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More "Artless" Quotes from Famous Books



... chiffon-draped cushions were meant for use, not ornament. Flowers were tastefully arrayed in every available position; the tea-table lacked only the presence of pot and kettle; Jill had arranged the little curl on her forehead at its most artless and captivating angle—in a ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... always easy to get a hearing, to procure an audience, but means could be found. Soon your name would be on every one's lips. Your art is fresh. The jaded world likes freshness. The cynical town runs to artless art as an antidote to its own poison. Most of the players are wrinkled and worn. A young face will seem ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... isn't at all what I mean. Now cut out the artless prattle and let me find some sense in this history ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... either face. Raoul was no favourite in the royal circle, and his visible cowardice in the recent campaign had brought him into open disfavour with the lion-hearted Edward. He loved Arthyn dearly, and this proof of her independence of spirit, together with her artless confidence in his kindliness of heart, pleased him not a little. He had been forced during these past days to act a stern part towards many of the Welsh nobles who had been brought before him. He was glad enough, this thankless task accomplished, to allow the softer ...
— The Lord of Dynevor • Evelyn Everett-Green

... without a mental image. As like as not he pictures all his relatives at a distance with their eyes shut. No boy wants to write familiar things to a forgotten aunt with her eyes shut. His thoughtless elders require him not only to write to her under these discouragements, but to write to her in an artless ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell

... poring, ye pale sons of toil, Who waste in studious trance the midnight oil, Say, can ye emulate with all your rules, Drawn or from Grecian or from Gothic schools, This artless frame? Instinct her simple guide, A heaven-taught Insect baffles all your pride. Not all yon marshall'd orbs, that ride so high, Proclaim more loud a present Deity, Than the nice symmetry of these small cells, Where on each angle genuine ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... artless narrative. The little man was at school again, God bless him, while his brother lay scalped upon ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... went, what she did, even what she thought—in simple, artless language that made me know her better, in the thorough workings of her nature, than during those long months of our intimacy ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... has a rare gift for composing stories for children. With a light, yet forcible touch, she paints sweet and artless, yet ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... willing to let the whole framework, as it were, of the book go by the board; it is not the thread of the narrative, but the sketches and incidents strung on it, that appeals to them. They revel in the fascinating novelty and ingenuousness of the Du Maurier vein, the art that is superficially so artless, the exquisitely simple delicacy of touch, the inimitable fineness of characterisation, the constant suggestion of the tender and true, the keen sense of the pathetic in life and the humour that makes it tolerable, the lovable drollery that corrects the tendency to the sentimental, ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... all that he longed for at this precise moment, even though he hurried to meet her. It was more the WOMAN IN HER—the something that satisfied his inner nature when he was with her—her coy touches of confidence, her artless outbursts of admiration, looking up in his face as she spoke, the dimples playing about the corners of her mouth. He revelled in all those subtle flatteries and cajoleries, and in all the arts to please of which she was past mistress. ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... he introduced to them the indisputably learned, the very argumentative, crashing, arrogant, pedantic, dogmatic, philological German gentleman, Dr. Gannius, reeking of the Teutonic Professor, as a library volume of its leather. With him is his fairhaired artless daughter Delphica. An interesting couple for the beguilement of a voyage: she so beautifully moderates his irascible incisiveness! Yet there is a strange tone that they have. What, then, of the polite, the anecdotic Gallic M. Falarique, who studiously ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and invariably by the same process; all, without exception, have violet eyes and velvet lips, (and sometimes the heroes also have the latter!) and all of them should wear key-holes at their ear-rings. Indeed, here is our quarrel with Mr. Reade. The conception of an artless woman is impossible with him. Plenty of beautiful ideals he creates, but with the actual woman he is almost unacquainted: Lucy Fountain, of all his feminine characters, is the only one whose counterpart ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... have taken for my text are very characteristic of this Apostle's manner. He has a great, wide-reaching truth to proclaim, and he puts it in the simplest, most inartificial manner, laying side by side two artless sentences, and stimulates us by the juxtaposition, leading us to feel after, and so to make our own, the large lessons that are in them. Let me, then, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... I shall not dress you for crying and roaring, but for being good and speaking with civility.' Just as she said these words, the door opened, and in came the lady whom I before saw, and whose name I afterwards found was Artless. As soon as she entered, the nurse addressed her, saying, 'Pray, madam, is it by your desire that Miss Nancy behaves so rudely, and bids me dress her directly, and change the buckles in her shoes, or else she will slap my face? Indeed she did give me a slap upon my hand; so ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner

... framing the enquiries that might best extort the desired evidence, and calculating with a judgment by no means to be despised, from the bearing, the turn of features, and the complexion of the victim, the probability whether he was making a frank and artless confession, or had still the secret desire to impose on the royal examiner, or from a different motive was disposed to make use of the treacherous authority which the situation afforded, to gratify his revenge upon some ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... strange compound; under an appearance of the most artless simplicity she concealed an iron will, and had hidden from every one of her family, and even from her most intimate friends, her firm resolve to become the Duchess of Champdoce. All her rambles in the neighborhood had turned ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... old Blake portraits still presided, and he found, for the first time, an artless humour in the formality of the ancestral attitude—in the splendid pose which they had handed down like an heirloom through the centuries. Among them he saw the comely, high-coloured features of that gallant ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... quote any parallel allusion in Byron?' You can ask all that: but you are not getting within measurable distance of it. Your mind is not even moving on the right plane. Or let me turn back to some light and artless Elizabethan thing—say to the Oenone duet in ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... as he was rather out of breath and very much moved, and I looked at him, for I felt pity for this poor, artless devil, and I was just going to give him some sort of answer, when the boat stopped. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... northern beauty to the fair of England; how would the simple graces of her seraphic form, which looked more like a being of air than of earth, put to shame the labored beauties of the court? And then it was not only the artless charms of a wood-nymph he would present to the wondering throng, but a being whose majesty of soul proclaimed her high descent and peerless virtues. How did he congratulate himself, in contemplating this unsullied temple of virgin ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... her, conversed with her in French, bowed and scraped before her, and called her "chere Maman"—a term to which she always responded in a tone of similar lightness and with her beautiful, unchanging smile. Only the lachrymose Lubotshka, with her goose feet and artless prattle, really liked our stepmother, or tried, in her naive and frequently awkward way, to bring her and ourselves together: wherefore the only person in the world for whom, besides Papa, Avdotia had a spark of affection was Lubotshka. Indeed, Avdotia always treated her with ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... the port of a tall young mountain- griffone, or negress, who is comely and knows that she is comely: it is a black poem of artless dignity, primitive grace, savage exultation of movement.... "Ou march tte enlai conm couresse qui ka passlarivi" (You walk with your head in the air, like the couresse-serpent swimming a river) is a creole comparison which pictures perfectly the poise of ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... he could have heard, no human voice, not even hers, could so have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him of her love for this same Cricket were once more freshly spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment was again before him; her pleasant voice—oh, what a voice it was for making household music at the fireside of ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... adorn our purses, Hitherto an artless place; More than pictures, songs, or verses, This ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 25, 1893 • Various

... finding fault with this and turning up his nose at that; and going in and coming out he was simply full of ennui. And as all the girls in the garden were just in the prime of youth, and at a time of life when, artless and unaffected, they sat and reclined without regard to retirement, and disported themselves and joked without heed, how could they ever have come to read the secrets which at this time occupied a place in the heart of Pao-yue? But so unhappy was Pao-yue within himself that he soon felt loth to stay ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... And the artless simplicity of Shelley's technique—much more really simple than the conscious "childishness" exquisite though that is, of a Blake or Verlaine—lends itself so wonderfully to the expression of youth's eternal sorrow. His best lyrics ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... one day with her attendant outside the city. The bandits carried their two captives to Anatolia, and there sold them. The little girl, who gave promise of great beauty, fell to the lot of a rich merchant of Broussa, the harshest, most severe, and intractable man of the town; but the artless grace of this child touched even his ferocious heart. He conceived a great affection for her, and distinguished her from his other slaves by giving her only light employment, such as the care of flowers, etc. A European gentleman who lived with this merchant ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... which justly you ascribe to Swift, is vernacularity; he never forgets his mother-tongue in exotic forms, unless we may call Irish exotic; for Hibernicisms he certainly has. This merit, however, is exhibited—not, as you fancy, in a graceful artlessness, but in a coarse inartificiality. To be artless, and to be inartificial, are very different things; as different as being natural and being gross; as different as being simple and ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... help fancying, dear, in spite of her innocent face and her artless ways, that your ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins

... that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old ballads is very artless; yet they contain many passages which would illustrate this opinion; and, I hope, if the following Poems be attentively perused, similar instances will be found in them. This opinion may be further illustrated by appealing to the Reader's own experience of the reluctance ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... West Indies, or knows human nature, will not be surprised that I should have continued this connection as long as I remained on the island. From the artless manner in which Carlotta had conducted her plot; from her gestures and her agitation, I was quite sure that she was a novice in this sort of crime, and that should she ever relapse into her paroxysm of jealousy, I should be able to detect any farther attempt ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... despair of the poor man thus torn up as it were by the roots was so artless, it showed so plainly the purity of his ways and his ignorance of the things of life, that Madame de Listomere and Mademoiselle de Salomon talked to him and consoled him in the tone which mothers take when they promise a plaything to ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac

... checking her horse and looking in his face. A quick conviction that she was on the point of some confession sprang into his mind, but unfortunately showed in his face. She beat back his eager look with a short laugh. "There, don't speak, and don't look like that. That remark was worthy the usual artless maiden's invitation to a compliment, wasn't it? Let us keep to the subject of yourself. Why, with your political influence, don't you get yourself appointed to ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte

... my Father's cottage stood, (The Woman thus her artless story told) One field, a flock, and what the neighbouring flood Supplied, to him were more than mines of gold. Light was my sleep; my days in transport roll'd: With thoughtless joy I stretch'd along the shore My father's nets, or watched, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... succeed," says I, in a low, gentle tone of voice. "Where anything but pure nature is expected, I must always keep in the shade. You know, Cousin E. E., what an artless young thing I ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... said Jeanne; and it struck him that her words were strangely like those which Eileen might have spoken had she been there, only an artless comradeship replaced what would have been Miss Brokaw's tone of intimacy. She added, with genuine sympathy in her face and voice: "You must be exhausted, M'sieur Philip. If you were Pierre I should insist upon going ashore for a number of hours. Pierre obeys me when we are together. ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood

... the soldiers of the Union in the late war, and endured all the dangers and privations of hospital life, is Miss Melcenia Elliott, of Iowa. Born in Indiana, and reared in the Northern part of Iowa, she grew to womanhood amid the scenes and associations of country life, with an artless, impulsive and generous nature, superior physical health, and a heart warm with the love of country and humanity. Her father is a prosperous farmer, and gave three of his sons to the struggle for the Union, who served honorably to ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett

... Clarence Hervey's speedy marriage with an heiress, Miss Hartley, and found them confirmed by a letter Lady Delacour received from him. Some years ago he had formed the romantic idea of educating a wife for himself, and having found a beautiful, artless girl in the New Forest, he had taken her under his care on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... that was much. Well I will see your rustic here. This infant passion must be crushed. Poor wench! some artless boy has caught thy youthful ...
— Speed the Plough - A Comedy, In Five Acts; As Performed At The Theatre Royal, Covent Garden • Thomas Morton

... baby on shore by somebody else, 'he' would know it, meeting it in the street: which, seeing that he had never set eyes upon it in his life, was not very likely in the abstract, but was probable enough to the young mother. She was such an artless little creature; and was in such a sunny, beaming, hopeful state; and let out all this matter, clinging close about her heart, so freely; that all the other lady passengers entered into the spirit of it as much as she: and the captain ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... prompted: he charged himself with the business of burning the bodies. This required some organisation. There were official formalities to fulfil, and the materials had to be assembled—the fuel, the improvised furnace, the iron bars, salt and wine and oil to pour upon the pyre. In his artless 'Records' he describes the last scene on the seashore. Shelley's body was given to the flames on a day of intense heat, when the islands lay hazy along the horizon, and in the background the marble-flecked Apennines gleamed. Byron looked on until ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow

... given me this cruel pain I feel!—You do not know the world; it is malignantly spiteful. People will perhaps say that your husband sent you back to your parents. Children brought up as you were, on your mother's lap, remain artless; maidenly passion like yours for Wenceslas, unfortunately, makes no allowances; it acts on every impulse. The little heart is moved, the head follows suit. You would burn down Paris to be revenged, with no thought of the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... straight under her Cambrai cap, the head-dress with its yellowing flaps, which she never left off even for great occasions. Good fortune had not changed her. She was a true peasant of the Rhone valley, independent and proud, without any of the sly humilities of Balzac's country folk, too artless to be purse-proud. One pride alone she had—that of showing her son with what scrupulous care she had discharged her duties as guardian. Not an atom of dust, not a trace of damp on the walls. All the splendid ground-floor, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet

... This book, unlike the others, was not rejected; for the simple truth, told by an earnest pen, touched and interested. It was accepted, and has been kindly welcomed, thanks to you, Jamie; for many buy it to learn more of you, to weep and smile over artless words of yours, and forget their pity in their reverence and love for the child who taught the man to be, not what he is, but what, with God's help, ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott

... companion and sister. She appealed to Dr. Harlowe, in her sweet, bewitching way, which always seemed irresistible; but he only gave her a genial smile, called me "a brave little girl," and bade me "God speed." "I wish Richard Clyde were here," said she, in her own artless, half-childish manner, "I am sure he would be on my side. I wish brother Ernest would come home, he would decide the question. Oh, Gabriella, if you only ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... conversation was artless and confiding to a degree, and the servant could not help feeling that as from visitor to common serving-man this state of things was highly improper. His conclusion was that one of two things must be the explanation—either that this was a begging impostor, or that the prince, if ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... comprehend the trick that had been played upon him, although as yet he could not fully credit it. What mainly bewildered him was that Clara, whom he had always supposed to be as artless as a child—Clara, whom he had cared for as an elder and a father—should have been able to keep a secret and devise a plot and carry out ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... him patiently, helping him out with questions and artless, admiring exclamations and comments, until he was quite sure that she was properly impressed. Then she said, in a tone of honest sympathy: "But you mustn't let all this worry you, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... introduced this conversation between Wilhelmina and Ramsay, to show not only what influence he had already gained over the artless, yet intelligent girl, but also the way by which he considerately prepared her for the acknowledgment which he resolved to make to her on some future opportunity; for, although Ramsay cared little for deceiving the father, he would not have married ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat

... 18): "A becoming gait is one that reflects the carriage of authority, has the tread of gravity, and the foot-print of tranquillity: yet so that there be neither study nor affectation, but natural and artless movement." Therefore seemingly there is no virtue about the style ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... all, the question that puzzled him the most,—not without reason: it might have puzzled the shrewdest bystander. The artless candour with which she manifested her liking to him was at variance with the ordinary character of maiden love; it seemed more the fondness of a child for a favourite brother. And it was this uncertainty that, in his own ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... 'tis enough to note That here in dwarf proportions were expressed The limbs of the great world; its eager strifes Collaterally pourtrayed, as in mock fight, 585 A tournament of blows, some hardly dealt Though short of mortal combat; and whate'er Might in this pageant be supposed to hit An artless rustic's notice, this way less, More that way, was not wasted upon me—590 And yet the spectacle may well demand A more substantial name, no mimic show, Itself a living part of a live whole, A creek in the vast sea; for, all degrees And shapes ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... cold, Whose virtues, rightly understood, Are, as Bethesda's waters, good. Strange words—The World, The Flesh, The Devil— Poor Babe, what can it know of Evil? But we must silently adore Mysterious truths, and not explore. Enough for him, in after-times, When he shall read these artless rhymes, If, looking back upon this day, With quiet conscience, he can say "I have in part redeem'd the pledge Of my Baptismal privilege; And more and more will strive to flee All which my Sponsors kind did ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... and deepens the humour is, of course, produced in the two cases in two exactly opposite ways. In both cases it is a picture of human simplicity—of a noble and artless nature out of harmony with its surroundings—which moves us; but whereas in the Spanish romance the simplicity is that of the incompris, in the English novel it is that of the man with whom the incompris consorts. If there is pathos as well ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill

... rider—though a slave in his youth; His artless earnest sermons were the simple tale of truth, How the Son of God who loved us, left a scepter, crown and throne, All the joys of highest heaven, to go, ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger

... the palace as happy as he at that moment, and that was the Nabob. Escorted by his friends, he occupied, filled the main aisle all by himself, talking in a loud tone, gesticulating, so proud that he seemed almost handsome, as if, by dint of gazing long at his bust in artless admiration, he had caught a little of the splendid idealization with which the artist had softened the vulgarity of the type. The head at an elevation of three-fourths, free from the high rolling collar, gave rise to contradictory opinions from the spectators concerning the resemblance; ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... hand over the smooth sheen of her dress; her gown was chaste, even stern, in its simplicity—the expensive simplicity that is artful rather than artless. ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst

... skein; of course the thread Got tangled, snarled and twisted; "Have Patience!" cried the artless maid, To him ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... This artless epistle was quickly enclosed in an envelope, addressed and deposited in the post-box. Afterward pretty little Rosalind spent a night of dreamless slumber and awoke in the morning as fresh and innocent-looking as the fairest of the ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... Brahmana, I am Syumarasmi by name. I have come here for acquiring knowledge. Desirous of doing good to myself I have started this conversation in artless candour and not from desire of disputation. The dark doubt has taken possession of my mind. O illustrious one, solve it to me. Thou hast said that they who take the path of the good (viz., Yoga), by which Brahma is attained, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... doorstep of a brick tenement a curly-haired child sat, puzzling over the convolutions of a tangled string. Liz flopped down beside her, with a crooked, shifting smile on her flushed face. But her eyes had grown clear and artless of a sudden. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... greatness, who noticed at the same moment that her eyes were full of tears. This little scene is not only charming and touching, it is very significant, suggesting a combination of such qualities as are not always found united: sovereign good sense and readiness, blending with quick, artless feeling that sought no disguise—such feeling as again betrayed itself when on her ensuing proclamation the new Sovereign had to meet her people face to face, and stood before them at her palace window, composed but sad, the tears running ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling

... dignity, the King's ease with him, their conversation, in which the King courteously draws from Johnson knowledge of that in which Johnson is expert, Johnson's manly bearing and voice throughout—all is set forth with the unadorned vividness and permanent effect which seem artless enough, but which are characteristic of only ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... hastily fill in a few blanks in my previous sketch of our island career and to pass on to features of novelty and interest—vignettes of certain natural and unobtrusive features of the locality, first-hand and artless. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... and silver oaks. They had been old and gnarled of trunk, when the man whose life had just guttered out inside had come, young and militant, to preach the letter of that law, whose spirit was to his understanding a fourth dimension. Through the long windows of colored but artless glass, now partly raised, poured slanting panels of summer sun, mottling the interior and its occupants with dashes ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... Felice was seated in one of them, with her coat still huddled about her, she looked around with artless curiosity, and watched as in a dream, while the Major put his hand on ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... and cares, discloses, in a touching manner, the domestic relations of Southern families and their servants wherever Christianity prevails. It is one strain of the ordinary music of life in ten thousands of those households, falling accidentally upon our ears, and giving us truthful, artless impressions, such as labored statements and solemn depositions would not so well convey, and which theories, counter-statements, arguments, and invectives never can refute. Our senior pastor would say that the letter is like the Epistles of John,—not a doctrinal exposition, ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams

... ingenuous as she was, the girl had, at first, drawn near to her cousin, simply and naturally, obeying the law of attraction that draws the young toward the young. She had met his friendly advances with the immodesty of innocence, artless effrontery, the liberties taught by life in the country, the happy folly of a nature abounding in high spirits, and with all sorts of ignorant hardihood, unblushing ingenuousness and rustic coquetry, against which her cousin's vanity was without means of defence. The child's presence ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... irrelevant to their language. Wherefore the matter was received with approbation, and by frequent use was much improved. To the native performers the name of histriones was given, because hister, in the Tuscan vocabulary, was the name of an actor, who did not, as formerly, throw out alternately artless and unpolished verses like the Fescennine at random, but represented medleys complete with metre, the music being regularly adjusted for the musician, and with appropriate gesticulation. Livius, who several years after, giving ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius

... whose sweethearting went no farther than her artless lips. There was not a spice of mischief in the girl. What she had told La Testolina had been no more than the truth: Master Baldassare was good to her—better than you would have believed possible in such a crabbed old stub of a man. He was more of a father to her than ever Don Urbano had been ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... hovered about him with open admiration, held just that quality of good-natured tolerance which did not offend the waitress but that showed discerning persons that he considered her only in the light of an artless child. ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper

... Their artless natures and simple affections remained unpolluted by the seductions of civilization. Nothing was wanting to content them: they were caressed by the English, received heaps of gifts and lived without the slightest fatigue, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... the infant phenomenon of the royal harem, so juvenile and artless were her looks and ways, despising a performance so rudimentary as the a, b, c, demanded to be steered at once into the mid-ocean of the book; but when I left her without pilot in an archipelago of hard words, she soon showed ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... the vast proportions of its owner; the pillars which supported it being the bodies of huge oaks or pines, in the natural state of the tree, and all about showed more marks of strength than skill in whoever built it. Ulysses, entering it, admired the savage contrivances and artless structure of the place, and longed to see the tenant of so outlandish a mansion; but well conjecturing that gifts would have more avail in extracting courtesy than strength would succeed in forcing it, from such a one as he expected to find the inhabitant, he resolved to flatter his ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB

... villain, divested of feeling, Wha 'd blight, in its bloom, the sweet flower o' Dumblane. Sing on, thou sweet mavis, thy hymn to the e'ening, Thou 'rt dear to the echoes of Calderwood glen; Sae dear to this bosom, sae artless and winning, Is charming young Jessie, the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... this atmosphere of pleasure and ease and riches; she was not entirely unfitted to judge a man. There was not much to awaken respect in the men she met at Crownlands, still less in the women. She liked Ward for his artless boyishness; forgave Anthony Pope much because he was straight and clean and self-respecting; but there were plenty of other men, spoiled and selfish, weak and stupid; men who amused and flattered Isabelle Carter perhaps, but among whom her husband loomed a very ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris

... to the door, avoiding his outstretched arm with an artless art which made me writhe; for once I had been the willing victim of all ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... which I had so often endeavoured to discover by intuition. A sort of stupor nailed me to the bank, and yet it was a very natural thing that I should come across the Nile in Egypt in the very centre of the Delta. But man is subject to such artless astonishment. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... kindly welcome, Jenny brings him ben; A strappin youth, he takes the mother's eye; Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en; The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye. The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy, But blate an' laithfu', scarce can weel behave; The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy What makes the youth sae bashfu' and sae grave, Weel-pleas'd to think her bairn's ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... young ladies were desired to amuse the company with music and singing; among the rest Miss Simmons sang a little Scotch song, called Lochaber, in so artless, but sweet and pathetic a manner, that little Harry listened almost with tears in his eyes, though several of the young ladies, by their significant looks and gestures, treated ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day

... either to melody or key, but wandering at will, and yet somehow with an effect that was natural and pleasing, like that of the of birds. As the dusk increased, I fell more and more under the spell of this artless warbling, listening and waiting for some articulate air, and still disappointed; and when at last I asked him what it was he sang—'O,' cried he, 'I am just singing!' Above all, I was taken with a trick he had ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the negroes in civilization, without any clothing, filthy in person, disgusting in manners, and destitute of natural affection; the parent selling his child with no more remorse or repugnance than he would his chicken, yet at the same time, by way of contrast, artless and good humoured. Their appearance is extremely barbarous and repulsive. They rub red clay softened with oil over their heads and bodies, and invariably wear a large semicircular piece of blue glass in the upper and lower lip, with ear-pendants ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... who, mindful of th' unhonored dead, Dost in these lines their artless tale relate; If chance, by lonely Contemplation led, Some kindred spirit shall ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester

... named the night and the hour of Rhoda's spectral encounter, and Brook felt like a guilty thing. The artless disclosure startled her; she did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of that ghastly night returned with ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy

... wrote in the "Village Minstrel" in the following candid and artless strain, "a sort of defiant parody on the Highland poets", of the natural features of ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry

... He has drawn me to the Life, but I'll return it— Such humble things make admirable Wives, and Women when they marry hectoring Blades, must buy their Peace with wond'rous Condescension, but when a Lady's unexception'd Graces, artless, immaculate, and universal, impow'r her to select thro' ev'ry Clime; nay, when she grasps the fickle Pow'r of Fortune, and is to raise the Man she stoops to wed, Lovers must sue on more submissive Terms; no Task's too hard when Heav'n's the Reward. I have a Lover too, no blust'ring ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... ere you squeeze my hand so devoutly, that I am not your artless country maid," exclaimed Helen, laughing; then, after a moment's pause, she cries, gayly, "ah! I have it, Frank; you must masquerade a little, that's all—win your bride under false colors, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various

... victory." Just as if God were not the God of the whole earth, a disinterested God, a God who makes His sun to shine and His rain to fall upon all His children, without regard to race or clime or color. Why, it is as artless as the way the old Hebrew peasant called on God to blast his enemy's field, and drown his children with floods, and smite his herds with the plague. The tribal idea of God belongs with the ox cart, the medicine man, the cave dweller. This is an era of science. Whatever is true is universal, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various

... apart for damsels whose modesty and circumspection would not permit of their occupying seats in the dress circle. I, however, noticed in them an audacity of manner that did not appertain to such artless beings as my companion would have me believe them. It struck me, too, that the toilet of these artless damsels was not what it should be. Indeed, there was an extravagance of color, and scantiness at both ends of their drapery, that both my mother and grandmother ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"

... and the other at the spinet. "I know he's a bad man, and will end by killing one of us and stealing the silver and a horse, just as Mr. Vreeland's bond-servant did. He makes me think of the villain in 'The Tragic History of Sir Watkins Stokes and Lady Betty Artless.'" ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation. It was no miraculous work, either as respects the difficulties overcome or as respects the consummation attained; nor was it made so by all the high-sounding words, which the Roman world of quality lavished in favour of Lucullus and the artless multitude in praise of Pompeius. Pompeius in particular consented to be praised, and praised himself, in such a fashion that people might almost have reckoned him still more weak-minded than he really was. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... said Dacres, "this little thing is just like a child, and in her very simplicity does not know what love is. Engagement! By Jove, I don't believe she knows the meaning of the word! She's perfectly fresh, artless, simple, and guileless. I don't believe she ever heard a word of sentiment or tenderness from any ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille

... seen her Poems? A fine, artless, sensible girl. Now, Cottle, that word sensible must not be construed here in its dictionary acceptation. Ask a Frenchman what it means, and he will understand it, though, perhaps, he can by no circumlocution explain its French meaning. Her heart is alive. She loves poetry. She loves ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... relic. The next day Eugene repaired to the head-quarters of General Bonaparte to implore that the sword of his father might be restored to him. The young general was so much impressed with the grace and beauty of the boy, and with his artless and touching eloquence, that he made many inquiries respecting his parentage, treated him with marked tenderness, and promptly restored the sword. Josephine was so grateful for the kindness of General Bonaparte to Eugene, that the next day she drove to his quarters ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... my simple lay, Whose accents flow with artless ease, Like orient pearls at random strung. A Persian Song of Hafiz. SIR ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... inward grace; In her dark eyes I have seen Sorrows of the Nazarene; In the proud and perfect mould Of her body I behold, Rounded in a single view, The good, the beautiful, the true; And when her spirit goes up-winging On sweet air of artless singing, Surely the heavenly spheres rejoice In union ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... a lover, I grant she should be so, and her sensibility will naturally lead her to endeavour to excite emotion, not to gratify her vanity but her heart. This I do not allow to be coquetry, it is the artless impulse of nature, I only exclaim against the sexual desire of conquest, when the heart ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... dismally at her shape and scornfully at her features, good, honest, irregular American features, that might not satisfy a Greek critic, but suited each other and pleased her countrymen. And then she would sigh heavily over her figure. Her friend had not the heart to impute the marquis's beautiful, artless compliments to mercenary motives. After all, the Italian was a good fellow, according to the point of view of his own race, if he did intend to live on his wife's money, and had a very varied ...
— Different Girls • Various

... a shepherd, so artless and gay, Whose flock ranges over yon mountain, And sweet is his song at the close of the day, By the echoing rock ...
— The Eskdale Herd-boy • Mrs Blackford

... bargains in politics, marm," he stated, dryly, "that takes more'n two to put 'em through when the pinch comes." He enjoyed the discomfiture that her artless confession brought to the Duke. The old man looked him up and down. That this Niles whom he himself had helped into office, who had been taking private toll from the liquor interests of the county as his predecessors had before him, a procedure ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... had a conviction that heredity plays its part in the evolution of genius, and her belief that the world will be inspired by the possession of her Thoughts is too artless to be offensive. She evidently has respect for rich material confided to her teacher, and one can imagine Miss Dearborn's woe had she been confronted by Rebecca's chosen literary executor and bidden to deliver certain "Valuable Poetry and ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... inquiry. Now what inquiry can be so useful as that which hath for its object the saving the lives of men? And when shall we find one more successful than that before us? Here are no vain boastings of the empiric, nor ingenious and delusive theories of the dogmatist; but a concise, an artless, and an incontested relation of the means, by which, under the Divine favour, Captain Cook, with a company of an hundred and eighteen men*, performed a voyage of three years and eighteen days, throughout all the climates, ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook

... ever seen, she certainly is the most marvelous phenomenon of innocence that can be imagined. She lives in that atmosphere of infamy with a calm and triumphing ease which is either wonderfully profligate or entirely artless. Strange scion of an adventuress, cast upon the muck-heap of that set, like a magnificent plant nurtured upon corruption, or rather like the daughter of some noble race, of some great artist, or of some grand lord, of some prince or dethroned ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant

... flirts with it, and goes home to dream about it. At length he falls in love with it, courts it, marries it, and then he takes the pretty face home, and begins to know something more about it. All has as yet been "very jolly." The face has hitherto been charming, graceful, artless, and beautiful. It has now to enter upon another sphere of life. It has to be seen much closer; it has to be seen daily; and it has to ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... astonishment, she saw the domestic group already described, and to her eyes dominated by the "most beautiful and perfectly elegant" young man she had ever seen. But let not the incautious reader suppose that she succumbed as weakly as her artless charges to these fascinations. The character and antecedents of that young man had been already delivered to her in the kitchen by the other help. With that single glance she halted; her eyes sought the ceiling in chaste exaltation. Falling back ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... piece of sewing put into my incapable fingers, which could not be trained to hold a needle. I imagined I was stolen by brigands, and became—by virtue and intelligence—spouse of a patriotic outlaw in a frontierless land. I asked artless questions which brought me into discredit with my teachers, as, for example, who 'massacred' St. Bartholomew. But vital facts, the great laws of propagation, were matters of but casual concern crowded out of my life and out of my companions' lives (in a convent ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... very ready to impose on him; in short, to conceive that a friend should, of his own accord, without any view to his own interest, endeavour to do him a service, must argue such weakness of mind, such ignorance of the world, and such an artless, simple, undesigning heart, as must render the person possessed of it the lowest creature and the properest object of contempt imaginable, in the eyes of every ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding

... of an art we had lost, but have found again in the sepulchers of the East—the art of preserving the remains of the dead from the outrages of corruption—the greatest power in the universe. O Lelia, deny the youth of the world if you can, when you see it stop in artless ignorance before the lessons of the past, and begin to live on the forgotten ruins of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various

... good-humouredly, partly in courtesy to her hoyden mistress, but partly at the burning, blushing indignation she beheld in the artless face of ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge

... chatted with animation, it had been such an immense piece of luck for him at his age to get appointed on the staff "of a big thing like that—don't you know." It would give him the pull over a lot of chaps all through life, he asserted. "Therefore—down with Montero! Mrs. Gould." His artless grin disappeared slowly before the unanimous gravity of the faces turned upon him from the carriage; only that "old chap," Don Jose, presenting a motionless, waxy profile, stared straight on as if deaf. Scarfe did not know the Avellanos very well. They did not give balls, and Antonia never ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... in the Edinburgh Review (Mr. Macauley) would account for the use of dialogue in Herodotus by the childish simplicity common to an early and artless age—as the boor always unconsciously resorts to the dramatic form of narration, and relates his story by a series of "says he's" and "says I's." But does not Mr. Macauley, in common with many others, insist far too much on the artlessness of the age and ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... interview between Gregory Newton and Clarissa, in which poor Clary had declared with so much emphasis her certainty that his brother's suit to Mary must be fruitless. This she had said, with artless energy, in no degree on her own behalf. She was hopeless now in that direction, and had at last taught herself to feel that the man was unworthy. The lesson had reached her, though she herself was ignorant ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope

... Sperver, deep in thought, who had now resumed his walk down the corridor. The portrait of Hedwige, in all its artless simplicity, mingled in my mind with the ...
— The Man-Wolf and Other Tales • Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian

... of artless innocence! Your dwellings are no more, And ye are turning from the path our fathers trod before; The homely hearth of honest mirth, all traces of the plough, The places of their ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard

... indicated, were afterwards taken up one by one, and minutely finished. We may almost count the locks of the hair, the plaits of the linen, the inlayings of the girdles and bracelets. This mixture of artless science and intentional awkwardness, of rapid execution and patient finish, excludes neither elegance of form, nor grace of attitude, nor truth of movement. These personages are of strange aspect, but they live; and to those who will take the trouble to look at them without prejudice, their ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero

... idealised in the Buddhist art of them: eternal are Kwannon and Benten; they need no help of man; they will compel reverence when the great temples shall all have become voiceless and priestless as this shrine of Koshin is. But these kind, queer, artless, mouldering gods, who have given ease to so many troubled minds, who have gladdened so many simple hearts, who have heard so many innocent prayers—how gladly would I prolong their beneficent lives in spite of the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... psychological realism. All that had been hitherto wanting to this particular development of his art had been the woman. In Audrey Craven he had found the indispensable thing—intimacy without love, or even, as he understood the word, friendship. She was the type he had long desired, the feminine creature artless in perpetual artifice, for ever revealing herself in a ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... himself he has obtained a mastery. Rhetoric, and rhetoric in a court dress, prevails but too much in many French tragedies, especially in those of Corneille, instead of the suggestions of a noble, but simple and artless nature; Racine and Voltaire, however, have come much nearer to the true conception of a mind carried away by its sufferings. Whenever the tragic hero is able to express his pain in antitheses and ingenious allusions, we may safely reserve our pity. This ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... the maiden's cheek, telling of discovery and shame. Nothing she said in answer, but diligently pursued her occupation. I could perceive that the fair hand trembled, and that the gentle bosom was disquieted. I could tell why downwards bent the head, and with what new emotions the artless spirit had become acquainted. Instantly I saw the mischief which my rashness had occasioned, and felt how deeply had fallen the first accents of love into the poor heart of the secluded one. What had I done by the short, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... years of age. Her oval face recalled that of the artless Madonnas whom veneration still displays at the street corners of the antique towns of Brittany. Her eyes betrayed an infinite simplicity. One would love her as the sweetest realization of a poet's dream. Her apparel was of modest ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... into the world, over whose destiny I have no control, and whose existence would most certainly be richer in pain, and misery than in happiness; and I know unquestionably that I have no right to teach a light-hearted girl to think, and force her to exchange the artless gayety of a playful little animal for my own fruitless speculations and ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... it Homer." Bentley was right. With all its pomp of language and melody of versification, its richness of imagery and magnificence of diction, Pope's Homer is widely different from the original. He could not avoid it. The "awful simplicity of the Grecian bard, his artless grandeur and unaffected majesty," will be sought for in vain in the translation; but if they had appeared there, it would have been unreadable in that age. Michael Angelo, in his bold conceptions, energetic will, and rapid execution, bears a close resemblance to the father ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... her son, and with the terms on which she thought proper to stand with those whom old acquaintance or kindred gave some title to her good offices. In addition to all those motives to a candid treatment of me, there were others which owed their efficacy to her maternal regard for me, and to the artless and ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... from childhood that a playmate could always be summoned even from the other end of the town by a clarion call, and they had never seen any reason for changing their convenient method when long skirts and piled-up hair might have been supposed to demand a less artless manner. But then every one shouted across blocks, and besides, every one knew that Afternoon Tea Willie just dearly loved to be yelled at. He whirled about now, waved his hat, and came hurrying back, with the peculiar jerky ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith

... admired the courage of Mollie Ainslie before she saw her; she had been charmed with her beauty and artless grace on the first night of her stay at Mulberry Hill, and had felt obliged to her for her care of the little Hildreth; but she had not once thought of considering her the peer of the Richardses and the Le Moynes, or as standing upon the same social plane ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee

... dances!" was an artless exclamation of Catherine's towards the close of their conversation, which at once surprised ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... as the lady crossed the room and took up his pen, 'I merely mention this to illustrate my point. I'm not saying that cab-men ought to be intellectuals. I don't think so; I agree with Keats—happy is England, sweet her artless cabmen, enough their simple loveliness for me. But when you come to the people who make up the collective industrial brain-power of the country.... Why, do ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

... nothing could be more artless and natural than the following legend of the Penobscot Indians of Maine, recorded by Mr. Leland, which tells of the origin of the "crowing of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... fate of artless Maid, Sweety flow'ret of the rural shade! By love's simplicity betray'd. And guileless trust, Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid Low ...
— Language of Flowers • Kate Greenaway

... his fancy. If matters had turned out otherwise than they had done, he told himself vaguely, he and "little May" would have been a pair of friends. He had no sister, and she had no brother, and he would have liked to play the brother to this most artless of learned ladies. "Look here, Miss May," he said, after the usual formulas, while he turned and walked a few paces by her side, "do you remember the fox-terrier puppy I was to have got for you and your sister Rose, in the spring? Well, he died of distemper, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... it's mebbes luppen in whan I was wadin' the watter," he said with artless smile. "They're ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang

... domestic slave, ready in his attendance at his master's nod; initiated in the Greek language, of a capacity for any art; you may shape out any thing with [such] moist clay; besides, he will sing in an artless manner, but yet entertaining to one drinking. Lavish promises lessen credit, when any one cries up extravagantly the wares he has for sale, which he wants to put off. No emergency obliges me [to dispose ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace

... engaged himself," said one mother. "Dear, innocent boy! His greatest hope is that he may creep one day into a clergyman's ear. It's very artless and loveable, that; and being engaged will keep him steady. What joy for ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... would melt; Tears have wet my burning cheek, Caused by thoughts I could not speak. Mysteries then confused my brain, Which have since become more plain; Much that then seemed plain and clear Has grown darker year by year; When my artless prayers I said, Skies were near—just over head; And the angels seemed so near, I could whisper in their ear. All that I have learned since then, I would give, if once again, Those bright visions would return. For I find, the more I learn, ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various

... inevitable spontaneity. He costumes his tale arbitrarily, like a stage-haberdasher, and invents a voice to deliver it withal. 'The Last Days of Pompeii' shall be mouthed out grandiloquently; the incredibilities of 'The Coming Race' shall wear the guise of naive and artless narrative; the humors of 'The Caxtons' and 'What Will He Do with It?' shall reflect the mood of the sagacious, affable man of the world, gossiping over the nuts and wine; the marvels of 'Zanoni' and 'A Strange Story' ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... provided in large quantities. On the fair field itself the food offered by the stall-keepers seemed to be chiefly enormous slabs of shiny gingerbread made in fanciful shapes, such as hearts, lyres, and garlands, cheap sweetmeats, and the small boiled sausages the artless German eats in public ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick

... Wrongfulness of Art Collecting is conceded, and as well Certain Stories: Campbell Corot, which recounts the career of an able and candid Picture Forger. The del Puente Giorgione, which tells of an artful Great Lady and an Artless Expert. The Lombard Runes, a mere interlude, but revealing a certain duplicity in Professional Seekers for Truth. Their Cross, so called from an inanimate Object of Price which wrought Woe to a well meaning New York Couple. The Missing St Michael, a tale of Italianate Americans ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather

... communicative. He seemed to take more interest than he used to do in the Mission, I noticed. He had always been a hero among the Mashona boys: that was no new thing. And I was thankful indeed to see that he had not lost his old artless art of making friends with them. So many things might have conspired to rob him of it. He stayed but a month in all at the Mission, and he said little all that time, but his eyes were full of thought ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... first shock, the poor girl recovered herself with admirable courage. She raised her head, and eyed the lawyer without uttering a word. In its artless consciousness of innocence the look was nothing less than sublime. Addressing herself to Mr. Troy, Lady Lydiard pointed to Isabel. "Do you see guilt ...
— My Lady's Money • Wilkie Collins

... Narcisse. Excuse me; I always forget your last name—and your first is so appropriate." It was worth all it cost, though Richling could ill afford the purchase. The young Latin's sweet, abysmal ignorance, his infantile amiability, his artless ambition, and heathenish innocence started the natural gladness of Richling's blood to effervescing anew every time they met, and, through the sheer impossibility of confiding any of his troubles to the Creole, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... back to the bank, and up the stream, and over the bridge, and down the stream again; and then, for the first time, the sweet girl turned appealingly to me, and confessed that she had exhausted her artless knowledge of the locality. It was exactly a week from the day when I had first followed her into the fields with my fishing-rod over my shoulder; and I had never yet caught anything but Alicia's hand, and that ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins

... and also those of the native dog. Here still was our own race amongst other animals all new and strange to Europeans. The prints of the foot of man alone were familiar to us. But here he was living in common with other animals, simply on the bounty of nature; artless, and apparently as much afraid of us, and as shy, as other animals of the forest. It seemed strange, that in a climate the most resembling that of Milton's paradise, the circumstances of man's existence ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... received more instruction from them than from her teaching. When we truly feel that the heart speaks, our own opens to receive its instructions, nor can all the pompous morality of a pedagogue have half the effect that is produced by the tender, affectionate, and artless conversation of a sensible woman on him who ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... through her tears at the stranger, and in a few artless words related her simple story. She was an orphan, and with her little brother, lived with her grandfather. They were very poor, and were wholly dependent upon a small pittance which the grandfather (who was blind) daily earned by ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... improvement in the mechanical part of his art, and also was the first who covered his picture with a thin varnish, both to preserve it and bring out the colors. He invented ivory black. His distinguishing excellence was grace, "that artless balance of motion and repose, springing from character, founded on propriety, which neither falls short of the demands nor overleaps the modesty of Nature." [Footnote: Fuseli, Lect. I.] His great contemporaries may have equaled him in perspective, accuracy, and finish; ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... of Germain's marriage as he told it to me himself, good husbandman that he is. I ask your forgiveness, kind reader, that I know not how to translate it better; for it is a real translation that is needed by this old-fashioned and artless language of the peasants of the country "that I sing," as they used to say. These people speak French that is too true for us, and since Rabelais and Montaigne, the advance of the language has lost for ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... anything to do with any of us. Pretended he didn't understand our kind of Latin. I offered him a place, myself, at a wage of more denarii than I could well afford. I wanted a chance to study him. Then came the colonel and fairy grabbed him. So I sent for you—in my artless professional way." ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... fans and tore their caps, was one of the first to enlist himself among her adorers. Squire Savage, the fox-hunter, who, like Hippolitus of old, chased the wily fox and timid hare, and had never yet acknowledged the empire of beauty, was subdued by the artless sweetness of Delia. Nay, it has been reported, that the incomparable lord Martin, a peer of ten thousand pounds a year, had made advances to her father. It is true, his lordship was scarcely four feet three inches in stature, his belly was prominent, ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin

... survivors, not of others alone, but, if I may be allowed the expression, of ourselves, find a void of so many years in our lives, which has silently brought us from youth to maturity, from mature age to the very verge of life! Still, however, I shall not regret having composed, though in rude and artless language, a memorial of past servitude, and a ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... composed by Al Wakidi, cadi of Bagdad, who was born A.D. 748, and died A.D. 822; he likewise wrote the conquest of Egypt, of Diarbekir, &c. Above the meagre and recent chronicles of the Arabians, Al Wakidi has the double merit of antiquity and copiousness. His tales and traditions afford an artless picture of the men and the times. Yet his narrative is too often defective, trifling, and improbable. Till something better shall be found, his learned and spiritual interpreter (Ockley, in his History of the Saracens, vol. i. p. 21-342) will not deserve the petulant ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... commenced, did not end soon. Patty was angry with John; and John, in consequence, renewed his attentions to Betty Sell. Not long, and his first liking increased to a feeling akin to real love. Betty was so sweet and artless in her doings and sayings, and, above all, hung with such evident fondness on every word of her admirer about his life and his struggles, his intense admiration of nature, his poetry, and his hopes of rising in the world through ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin

... found anybody out in some act of atrocious meanness, she never indulged in any idle threats of revenge: it was sufficient that she knew, and would take suitable steps on the earliest occasion. Consequently when it appeared, from the artless conversation of the Guru at lunch that the perfidious Mrs Quantock had not even asked him whether he would like to go to Lucia's garden party or not (pending her own decision as to what she was meaning to do ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson

... by, slowly at first, then quicker, for the young native woman whom he had married a year before had aroused in him a sort of unspoken affection for her artless and childlike innocence, and this deepened when her first child was born; and sometimes, as he worked at his old trade of boat-building—learned before he joined the King's ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... the side of the thoughtless and betrayed victim. All were held as trophies of victory,—all esteemed alike valuable. How shocking to the man of sensibility! How mortifying and heart-sickening to the intellectual, the artless, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis

... appears to have continued to assist with more amiability than wisdom. He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous horses, Maggie and Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. 'Lord Rokeby, his neighbour, called him kinsman,' writes my artless chronicler, 'and altogether life was very cheery.' At Stowting his three sons, John, Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter, Anna, were all born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson

... simple and artless fashion Cynthia's son went about the creation of his own special Sunday-school class and when he got through the result was startling. It was the largest and somebody said the weirdest Sunday-school class ever seen in Green Valley. Indeed, when Mr. James ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds

... and an excessive eulogy of Granville, to whom the poem is inscribed. The whole is skilfully adapted to the time by a brilliant eulogy upon the peace which was concluded just as the poem was published. The Whig poet Tickell, soon to be Pope's rival, was celebrating the same "lofty theme" on his "artless reed," and introducing a pretty little compliment to Pope. To readers who have lost the taste for poetry of this class one poem may seem about as good as the other; but Pope's superiority is plain enough to a reader who will condescend to distinguish. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen

... dazzles oft, and oft deceives; nor yet The dull unmeaning lustre that can gaze Alike on all the world. But paint an eye In whose half-hidden, steady light I read A truth-inquiring mind; a fancy, too, That could array in sweet poetic garb The truth he found; while on his artless harp He touched the gentlest feelings, which the blaze Of winter's hearth warms in the homely heart. And oh! recall the look of faith sincere, With which that eye would scrutinize the page That tells us ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar

... Stranger bursting into tears, look'd pale, And this the purport of her artless tale. 'I have no Parents; and no friends beside: 'I well remember when my Mother died: 'My Brother cried; and so did I that day: 'We had no Father;—he was gone away; 'That night we left our home new cloaths to wear: ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield

... said, 'Come in, Shelley, its only our friend Tre just arrived.' Swiftly gliding in, blushing like a girl, a tall, thin stripling held out both his hands; and although I could hardly believe, as I looked at his flushed, feminine, and artless face, that it could be the poet, I returned his warm pressure. After the ordinary greetings and courtesies he sat down and listened. I was silent from astonishment: was it possible this mild-looking, beardless boy, could be the veritable monster at ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... study. She was of medium stature, elegant form, with light hair, fair complexion and soft, expressive blue eyes that lent an enchantment to features that were not otherwise striking. In demeanor she was artless, unaffected and ladylike. Romantic stories were continually in circulation regarding suitors for her hand. As the wife of Count Rossi, an attache of the Sardinian legation, she retired to private life in 1830, and passed many happy years with her husband in various capitols of Europe. ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... and she settled down again into a busy home life. But it was no longer the home life of the past. The year of absence had left a profound impression upon her character. Her mind and heart had undergone a rapid development. She was only twenty-two on her return, and had still all the fresh, artless simplicity of a young girl, but there was joined to it now the maturity of womanhood. Of the rest of the year a record is preserved in letters to her cousin. These letters give many little details respecting her daily tasks and the life she led in the family and in the world; ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... unblest, Inhuman monster, without aim or rest, Who, like the greedy surge, from rock to rock, Sweeps down the dread abyss with desperate shock? While she, within her lowly cot, which graced The Alpine slope, beside the waters wild, Her homely cares in that small world embraced, Secluded lived, a simple, artless child. Was't not enough, in thy delirious whirl To blast the stedfast rocks; Her, and her peace as well, Must I, God-hated one, to ruin hurl! Dost claim this holocaust, remorseless Hell! Fiend, help me to cut short the hours of dread! Let what must happen, ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

... boldly forth, my simple lay, Whose accents flow with artless ease, Like orient pearls at random strung. A Persian Song of ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... are some of us," he said gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, "who know a more intimate relationship with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood

... whom old acquaintance or kindred gave some title to her good offices. In addition to all those motives to a candid treatment of me, there were others which owed their efficacy to her maternal regard for me, and to the artless and unsuspecting ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... something very touching in this primeval figure of Heroism; in such artless, helpless, but hearty entire reception of a Hero by his fellow-men. Never so helpless in shape, it is the noblest of feelings, and a feeling in some shape or other perennial as man himself. If I could show in any measure, what ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... overflowing of her heart, Which really knew or thought it knew no guile, She called her husband now and then apart, And bade him counsel Juan. With a smile Lord Henry heard her plans of artless art To wean Don Juan from the Siren's wile; And answered, like a statesman or a prophet, In such guise that she could make ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... however having been determined by the boy's father that he should be a painter, and that art being unknown to the Abbe Charles and the village Cure (in which manner of ignorance, if the infallible Pope did but know it, he and his now artless shepherds stand at a fatal disadvantage in the world as compared with monks who could illuminate with color as well as word)—the simple young soul is sent for the exalting and finishing of ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... such characters. They, while submitting implicitly to his influence, never acknowledged, because they never reflected on, his superiority; they were quite tractable, therefore, without running the smallest danger of being servile; and their unthinking, easy, artless insensibility was as acceptable, because as convenient, to Mr. Yorke as that of the chair he sat on, or of the floor ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... her tears at the stranger, and in a few artless words related her simple story. She was an orphan, and with her little brother, lived with her grandfather. They were very poor, and were wholly dependent upon a small pittance which the grandfather (who was blind) daily earned by basket making, together with the very small profits which she ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... kindly welcome Jenny brings him ben;{15} A strappin' youth; he takes the mother's eye; Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en; The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye.{16} The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy, But, blate and lathefu', scarce can weel behave; The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy What makes the youth sae bashfu' an' sae grave; Weel pleased to think her bairn's respected like ...
— Six Centuries of English Poetry - Tennyson to Chaucer • James Baldwin

... and Mrs. Freeze and Mrs. Dow, who were always hovering about Nelly, often whispered to me their hope that she would eventually come into our church and not "go with the Methodists"; her family were Wesleyans. But to me these artless plans of theirs never wholly explained their watchful affection. They had good daughters themselves,—except Mrs. Spinny, who had only the sullen Scott,—and they loved their plain girls and thanked God for them. But they loved ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... striving to gain control of himself. In the early days of his misfortunes the necessity for straining every effort had kept him from brooding upon his losses, and finally a numbness of despair had seized him. But to-night the child's artless talk had brought back vividly the old home scene. He could see it now, as he had seen it so often in the light of a summer evening. The sparkling sea, with the tang of salt water wafted up over his fields; the rippling stream, ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith

... therefore, derived much pleasure, since my arrival at the Hall, from observing the fair Julia and her lover. She has all the delightful, blushing consciousness of an artless girl, inexperienced in coquetry, who has made her first conquest; while the captain regards her with that mixture of fondness and exultation with which a youthful lover is apt to contemplate so ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... needs have been moved and melted by her fascination. What was the cold patrician beauty of Miss Paget's face when compared with the changeful charm of this radiant girl, with the flashing gray eyes and piquant features, and all those artless caprices of manner which made her arch loveliness irresistible? Diana's heart grew sick and cold as she watched these two day by day, and saw the innocent school-girl's ascendancy over the adventurer. The attributes ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... imputed to him in that beautiful outbreak, the hour there, amid such happy provision, striking for him, would have been then, on behalf of my man of imagination, to be logically and, as the artless craft of comedy has it, "led up" to; the probable course to such a goal, the goal of so conscious a predicament, would have in short to be finely calculated. Where has he come from and why has he come, what is he doing (as we ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... the speaker, but never intruding upon his speech. There is always a suggestion of shyness in his manner, and there is ever present a deep respectfulness. He is frank, open-hearted, and out-spoken. All his actions are artless and quiet; even the modulations of his voice ...
— Modern Americans - A Biographical School Reader for the Upper Grades • Chester Sanford

... His artless talk and answers very likely inclined this gentleman in the boy's favour, for next day Mr. Holt said Harry should ride behind him, and not with the French lacky; and all along the journey put a thousand questions to the child—as to his foster-brother and relations at Ealing; what his old grandfather ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... so artless that Mamie laughed. "No—it doesn't touch her. Besides, perhaps he isn't. It isn't as for you—people seem not to know. He has settled everything, at all events, by going to see her. It's before her that he's the ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... great green glade was before them, and high old trees, and under the shade of these, in the fresh turf, the crooked course of a rural footpath. "It's the Forest of Arden," Sir Claude had just delightfully observed, "and I'm the banished duke, and you're—what was the young woman called?—the artless country wench. And there," he went on, "is the other girl—what's her name, Rosalind?—and (don't you know?) the fellow who was making up to her. Upon my word he IS making up ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James

... looked at John with some suspicion. But John put on so innocent and artless a look that Mr. Mudge at once dismissed the idea that there was any covert meaning in what he said. Meanwhile Paul, from his hiding-place in the bushes, had listened with anxiety to the foregoing colloquy. When John described ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger

... perfumes vainly spoil The native use and sweetness of his oil. Instead of these, his calm and harmless life, Free from th' alarms of fear, and storms of strife, Does with substantial blessedness abound, And the soft wings of peace cover him round: Through artless grots the murmuring waters glide; Thick trees both against heat and cold provide, From whence the birds salute him; and his ground With lowing herds, and bleating sheep does sound; And all the rivers, and the forests nigh, Both food and game ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley

... in which he had taken refuge, de Gery was watching the scene with interest, knowing what importance his friend attached to this presentation, when chance, which had so cruelly given the lie all the evening to his artless neophyte's ideas, brought to his ears this brief dialogue, in that sea of private conversations in which every one hears just the words that are ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet

... Cecilia to check, however artless, the tenderness of her fervent young friend, whom she was much teized by meeting in such company, but who seemed not to dare understand the frequent looks which she gave her expressive of a wish to be alone ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... I felt them stirring under her look. If I commit faults in my life to come—if I am even guilty of crimes—she will bring the retribution, without (as I firmly believe) any conscious exercise of her own will. In one indescribable moment I felt all this—and I suppose my face showed it. The good artless creature was inspired by a sort of gentle alarm for me. "I am afraid the heat of the room is too much for you; will you try my smelling bottle?" I heard her say those kind words; and I remember nothing else—I fainted. When I recovered my senses, the company had all gone; ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins

... to encounter the Cossacks, who were certainly not likely to bring Higson with them, he hurried on his men, and at length reached Colonel Paskiewich's house. The fair Feodorowna, in an artless manner, showed her pleasure at seeing Tom in safety; while Ivanowna could not restrain her tears on hearing that the ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston

... Ludlow seemed to regard Fanny Fabens with increased attention; and as their glances more than once met, an artless, innocent blush would express on each face the timidity of their natures, if not the emotions of ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee

... in those glad days was when some freak of manner in friend or visitor suggested a new game. We used to wish, sometimes, that these kind people understood how much pleasure they were giving to the artless babe who was studying them with such interest, while they, all unconscious of their real use, imagined probably she was thinking of nothing more serious than sweets. After an hour in the bungalow, ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... them with songs adoring Their artless homage bring To Christ the Lord, and crown Him The children's Guide ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... me—but I shall continue to feel grateful to our slightly dogmatic young friend for his artless brutalities. Now I know what the business man keeps to himself when I ask him why he has lost interest in ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... maddest mirthful mood, Strange pangs would flash along Childe Harold's brow, As if the memory of some deadly feud Or disappointed passion lurked below: But this none knew, nor haply cared to know; For his was not that open, artless soul That feels relief by bidding sorrow flow; Nor sought he friend to counsel or condole, Whate'er this grief mote be, which he could ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron

... soil, they labored by day: and in their shadows slept when work was done. Yet, someone had discovered that they held a picturesque and rugged beauty; that they were not merely steep fields where the plough was useless and the hoe must be used. She must tell Samson: Samson, whom she held in an artless exaltation of hero-worship; Samson, who was so "smart" that he thought about things beyond her understanding; Samson, who could not only read and write, but speculate on ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... half-an-hour Sanchia was at the top of bliss. To be petted and diminutived by a butterfly—it was like that; for though the child was a year older than she, six years of marriage had made a baby of her. Her audacities of old had become artless prattle, her sallies were skips in the air. Yet to be purred over by a kitten was pure joy. "You darling!' You darling little Sancie! You beautiful, pale, Madame-de-Watte- ville kind of person! Oh, my treasure—and I thought I should ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... was seated in one of them, with her coat still huddled about her, she looked around with artless curiosity, and watched as in a dream, while the Major put his hand on Margot's ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke

... of nature the hard features of a society of adult vice, much as Hogarth, in some of his masterpieces of the human woes or vices of his time, gives, in striking contrast, a foreground of maternal affection, or of children at play in the artless innocence of ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... beloved. It was but yesterday that, as they roamed through the park in the calm summer evening, her Bluebeard pointed out to the keeper the fat buck he was to kill. "Ah!" said the widow, with tears in her fine eyes, "the artless stag was shot down, the haunch was cut and roasted, the jelly had been prepared from the currant-bushes in the garden that he loved, but my Bluebeard never ate of the venison! Look, Anne sweet, pass we the old oak hall; 'tis hung with trophies won by him in the ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various

... beliefs spring full-armed from the head and front of her great Jove Intuition. Logic, says the ancient platitude, hangs by the end of a philosopher's beard; and an American woman would as soon grow hair on her face as admit reason to her soul. Therein, doubtless, lies her charm, her artless allurements, her enigmatic ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... girl's nature, which I can look through, as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain? Why has the child trusted me with such artless confessions,—self-revelations, which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the light of day without a feeling of wronging a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... country beauties as we often see Something that takes in their simplicity, Yet while they charm they know not they are fair, And take without their spreading of the snare— Such artless beauty lies in Shakespear's wit; 'Twas well in spite of him whate'r he writ. His excellencies came, and were not sought, His words like casual atoms made a thought; Drew up themselves in rank and file, and writ, He wondering how the devil ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various

... plains are cleared of the mutinous, blind, unreasoning hordes whom this cunning, vainglorious upstart has called away from their peaceful homesteads, I will return, my darling little girl, with the tidings; and I shall bring you back to the spot where you grew up pure and artless as the lily that brightens the pond upon which we have so often paddled our birch together. What the days after that may have in store for us ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... you have not been as frank as you would have me believe. That, in fact, explains my connection with the affair. Believe me when I say that I am interested only in seeing justice done to both of you young people, and in making sure that you do not deceive each other. It is an impulse of artless youth to trick itself in glowing colors, but you should know the whole truth about Buddy and he about you. If, after you are thoroughly acquainted with each other, you still maintain a mutual regard I shall have nothing further to ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... which she intended to finish with real beads and real feathers. She was as eagerly curious as a child about the older woman's dainty toilet accessories, experimenting with manicure sets and creams and powders with artless pleasure. "I'm going to have that and do it that way!" she would announce, when impressed by some particular little nice touch about Cornelia's letters, or some allusion that gave ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris

... myself the temper of my people. And this is not to be learned by Edward, Prince of Wales, seated in the midst of proud nobles at his father's court; but it may be learned by a humble wayfarer, who travels from place to place seeking information from whence it may truly be culled—namely, from the artless sons of the soil, who speak not to please their listener ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green

... Mr. Godwin shall know what an innocent, simple child she was when we pushed her into this knavery, and how we dared not tell her of our purpose lest she should draw back. He shall know how she was ever an obedient, docile, artless girl, yielding always to my guidance; and you can stretch a point, Kit, to say you have ever known me for a headstrong, masterful sort of a fellow, who would take denial from none, but must have my own way in all things. I'll take all the ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett

... the story. It came disjointedly from each in turn, but most fluently, most picturesquely, most convincingly, from the lips of Augustus Adolphus Schmidtt and the fair Josephine. When they had finished their artless recital, Miss Clarkson sought Fraulein von Hoffman. That afternoon, beside the big open fire in the children's winter play-room, Fraulein von Hoffman addressed her young charges in words brief but pointed, and as she talked the mission of Ivan at Locust Hall took on ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... charm of his manner, his noble presence, his elevated sentiments, his rich, full, ringing English voice. Whatever it may have been, however, she did not conceal the pleasure which his society afforded her. She was artless and open; her feelings expressed themselves readily, and were made manifest in her looks and gestures. Still, there was a melancholy behind all this which Windham could not but notice—a melancholy penetrating far beneath the surface talk ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... solidly amazed Evadore; but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in experience than the rest there, alone entirely ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... to the woman, the devout shoe-maker and his wife gave thanks to God with overflowing hearts. While the little flock were appeasing their hunger with the nice new bread and milk, the father repaired to the house where I was an inmate, and told his artless tale with streaming eyes, and it is unnecessary to say, that he returned to his home that night with a basket heavily laden, and a heart full of ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various

... about sixty-four to the rupee. However, you soon come to know the coolies by sight, and after some experience are rarely 'taken in,' but many young beginners get 'done' most thoroughly till they become accustomed to the tricks of the artless and ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... again. "Religious as Cromwell, and artless as Macchiavelli! Begins his orders with an honourable mention of God, closes them with 'Put all deserters in irons,' and in between gives points ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... Lord's Prayer, the Creed, prayers and hymns, and some Latin should be taught. In the second, the Latin grammar, Latin authors, and religion. In the third, completion of the grammar, difficult Latin authors, rhetoric, and logic. Williams calls this "Melanchthon's somewhat artless ideas of a proper school system," which he excuses as being "marked possibly by the crudity of a first effort at organization, but more probably controlled in form by the fewness of teachers in the schools ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... as he was leaving London with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817) Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year, "the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... after group; and through the foliage, spied sweet forms of maidens, like Eves in Edens ere the Fall, or Proserpines in Ennas. Artless airs came from the shore; and from the censer-swinging roses, a bloom, as if ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... were far more unendurable, her heroism far more noble, than any which in more recent times have been so much pitied and so much applauded; but she was a simple missionary's wife, an American by birth, and she told her tale with an artless modesty—writing only what it became her to write, treating only of matters that became a woman. Her captivity, if so it can be called, was voluntarily endured. She of her own free will shared the sufferings ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... "As artless yet as strange a face as I have ever seen," answered the merchant. "What's his business here, and why comes he with the other rogue? He would speak with your excellency, I doubt ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... bitterness to his soul. He had obliged himself to treat her with paternal kindness: he had forced himself not to hate her, and even, perhaps, to feel some degree of kindly regard for her, at last, in return for her artless and unsuspecting attachment to himself; but the bitterness of his self-condemnation for his inward feelings towards that innocent being, his constant struggles to subdue the evil promptings of his nature (for it was not a generous one), though partly guessed at by those ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... me in artless admiration, then taking my hand, placed it on his breast. I spoke his language, and I was therefore his friend. This is a feeling common to all men, whatever may be their ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... Julia, her bright face gleaming radiantly with the pure lustre of her artless spirit, "I am glad to see him; I do prize his coming; I do love Paullus. Why, then, should I dissemble, when to do so were dishonest, and ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... Sweeps down the dread abyss with desperate shock? While she, within her lowly cot, which graced The Alpine slope, beside the waters wild, Her homely cares in that small world embraced, Secluded lived, a simple artless child. Was't not enough, in thy delirious whirl To blast the stedfast rocks! Her, and her peace as well, Must I, God-hated one, to ruin hurl! Dost claim this holocaust, remorseless Hell! Fiend, help me to cut short the hours of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke

... Leonardo da Vinci, the unity and simplicity which characterised the repose of the ancients; a repose to which is joined that profundity of sentiment which is the characteristic of Christianity. She admired the artless composition of Raphael's pictures, especially those in his first manner. All the figures are directed towards one principal object, without any contrivance on the part of the artist to group them ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael

... presently; but tell me, first, if it looks quite right and natural to you. Children sometimes spy out faults that no one else can see," answered the lady, evidently pleased with the artless praise her work received. ...
— Marjorie's Three Gifts • Louisa May Alcott

... 'An artless woman looks with ardour on Krishna's lotus face.' 'Another on the bank of the Jumna, when Krishna goes to a bamboo thicket, Pulls at his garment to draw him back, so eager is she for amorous play.' 'Krishna praises another woman, lost with him in the dance of love, The dance where the sweet ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer

... existence would most certainly be richer in pain, and misery than in happiness; and I know unquestionably that I have no right to teach a light-hearted girl to think, and force her to exchange the artless gayety of a playful little animal for my own fruitless speculations ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... manuscripts. We have watched the varied gestures, the cadences of voice and facial expression to harmonize with and so express the sense of the words that one seemed to grow out of the other; still these graces of elocution, that looked so artless and so charming, were the fruit of long years of study. All was fresh! All was natural! All palpitated with the blood of life, yet all were the products of previous toil. It is nonsense, then, for any man to assert that the written sermon must bear ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan

... could have heard, no human voice, not even hers, could so have moved and softened him. The artless words in which she had told him of her love for this same Cricket were once more freshly spoken; her trembling, earnest manner at the moment was again before him; her pleasant voice—oh, what a voice it was for making household music at the fireside of an honest man!—thrilled through ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... theirs, full of the artless appeal of love and passion, shameless because as yet unrecognized, and then ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the life and message of Jesus Christ, coloured, if at all, by local and temporal backgrounds, by the experience of the earlier German mystics who helped them to interpret their own simple and sincere experiences. They are as naive and artless as little children, and they expect, as all enthusiasts do in their youth, that they have only to announce their wonderful truths and to proclaim their "openings" in order to bring the world to the light! They go to the full length of the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... 'how unlike the complex works of man, Heaven's easy, artless, unencumbered plan, No meretricious graces to beguile, No clustering ornaments to clay the pile. From ostentation as from weakness free, It stands like the cerulean arch we see, Majestic in its own simplicity. Inscribed above the portal from afar, Conspicuous ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King

... we have Smith posing as the Prince of Denmark; on the other the fat woman, whose unpleasant mass of unhealthy flesh is real—the lady giant hovers between reality and fiction. On the one side art, on the other artless entertainment; but, after all, it is difficult to say that this wall is very solid, since sometimes the artless department is abominably artful, and sometimes, as in the famous story of the mimic with a live pig in a poke, the real ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"

... be expected, where there is power to add to the natural obligation, all the comforts and conveniences of life? We people in upper life love to hear how gratitude and unexpected benefits operate upon honest minds, who have little more than plain artless nature for their guide; and we flatter ourselves with the hopes of many a delightful hour, by your means, in this our solitary situation, if obliged to pass the next winter in it, as my lord and the earl threaten me, and the countess, and Lady Betty, that we shall. Then let ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... them, and being endued with a strong understanding and retentive memory he soon learned their dialect, and by gradual advances impressed them with a very ill opinion of the English, representing them as fraudulent, avaritious and encroaching people; he at the same time inflated the artless savages with a prodigious high opinion of their own importance in the American scale of power.... Having thus infected them... he easily formed them into a nominal republican government—crowned their old Archimagus emperor after a pleasing new savage form, and invented a variety of high-sounding ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner

... And wisdom speaking in her mien: Yet—she so artless all the while, So little studious to be seen— We naught but instant gladness know, Nor think to whom the gift ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... them, at least, in English versions of the Contes de ma Mere l' Oye of Perrault, and the Contes de Fees of Madame D'Aulnoy; those tight-laced, high- heeled tales of the 'teacup times' of Louis XIV and his successors, in which the popular tale appears to as much disadvantage as an artless country girl in the stifling atmosphere of a London theatre. From these foreign sources, after the voice of the English reciter was hushed—and it was hushed in England more than a century ago—our great-grandmothers learnt to tell of Cinderella and Beauty ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent

... kirtle; and some were unspeakably fair, with the fine white teeth, fair complexion, and ruddy cheeks, common to other branches of the Celtic race, but nowhere so characteristic as among the fair maidens of Cambria. It was, no doubt, those sweet shining faces, wreathed with free artless smiles, that had caused the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... what the true course in regard to this or the other high matter will be; what the public will think of it; and, in short, what and how the Executive-Royal shall DO therein: this, the essential function of a Parliament and Privy-Council, was here, by artless cheap methods, under the bidding of mere Nature, multifariously done; mere taciturnity and sedative smoke making the most of what natural intellect there might be. The substitution of Tobacco-smoke for Parliamentary ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... He had a rare and fine sense where women were concerned, were they absent or present. "How very artless—and in so short a time, too!" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... art, with tortuous steel, Thy artless locks of gold deface, In serpent folds their charms conceal, And spoil, at every ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... that made the home more comfortable or attractive, had become to Karin a model of all that was pure and lovely and lovable. The baby, who fell much to her care, seemed to have a healing influence on her wounded, humbled, penitent heart. It had for her its artless smile, and its little arms went out to her as trustfully as if she had never strayed from the narrow path. Karin had a new standard in life, a new picture of what she wished to be, a new way of ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker

... to his sister's room, in the passage which connected one wing with the other, Prince Andrew met Mademoiselle Bourienne smiling sweetly. It was the third time that day that, with an ecstatic and artless smile, she had ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... in my face. "Oh, our artless little Chota Rani!—straight as a schoolmaster's rod, eh? But a woman is not built that way. She is soft and supple, so that she may ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... be, and let no one fear to prosecute his researches, for out of this merciless dissection comes life. But we need not be surprised at the feverish heat which, after these orgies of dialectics, can only be calmed by the kisses of the artless creature in whom nature lives and smiles. Woman restores us to communication with the eternal spring in which God reflects Himself. The candour of a child, unconscious of its own beauty and seeing God clear as the daylight, is the ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... speedy marriage with an heiress, Miss Hartley, and found them confirmed by a letter Lady Delacour received from him. Some years ago he had formed the romantic idea of educating a wife for himself, and having found a beautiful, artless girl in the New Forest, he had taken her under his care on the death of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... began, and Cherry sat entranced from the moment the curtain rose till it fell again. She had never seen anything of the sort before, and was perfectly captivated and carried away, living in the glamour of absolute enchantment, and amusing her fashionable companions almost as much by her artless admiration and enthusiasm as the players did by their mummery ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green

... asked courteously what could be done for them. "We want to see the head of the firm," said Mrs. Hardy. "We want to buy a house." It occurred to Irene that in some respects her mother was extremely artless, but the issue was ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... did not know it," replied the dark young man, in a tone which he vainly strove to render artless; "I am but just arrived, as I told you, from ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere

... very clear idea how it is done, because everybody takes a hand in them. But this is not applicable to the romance of rustic manners: it has existed in all ages and under all forms, sometimes pompous, sometimes affected, sometimes artless. I have said, and I say again here: the dream of a country-life has always been the ideal of cities, aye, and of courts. I have done nothing new in following the incline that leads civilized man back to the charms of primitive life. I have not intended to invent a new language or to create ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand

... their own knowledge. They have not invented, but have received the thought, which constitutes the support of their life. A mind of ordinary cultivation is free henceforward from all danger of falling into the artless error of J.J. Rousseau, when he pretended that even though he had been born in a desert island and had never known a human being, he would have been able to draw up the confession of faith of the Vicaire Savoyard. The habit of historical research has dispelled these illusions. A French ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... drawn from the journal of Pierre de L'Etoile. In the simplicity of his narration, so pleasing in the old writers, the nurse and the monarch,—the religious remorse of the one, and the artless consolations of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... of character, Asaad had the constitutional weakness of being artless and confiding. In January, 1826, the Patriarch sent his own brother, as a special messenger, inviting Asaad to an interview, and making him flattering promises. The consultation with the priest was ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume I. • Rufus Anderson

... spoken in an artless manner, but in a tone which obviously declared she thought her guardian young and handsome. He replied, but not without some little embarrassment, "A plain man you shall find ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald

... was sorry for what I'd done, of course, and confoundedly bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to the library to fetch a book she'd mislaid, like any artless heroine on the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered, and it suddenly occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty, would look exactly like my aunt's when she grew older. I was glad I had noticed this, for it made it easier for me to do what ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... In her artless way she told me. A refreshing story, as old as the crusades, with the accessories of orthodox tradition; a European disguise, purchased at a slop dealer's by the precious Harry, a rope, a midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an English ship; the anchor weighed; and the lovers ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... in the fields of science, history, and biography, but in the attractive fields of literature, also, can the libraries aid and supplement the teachings of the school. A fine poem, or a simple, humorous, or pathetic story, told with artless grace or notable literary skill, when read aloud by a teacher in school, awakens a desire in many to have the same book at home to read, re-read, and perhaps commit to memory the finer passages. What more inspiring or pleasing reading than some of Longfellow's poems, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... this conversation between Wilhelmina and Ramsay, to show not only what influence he had already gained over the artless yet intelligent girl, but also the way by which he considerately prepared her for the acknowledgment which he resolved to make to her on some future opportunity; for, although Ramsay cared little for deceiving the father, he would not have married the daughter without her being fully aware ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... European chivalry, with the gorgeousness and effeminate luxury of the east. They are brief, seizing single situations of the highest poetic interest, and striking the eye of the reader with a brilliancy of execution, so artless in appearance withal as to seem rather the effect of accident than study. We are transported to the gay seat of Moorish power, and witness the animating bustle, its pomp and its revelry, prolonged to the last hour of its existence. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott

... shadow, the soft shadow of a light upon the skin, which gave her the virginal grace that all painters seek and Leopold Robert found for the Raffaelesque face of the woman who holds a child in his picture of "The Gleaners." Beneath this fluted frame of light sparkled a white and rosy and artless face, glowing with vigorous health. The warmth of the room brought the blood to the cheeks, to the tips of the pretty ears, to the lips and the end of the delicate nose, making the natural white ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac

... feeling being, whose mind is too keen for his frame, and wears it out. I have not spoken to him above thrice in my life, for he is a Dissenter, and has rarely come in my way. The document is a sort of record of his feelings, after the perusal of "Jane Eyre;" it is artless and earnest; genuine and generous. You must return it to me, for I value it more than testimonies from higher sources. He said, 'Miss Bronte, if she knew he had written it, would scorn him;' but, indeed, Miss Bronte does not scorn him; she only grieves that a mind of which this is ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... sighs because they pierce the sky, Not loud my sighs because they are not heard; My death begun because I artless cry, But not begun because I am debarred. Thus sighs and death my heart no comfort give; Both life deny, and both do make ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher

... has known—that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets; that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit even more than the first—and yet we find ourselves (we are all alike) painfully pshaw-ing over some new and uncut barley sugar in rime, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... Zosephine, like all the rest of Carancro, began to look up with a certain deference, half-conscious, half-unconscious, to the needy young man who was nobody's love or lover, and yet, in a gentle, unimpassioned way, everybody's; landless, penniless, artless Bonaventure, who honestly thought there was no girl in Carancro who was not much too good for him, and of whom there was not one who did not think him much too good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning—for ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable

... that Hamlet's grief should assume a comprehensive form. The Queen had drawn the world in her train. Nobles and people, councillors and courtiers, the honoured statesman, the artless maiden, had joined her, had connived, were her accomplices. They had, parted among them, all the vices appropriate to her Court, her people. The world was betrayed to Hamlet in all its meanness and littleness: and he looked ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various

... listeners, almost the only dry-eyed one, but he was not dry-eyed because he felt the artless story least. Again and again he rose from his chair restlessly, and Grizel thought he scowled at her when he was really scowling at himself; as soon as she had finished he cleared the room brusquely of all intruders, and then he turned on ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie

... yellow; In her eyes the limpid blueness Of the noonday sky was mirrored. And the squaws of darksome features Smiled upon her fair young beauty; Felt their woman hearts within them Warming to the Pale-Face maiden. And the braves, who scorned all weakness, Listened to her artless prattle, While their savage natures softened, Of the change ...
— The White Doe - The Fate of Virginia Dare • Sallie Southall Cotten

... matrimonial alliance between aged Dives with his crutch and money-bags, and the fascinating and artless Miss Sans Avoir, who dedicates her life to making happy the ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke

... the ships had descended from above on their ample wings, and that these marvellous beings were inhabitants of the skies. They appeared to be simple and artless people, and of gentle and friendly dispositions. As Columbus supposed that the island was at the extremity of India, he called them Indians. He understood them to say that a king of great wealth resided in the south. This, he concluded, could ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... which enchants us. The result of the standard set by the great masters of our art, the ancients, and confirmed by the submissive verdict of modern imitation." This is unphilosophical, unsatisfactory; nor is that of grace less so—"that artless balance of motion and repose, sprung from character, founded on propriety, which neither falls short of the demands, nor overleaps the modesty of nature. Applied to execution it means that dexterous power which hides the means ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various

... a Patron? JOHNSON knew, And well that lifelike portrait drew. He is a Patron who looks down With careless eye on men who drown; But if they chance to reach the land, Encumbers them with helping hand. Ah! happy we whose artless rhyme No longer now must creep to climb! Ah! happy we of later days, Who 'scape those Caudine Forks of praise! Whose votive page may dare commend A Brother, or a private Friend! Not so it fared with scribbling man, As POPE says, ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson









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