"Characteristic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand, and willingly adopted the opinion advanced by the Chancellor (Lord Northington), that "the measure was strictly legal, and that no indemnity was necessary." Lord Northington's language on the subject Lord Campbell describes as "exhibiting his characteristic rashness and recklessness, which seemed to be aggravated by age and experience,"[19] and the censure does not seem too severe, since he presently "went so far as to maintain that the crown had a right to interfere, even against a positive act of parliament, and that ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... represents the Dakota village; the single horseman, covered by a shield, and hanging behind his horse's neck in a characteristic way, represents the attacking Omahas. Bullets are flying, the ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... that all impartial observers must acknowledge, that by far the most prominent cause is the conduct of the abolitionists. . . . . Nor is it by argument that the abolitionists have produced the present unhappy excitement. Argument has not been the characteristic of their publications. Denunciations of slaveholding, as manstealing, robbery, piracy, and worse than murder; consequent vituperation of slaveholders as knowingly guilty of the worst of crimes; passionate appeals to the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... grocery and came back with the articles demanded. Main Street's curiosity had never been so whetted and teased. If it had been any one but Amzi; but it was so unmistakably Amzi! Amzi placed the box under the window and stood upon it. Then with characteristic nonchalance he removed the wrapper from the cake of soap, while the crowd surged and shuffled, filling the street again in its anxiety to miss nothing. Amzi broke the bar of soap in two, and calmly trimmed half of it to serve as a crayon. As he began to write upon the glass, his guards ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... Bishop sat down, he examined him carefully, noticing that there was nothing noticeable about him. He seemed a characteristic prelate—large, genial, ruddy and smiling, with bright eyes and well-cut mouth. He was in his purple and ferraiuola, and carried ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... young German perceived that his neighbour could not be an Englishman, as his servant had told him he was. His strikingly thin, finely-cut features, and his peculiarly oval, black eyes and soft, dark beard betrayed much more the Sarmatic than the characteristic Anglo-Saxon type. ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... formidable. It is the faction that makes them truly dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France; that informs it as a soul; that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions, and the same general views, in other men and in other communities. It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... to "establish" himself in his role, just as an actor does. At first he felt his way tentatively and with tact. Every store has its own tone and atmosphere: in a day or so he divined the characteristic cachet of the Beagle establishment. He saw what kind of customers were typical, and what sort of conduct they expected. And the secret of conquest being always to give people a little more than they expect, ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... Lord Home as a conspirator—'in good faith he will never help his friend or harm his foe'—and the praises of Bower, are characteristic, and, here, are in place; elsewhere they are idle repetitions, mere copies. The apology for bad writing—Logan could not employ a secretary in this case—is natural: the two days writing agrees with Sprot's evidence. ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... the response with a characteristic toss of her head. "With those pins in your mouth you talk like a dialect story. I'm off now. Dr. Morgan wishes the committee to meet in her parlor. I suppose she wants to get our mouths into the 'papa, potatoes, prunes and prisms' shape ...
— Elizabeth Hobart at Exeter Hall • Jean K. Baird
... the cleared space what was presumably a quadrille, though it bore almost as great a resemblance to a Scottish country dance, or indeed to one of the measures of Bretonne France, which was, however, characteristic of the country. The Englishman has set no distinguishable impress upon the prairie. It has absorbed him with his reserve and sturdy industry, and the Canadian from the cities is apparently lost in it, too, for theirs is the leaven ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... beyond all limits. Conditions were as disastrous as in the time of Wang Mang. And once more, as then, a popular movement broke out, that of the so-called "Yellow Turbans". This was the first of the two important events. This popular movement had a characteristic which from now on became typical of all these risings of the people. The intellectual leaders of the movement, Chang Ling and others, were members of a particular religious sect. This sect was influenced by Iranian Mazdaism on the one side and by certain ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Dr. Saleeby had gone up to Byron and said, "My lord, I perceive you have a club-foot and inordinate passions: such are the hereditary results of a profligate soldier marrying a hot-tempered woman." The poet might logically reply (with characteristic lucidity and impropriety), "Sir, I perceive you have a confused mind and an unphilosophic theory about other people's love affairs. Such are the hereditary delusions bred by a Syrian doctor marrying a Quaker lady from York." Suppose Dr. Karl Pearson had said to Shelley, "From what I see ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... Taine, who generally pays little attention to the opinion of others, gives as Lord Byron's predominant characteristic that which phrenologists denominate "combativite." Which of the two is likely to be right? If Moore is right, Lord Byron must have been almost wanting in consistency of character; if Taine is correct, then Byron was really of a most passionate nature. But as we have proved that Lord ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... proceeding, so disreputable to all concerned, and so characteristic of the fidelity with which the business of "Uncle Sam" is managed, was not confined to the detention and destruction of the poor orphan's letters, but to the piracy of their ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... there is a characteristic letter to General Crawford, concerning the dismissal of an officer, whom Cromwell would have restored. "Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit he be, shall that render him ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... take the breakfast dishes from the sofa and carry them downstairs. One by one my friends arrived, the clock struck seven, and to our great astonishment, Solling had not yet appeared. One, two, even five minutes passed before we heard him run upstairs and knock at the door with his characteristic short blows. ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... horned cattle are said to be the same species as those in Europe, but they differ so much in appearance, that we were inclined to doubt it: They have indeed the palearia or dewlap, which naturalists make the distinguishing characteristic of the European species, but they certainly are found wild, not only in Java, but several of the eastern islands. The flesh of those that we eat at Batavia, had a finer grain than European beef, but it was less juicy, and miserably ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... absolutely unknown among the North Italians; sometimes one comes upon a young Italian who wants to learn German, but not often. Priggism, or whatever the substantive is, is as essentially a Teutonic vice as holiness is a Semitic characteristic; and if an Italian happens to be a prig, he will, like Tacitus, invariably show a hankering after German institutions. The idea, however, that the Italians were ever a finer people than they are now, will not pass muster with ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... consistently the Jingo party. He was an aristocrat, in the sense that all our public men were then aristocrats; but he was very emphatically what may be called a commercialist—one might almost say Carthaginian. In this connection he has the characteristic which perhaps humanized but was not allowed to hamper the aristocratic plan; I mean that he could use the middle classes. It was a young soldier of middle rank, James Wolfe, who fell gloriously driving the French out of Quebec; it was a young ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... last part of the poem we find a beauty of image and comparison that thrills us, and something of that strange, weird suggestiveness which was characteristic of all of Poe's poetry, the thing he has in common ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... is no introduction and no notes—merely a postscript in which the translator declares that he has endeavored everywhere faithfully to reproduce the peculiar tone of the play and to preserve the concentration of style which is everywhere characteristic of Shakespeare. He acknowledges his indebtedness to the Swedish translation by Hagberg and the German by Schlegel. Inasmuch as this work was published for wide, general distribution and for reading in the schools, Lassen cut out the passages which he deemed unsuitable for the untutored ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... consisted of Mrs Musgrove, Henrietta, and Captain Harville, beside their two selves. He gave her a very plain, intelligible account of the whole; a narration in which she saw a great deal of most characteristic proceeding. The scheme had received its first impulse by Captain Harville's wanting to come to Bath on business. He had begun to talk of it a week ago; and by way of doing something, as shooting was over, Charles had proposed coming with him, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... stranger, old Mr. Lonner was seated near the side of his bed in his private apartment. Although weighed down by age and the grief that had oppressed his early life, he nevertheless possessed that gentleness and sociability, which had ever been the characteristic traits of his life. His flowing white locks fell around his countenance, from which the traces of manly beauty had not been entirely eradicated, and as he smoked his pipe with an air of dignified ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... realms of gold" is rendered impossible by the cares of business, has seemed sufficient excuse for its being. Though the beauty of the original is of necessity lost in a condensation of this kind, an endeavor has been made to preserve the characteristic epithets, and to retain what Mr. Arnold called "the simple truth about the matter of the poem." It is believed that the sketch prefacing each story, giving briefly the length, versification, and history of the poem, will have ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... of the second story, I imagined that I discovered vestiges of that catastrophe which the past night had produced. The bed appeared as if some one had recently been dragged from it. The sheets were tinged with yellow, and with that substance which is said to be characteristic of this disease, the gangrenous or black vomit. The floor ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... lies prostrate at my feet. It does not know that a sick conscience is a characteristic trait of all slaves. It is the universal self-accuser. Were the people—individually and collectively—to sin on a grand scale, were they to refuse to be the puppets of the man-made idols—were that to happen, masters and slaves would ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... members of the same tribe or race gather around a common center or occupy a continuous stretch of territory, as compactly as their own economic status, and the physical conditions of climate and soil will permit. This is characteristic of all mature and historically significant peoples who have risen to sedentary life, maintained their hold on a given territory, and, with increase of population, have widened their boundaries. The nucleus of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... for Bruce's machinations, and those machinations were conceived and carried on with consummate and characteristic cleverness. Bruce did not spread his net in the sight of the bird, but set to work with wariness and caution. He determined to try the arts of fascination, not of force. The thought of the desperate wickedness involved in his attempt either never crossed his ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... swallowed this title so readily, from that time I have designated, and I shall always designate him, by the title of JOHN GULL, instead of John Bull; GULL being a most appropriate title, with a very significant and truly characteristic meaning. ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... governor of that state, whose speech on the French revolution has been already quoted, threatened to join in lynching Mr. Hale, if he ever set foot in Mississippi, whither he invited him to come for that purpose. This part of the debate was so peculiar and so characteristic, showing so well the spirit with which the District of Columbia was then blazing against me, that I cannot help giving the following extract from Mr. Foote's speech, as contained in the ...
— Personal Memoir Of Daniel Drayton - For Four Years And Four Months A Prisoner (For Charity's Sake) In Washington Jail • Daniel Drayton
... one that has been characteristic of the Anglican Church ever since. It has always been restless in the presence of a divided Christendom; the sin of the broken unity has always haunted it. It never has taken the smug attitude of sectarianism, a placid self-satisfaction with its own perfection. It has ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... little centre of a purely agricultural region, we find here one of those small, specific industries, as characteristic of French districts as soil and produce. Folks being great water-drinkers, they will have their drinking-water in a state of perfection. Some native genius long ago invented a vessel which answers the requirement of the most fastidious. This is a pail-shaped receptacle ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... as his wife had given her name, Nina, to Nineveh,*** and was, as the companion of the Chaldaean Bel, styled the divine lady Belit; she was, in fact, a chaste and warlike Ishtar, who led the armies into battle with a boldness characteristic of her father.**** ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... painting, and for various other arts and pursuits of an absorbing character. She had hardly any acquaintances except her relations, but possessed an enormously large number of extremely intimate friends—a characteristic that had remained to her ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... splendid period of the art revival covered the latter part of the fifteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth. The characteristic art of the Renaissance in Italy was painting, although the aesthetic genius of the Italians also expressed itself both in architecture and sculpture. [Footnote: The four supreme masters of the Italian Renaissance were Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Michael Angelo ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... sanguine complexion, with a broad, good-natured visage, which he could lengthen at will in a surprising manner. His hair was cropped close to his head, and the razor did daily duty over his cheek and chin, giving him the roundhead look, some years later, characteristic of the Puritanical party. Nicholas had taken to wife Dorothy, daughter of Richard Greenacres of Worston, and was most fortunate in his choice, which is more than can be said for his lady, for I cannot ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... organism. Taken altogether, the internal secretions are the forces which build up the man's and woman's distinctively sexual constitution: the special disposition and growth of hair, the relative development of breasts and pelvis, the characteristic differences in motor activity, the varying emotional desires and needs. It is in the complex play of these secretions that we now seek the explanation of all the peculiarities of sexual constitution, imperfect or one-sided physical ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... resulting vices fall into two classes. Vices resulting from the former sort of temptation are vices of defect. Vices resulting from the latter form of temptation are vices of excess. As one of these temptations is usually much stronger than the other, we will discuss simply the strongest and most characteristic temptation in connection with each object. Yet as both classes of vice exist with reference to every object, it will ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... This characteristic of these ceremonies appeared most strikingly in the custom which required that the departed ancestors should be represented by living relatives of the same surname, chosen according to certain rules that are ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... and so forth, will be made, and may be met by the true consideration that something of this sort is inevitable in autobiography. However, for the matter of vanity, all I know of myself is the fact that praise, if consciously undeserved, only depresses me instead of elating; that a noted characteristic of mine through life has been to hide away in the rear rather than rush to the front, unless, indeed, forced forward by duty, when I can be bold enough, if need be; and that one defect in me all know to be a ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... one in my cap that it might move along with me, and give me light whichever way I turned." A still severer school of discipline had, previously to his appearance in the London garret, given his mind the practical turn chiefly characteristic of his life and works. He was born in 1782, at Norton, in Derbyshire, and when eight years old lost his father. His mother married again, and in 1798 proposed to apprentice him to a solicitor in Sheffield. Whilst walking through that town the boy saw some wood carving in a shop window. ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... photograph of a Cygni, taken November, 26, 1886, shows that the H line is double, its two components having a difference in wave length of about one ten-millionth of a millimeter. A photograph of o Ceti shows that the lines G and h are bright, as are also four of the ultra-violet lines characteristic of spectra of the first type. The H and K lines in this spectrum are dark, showing that they probably do not belong to that series of lines. The star near [chi]' Orionis, discovered by Gore, in December, 1885, gives a similar spectrum, which affords additional ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... gave rise to this remark is too long to relate in the text, but is highly characteristic and instructive for Wagner's attitude towards art. It will be found in the sixth volume of Glasenapp's biography, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... then the sort of thing that was fortunately characteristic of the men who rose in the nick of time to seize the reins. He hurried to his quarters, packed in its case the sword of honor that had once been given him by his Queen, and despatched it without a written line of comment to Mahommed Gunga. The native who took it was ordered to ride like ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... It was characteristic enough of the parties engaged in the great political drama that the republic now requested from France and Great Britain a written recognition of its independence, and that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... if rather carelessly, and presented to the world a somewhat imposing personality. He did not wear gloves, and he had no flower at his button-hole; but the respectability of his silk hat and well-made coat was unimpeachable, and he had all the air of easy command which is so characteristic of the well-bred Englishman. The slight roughness about him was as inseparable from his build and his character as it is to the best-groomed and best-bred staghound or mastiff of the ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... incident to a sensation leave permanent traces, which are the physical bases of memory. One or several such remembered sensations, evoked by a present sensation, combine with it to form an Emotion. Characteristic of their origin is it that the emotions fall naturally into a dual classification, in which the one involves pleasurable or elevating, the other painful or depressing conditions. Thus we have the pairs joy and grief, hope and ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... fond eye those who have graced these collections look as diverse as sheep to their shepherd, or the members of a Chinese family to their uncle; and if there is an allegation which I would 'deny with both hands', it is this: that an insipid sameness is the chief characteristic of an anthology which offers—to name almost at random seven only out of forty (oh ominous academic number!)—the work of Messrs. Abercrombie, Davies, de la Mare, Graves, Lawrence, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1920-22 • Various
... against the wall. An Indian (for Indians were plenty in that region then) passed along as the bereaved mother washed the bloody corpse of her murdered child, and learning the cause of its death, said, with characteristic vehemence, 'If I had been here, I would have put my tomahawk in his head!' meaning ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... contain a yellow oil, bitter and astringent, with a characteristic odor, having a taste somewhat resembling the odor. In decoction they are used for diarrhoea and dysentery, on account, doubtless, of the tannin they contain. The dose is 1-2 seeds dried, pounded and infused with ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... intelligence in our own times to an extent which can hardly be over-estimated. Far more mind has been employed in constructing the great fabric of knowledge, which we call science, than in any other pursuit of men. Far more mind has had its characteristic qualities and temper imparted to it by scientific study than by study in any other field. It is of science—which to all intents and purposes means physical science—of science and its methods and results that the modern mind is most confident, and speaks with the most natural and ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... him, and then flew back to try and save some of her own treasures. The first thing she thought of was her portfolio of drawings, which she dragged outside; but it had already been partially burned, and most of the valuable and characteristic sketches she had made at the different durbars were destroyed. She next tried to rescue her jewels, many of which she had worn the night before; her pearls were lying on the dressing-table, and she was only just in time to save them; one of the strings had caught fire, and several ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... many more who surrendered at discretion. The latter were formed into a brigade, and were distributed throughout the valley of the Nile in military settlements. They submitted to their fate with that resignation which we know to have been a characteristic of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... them. Harold knew that his plans could not be carried out with a woman for companion—and he had sense enough to know that Mary's words were born of a momentary enthusiasm. When he spoke it was with characteristic blunt honesty. ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... the year 1210 (edited by Dr. Robert Reinsch, Leipzig, 1890). While endeavoring to retain somewhat of the quaintness and naivete of the original, I have omitted those repetitions and tautological expressions which are so characteristic of mediaeval literature. The religious application of the various animals is usually very long, and often is the mere repetition of the same idea. The symbolical meaning of the lion here given may be taken as a ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... happy thought of setting up the body of the dead bird by the aid of wires, very much as a taxidermist mounts them. This plan worked well and enabled him to have his birds permanently before him in a characteristic attitude: "The bird fixed with wires on squares I studied as a lay figure before me, its nature previously known to me as far as habits went, and its general form having ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... heart cried out. The grim remorselessness of that business had no pity for hearts. There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself about him—about his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved resort of tiny, helpless things. With characteristic insight he saw he must part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in such a situation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless thing prevailed. He would not run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and so to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Comparison, which was introduced by Spurzheim. Direct perception of truth is its leading character. Illustration by comparison belongs to the breadth of the forehead, to the Ideal and Inventive region, and is the characteristic of poetry. Spurzheim's description, however, is substantially correct. It qualifies for clear statement, but not for comprehensive or ingenious reasoning. The portion on the median line has still more penetration, in consequence of which it perceives the nature and tendencies ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... two prime factors in Plutina's detestation of Hodges. The first was due to his insolence, as she deemed it, in aspiring for her favor. With little training in conventional ideas of delicacy, the girl had, nevertheless, a native refinement not always characteristic of her more-cultured sister women. There was to her something unspeakably repugnant in the fact that this bestial person should dare to think of her intimately. It was as if she were polluted by his dreaming of her kisses, of her yielding to his caresses. That he had so aspired ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... men to War: instinctive hostility and hostile intention. In our definition of War, we have chosen as its characteristic the latter of these elements, because it is the most general. It is impossible to conceive the passion of hatred of the wildest description, bordering on mere instinct, without combining with it the idea of a hostile intention. On ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... very afternoon, he donned his best funeral suit and boarded the same train himself. As he passed through the drawing-room car he bowed to the great man, who returned his greeting with the shortness characteristic of him, and passed on to the smoker, where he ensconced himself in a chair near the door, depositing on the seat next to him a pile of magazines and his coat. Half an hour passed and the car filled up, save for ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... smart journalistic instinct characteristic of all his school, the editor of The Atheist had put first in his paper and most prominently in his window an article called "The Mesopotamian Mythology and its Effects on Syriac Folk Lore." Mr. Evan MacIan ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... is incontestable that the Zohar makes allusions to the beliefs in the Trinity and the Incarnation."[63] M. Vulliaud adds: "The idea of the Trinity must therefore play an important part in the Cabala, since it has been possible to affirm that 'the characteristic of the Zohar and its particular conception is its attachment to the principle of the Trinity,'"[64] and further quotes Edersheim as saying that "a great part of the explanation given in the writings of the Cabalists resembles in a surprising manner ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... Spanish Christianity upon the soil of the United States was wholly characteristic. In quest of the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de Leon sailed for the coast of Florida equipped with forces both for the carnal and for the spiritual warfare. Besides his colonists and his men-at-arms, he brought his secular priests ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... remarks, in his 'Principles of Psychology,' such solitary hallucinations of the sane and healthy, once in a life-time, are difficult to account for, and are by no means rare. 'Sometimes,' Mr. Tylor observes, 'the phantom has the characteristic quality of not being visible to all of an assembled company,' and he adds 'to assert or imply that they are visible sometimes, and to some persons, but not always, or to everyone, is to lay down an explanation of facts which ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... identified with the "Imagist" movement in poetry and with the technical use of 'vers libre'. These movements, however, were not yet influencing poetry when "The Little Book of Modern Verse" was edited, and Miss Lowell is, therefore, represented by a lyric in her earlier and less characteristic manner. Her volumes in their order are: "A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass", 1912; "Sword Blades and Poppy Seed", 1914; "Men, Women, and Ghosts", 1916. Miss Lowell is also the editor of "Some Imagist Poets", 1915; "Some Imagist ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... happiest nations are those in whose people you witness the least sensible reverses from gayety to dejection; and that thought, which is the noblest characteristic of the isolated man, is also that of a people. Freemen are serious; they have objects at their heart worthy to engross attention. It is reserved for slaves to indulge in groans at one moment and laughter ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stations. A wound received, or a limb lost, will, in many instances, constitute a stronger recommendation for political preferment than long experience, coupled with ability and high character. This disposition to reward those who have faithfully served the country in time of war is an amiable characteristic of the American people, and proves that, in this particular at least, republics are not ungrateful. But it is clear, at the same time, that the public gratitude, thus turned into political channels, may be productive of great evil, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... names I have forgotten, but they had one common characteristic. They were puffed up with spiritual pride, and I used to amuse myself with finding their originals in the Pilgrim's Progress. When I tried to judge them by the standard of old Peter, they fell woefully short. They shut out the ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... of Rousseau. It deliberately refused to consider man as he really was under its own eyes, and persisted in seeing nothing in him but the abstract being created in books. Consequently, with the blindness and obstinacy characteristic of a speculative surgeon, it destroyed, in the society submitted to its scalpel and its theories, not only the tumors, the enlargements, and the inflamed parts of the organs, but also the organs themselves, and even the vital ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... One is nothing; two are a coincidence; three are a moral certainty. A really trained man can see a molehill; I can see a mountain; most of you fellows couldn't see the Himalayas." With which sage remark he thoughtfully lit his pipe and relapsed into silence. And silence being his usual characteristic he came into the Battalion Head-quarters dug-out one evening and dropped quietly into a seat, almost unnoticed by the somewhat noisy group around ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... that madame was waiting for them upstairs. In the drawing-room Valdoreme was standing with her back to the window like a low-browed goddess, her tawny hair loose over her shoulders, and the pallor of her face made more conspicuous by her costume of unrelieved black. Caspilier, with the grace characteristic of him, swept off his hat, and made a low, deferential bow; but when he straightened himself up, and began to say the complimentary things and poetical phrases he had put together for the occasion at the cafe the night before, the lurid ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... in 1755, his father being a Jacobite refugee from Scotland. He began to paint at an early age, worked faithfully at drawing, and finally, at the age of nineteen, began portrait painting in earnest. One of his first pictures was a striking example of a remarkable characteristic, the power of visual memory, which he retained through his whole life. His grandmother had died five or six years before, but he painted a portrait of her, producing so striking a likeness that it immediately brought him orders for others. But Newport ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... powerful champions. He was founder and principal editor of the Pere Duchesne, a poor imitation of the journal, published under the same title, by Hebert, in the time of the first Revolution. This paper, one of the most characteristic of the Commune, was filled with trivialities, in the vilest taste and slang, which cannot be rendered in English. The first number of Vermesch's journal was published on the 6th of March, but was suppressed by General Vinoy; it re-appeared, however, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... have with which to work. Mistakes have been made in the past by the prospective nut growers because they did not stop to consider the possibilities of the nuts that were native in their own locality, but looked abroad for something else. This is characteristic of many people. "Distant fields look green," and, of all the imported nut trees, none except the English walnut have been of any success here whatever, while, in one instance at least, their importation has resulted ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifth Annual Meeting - Evansville, Indiana, August 20 and 21, 1914 • Various
... Carolina to assist in pulling down the Tory ascendancy of the disaffected portion of upper South Carolina. In one of these expeditions Col. Johnston experienced an adventure—a passage at arms, which, as an incident of the war and characteristic of his bravery, is here worthy of narration. On Pacolet river, near the place where the late Dr. Bivings erected a factory, Col. Johnston, in a skirmish, had a personal rencontre with Patrick Moore, a Tory officer, ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... brown cloak hanging from his shoulders, sat a short stout personage, a man about thirty years of age, with fair flaxen hair, a florid complexion, a very fair skin, and massive German features. The expression of his face, so far as such a countenance could be said to have any characteristic expression, was that of ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... each generation followed various honourable professions, but they failed to rise to high rank in them, owing, I fancy, to a want of worldly ambition—the general characteristic of our race. Altogether, however, I believe them to have been a simple-minded, upright, clear sighted set of people, who did whatever their hands found to do honestly and with all their might. Such people ought to rise, it may be said. So they ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... great social revolution, with its various and endless aspects, affecting all central Europe, and being more or less felt in the west, the north, and the south. On one side, the Greek and Latin partiality for ancient corporations, modified by a democratic element, and an innate feeling of opposition characteristic of barbaric tribes; and on the other, the free spirit and equality of the old Celtic tribes rising suddenly against the military hierarchy, which was the offspring of conquest. Europe was roused by the double current of ideas ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... for the fight, and looking forward to it with eagerness. There had been possibly a slight pallor upon his face, as Miss Dodge had adjusted his mask of gauze, but, as Burns recalled it, this was a common matter with many surgeons, and it might easily have been characteristic of Leaver himself, even though Burns had not remembered it. His own heart was thumping heavily in his breast, as it had never thumped when he had been the chief actor ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... bring the three boats alongside, and in a few seconds more the crew were congratulating their comrades with that mingled feeling of deep heartiness and a disposition to jest which is characteristic of men who are used to danger, and think lightly of it after ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... often in these manuscripts, we seem to see Casanova thinking on paper. He uses scraps of paper (sometimes the blank page of a letter, on the other side of which we see the address) as a kind of informal diary; and it is characteristic of him, of the man of infinitely curious mind, which this adventurer really was, that there are so few merely personal notes among these casual jottings. Often, they are purely abstract; at times, metaphysical jeux d'esprit, like the sheet ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... side of the road they found the ends of two similar buildings (D, E). This looks as if this portion of the fort was filled with four barracks. On the other side of the row of buildings I-III remains were traced of stone structures; one of these (F) had the L-shape characteristic of barracks, and indications point to two others (G, H) of the same shape. This implies six barrack buildings in this portion of the fort and ten barrack buildings in all, that is, a cohort 1,000 strong. But the whole fort is only just 3 acres, ...
— Roman Britain in 1914 • F. Haverfield
... has led is seen, in the general tendency of our artists, to shun the deep and sober tones of the Italian school, and, as their phrase is, to put as much daylight as possible into their works. But even here I would pause to suggest, that light, daylight, in its great characteristic, is more lustrous than white, and will be produced rather by the lower than the lighter tones, as may be seen in the pictures of Claude, whose key of colouring is many degrees lower than in pictures which affect his light, without his means of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... This is the question asked by an ever- increasing number of thoughtful teachers. They have no wish to displace or to discredit the classics. On the contrary, they love and revere them. But they do wish to give their pupils something additional, something that pulses with present life, that is characteristic of to-day. The children, too, wonder that, with the great literary outpouring going on about them, they must always fill their cups from ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... remain permanently depressed, and shortly after his return to Lochlea, a trifling accident to a ewe he had bought prompted him to the following delightful and characteristic production. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land. One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it "this very un-Jewish characteristic." She was perfectly well aware both of the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race. In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy test I have suggested; ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... it insensibly rises towards the distant Sierra Ventana. There are in this neighbourhood some other and lower plains, but they do not abut one at the foot of the other, in the manner hereafter to be described, so characteristic of Patagonia. The plain on which the settlement stands is crossed by many low sand-dunes, abounding with the minute shells of the Paludestrina australis, d'Orbigny, which now lives in the bay. This low plain is bounded to the south, at the ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... objected to this with an indignation that was scarcely in the sequel justified, because Mary found the book jammed against the paint-box and a dry walnut nestling in its centre. She cried and protested and then suddenly, with the disgusting sentimentality that was so characteristic of her, abandoned her position altogether and said that Jeremy could have it, and then cried again because he ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... make-believe—an age of wild people, of insane impulse, of homicidal mania. The sweet-souled songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic. Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty—for the naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North- -he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his part, had always held that poetry ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... respectable young and married ladies in the place are attending them. These are steps in the right direction, and show that our fair countrywomen, with the grand good sense which is their leading characteristic, are resolved to supply whatever in our ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to measure one of them, before they were skinned and cut up. It had a body four feet in length; and a tail two and a half feet long, black at the tip, but without the characteristic tuft of the lion. Its limbs were very thick and muscular, to enable it to climb trees and spring a great distance. Its coat was of a light tawny tint, and ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... certain ungracious epithets. Emboldened by success, he went further with his experiments: he began to alter sentences and their meaning: and he was really skilful in it. The whole art of it consisted in preserving the general appearance of the sentence and its characteristic form while making it say exactly the opposite of what Christophe had meant. Mannheim took far more trouble to disfigure Christophe's articles than he would have done to write them himself: never had he worked so ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... followed where his conscience led. Before his conversion he was a great smoker. The missionary asked him one day if he smoked for the glory of God. He took the cigarette from his mouth, threw it away and never smoked again. This was characteristic of his determination and his unfaltering devotion to what he esteemed to ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... in some respects, the authentic voice of health. Undoubtedly the most characteristic thing about the past is that it is not present, and to lavish on it too tragic and intense a devotion is to love death more than life. And yet our bluff Englishman can learn in two words how it comes about that his invitation represents a demand for the impossible. In ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... in idea is "Modern Daughters." Mr. Black has written some exceedingly clever conversations, which give us verbal pictures, so to speak, of some characteristic types of American womanhood. The chapters called "With a Gym Girl" and "With a Club Woman" are specially successful. There is a perception and a sense of humour about them which make them not only delightful to read, but worth thinking about afterwards. The ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of the ordinary chambers, except that they are separated by much smaller intervals. Examples of this arrangement are still to be seen at S. John's College, Jesus College, and Queens' College, Cambridge; but perhaps the most characteristic specimen of all is that which was built over the Hall at Pembroke College in the same University, by Laurence Booth (Master 1450-1480), the aspect of which has been preserved in Loggan's print, ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... and he has symmetrically formed and arranged the members, to give combined and appropriate action to the whole. This would point to an allotment of the soul and the elementary body to Washington, and of the arranging, developing, and informing spirit, to Hamilton—the same characteristic which is found in the great works he devised for the country, and are still the chart by which his department of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... unskilled. The only really efficient officers and engineers they had were a few Englishmen and Americans and two Germans. The Japanese, from Admiral Count Ito, who commanded, down to the youngest of the bluejackets, were not only brave with the inherited recklessness of death and suffering, which is characteristic of their race, but were also highly trained in every branch of their profession, first-rate sailors, excellent gunners. And the fleet had for years been exercised in manoeuvres, so that the ships could work together as an organized whole. The spirit which animated it was that of "No surrender—Victory ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... then placed his palms on the corresponding parts of the invalid's body, and pressed his head several times between his hands. After touching any part of the invalid, Hostjoghon threw his hands upward and gave one of his characteristic hoots. The song-priest placed coals in front of the invalid and herbs upon them, as he had done the day before, and then retired. The coals were afterwards thrown out of the fire opening and the crowd rushed ...
— Ceremonial of Hasjelti Dailjis and Mythical Sand Painting of the - Navajo Indians • James Stevenson
... by what uncommon Accident she, the erst Ballet Dancer in the King's Opera-House at Paris, had come to be the tenant of this Outlandish House, and arrayed in this Heathen Habit. She answered me with that Candour and Simplicity which I ever found characteristic of her. Old Mr. Lovell was still alive, and in Paris; and this is how his Daughter had become separated from him. A very brilliant Engagement, as First Dancer, indeed, had been offered to her at the King's Theatre at Palermo; and, after long unsuccessful importunities ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... that superb unconcern which is the characteristic of genius," replied the Ambitious Writer, contemptuously passing ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... Codex at least, nothing is to be taken for granted, nothing charged to a careless scribe, and no variants regarded as being identical in value—with a very few exceptions, to which I shall advert later. Wherever there remains enough of any glyph to show its characteristic strokes, it can be regarded as safely indicated; whenever the strokes are not just those characteristic of any glyph, it cannot be inferred. Down to the very end of the various revisions I found myself able to add glyphs which at first seemed hopeless, and yet when once seen became ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates
... reclosing of the safe and the removing of the hashish tabloids, leaving no clew beyond the delirious ravings of a drug slave—for so anyone unacquainted with the East must have construed West's story—is particularly characteristic. His own tabloids were returned, of course. The sparing of his life alone is a refinement of art which points to ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... Sheane, the residence of Dr. Harris, on the 11th, and were received by him with the characteristic kindness with which friends or strangers are ever welcomed by that gentleman, He had accompanied Mr. Oxley as a volunteer in 1818, and his name was then given to the mount which formed the extreme point to which the main body of the first expedition down the banks of the Macquarie penetrated, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... afterwards the chevalier Nicolas Iron, then one of the inquisitors, astonished me greatly by telling me the whole story, giving the names of all the actors. He did not tell me whether any one of the band had betrayed the secret, and I did not care to know; but I could clearly see the characteristic spirit of the aristocracy, for which the 'solo mihi' ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... struck her as excessive, but I confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was irritating in the narrowness of that lady's point of view? "Mrs. Saltram," I explained, "undervalues him where he's strongest, so that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he's weak. He's ...
— The Coxon Fund • Henry James
... introduced in Shadwell's play, the Lancashire Witches, 1682, as a persona dramatis, along with Mother Dickinson and Mother Hargrave, two of the witches convicted in 1633, but without any regard to the characteristic circumstances under which she appears in the present narrative. The following invocation, which is put into her mouth, is rather a favourable specimen of that play, certainly not one of the worst of Shadwell's, in which there are many vigorous strokes, with an alloy of coarseness ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... during this time Mrs. Ray and Willy sat together in a room above. The reason of Ralph's absence had been explained to his mother by Rotha, who had received her information from Robbie Anderson. The old dame had accepted the necessity with characteristic resignation. What Ralph thought well to do she knew would be best. She did not foresee ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... 1894, to present a silver chalice to Hawarden Church as "a memorial of Mr. Gladstone's sympathy with and assistance to the Armenian people." Mr. Gladstone's address to the deputation was regarded as one of the most peculiar and characteristic acts of his life. He gave himself wholly to the cause of these oppressed people, and was stirred by the outrages and murders perpetrated upon them as he was 18 years before. He said that the Turks should go out as they did go out ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... Nature's side of the picture. The reverse was this: the earth everywhere torn and disfigured by prospectors, whose picks had produced the effect of some huge snout of swine, applied with the industry characteristic of that animal in forbidden grounds. Rude cabins were scattered about, chiefly in the neighborhood of the stream. Rockers, sluice-boxes, and sieves strewed its borders. Along the dusty road which led ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... son-in-law continues the family of his wife's parents, and lives in their home. The custom is still very prevalent in Japan, but it is not considered very honorable in China to enter into a strange family in this way. It is characteristic that Mosu, as a punishment for disdaining to "marry into" a family the first time, is obliged to "marry into" a second time, the family of ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... he cried in a husky voice, wiping away a tear that sprang unbidden to his eye, with the characteristic ready emotional sympathy ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the night almost every breath came with an effort, but he scarcely heeded the fact. With characteristic persistence he forced himself to follow her steps in imagination from the time she left home until she reached her destination. The eight-o'clock sleeper that she had taken was due in Chicago at five-thirty. She would probably not leave it before ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... civilization to that race would be an artificial state of existence.[3] The vestiges of barbarism characterize the African, in his normal state. The latent principle of cannibalism, lurks, in dormant energy, within the very core of his being, and constitutes a prominent characteristic of his animal existence. The economy and order of nature is no less marked in the carnivorous than in the herbivorous mammalia and quadrumana; and although their physical distinctions are not always so marked as to render apparent, ...
— The Right of American Slavery • True Worthy Hoit |
