to bisect the Confederacy, and let 'the Father of Waters flow unvexed ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... exposure were placed by mine to shame their coarser mould. We thought we were in love, or as near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. My playmate, too, flowed on to ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... the indulgent years. So in the visible meadows stand the ancient barns, with roofs of umber tiles parcel-gilded with old gold of lichen, and crowning their seasoned timbers "as naturally as leaves"; restful structures of a quiet age, capacious of dim space, unvexed by the glare ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... a stranger and a foreigner in this curiously self-centred Dunport, and a most disturbing element to its peace of mind. She wondered if, since she had not grown up here, it would not have been better to have stayed away altogether. Her own life had always been quite unvexed by any sort of social complications, and she thought how good it would be to leave this talkative and staring little world and go back to Oldfields and its familiar interests and associations. But Dunport was a dear old place, ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... life worth living. It is our wont to think of our great-great-great-grandmothers as spending their days in undisturbed tranquillity. We take imaginary naps in their quiet rooms, envying the serenity of an existence unvexed by telegrams, telephones, clubs, lectures, committee-meetings, suffrage demonstrations, and societies for harrying our neighbours. How sweet and still those spacious rooms must have been! What was the remote tinkling of a harp, compared to pianolas, and phonographs, and all ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... at ease, at one's ease, at home; with the mind at ease, sans souci[Fr], sine cura[Lat], easygoing, not particular; conciliatory; unrepining[obs3], of good comfort; resigned &c. (patient) 826; cheerful &c. 836. unafflicted, unvexed[obs3], unmolested, unplagued[obs3]; serene &c. 826; at rest, snug, comfortable; in one's element. satisfactory, tolerable, good enough, OK, all right, acceptable. Adv. contently[obs3], contentedly, to one's heart's content; a la bonne heure[Fr]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... it. The preacher's position would be far easier, if there might be a transfer of experience; if some of that bitter painful sense of sin with which the struggling Christian is burdened might flow over into the easy, unvexed, and thoughtless souls of the men of this world. Would that the consciousness upon this subject of sin, of a Paul or a Luther, might deluge that large multitude of men who doubt or deny the doctrine of human depravity. The materials for that consciousness, ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... but could not be pursued in his retreat. On July 9, five days later, the defender of Port Hudson, invested shortly before by Banks, who had not force enough for an assault, heard the news of Vicksburg and surrendered. Lincoln could now boast to the North that "the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea." ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... us this day our daily bread, Let us be duly clothed and fed, And keep thou from our homes afar Famine and pestilence and war, That we may live in godly peace, Unvexed by cares and avarice. ...
— The Hymns of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... meet in the Eternal City in the cause of liberty and the cause of truth. We need to express, each in his own way, unfettered and unvexed by coercion and fear of suppression, the things we believe are right and just and beautiful, and should be said. We know but little, but in this we are agreed—that there is no final, arbitrary and dogmatic truth. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... boundaries of the intellectual world underwent similar expansion. The reward of enterprise might be the discovery of an island in which wild pepper enough to load a ship might be had almost for the asking, or of forests where precious gems had no commercial value, or spice islands unvisited and unvexed by civilization. Every ship-master and every mariner returning on a richly loaded ship was the custodian of valuable information. In those days crews were made up of Salem boys, every one of whom expected to ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... beautiful June had not yet begun to turn her back upon the young summer, when the Olmstead family found themselves lodged as they had never hoped to be; while the Macons, equally content with the arrangement, took their seats in a Pullman sleeper, unvexed by visions of tramps and fire, moths and carpet-bugs, or precious books ruined ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... lake sparkled and wimpled in the morning sun, unvexed now by any steamer's prow, unshaded by any smoke from cities or ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... lucrative post of Secretary. Spenser had found time and place, during a similar service in the same country, to complete the 'Faery Queene'; although the fair land in which the loveliest of English poems has its action was not unvexed by the chronic turbulence of a mercurial and badly used race. Irish residence was coincident in Addison's case, not only with prosperous fortunes and with important friendships, but also with the beginning of the work on which his fame securely rests. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... jealousy, seemed of all others the easiest to deceive. The hide of the rhinoceros is no contemptible gift, and a certain bluntness, I might say coarseness of character, enables a man to go through the world comfortably and happily, unvexed by those petty stings and bites and irritations that worry thinner skins to death. With Lord Bearwarden to suspect was to fret and ponder and conceal, hating and despising himself the while. He had other points, besides his taste for soldiering, in ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... look better. The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea. Thanks to the great Northwest for it; nor yet wholly to them. Three hundred miles up they met New England, Empire, Keystone, and Jersey, hewing their way right and left. The sunny South, too, in more colors than one, also ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. II • John T. Morse
... Joe, the emigrant train which Tom had joined, entered the territory of Kansas. At that early day the settlement of this now prosperous State had scarcely begun. Its rich soil was as yet unvexed by the plow and the spade, and the tall prairie grass and virgin forest stretched for many and many a mile ...
— The Young Adventurer - or Tom's Trip Across the Plains • Horatio Alger
... that they should be any hindrance. He read and re-read the letter, while all eyes but those of Aimee were fixed upon his countenance. With an expression of the quietest satisfaction, she was gazing upon her brothers, unvexed by the presence of numbers, and the transaction of state business. They were there, and she ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... such a golden evening forth there floats, Between the grave earth and the glowing sky In the clear air, unvexed with hazy motes, The mystic-winged and flickering butterfly, A human soul, that drifts at liberty, Ah! who can tell to what strange paradise, To what undreamed-of fields and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... Garden of innocence and joy where the soul, while all unvexed by a sham and superficial civilization of the mind, might yet know growth—a realm half divined by saints and poets, but to the gross majority ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... lead somehow to freedom. They went on in that strange bound way, and the day drew away from them till they turned a sudden corner, when it lay all along the yellow sky across the river, behind a fringe of winter woods, stayed in the moment of its retreat on the edge of unvexed landscape. They stopped involuntarily to look, and she saw a smile come up from some depth ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... Not unvexed by this, for the second time, unexpected response, again he withdrew, and from my wife, and daughters ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... swore him first to secrecy: He wept Your fortune, and with tears not squeezed by art, But shed from nature, like a kindly shower: In short, he proffered more than I demanded; A safe retreat, a gentle solitude, Unvexed with noise, and undisturbed with fears. I ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... necessary consequence of the fall of Vicksburg), and thus terminated probably the most important enterprise of the civil war—the recovery of the complete control of the Mississippi River, from its source to its mouth—or, in the language of Mr. Lincoln, the Mississippi went "unvexed to ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... and unwillingly; and in the end receive the promised gift—years like the days you have called heaven upon earth. Or retract the vows you plighted, receive again the heart and name you gave me, and live unvexed by the stormy nature time alone can tame. Here is the ring. Shall I restore or keep ...
— Pauline's Passion and Punishment • Louisa May Alcott
... surprise quite so much as Bertie and Billy were enjoying their entirely unpremeditated flight from Oscar. The wind rippled on the water; down at the boat-house Smith was helping some one embark in a single scull; they saw the green meadows toward Brighton; their foreheads felt cool and unvexed, and each new minute had the savor ...
— Philosophy 4 - A Story of Harvard University • Owen Wister
... us to defy with impunity the inexorable laws of finance and trade. At the same time, in our efforts to adjust differences of opinion we should be free from intolerance or passion, and our judgments should be unmoved by alluring phrases and unvexed by ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... very pleasant to meet her again. We were white-headed, but she was not; in the sweet and unvexed spiritual atmosphere of the Bermudas one does not ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... together to drink at sweetest streams, climbing hand in hand among the difficult slopes, opening in sudden dances round the mossy knolls, gathering into companies at rest among the fragrant fields, gliding in grave procession over the heavenward ridges—nothing of this can be conceived among the unvexed and unvaried felicities of the lowland forest: while to all these direct sources of greater beauty are added, first the power of redundance,—the mere quantity of foliage visible in the folds and ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... standing before him with the exquisite clarity of her complexion unclouded; with the dark pools of her eyes unvexed by the weight of hideous perfidy that should be stifling ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck |
