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More "Felicitous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impossible that in its course it should not once and again touch upon some point worth notice, if not exploration. Even that miserable animal the "unattached writer" may gratefully and respectfully recognize his accurate apprehension and his felicitous application of well-nigh the most hackneyed verse in all the range of Shakespeare's—which yet is almost invariably misconstrued and misapplied—"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin;" and this, as the poet goes on to explain, is that all, with one consent, ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... appeal to childish imaginations. The merry rhymes and grotesque illustrations make each other doubly effective. No better book since "Mother Goose" than this for reading to children, who will cry, "Again, again," and will never tire of its felicitous jingles. It is dedicated to "My mother, Julia ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the breeze toward the cabin and Frank, then put mind and muscle to the sore task of remaining with Spot. Jones was born on a saddle, and had been taking his meals in a saddle for about sixty-three years, and the bay horse could run. Run is not a felicitous word—he flew. And I was rendered mentally deranged for the moment to see that hundred paces between the bay and Spot materially lessen at every jump. Spot lengthened out, seemed to go down near the ground, and cut the air like a high-geared ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... face. He had thought he knew her, heart and soul, but he found himself thoroughly astonished by this new attitude. He was so accustomed to a charming compliance in her, he could hardly realize that he was being brought to book in a manner at once so felicitous yet so firm. She gave him back his scrutiny without flinching, and somehow, though she put him in the wrong, he had never loved her better. Here was a comrade who could ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond
... it is very fine, very noble, and at times very beautiful, and it discloses the distinctly poetic faculty of which rhythmic and figurative is native expression. It is impressionable rather than imaginative in the large sense; it is felicitous in detail rather than in design; and of a general rather than individual, a representative rather than original, inspiration. There is a field of poetry, assuredly not the highest, but ample and admirable—in which these qualities, more or less unsatisfactory in prose, are legitimately ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... which bear on the difficulties of stenography. The book is in everybody's hands. But I cannot forego the pleasure of brightening my pages with Dickens' own description of his experiences as a reporter, a description contained in one of those charming felicitous speeches of his which are almost as unique in kind as his novels. Speaking in May, 1865, as chairman of a public dinner on behalf of the Newspaper Press Fund, he said: "I have pursued the calling of a reporter under circumstances of which many of my brethren ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... impossible to listen to Scott's oral narrations, whether gay or serious, or to the felicitous fun with which he parried absurdities of all sorts, without discovering better qualities in his talk than wit—and of a higher order; I mean especially a power of vivid painting—the true and primary sense of what is called ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... triumphed. The first distinguished names of the new school are those of Franzen and Wallin. Franzen (1772-1847), a bishop, was celebrated for his lyrics of social life, and in many points resembles Wordsworth. The qualities of heart, the home affections, and the gladsome and felicitous appreciation of the beauty of life and nature found in his poems, give him his great charm. Archbishop Wallin (1779- 1839) is the great religious poet of Sweden. In his hymns there is a strength and majesty, a solemn splendor and harmony of intonation, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... the hope, my lord, since I am to be that most fortunate man!' It was not the most felicitous moment, but Elmur was aware that in no other way could he assure Valerie's safety against the treachery of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... times obtained pardon for his crimes, was now guilty of high treason in the first degree, and that he would, as recalcitrant, be placed under the ban of the Empire if he did not within forty days appear at the Gilded Threshold of the Felicitous Gate of the Monarch who dispenses crowns to the princes who reign in this world, in order to justify himself. As may be supposed, submission to such an order was about the last thing Ali contemplated. As he failed to appear, the Divan caused ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... almost everything a keen appreciation and talked very readily. For through his authority and recklessness and his habit of saying right out without reflection anything at all that occurred to him, and not being ashamed to air his thoughts, he often stumbled upon some felicitous expression. [But the same Antoninus made many mistakes through his headstrong opinions. It was not enough for him to know everything: he wanted to be the only one who knew anything. It was not enough for him to have all power: he would be the only one with any power. Hence ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... the memory of the learned and indefatigable Chalmers for having ventured to impeach his genealogical proposition concerning the descent of the Douglasses, we are bound to render him our grateful thanks for the felicitous light which he has thrown on that of the House of Stewart, still more important ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... heartily welcome to it: 'Yet a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.' Laissez nous faire. Moreover, Dr. Grey, if you will courteously lend me your ears, I will favor you with a still more felicitous exposition of ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... rebuked, as the case might require, with becoming zeal, and the "pestilent opposition sheets" were attacked with that felicitous but inexorable sarcasm which distinguishes editorial contests. The rhetorical expression of contempt or indignation, and the large share which these passions had in the leading articles, justly entitled the "Vidette" to an eminent place among the ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... is an admirable book. Nothing could be more felicitous and fairer than the way in which he takes us through Carlyle's life and works."—Pall ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... quarto volume in 1609. At the end of the volume a narrative poem was printed, under the name A Lover's Complaint. It tells in the first person the story of a girl who has been seduced by a plausible villain. It is a work of Shakespeare's youth, fresh and felicitous as youth's work often is, ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... the past) as to be almost capable of verbatim reproduction, even at the present short interval after his death. If they were to be reproduced, they would be found to cover two hundred pages of the present volume, and to be so easy, fluent, varied, and wholly felicitous as to style, and full of research and reflection as to substance, as probably to earn for the writer a foremost place for epistolary power. Indeed, I am not without hope that this accession of a fresh reputation may ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... professions. For several years its work was carried on with efficiency and enthusiasm, chiefly by the propaganda of the press. It has always seemed to me that the name of the society was especially felicitous, for it expressed tersely the object of the organization, not the abolition of all scientific utilization of animal life, but the repression and elimination of abuse. A year or two later there was incorporated at Washington the National Society for the Humane ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... remark!" said Mrs. Slapman. "I must repeat it to Chickson. The author of 'A Snowflake's Lament' will appreciate that felicitous observation. ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... expected it of the stranger within his gates. The family altar probably never failed from the day he first entered with his newly married wife, into their pioneer home, amid the forests, till his death. He was solemn, earnest and felicitous in prayer. The atmosphere of his home was eminently that of a christian household. Two of his four sons became officers in their churches, and also both his sons-in-law. Four of his grandsons entered the Christian ministry, and a granddaughter is the wife of ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman
... of the book is felicitous, and it is worked out with an acute and sympathetic appreciation of methods for enlisting the attention and impressing intelligently the memory of children. The illustrations ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... tidings of the capture of Camerino. We beg that you will do honour to this message by an immediate improvement, and inform us of it, because, tormented as we are to know you so ill, nothing, not even this felicitous event, can suffice to afford us pleasure. We beg you also kindly to convey the present to the Illustrious Lord Don Alfonso, your husband and our beloved Brother-in-law, to whom we ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... friend, commemorated him in a beautiful ode. Another—left unfinished—that on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, was for many years lost sight of, but was discovered by Dr. Alex. Carlyle (q.v.). C.'s poetry is distinguished by its high imaginative quality, and by exquisitely felicitous descriptive phrases. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... let him ask his friends; they are disinterested parties, and will find out some annoyance that has escaped his notice. It was thus with Agamemnon Collumpsion Applebite. He had made up his mind that he wanted for nothing, when it was suddenly found out by his friends that he was in a state of felicitous destitution. It was discovered simultaneously, by five mamas and eighteen daughters, that Agamemnon Collumpsion Applebite must want a wife; and that his sixteen thousand and odd pounds must be a source of undivided anxiety to him. Stimulated by the most praiseworthy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... treatment. Young's treatment of it is too often declamatory; he drops the poet in the rhetorician and the wit. There is much of the false sublime in the poem, and much that reveals the hollow character of the writer. The first book is the finest, sparkling with felicitous expressions and rising frequently to true poetry. The poetical quality of that book, however, is lessened by the author's passion for antithesis. The merit of the following passage, for example, is not due ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... well, not even his admirable translation of Heine's Reisebilder. He is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his motto, 'Hilariter,' and in expressing his bright thoughts, he has been peculiarly felicitous in style. Nothing of his that we have read shows so much elegance and polish. Every chapter in the book is delightful, but we especially enjoyed that on 'Tannhaeuser,' with the fine translation and subsequent elucidation ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... sure that you have greatly enjoyed the brilliant and witty speech to which you have just listened—a speech which shows that our distinguished guest is as felicitous at the dinner-table as he is signally successful in other fields of oratory. But if you have deluded yourself with the idea that because of this change in the programme you are to escape the infliction of the usual address ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... Divinity, he only reduces the Divinity into an An like himself." During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden, have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse. The Vril-ya unite in a conviction of a future state, more felicitous and more perfect than the present. If they have very vague notions of the doctrine of rewards and punishments, it is perhaps because they have no systems of rewards and punishments among themselves, for there ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... so much of the romantic as to render the story not ill adapted for an epic poem. Lord Byron, indeed, has partially treated the subject; but by blending two incongruous stories, and leaving both of them imperfect, and by mixing up fact with fiction, has been less felicitous than usual; for, beautiful as many passages in his Island are, in a region where every tree, and flower, and fountain breathe poetry, yet as a whole the poem is feeble and deficient ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... now before us gives, in addition to the poems and lyrics contained in the two previous editions, some hundred or more pages of the later productions of the author, in the sprightly vein, and marked by the brilliant fancy and felicitous diction for which the former were noteworthy. His longest and most elaborate poem, Urania, is perhaps the best specimen of his powers. Its general tone is playful and humorous; but there are passages of great tenderness and pathos. Witness the following, from a description of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... collection of illustrated post-cards had prepared her to identify many of the places she passed, but once or twice she felt, a little ruefully the difference between this, her actual first glimpse of New York and the same first glimpse as she and John had planned it before the benign, but hardly felicitous, interference of Uncle Richard. This feeling of loneliness was strongly in the ascendent when the cab stopped under an ornate portico and two large male creatures, in powdered wigs and white silk stockings, emerged before her astonished eyes. Open flew her little ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... trust your suggestion for Miss Kavanagh's benefit will have all success. It seems to me truly felicitous and excellent, and, I doubt not, she will think so too. The last class of female character will be difficult to manage: there will be nice points in it—yet, well-managed, both an attractive and instructive ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... and in many another passage that I might quote; but as a general thing I should characterise the more metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous conceits. They seem to me to be qualified in this manner by the very fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... lines from a correspondent-besides the deep, quaint strain of the sentiment, and the curious introduction of some ludicrous touches amidst the serious and impressive, as was doubtless intended by the author-appears to us one of the most felicitous specimens of unique rhyming which has for some time met our eye. The resources of English rhythm for varieties of melody, measure, and sound, producing corresponding diversities of effect, having been ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Our felicitous Author, throwing aside all these traditional idiosyncrasies, launches boldly into the billowy sea of his idea-scattered brain[A], and in his very first line gives a full, concise description of the heroine, Mrs. HUBBARD; and having finished her description, enumerates, as was meet, the peculiarities, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... it is supposed, however, will only happen if the food so raised is eaten in the house in which the future mother happens to be. It is thought that the pasting up of the red papers containing antithetical and felicitous sentences on them, as at New Year's time, by a man under similar circumstances, and this whether the future mother sees the action performed or not, will cause the child to have red marks on the face or any part of the body. The causes producing ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... him to explain that adjustment of our State and National governments which Englishmen seem to find so hard to understand. Nothing shows his peculiar powers to more advantage than just such interruptions. Then he displays his felicitous facility of illustration, his familiar way of bringing a great question to the test of some parallel fact that everybody before him knows. An American state-question looks as mysterious to an English audience as an ear of Indian corn wrapt in its sheath to an English wheat-grower. Mr. Beecher ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... rightful place in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most educated and the most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious description, after Burns's worst manner; at subjective sentiment, after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the while, a consciousness that there was something worth ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... heard, she said, in fact Mrs. Archer had told her, that Thursday nights were festival occasions with the Swedes. She thought it rather a pleasant and convivial notion. Servants must enjoy themselves, after all. Better a happy gathering of girls than a rowdy collection of men. Letitia thought the idea felicitous. She had no objections to giving privileges to a cook. Nor had I, for the matter of that. I ventured to remark, however, that Gerda didn't ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... "A felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave, and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion, ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... under existing entanglements, the girl's speedy death would prove the most felicitous solution of this devouring riddle, which so unexpectedly crossed his smooth path; then what meant the vehement protest of his throbbing heart, the passionate longing to snatch her from disease, and disgrace, and keep her safe forever in the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... "jingle between king and kine," in Sardanapalus, act v. sc. I, lines 483, 484. It is hard to say whether Byron inserted and then omitted to erase these blemishes from negligence and indifference, or whether he regarded them as permissible or even felicitous.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... obnoxious to the rigid Papists on account of his writings. After the death of Cardinal Beatoun he wrote the tragedy of 'The Cardinal,' a poem in which the spectre of the Cardinal is the spokesman, and which teems with good advice to all and sundry. The execution, however, is not so felicitous as the plan. In 1548 Lyndsay went to Denmark to negotiate a free trade with Scotland. On his return in 1550 he wrote his very pleasing and chivalric 'History of Squire Meldrum,' founded on the actual adventures of ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... stories, told with that felicitous simplicity and elegance of diction which characterize all Mr. Woodworth's efforts ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... hands of the restorers. It has been "done up" without mercy; its natural place would be at Rochelle the New. A sort of battlemented curtain, flanked with turrets, divides it from the street and contains a low door (a low door in a high wall is always felicitous), which admits you to an inner court, where you discover the face of the building. It has statues set into it and is raised upon a very low and very deep arcade. The principal function of the deferential old portress who conducts you over the place is to call your attention to the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... conversation, Moses arose, shook his master by the hand, appeared to say "Good-night" very obviously, yawned, and retired to the kitchen, whence, in five minutes or so, there issued sounds which betokened felicitous repose. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... pedantic and pedagogic and professorial character of Seneca's diction, its rhetorical ornament and antitheses, and its deficiency in stern masculine simplicity and strength. In another remark he showed himself a still more felicitous critic. He called Seneca's writings Arenu sine Calce, "sand without lime," or, as we might say, "a rope of sand." This epigram showed a real critical faculty. It exactly hits off Seneca's short and disjointed sentences, consisting as they often ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... her duty to herself could prevail to make her do anything but run away from him at the first warning of his approach. Nevertheless, from him, even, she had learned something. She had become acquainted with the fact, whispered in his own exquisitely felicitous manner, and with the tact and judicious appreciation of opportunity peculiar to him, that Ludovico di Castelmare was, to the great sorrow of his friends and family, enslaved by a certain Venetian artist, then resident in Ravenna,—a girl ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... were ordered. In the meantime he went to the bar for an "appetizer," as he termed it. Here he met an acquaintance among the loungers present, and, of course, asked him to take a social glass also. This personage complied in a manner peculiarly felicitous, and in such a way as to give the impression that his acceptance of the courtesy was a compliment to Haldane. Much practice had made him perfect in this art, and the number of drinks that he was able to secure gratis in the course of a year by being always ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... industry and acquirements with the most brilliant wit and genius, well and accurately informed on all subjects, both in science and art; endowed with a memory that retained whatever it received, with quick and clear perceptions, the choicest, most felicitous, and forcible language in which to clothe his thoughts, no one could doubt his meaning or withhold the tribute of wonder ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... vastly; but more so as the master and mistress of the family are excessively clean and obliging; two things so material to my repose, that I absolutely could not dispense patiently with either.—This it was which made me felicitous about taking a house; I am now so happily situated, I wish not to have one in town whilst I remain a batchelor. Heaven knows how long that will be!—Your nonpareil has given me a dislike to ...
— Barford Abbey • Susannah Minific Gunning
... his Gulistan sets forth only his well-pondered thoughts in the most felicitous and expressive language. There is no need to form an abstract or epitome of a work in which nothing is superfluous, nothing valueless. But, as in a cabinet of gems some are more beautiful than others, or as in a garden some flowers are more attractive ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... human creative art—as, for example, the "De Imitatione Christi," or "The Pilgrim's Progress," or" Robinson Crusoe," or "The Vicar of Wakefield,"—was worth any conceivable amount of attainments when rated as an evidence of anything that could justly denominate a man "admirable." One felicitous ballad of forty lines might have enthroned Crichton as really admirable, whilst the pretensions actually put forward on his behalf simply install him as a cleverish or dexterous ape. However, as Lady Carbery did not forego her purpose of causing me to shine under every angle, it would have been ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... bargain, and if he is not altogether a fool he will be content with his ten thousand dollars, and Nos. 13-15 Barowsky Chambers will be again without a tenant. Otherwise—and it is generally otherwise with these meddlers—there will have to be a new adjustment of averages—what a felicitous phrase!—and this, as usual, I will take upon myself. One way or the other, and, personally, I don't care ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen
... judges, particularly in the older states, has been not uninfluenced by these considerations. Marshall, Bushrod Washington, Story, Kent, Ware, Bradley, and many of their contemporaries and successors, were put upon the bench in part because of their legal scholarship and their power of felicitous expression. Hence the better American opinions have more elaboration and finish than many which come from the English courts, and are more readily accepted as authorities by American judges. But the great multiplication of reports has so widened ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... in which simple ones go about And draw a fine picture of things they don't know about! We all know a kitten, but come to a catamount The beast is a stranger when grown up to that amount, (A stranger we rather prefer should n't visit us, A felis whose advent is far from felicitous.) The boy who can boast that his trap has just got a mouse Must n't draw it and write underneath "hippopotamus"; Or say unveraciously, "This is an elephant,"— Don't think, let me beg, these examples irrelevant,— What they mean is just this—that a thing ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... to take the brush out of his hand and to paint for him "with her own bare, sheer, penetrating power." Rousseau, however, is French, and in virtue of his nativity exhibits always what Wordsworth's treatment of nature exhibits only occasionally, namely, the Gallic gift of style. It is rarely as felicitous as in Corot, in every detail of whose every work, one may almost say, its informing, co-ordinating, elevating influence is distinctly to be perceived; but it is always present as a factor, as a force dignifying and relieving from all touch, all taint of the commonness that is so often inseparably ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... will be pleased to order that the communications accompanying this letter be examined, and that you will grant me the favor that seems most fitting to your majesty, whose sacred royal Catholic majesty may our Lord have in his keeping, and give you increase of kingdoms and seigniories for many and felicitous years. From Cubu, May ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume II, 1521-1569 • Emma Helen Blair
... personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire. Mr. Hall Caine, it is true, aims at the grandiose, but then he writes at the top of his voice. He is so loud that one cannot bear what he says. Mr. James Payn is an adept ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... unskilful counterpoint—may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions, the prevailing characteristics of which are a feeling as uncommon as beautiful; a treatment as original as felicitous; a melody and a harmony as new, fresh, vigorous and striking as they are utterly unexpected and out of the original track. In taking up one of the works of Chopin you are entering, as it were, a fairyland untrodden by human footsteps—a path hitherto unfrequented ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... were made by Rev. Doctors BELLOWS and BETHUNE, who, though pole-wide apart in the sphere of theology, spanning the distance between Arius and Calvin, find common grounds of sympathy in their love for, and appreciation of Art. Mr. DURAND, the President, in a very felicitous speech, narrated his experience as an artist and as one of the founders ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... lines on "The Mocking Bird." Of the quality of Miss Owen's poetry it is scarce necessary to speak; be it sufficient to say that the present piece ranks among her best. In the intense fervour of the sentiment, and the felicitous choice of the imagery, the touch of the born poet is alike shown. Through an almost inexcusable editorial mistake of our own, the first word of this poem is erroneously rendered. Line ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... a spell of magazine work established his reputation as a novelist in 1875 with "Roderick Hudson"; most of his life has been spent in Italy and England, and the writing of fiction has been varied with several volumes of felicitous criticism, chiefly on French life and literature; his novels are characterised by a charming style, by a delicate discriminating analysis of rather uneventful lives, and by an almost complete absence of strong dramatic ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... is the ever-present use of color. It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of colors used in the descriptions. It will serve at least to call the reader's attention to the felicitous choice of words used in describing the opalescence of St. Mark's or the skillful combination of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence as, "the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... flying extract, entitled, "Superstitions on the Weather," being a fair specimen of the very agreeable manner of the digressions in the above work, which is, perhaps, less practical than it might have been; but this defect is more than atoned for in the author's felicitous mode of intermingling with the main subject, some of the most curious facts and phenomena in natural history and philosophy so as to familiarize the angler with many causes and effects which altogether belong to a higher class of reading than that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume XII., No. 324, July 26, 1828 • Various
... the Atlantic in Boston and Blackwood in Edinburgh. The name was easily had, and for a sign manual on the cover some one drew a grizzly bear, that formidable exemplar of Californian wildness. But the design did not quite satisfy, until Bret Harte, with a felicitous stroke, drew two parallel lines just before the feet of the halting brute. Now it was the grizzly of the wilderness drawing back before the railway of civilization, and the picture was complete as ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... with reference to the essay Of dramatick poesie, "The contrast of Ben. Jonson and Shakspere is peculiarly and strikingly felicitous." He could have said no less—whatever he might have said as to its authorship—had he seen the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... right. We find here and there pretty designs, short felicitous passages, smiling bits of nature; but obscurity, stiffness of expression, and the dragging in of Fancy by the hair continually mar the reading and take away all its charm. Even the pieces most highly lauded in advance, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... exordium and the recurring machinery of a vision—to the origin of which latter (the dream of Scipio related by Cicero and expounded in the widely-read Commentary of Macrobius) the opening lines of the "Romaunt" point. He owes to the French poem both the germs of felicitous phrases, such as the famous designation of Nature as "the Vicar of the almighty Lord," and perhaps touches used by him in passages like that in which he afterwards, with further aid from other sources, drew the character of a true gentleman. But the main service which the work of this ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... closer together, voices were lowered, and the discussion became general, each one offering his or her advice. Nothing was said to shock the proprieties. The ladies, in particular, were most expert in felicitous turns of phrase, charming subtleties of speech for expressing the most ticklish things. A foreigner would have understood nothing, the language was so carefully veiled. But as the slight coating of modesty with which every woman of the world is enveloped is hardly more than skin deep, they expanded ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... reign of wisdom is temporarily suspended. Newman wished Madame de Cintre so well that nothing he could think of doing for her in the future rose to the high standard which his present mood had set itself. She seemed to him so felicitous a product of nature and circumstance that his invention, musing on future combinations, was constantly catching its breath with the fear of stumbling into some brutal compression or mutilation of her beautiful personal harmony. This is what I mean by Newman's tenderness: Madame de Cintre ...
— The American • Henry James
... languages would permit. But it is to be remembered that the familiar uses and subtle associations which give to words their full meaning are never absolutely the same in two languages. Love in English not only SOUNDS but IS different from amor in Latin, or amore in Italian. Even the most felicitous prose translation must fail therefore at times to afford the entire and precise ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... and slave-drivers from South Carolina entered the vast hall arm in arm. The great meeting rose to its feet, and walls and roof shook with applause. General John A. Dix of New York called the Convention to order, and, in an eloquent and felicitous speech, stated the objects of the assembly—to renew fraternal feeling between the sections, heal the wounds of war, obliterate bitter memories, and restore the Union of the fathers. Senator Doolittle of Wisconsin was chosen permanent president, and patriotic resolutions were adopted ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... What, the Rhodian? Form and face, Victory's self upsoaring to receive The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name, Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants, Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end In ion' . ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... indeed, John Fletcher lost himself in the needs and spirit of his Master, finding in his increasingly clear view of God, his ever more intimate fellowship with Christ, abiding treasure and keen delight which were beyond even his power of felicitous expression. It was in keeping with his hourly experience that he exclaimed in a letter to ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... fame, were present. They were in their happiest vein, interspersing the speeches with appropriate and felicitous songs. Lucretia Mott did not confine herself to a single speech, but, in Quaker style, whenever the spirit moved made many happy points. When she first arose to speak, a call came from the audience for her to ascend the pulpit in order that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... is not, however, so much in the selection of single incidents of this kind, as in the feeling which regulates the arrangement of the whole subject, that the mind of a great composer is known. A single incident may be suggested by a felicitous chance, as a pretty motto might be for the heading of a chapter. But the great composers so arrange all their designs that one incident illustrates another, just as one color relieves another. Perhaps the "Heysham," of the Yorkshire series, which, as to its locality, may ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Cooper. With an earnestness and indefatigable zeal proportioned to the object, and which nothing but the most generous friendship could impel him to employ, Mr. Holcroft gave those powers to the instruction of our hero, and with such speedy and felicitous effect, that the young gentleman was, in the course of a few months, considered by his two friends as perfectly qualified to appear before a London audience in some of Shakspeare's most important characters. Having been for some time ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... dignity, which has its only parallel by the way in the case of Vasco de Gama, (according to the narrative of Camoens,) when met and confronted by a sea phantom, whilst attempting to double the Cape of Storms, (Cape of Good Hope,) a ludicrous passage, in which one felicitous blunder did Csar a better service than all the truths which Greece and Rome could have furnished. In our own experience, we once witnessed a blunder about as gross. The present Chancellor, in his first electioneering contest with the Lowthers, upon ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... her needs? She almost persuaded herself he would be gratified at her request. After all, Simeon was not an anchorite; he had his moods like other men, and there were times when a rough passion marked his dealings with his wife; perhaps he had not been very felicitous in his role of lover, but the remembrance that there was such a side to his nature gave a fillip to ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... religion to poetry which is thus expressed in the hymnology of the church is very large. Probably many of us are indebted for definite and permanent religious conceptions and impressions quite as much to felicitous phrases of hymns as to any words of sermon or catechism. Our most positive convictions of religious truth are apt to come to us in some line or stanza that tells the whole story. The rhythm and the rhyme have helped to fix it and ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... Then our men took to the rifle-pits—pits ten or twelve feet long by four or five deep, with the loose earth banked up a few inches high on the exposed sides. All the pits bore names, more or less felicitous, by which they were known to their transient tenants. One was called "The Pepper-Box," another "Uncle Sam's Well," another "The Reb-Trap," and another, I am constrained to say, was named after a not-to-be-mentioned tropical locality. Though this ...
— Quite So • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... nothing else to do, he got out the manuscript of Aliris: A Romance of all Time, and read it through carefully from the beginning. To his surprise he found it very poor. Its language was felicitous in some spots, but stilted in most; the erudition was pedantic, and dragged in by the ears; the action was idiotic; and the proportions were padded until they no longer existed as proportions. He was astounded. He began to see that he had misconceived the whole treatment of it. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... greatest master of satire in English literature, and one of the truest painters of social life that any age has produced; not so much admired by women as by men; accurate in his delineation of character, though sometimes bitter and fierce; felicitous in plot, teaching lessons in morality, unveiling shams and hypocrisy, contemptuous of all fools and quacks, yet sad in his reflections ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... for we find him having no fewer than five bastard sons, named respectively, Tormod Uigeach, Murdoch, Neil, Donald, and Rory Og, all of whom arrived at maturity. In these circumstances it can hardly be supposed that his lady's domestic happiness was of the most felicitous and unmixed description. ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... more felicitous. The lad threw himself down on the grass, laughing boisterously. Amy joined, in natural reaction from her former fear, and even the "Californian" helped on the fun by observing them with an absurdly ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... energetic demonstrations that healing measure was mainly attributable, were thoroughly satisfied, and, instead of displaying their nationality in angry and defiant resolutions, they adopted the language of congratulation and enthusiastic allegiance to the Government. This felicitous state of things was suddenly interrupted by one of those incidents which no foresight could have anticipated, and which, absolutely trivial in itself, was magnified at once, by the jealous spirit of patriotism, into a violation of the solemn compact that had just been ratified on both ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... signing of the marriage act has been great happiness; and there is about to be despatched at this time after him one of my servants, charged with what would appear necessary, whereby may be declared, on my part, the inexpressible joy of this felicitous conclusion, which, when received, will hasten ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Romance. The time and space we have occupied sufficiently indicate the favourable sentiments respecting it with which we have been impressed. Of the execution of the satires, from the several extracts we have given, the reader will himself be enabled to judge. This is of course unequal, but generally felicitous. In the personal allusions which occur through the work, the author exhibits, as we have before noticed, a freedom from malice and all uncharitableness, and in many of them has attained that happy desideratum which Dryden considered a matter of so ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... not rank high. His fame rests on his speeches. His eloquence was transcendent, so far as it was rendered vivid by passion. He knew how to move men; he understood human nature. No orator ever did so much by a single word, by felicitous expressions. In the tribune he was immovable. His self-possession never left him in the greatest disorders. He was always master of himself. His voice was full, manly, and sonorous, and pleased the ear; always powerful, yet flexible, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and pithy point of this passage stamps it as one of Bunyan's most felicitous descriptions. We who live in a later age may, indeed, suspect that he has somewhat antedated the death of Pagan, and the impotence of Pope; but his picture of their cave and its memorials, his delineation of the survivor of this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... was himself quite astonished at this long and felicitous compliment, for as a rule he did not find it easy to express himself coherently. He expected, too, that his beautiful partner would show her ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... friends, so that there was little of the toil of preparation with him, and if the demand had been equal to the supply, he might have lectured continuously. But if there was little of formal and finished composition in Mr. C.'s lectures, there were always racy and felicitous passages, indicating deep thought, and indicative of the man of genius; so that if polish was not always attained, as one mark of excellence, the attention of his hearers never flagged, and his large dark eyes, and his countenance, in an excited state, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... unenviable state of mental anxiety, and corporeal lassitude, was our justly renowned hero, at the period of those preparations being completed, which were calculated to display him, in the view of an enraptured people, as the greatest and most felicitous of mortals; nor did his admirable heart, amidst all it's oppressions, reject a temporary participation in the bliss which was so ...
— The Life of the Right Honourable Horatio Lord Viscount Nelson, Vol. II (of 2) • James Harrison
... a quaint cheerfulness in them, toned down with a shade—the shadow of a shade—of the most touching melancholy, effected, we can scarcely tell how, by an exquisitely felicitous, though but slight introduction of the minor key, perchance but a single note or chord. But that suffices, and it is as a sudden vision of our home, far off among the mountains, or in the "happy valley" of our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... discovery of itself to us, as the appropriate attitude on our part, the dialectical spirit, which to the last will have its diffidence and reserve, its scruples and second thoughts. Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the "philosophic temper," in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... 'How, O father, do men attain to those superior regions whence there is no return to earthly life? Is it by asceticism or by knowledge? How also can one gradually attain to felicitous regions? Asked by me, O answer it ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... is the felicitous term given by Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott to the period of nearly three centuries following the campaign against the inhabitants of Canaan, when the Israelites took possession of their land. The Book of, Judges is a record of those ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... and from the aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, but also natural for ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... in a recent number of Macmillan's Magazine, entitled 'In Capri,' and signed 'W. Wordsworth,' are from the pen of a grandson of the famous author of 'The Excursion.' They are gracefully written, in an agreeable rhythm, and with much command of felicitous expression. If, therefore, the writer has indeed the relationship to the great Wordsworth which rumour assigns him, the fact is interesting, and suggests some considerations as to the transmission of the poetic faculty from one generation ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... that land which had, for long years, been to me a region of romance. Since the time when, as a child, my highest delight had been in the letters of a dear relative, describing to me his home and mode of life in the "Indian country," and still later, in his felicitous narration of a tour with General Cass, in 1820, to the sources of the Mississippi—nay, even earlier, in the days when I stood at my teacher's knee, and spelled out the long word Mich-i-li-mack-i-nac, that distant ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... this remarkable attachment had its inception, are not known; but like all such affairs, it arose, no doubt, from felicitous accident. In one of his sketches, Irving speaks of a mysterious footprint seen on the sward of the Battery, which awoke a romantic interest in his breast. This youthful incident comes to our mind when we remember that Mr. Hoffman lived at Number 68 Greenwich street, not a stone's throw from the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... Holocaust," though superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad" satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are adapted to the new age of steam, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... conducted with a certain formality. Todd had therefore, on his arrival, unpinned from the inside of his jacket a portentous document signed with his owner's name and sealed with a red wafer, which after such felicitous phrases as—"I have the distinguished honor," etc.—gave the boy's age (21), weight (140 pounds), and height (5 feet 10 inches)—all valuable data for identification in case the chattel conceived a notion of moving further north (an unnecessary precaution in Todd's case). To ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... years I have been in search of Aladdin's wonderful lamp to enlighten me how to effect this felicitous transformation. Like Aladdin's quest of old the search has been long and wearisome and has led me a tedious road through many vexatious disappointments, but at last I have found the lamp! I have in my power the magic ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various
... Japon, which from continual intercourse and friendly relations with the said Filipinas Islands may—if the Christian faith is preserved and permanently maintained in the latter, and as deeply rooted and as pure and constant as at present—look, in the said matter of religion, for felicitous and great results. The same [may be said] for what concerns the service of your Majesty, and the profitable and advantageous increase of the royal estate, since even the profits which your Majesty at present ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various
... so far as to understand the story, and if that pleased or interested him, he finished the volume. But it was in vain to attempt fixing his attention on critical distinctions of philology, upon the difference of idiom, the beauty of felicitous expression, or the artificial combinations of syntax. 'I can read and understand a Latin author,' said young Edward, with the self-confidence and rash reasoning of fifteen, 'and Scaliger or Bentley could not do much more.' Alas! while he was thus permitted to read only for the gratification ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... his first speech at the convention—the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind—the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken by surprise—the applause which followed from the beginning to the end of his felicitous remarks. I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever. There stood one, in physical ...
— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - An American Slave • Frederick Douglass
... ordinary persons seem to be without character; such men are therefore called, distinctively, 'characters'; and it is a matter of common experience that, whether through the unconscious prescience of parents or through that felicitous sense of propriety which often guides the hazards of destiny, they usually bear names to match their qualities. Meshach Myatt! Meshach Myatt! What piquant curious syllables to roll glibly off the tongue, and to repeat for the ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... wealth. Everybody struggles to rise into some superior class. The spirit of caste is found as keenly at work among the humblest as among the highest ranks. At Birmingham, there was a club of workmen with tails to their coats, and another without tails: the one looked down upon the other. Cobbett, so felicitous in his nicknames, called his political opponent, Mr. Sadler, "a linendraper." But the linendraper also has plenty of people beneath him. The linendraper looks down on the huckster, the huckster on the mechanic, and the mechanic on the day labourer. The flunkey ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... saying in halting prose that I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... English. My readers, however, will no doubt remember that this epigram was also translated into English by Pope. Though the modern poet's version is to be preferred, the older translation contains one of the most felicitous ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... experience in the active management of men. His explanation of the policy of Pausanias at Byzantium, if it be not (as I think it is) the right one, is at least the only one yet offered. I venture to think that, historically, it merits attention; as, from the imaginative point of view, it is undoubtedly felicitous. By elevating our estimate of Pausanias as a statesman, it increases our interest ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... look volumes," cried she: "and I can't bear it. I won't bear it. If you don't believe ME, ask my MAID." And with this felicitous speech, she ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... stood a great brickyard, with smoking chimneys. First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America. A little way beyond was another great hole, which they had emptied and not yet filled up. This held water, and all summer it stood there, with the near-by soil draining into it, festering ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... conscience to disgust him with the hard give-and-take of the struggling lawyer's life. He sought escape in graduate work in history and politics at Johns Hopkins, where, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled Congressional Government, a study remarkable for clear thinking and felicitous expression. These qualities characterized his work as a professor at Bryn Mawr and Wesleyan and paved his path to an appointment on the Princeton faculty in 1890, as Professor of ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... already make their way." The rapidity, the compactness of the sentences, impressed Gaston Paris as very remarkable. The assassin gallops away upon his mare, and seeks by night to cross the Rhone. A singularly felicitous use of the supernatural is made here. Ourrias is carried to the bottom of the river by the goblins and spirits that come out and hover over it at night. There is a certain terror in this termination, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... Though perhaps less felicitous, the names of Baer express the same ideas as those of Cuvier. By the Peripheric he signified those in which all the parts converge from the periphery or circumference of the animal to its centre. Cuvier only reverses this definition in his name of Radiates, signifying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... neither so ingenious nor so felicitous as the language- expedient of the man who wished to leave some luggage at a railway station in Rome, and knowing nothing of any foreign tongue but a few Latin phrases, mostly of an obituary character, pointed ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... foregoing sentiments have taken a spice of acridity from a circumstance that happened about this stage of the feast, and very much interrupted my own further enjoyment of it. Up to this time, my condition had been exceedingly felicitous, both on account of the brilliancy of the scene, and because I was in close proximity with three very pleasant English friends. One of them was a lady, whose honored name my readers would recognize as a household word, if I dared write it; another, a gentleman, likewise well known to them, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... front a man had risen from his seat—the felicitous Mr. Truesdale. Glancing around at his fellow-members he then began to explain in the impressive but conversational tone of one whose counsels are in the habit of being listened to, that this was merely a little measure to remedy a flaw in the statutes. Mr. Truesdale believed in corporations ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... there are at least four other fictitious narratives by the same writer—'Roxana,' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,' and 'Colonel Jack'—which possess an interest not inferior to 'Robinson Crusoe'—'except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation.' Granting most unreservedly that the same hand is perceptible in the minor novels as in 'Robinson Crusoe,' and that they bear at every page the most unequivocal symptoms of De Foe's workmanship, I venture to doubt the 'partiality' and the 'unfairness' of preferring ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... regular metre: for even the prose has in the highest and lowest dramatic personage, a Cobbler or a Hamlet, a rhythm so felicitous and so severally appropriate, as to ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the object, emotion, or idea expressed is beautiful, we demand certain formal and material elements of beauty. A telegram may convey the very apex of felicity, yet be not at all felicitous in its form or in the music of its words. If in such cases, we speak of beauty, the term is altogether metaphorical and imputed; we are using it in the same analogical sense as when we speak of a "beautiful operation" or a "beautiful deed"; it is a moral rather ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... to pay the penalty of our experience in a certain lack of innocence. The artless graces of a child seem mincing affectations in a grown-up woman. But the poetry of this age has amply made up for any lack of innocence by its sumptuous fulness, its variety, its magnificent accomplishment, its felicitous response to a multitude of moods and apprehensions. It has struck out no new field for itself; it still remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that defined sphere it has ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... maintain so high a rank among German poems, because they arose with and in the achievements which are their subject; and because, moreover, their felicitous form, just as if a fellow-combatant had produced them in the loftiest moments, makes us feel the most ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... an evening of felicitous chatter, of showing off Christmas cards, of exchanging of news, of building of schemes, the most prominent being that Valetta should be in the constant companionship of Mysie and Fly until her own schoolroom should be re-established. This had been ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... gives an amusing case of a youth who was permitted to whisper his name into the ear of his obdurate mistress, the consequence of which was that the lady contracted a habit of dreaming about him, which led to a felicitous change of feeling ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... hands, and thoroughly understood the principle as well as the details of the machine. When the case came on for trial, the learned sergeant was enabled to work the model on the table with such case and skill, and to explain the precise nature of the invention with such felicitous clearness, as to astonish alike judge, jury, and spectators; and the thorough conscientiousness and mastery with which he handled the case had no doubt its influence upon ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... is not easy to discover anything noble or even felicitous in this Dedication. Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... bosom a degree of liberty and an amount of individual and public prosperity to which there is no parallel in history, and substituting in its place hostile governments, driven at once and inevitably into mutual devastation and fratricidal carnage, transforming the now peaceful and felicitous brotherhood into a vast permanent camp of armed men like the rival monarchies of Europe and Asia. Well knowing that such, and such only, are the means and the consequences of their plans and purposes, they endeavor to prepare the people of the United States for civil war by doing everything ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 5: Franklin Pierce • James D. Richardson
... blindly, in his place. Tall, lean, loosely and feebly put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face, furnished, but by no means decorated, with a straggling moustache and whisker. He looked clever and ill—a combination by no means felicitous; and he wore a brown velvet jacket. He carried his hands in his pockets, and there was something in the way he did it that showed the habit was inveterate. His gait had a shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on his legs. As I have said, whenever he passed ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... her mother or some other discreet female is present, to prevent misinterpretation or remark. I have also taken a good deal of interest in Benjamin Franklin, before referred to, sometimes called B.F. or more frequently Frank, in imitation of that felicitous abbreviation, combining dignity and convenience, adopted by some of his betters. My acquaintance with the French language is very imperfect, I having never studied it anywhere but in Paris, which is awkward, as B.F. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... and assembled poets and cavaliers from all quarters, who entertained the ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their madrigals and gossip, their sonnets and their repartees. "Little by little the poets had the better of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme was valued more than an elaborately constructed compliment." And this easy form of literature became the highest fashion. People hastened to call themselves by the sentimental pastoral names of the Arcadians, and almost forgot their love-intrigues so much were they ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... by a felicitous exercise of the faculty of successful generalisation can we arrive at a knowledge ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... sabbaths) from one to another, and another, through some forty centuries, equally fulfilled in each case, but still looking forward with hope to some grander catastrophe: it is not that they are loosely suited, like the Delphic oracles, to whatever may turn up, but that they, by a felicitous adaptation, sit closely into each era which the Architect of Ages has arranged. Pythonic divination may be likened to a loose bag, which would hold and involve with equal ease almost any circumstance; biblical prophecy to an exact mould, into which alone, though not all similar in perfection, ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... act, when taken in connection with the grin and the droop of the glass eye, seemed to the spectators as if he and she understood each other, and that the wink in question was a kind of telegraphic dispatch sent to let her know that she had a friend on the bench. Sir Spigot was deaf, too, a felicitous circumstance, which gave him peculiar facility in the decision of ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... it not have been planned and calculated beforehand, to bewilder and mislead?—It may well be doubted. No preconceived and elaborated programme can come up to the inspiration of the moment, which is genius. Such felicitous wording of subject-matter so objectionable: such an unassailable presentation of so indefensible a principle—could hardly have been the fruit of premeditation. Cornelia was allowing things to take ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... sister, as Mr. Locke was to M. d'A. ; and on the 1st of August the ceremony was re-performed in the Sardinian chapel, according to the rites of the Romish Church; and never, never was union more blessed and felicitous; though after the first eight years of unmingled happiness, it was assailed by many calamities, chiefly of separation or illness, yet still mentally unbroken. F. D'ARBLAY. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... though I stood at his side; his object seemed rather to awaken the indignant attention of the universe. Some muttered allusions, which followed, to dogs and the smell of roast-meat, struck me as singularly felicitous. The courtyard, a large square space, was one torrid blaze of sunshine, and, bathed in intense light, Cornelius was creeping across in full view with an inexpressible effect of stealthiness, of dark and secret slinking. He reminded one of everything that ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... perceived facts and formed theories instantaneously, and with a spirit of inventive penetration which distanced the slower approaches of more learned men. But if his powers of mind were singularly great, the qualities which accompanied them were still more felicitous. He possessed the most singular amenity of disposition with the highest feeling, the rarest simplicity united to the highest genius. In the great distinction and the superior society to which his discovery introduced him, the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... fly with me, but she would leave her large fortune behind in the hands of her devil of a guardian. Now, with what knowledge you already have of my father's will, you can easily guess the rest. You are no stranger to me. I know your history, your family, your education, and, under the most felicitous circumstances, would be proud and happy to call you brother. Now, then, decide to try again. Clara shall not refuse you; she does not wish to do so; on the contrary, she loves you; but some of her oddness was in the ascendant ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... elegant, polished, classical, Attic, correct, Ciceronian, artistic; chaste, pure, Saxon, academical^. graceful, easy, readable, fluent, flowing, tripping; unaffected, natural, unlabored^; mellifluous; euphonious, euphemism, euphemistic; numerose^, rhythmical. felicitous, happy, neat; well put, neatly put, well ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... putting on his breeches, are drawn with a point at once so precise and vivacious, so full of keen fun and inimitably happy invention, that I have not found their equal in comic etching anywhere ... the picturesque details of the room are etched with the same felicitous intelligence; but the marvel of the work is in the expression of the strange little faces, and the energy of the comical wee limbs."[90] In The Witches' Frolic ["Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft"], we find a happy blending of the terrible and the grotesque. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... fancies. The favoured individual whose daily walk might be between the yew-hedges on that elastic lawn; who should eat, drink, and sleep through the commonplace hours of this present time behind those mystical white shutters! But when the individual added to this felicitous dispensation of fortune the personal attributes of unparalleled beauty and pea-green satin; of having worn hoops, high heels, and powder; of countless lovers, and white brocade with pink rosebuds—well ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Major Fitzgerald, formally opened proceedings; and, alluding in felicitous terms to the momentous occasion, announced, amid cheers, that there were no less than nineteen competitors for the badge, who, their names having been drawn from a hat, were to address the meeting ...
— Australia Revenged • Boomerang
... acquaintance of the performer at the house of a mutual acquaintance, the couple quickly became enamored of each other. A brief engagement of less than a month was followed by marriage, and so Moscheles entered into a relation singularly felicitous in all the elements which make domestic life most blessed. After a brief tour in the Rhenish cities, and a visit to Paris, Moscheles proceeded to London, where he had determined to make his home, for in no country had such genuine ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... chaussee—and a bright blue sky above the green trees—all these things irresistibly rivet the attention and extort the admiration of a stranger. You may have your boots cleaned, and your breakfast prepared, upon these same boulevards. Felicitous ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... "I strive to subject things to myself, not myself to things." This eminently practical wisdom, which is only a highly-developed egoism, is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was expressed by Voltaire in verses that were sometimes felicitous. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... his impatient and uncurbed mind feels? Why cannot my form accompany the bold flights of my mind and satisfy the craving I feel to resolve the vexed question that ever rises to my lips—"Is he alive?" O soul of mine, be patient, thou hast a felicitous tranquillity, which other men might envy thee! Sufficient for the hour is the consciousness thou hast that thy mission is a holy ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... connected with real life, it is not easy to understand why the radiant youth, "the world's fresh ornament," "only herald to the gaudy spring," etc., should need such an amount of persuasion to marry. Seventeen sonnets of great poetical beauty and felicitous language are devoted to this object. It is an exquisite treat to read them as works of art, but taken literally they are unspeakably absurd. No sane man would draw out such lengths of linked sweetness for the purpose named; nor would any youth, however credulous, take the sonnets at their ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... was her tongue the prattling servant of her beauty, but a guide of cheerful converse; for just as she charmed without device or scheme of fascination, so she possessed the art of speaking well without seeming to have ever studied it. In the chase after just and felicitous ideas, she could lead or follow over the most varied fields with the intuition of the huntress born. With all these excellences, her wit, her sincerity, her ardour for all things bright and true, she had no conceit of herself but kept ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... moment's hesitation she started off in the flow of her discourse, which rolled smoothly and uninterruptedly on for nearly two hours. It was very apparent that it was not a cut and dried speech, for she was as fluent and as felicitous in her allusions to circumstances immediately around her as she was when she rose to a more exalted pitch of laudation of the "Union," or of execration of the old slavery system. Her voice was remarkable—as ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... career of the most majestic of the Greek poets was eminently felicitous. His birth was noble, his fortune affluent; his natural gifts were the rarest which nature bestows on man, genius and beauty. All the care which the age permitted was lavished on his education. For his feet even the ordinary obstacles ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... monuments of EDWARDIII. and the BLACK PRINCE, severally at Westminster and Canterbury. Ishall refer to these fine shields again, and to other admirable examples with them, hereafter (Chapter IX.). The conventionalism in all these examples, however felicitous the manner in which it is treated in them, is very decidedly exaggerated. These examples, and others such as these, are not the less valuable to us because their teaching includes an illustration of the excesses that we must always be careful to avoid. Imay here observe, that on the subject ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... vulgar taste of an ass. No! say what you will, there is a real pleasure in working for people who are able to appreciate the refinements of an art; who know how to yield a kind recognition to the beauties of a work, and who, by felicitous approbations, reward you for your labour. Yes! the most charming recompense one can receive for the things which one does is to see them understood, and to have them received with the applause that honours. Nothing, in my opinion, can ...
— The Shopkeeper Turned Gentleman - (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme) • Moliere (Poquelin)
... and thoroughly understood the principle as well as the details of the machine. When the case came on for trial, the learned sergeant was enabled to work the model on the table with such case and skill, and to explain the precise nature of the invention with such felicitous clearness, as to astonish alike judge, jury, and spectators; and the thorough conscientiousness and mastery with which he handled the case had no doubt its influence upon the ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... life—the negotiations had to be conducted with a certain formality. Todd had therefore, on his arrival, unpinned from the inside of his jacket a portentous document signed with his owner's name and sealed with a red wafer, which after such felicitous phrases as—"I have the distinguished honor," etc.—gave the boy's age (21), weight (140 pounds), and height (5 feet 10 inches)—all valuable data for identification in case the chattel conceived a notion of moving further north (an unnecessary precaution in Todd's case). ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the painter is the ever-present use of color. It is interesting merely to count the number and variety of colors used in the descriptions. It will serve at least to call the reader's attention to the felicitous choice of words used in describing the opalescence of St. Mark's or the skillful combination of the colors characteristic of the great Venetians in such a sentence as, "the low bronzed gleaming of sea-rusted armor shot angrily under their blood-red ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... things to myself, not myself to things." This eminently practical wisdom, which is only a highly-developed egoism, is that of Horace and Montaigne, and was expressed by Voltaire in verses that were sometimes felicitous. ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... say, he hates to leave anything out; dreading diffuseness, as he dreads the tame sweetness of an easy melody, he will use only the smallest possible number of words to render his thought; and so, as here, he is too often ingenious rather than felicitous, forgetting that to the poet poetry comes first, and all ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... EDWARDIII. and the BLACK PRINCE, severally at Westminster and Canterbury. Ishall refer to these fine shields again, and to other admirable examples with them, hereafter (Chapter IX.). The conventionalism in all these examples, however felicitous the manner in which it is treated in them, is very decidedly exaggerated. These examples, and others such as these, are not the less valuable to us because their teaching includes an illustration of the excesses that we must always be careful ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Balder's apprehension, not by words, but by some subtile expressiveness of eye and gesture. Gnulemah could give voiceless utterances in a manner pregnant and felicitous almost beyond belief. ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... felicitous in his description of this bay. He probably means to say that from the point where he then was, off Little Boar's Head, to the point where it extends farthest into the land, or to the west, it appeared to be about ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... Welsh tales given of Fairy dances the music is always spoken of as most entrancing, and Shakespeare in felicitous terms gives ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... silver dollar. So I sent my "extras" along with the money, and in return received a fine sheep with long white wool, when all we had hoped for was only a goat. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that my felicitous compliment brought ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... Tepelen, having many times obtained pardon for his crimes, was now guilty of high treason in the first degree, and that he would, as recalcitrant, be placed under the ban of the Empire if he did not within forty days appear at the Gilded Threshold of the Felicitous Gate of the Monarch who dispenses crowns to the princes who reign in this world, in order to justify himself. As may be supposed, submission to such an order was about the last thing Ali contemplated. As he failed to appear, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... accompanied this absence of strain one already alluded to may be mentioned again. Scott is one of the most literary of all writers. He was saturated with reading; nothing could happen but it brought some felicitous quotation, some quaint parallel to his mind from the great wits, or the small, of old. Yet no writer is less bookish than he; none insults his readers less with any parade, with any apparent consciousness of erudition; and he wears his learning so lightly that pedants ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... more-truly felicitous or original in its way than the mode of warfare adopted by little Neal Malone, who was tailor for the O'Callaghan side: for every tradesman is obliged to fight on behalf of his own faction. Big Frank Farrell, the miller, being on the O'Hallaghan side, had been sent for, and came up ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... poem was followed by a narrative of travel in Italy, happily written, full of felicitous description, and touched by a humor which, in quality and manner, was new to English readers. Then came one of those indiscretions of the imagination which showed that the dignified and somewhat sober young poet, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... past sufferings, and he was fully entered on optimism. Cosette was by his side, she seemed to be his; an optical illusion which every one has experienced. He arranged in his own mind, with all sorts of felicitous devices, his departure for England with Cosette, and he beheld his felicity reconstituted wherever he pleased, in the perspective ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... experience in a certain lack of innocence. The artless graces of a child seem mincing affectations in a grown-up woman. But the poetry of this age has amply made up for any lack of innocence by its sumptuous fulness, its variety, its magnificent accomplishment, its felicitous response to a multitude of moods and apprehensions. It has struck out no new field for itself; it still remains where the romantic revolution of 1798 placed it; its aims are not other than were those of Coleridge and of Keats. But within that defined sphere it has developed a surprising activity. ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... is plain that he could never have been a rhetorician. He has no power at all as a writer, if writing be considered an accomplishment which can be separated from earnest thinking. Words are, with him, the mere instruments for the expression of things; and he hits on felicitous words only under that impatient stress of thought which demands exact expression for definite ideas. All his words, simple as they are, are therefore fairly earned, and he gives to them a force and significance which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... though superficially different, is a variant of the same theme, presenting the product of life in masses; its inclusion of the indestructibility of the good is noticeable as a philosophical idea such as he rarely introduced in an explicit way. The felicitous allegory of "The Celestial Railroad" satirizes human nature without bitterness; but, while the universality of Bunyan's emblems is strikingly shown by the ease with which they are adapted to the new age of steam, the ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... Virginia Water, by the editor, could hardly be written by his fireside—it has too much local inspiration in every line; Auguste de Valcour, by the author of Gilbert Earle, is in his usual felicitous vein of philosophic melancholy; Miss Roberts has a glittering Tale of Normandy; the Orphans, by the editor, is simple and pathetic; Palinodia ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... but also as evidence of an almost incredible blindness to circumstances. "Did he think Kilbogie wes a fishing village?" Mains inquired of the elders afterwards, with pointed sarcasm. Kilbogie was not indifferent to a well-ordered prayer—although its palate was coarser in the appreciation of felicitous terms and allusions than that of Drumtochty—and would have been scandalised if the Queen had been omitted; but it was by the sermon the young man must stand or fall, and Kilbogie despised a man who postponed ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... a young man, passion-laden, In a chamber meets a maiden, Then felicitous communion, By love's strain between the twain, Grows from forth their union; For the game, it hath no name, Of lips, arms, and ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... are a part of the history of Little Rivers!" he said, airily. "You have brought us something which we lacked in our singularly peaceful beginning. Without romance, sir, no community is complete. I have found you a felicitous disputant whom I shall miss; for you leave me to provide the arguments on both sides of a subject on the same evening. Our people have found you a neighbor of infinite resources of humor and cheer. We wish you a pleasant trail. We wish ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... the mere grounds of taste I can see an at least equally good case made out for the Birds. That brightly plumaged fantasy has an aerial wit and colour all its own. But there are certain works in which a man finds himself at an angle of vision where there is an especially felicitous union of the aesthetic and emotional elements which constitute the basic qualities of his uniqueness. We recognize these works as being welded into a strange unity, as having a homogeneous texture of ecstasy over them that surpasses any aesthetic surface of harmonic colour, though that harmony ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... rudely flung adrift. It was true that the man was largely responsible for the troubles that had fallen upon him, but this was no reason for refusing him pity, and Cyril had his strong points. He had staunchly declined to profit by a felicitous change of fortune out of consideration for the relatives who had once disowned and the woman who had deserted him. Jernyngham had been a careless fool, and Prescott suspected that he was not likely to alter much in this respect, but he did not expect ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... public prosperity to which there is no parallel in history, and substituting in its place hostile governments, driven at once and inevitably into mutual devastation and fratricidal carnage, transforming the now peaceful and felicitous brotherhood into a vast permanent camp of armed men like the rival monarchies of Europe and Asia. Well knowing that such, and such only, are the means and the consequences of their plans and purposes, they endeavor to prepare the people of the United States for civil war by doing everything ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Franklin Pierce • Franklin Pierce
... a man had risen from his seat—the felicitous Mr. Truesdale. Glancing around at his fellow-members he then began to explain in the impressive but conversational tone of one whose counsels are in the habit of being listened to, that this was merely a little measure to remedy a flaw in the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the State prevented that; we now rely on opinion instead; the public approval is a reward, its disapproval a severe penalty, on the Bank directors; and of these it is most important that the finance minister should be a sound and felicitous exponent. ...
— Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market • Walter Bagehot
... almost blindly, in his place. Tall, lean, loosely and feebly put together, he had an ugly, sickly, witty, charming face, furnished, but by no means decorated, with a straggling moustache and whisker. He looked clever and ill—a combination by no means felicitous; and he wore a brown velvet jacket. He carried his hands in his pockets, and there was something in the way he did it that showed the habit was inveterate. His gait had a shambling, wandering quality; he was not very firm on his legs. As I have said, whenever he passed the old man in the chair ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... motive, a little consciousness, on his own part, of not being exactly in his element in that tender style of writing, which such a scene, to make it worthy of the rest, would have required; and of which the specimens left us in the serious parts of The Rivals are certainly not among his most felicitous efforts. ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... the case that the person accords with the high qualification of the mind. Mr —- was a singular and felicitous exception to this mortifying rule. His deportment was truly dignified, his frame well-knit and robust, and his features were almost classically regular. His complexion was florid, and the expression of his countenance serene, yet highly intelligent. ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Representation, which, in its present shape, was then for the first time published. I saw in this great practical and philosophical idea, the greatest improvement of which the system of representative government is susceptible; an improvement which, in the most felicitous manner, exactly meets and cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent, defect of the representative system; that of giving to a numerical majority all power, instead of only a power proportional to its numbers, ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... aspect, a pleasing inquisitiveness concerning bird mystery, and a simple, candid style of self-revelation in his essays full of fascination, with touches now and again that remind one of the descriptive qualities of Francis A. Knight. The wood-joy that inspired the felicitous phrases and delightful reflections of John Burroughs in the Western Hemisphere finds its counterpart ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them! Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them— No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest; does tempest carry the grain ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of criticising in private the methods of other speakers. He had a poor opinion of much studied oratory, and used to declare that no one had ever convinced him by merely felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realise that his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic surface to persuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying that, coming as he did from the florid East, he found English ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... as I am, and still given to poetical quotations, I never made a more felicitous quotation than that. I little guessed then to what splendor that bony black-eyed damsel ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... thesis—I could never have achieved what I have here achieved in dramatic art had I not harked back to the great tradition of the English heroic decasyllable such as our Shakespeare has handled with so felicitous an effect. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... an interesting subject for my fancies. The favoured individual whose daily walk might be between the yew-hedges on that elastic lawn; who should eat, drink, and sleep through the commonplace hours of this present time behind those mystical white shutters! But when the individual added to this felicitous dispensation of fortune the personal attributes of unparalleled beauty and pea-green satin; of having worn hoops, high heels, and powder; of countless lovers, and white brocade with pink rosebuds—well might I sit, my brain whirling with ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... eyes possessed all these qualities, as well as a large chin and a firm mouth, full of very strong white teeth. He also possessed the convenient power of ability to go to sleep at a moment's notice and to remain in that felicitous condition until he chose to awake. His order to be "called" in the morning had reference merely to hot water; for at the time of which we write men were still addicted to the ridiculous practice of shaving—a practice which, as every ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... Milton has given us his idea of what was meant by this purple light, when applied to the human countenance, in the felicitous expression of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... gained the advantage, though altogether about 5,000 men fell on the field. Negotiations were entered into between the king and the Parliament, and these were renewed again and again, but never with felicitous issues. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... recurs. The Prodigal spits on a chip, and tosses it. "Wet—I crawl back home; dry—I see it out. Wet it is." So he goes, to meet the ring, and the robe, and the fatted calf. His latter alternative has taken him home; and a felicitous option on the old man's part has given him a welcome. But the earlier alternative is following him up, for the farm is gone! The old man himself cannot undo the effect ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... hesitation she started off in the flow of her discourse, which rolled smoothly and uninterruptedly on for nearly two hours. It was very apparent that it was not a cut and dried speech, for she was as fluent and as felicitous in her allusions to circumstances immediately around her as she was when she rose to a more exalted pitch of laudation of the "Union," or of execration of the old slavery system. Her voice was remarkable—as sweet as any woman's voice we ever heard, and so clear and distinct as to pass ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... be good and obey; but the charm of the painter is so strong that one can't keep his entire attention on the developing portrait, but must steal side-glimpses of the artist, and try to divine the trick of her felicitous brush. In this book the doctor lives and moves just as he was. He was the most extensive slave-holder of his time, and the kindest; and yet he died without setting one of his bondmen free. We all send our very, very kindest regards. Sincerely ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mr. Stead's felicitous term) put their hands into our pockets because they know that, virtually, none of us will refuse to take their hands in our own afterwards, in friendly salutation. If notorious rascality entailed social outlawry the only rascals would be those properly—and ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... his sister Margaret, written soon after his arrival, shows a delightful relation between them and warm affection on his part. It tells in a felicitous manner of the place, the people, and his experiences. He had been to a camp-meeting and was struck with the quaint, old-fashioned garb of the girls, seeming to make the ugly ones uglier and the pretty ones prettier. It was raining when he wrote ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... speed, and compliments were set aside by Garnache, who, at his best, was not felicitous with them. Valerie felt herself caught by the wrist, a trifle roughly she remembered afterwards, and hurried across the cobbles to the tethered horses, with which Rabecque was already busy. She saw Garnache raise his foot to ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... could be reached, and her resolution undermined. It lay in the suggestion that Bertha's strong inclination to visit America sprang from a desire again to behold Maurice, and that the result of their meeting, after so long a separation, might be in the highest degree felicitous. Bertha, he urged, during the absence of Maurice, had probably learned that he was dearer to her than she imagined; and, if Maurice had reason to believe that she crossed the ocean for the sake of rejoining him, could he remain insensible to such a proof of devotion? The countess ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... result. In short, Congress was with him a law-making body. It met for that business and so far as he could direct its proceedings, Mr. Fessenden, as chairman at different times of leading committees, held it to its work. He was felicitous with his pen beyond the rhetorical power of Mr. Sumner, though not so deeply read, nor so broad ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... him that under existing entanglements, the girl's speedy death would prove the most felicitous solution of this devouring riddle, which so unexpectedly crossed his smooth path; then what meant the vehement protest of his throbbing heart, the passionate longing to snatch her from disease, and disgrace, and keep her safe forever in the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... a felicitous affair," said the Count, "which has the fortune to introduce me to this charming company," and the Count bowed first to Bulldog and then to the school with such a marked indication in one direction that Speug almost blushed. "My sorrow is to be so stupid a witness; but, monsieur, ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... edition, I have reason to know—thanks to the merit of Cruikshank's original and felicitous sketches—excited the greatest delight in the mind of Chamisso. In his autobiography he says that "Peter" had been kindly received in Germany, but in England had ...
— Peter Schlemihl • Adelbert von Chamisso
... folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp. . . . Into another state, under new rule I knew myself was passing swift and sure; whereof the initiatory pang approached, felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet as when the virgin band, the victors chaste, feel at the end the earthy garments drop, and rise with something of a rosy shame into immortal nakedness: so I lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill into the ecstasy and out-throb pain. I' the gray of the dawn it was I ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... acceptance of the situation was less felicitous. Mrs. Prescott, whose utter lack of a sense of humor had long saddened her domestic circle, suddenly felt the birth of one now that was even more saddening, and the cause of it was Lily Bell. She referred ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... patronage of the dutchess of Gordon, who was a lady not only distinguished for her taste; but cultivated a correspondence with some of the most eminent poets then living. The dutchess was so zealous in Mr. Boyse's affairs, and so felicitous to raise him above necessity, that she employed her interest in procuring the promise of a place for him. She gave him a letter, which he was next day to deliver to one of the commissioners of the customs at Edinburgh. ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... over the adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and will continue to do so, we trust, while the world lasts, how few comparatively will bear to be told that there exist other fictitious narratives by the same writer—four of them at least of no inferior interest, except what results from a less felicitous choice of situation. 'Roxana,' 'Singleton,' 'Moll Flanders,' 'Colonel Jack,' are all genuine offsprings of the same father. They bear the veritable impress of Defoe. Even an unpractised midwife would swear to the nose, lip, forehead, and eye of every one of them. They are, in their ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... they were too popular in temporary effect, ever to become influential by permanent inspiration. In their highest moods, and amid their noblest hours of triumph, they were "of the earth earthy." Party; personality; crushing rejoinders, or satirical attacks; a felicitous exposure of inconsistency, or a triumphant self-vindication; brilliant repartees, and logical gladiatorship,—such are among the prominent characteristics which caused parliamentary debates in Burke's day to be ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... gunwale of the gig, Paul replied in a felicitous manner as he accepted the trophy from her hands. The reception at Memphis was in accordance with the enthusiasm of the excursionists and Paul resumed the voyage Monday afternoon with the well wishes of ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton
... this enterprising negro, "why don't English barristers—white ones, I mean—go and practise there?" Feel that reference to colour is not felicitous; still, difficult to express the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... some things, however, in this work which we could have wished somewhat different from what they are. Mr. Parton's fluent and forcible style sometimes degenerates into flippancy. We could cite many instances of felicitous expression, some, also, of bad taste, and some of hasty assertion. "Clubable" is hardly a good enough word to bear frequent repetition. "This question was a complete baffler" is too much like slang to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... with the Hotel de Ville) you gain the best view of this Hotel, in conjunction with the open space, or market place, and of the churches in the distance. About this spot, Mr. Lewis fixed himself, with his pencil and paper in hand, and produced a drawing from which I select the following felicitous portion. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... latter introduced, in a time of literary poverty, a wide range of new subjects for epical treatment,—the life of German peasants, with their simple, healthy, vigorous natures undepraved by a spurious civilization. In painting these sinewy figures, full of a character of their own, he was very felicitous, had an enormous success, and drew a host of less gifted followers after him. Herr Ludwig is one of these. We shall not despair of his becoming, at some future time, a second Auerbach; but he is not one yet. There is, in this work, too much spreading out and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... eminent British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. It contains Jameson, Ramsey, Romney, Runciman, Copley, Mortimer, Raeburn, Hoppner, Owen, Harlow, and Bonington; all sketched in the author's most felicitous style. The memoir of Bonington is of peculiar interest, since all our readers must recollect the premature death of that promising artist. Mr. Cunningham ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various
... condition and history, partake so much of the romantic as to render the story not ill adapted for an epic poem. Lord Byron, indeed, has partially treated the subject; but by blending two incongruous stories, and leaving both of them imperfect, and by mixing up fact with fiction, has been less felicitous than usual; for, beautiful as many passages in his Island are, in a region where every tree, and flower, and fountain breathe poetry, yet as a whole the poem is feeble and ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... prose that I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea, beyond which the pale-faced ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... anything much better than his father's 'Cottage in the Wood' would have resulted from his following the advice of James Montgomery. Fluent ease, often on the verge of twaddle, with here and there a bright, felicitous touch, with here and there a smack of the conventional hymn-book and pulpit twang—such weak and characterless effusions are all that is left of the passion-ridden pseudo-genius of Haworth. Real genius is perhaps seldom of ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... most excellent one-look-and-expression likeness,—an every-day, and of "the earth, earthy" one;—and the last, which the same artist painted, and which is now in the possession of Mr. John Hunter, of Craig Crook, Edinburgh, may be an equally felicitous rendering of one look and manner; but I do not intimately recognize it. There is another, and a curiously unconscious likeness of him, in the charming Dulwich Gallery of Pictures. It is in the portrait of Wouvermans, by Rembrandt. It is just ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... the bar for an "appetizer," as he termed it. Here he met an acquaintance among the loungers present, and, of course, asked him to take a social glass also. This personage complied in a manner peculiarly felicitous, and in such a way as to give the impression that his acceptance of the courtesy was a compliment to Haldane. Much practice had made him perfect in this art, and the number of drinks that he was able to secure gratis in the course of a year by being always on ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... that the undertaking of the captain would have been accounted among those happy expedients which, in all pursuits, are thought to distinguish the mental efforts of men particularly gifted by Nature; while, under the actual circumstances, he who would have reaped all the credit of so felicitous an idea, was mentally chafing with the apprehension that his unlucky design might become known. His companion was no other than Robert Yarn, the fore-top-man, who, on a former occasion, had been heard to affirm, that he had already enjoyed so singular a view of the lady of ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... to extend greeting to the Fifty-fifth Congress, assembled in regular session at the seat of Government, with many of whose Senators and Representatives I have been associated in the legislative service. Their meeting occurs under felicitous conditions, justifying sincere congratulation and calling for our grateful acknowledgment to a beneficent Providence which has so signally blessed and prospered us as a nation. Peace and good will with all the nations of ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... beautiful ode. Another—left unfinished—that on the Superstitions of the Scottish Highlands, was for many years lost sight of, but was discovered by Dr. Alex. Carlyle (q.v.). C.'s poetry is distinguished by its high imaginative quality, and by exquisitely felicitous descriptive phrases. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... the song's own sake is manifest; and this is shown in the variety of his treatment, and the delicate sense of music which determined his choice of metre. His descriptive writing is full of picturesque expression. The fifth hymn, 'Ad Incensum Lucernae,' is glorious with passionate colour and felicitous cadence, be he describing with precious solicitude for Christian archaeology the different means of artistic lighting, flambeaux, candles, lamps, or dreaming with all the rapture of a southern dream of ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... the Tales—of the Council of Nice, in the fourth century, Mr. Smith indulges his usual felicitous vein of humour, in a burlesque which he puts into the mouth of a slave of the Bishop of Ethiopia,—"a little, corpulent, bald-headed, merry-eyed man of fifty, whose name was Mark; whose duty it was to take charge ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 544, April 28, 1832 • Various
... to me if Miss Mitty would consider me entitled to so felicitous a phrase, but smothering it the next minute as best I could, I followed Sally, not without trepidation, up the short flight of steps, and into the wide hall, where the air was heavy with the perfume of fading roses. Great silver bowls of them drooped now, with blighted heads, amid ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... Peach," and purports to be written by a bank-officer (possibly the author had Barton in his mind while writing it) who fears he may become a second Fauntleroy. The piece contains one or two delightful passages, and is, in fact, full of happy touches and felicitous bits of description. Very charming (to me, at least) is the account of the plucking of the last peach, and very touching is the allusion to the babe Fauntleroy. But good wine (or a good peach) needs no bush; and therefore, without further comment or commendation, I present ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... ingenious nor so felicitous as the language- expedient of the man who wished to leave some luggage at a railway station in Rome, and knowing nothing of any foreign tongue but a few Latin phrases, mostly of an obituary character, pointed several times to his effects, saying, ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... has been much admired. But why? The Athenian statesman was found to have intrigued with Persia against Athens in time of peace; he fled to the Persian monarch and was richly rewarded as a renegade. No simile could have been less felicitous.] ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... no position to say how she might have struck him the night before, but what he saw during these charmed hours filled him with admiration and gratitude. She WAS in it, this time; she had pulled herself together, she had taken possession, she was felicitous at every turn. Fresh from his revelation of Nona he was in a position to judge, and as he judged he exulted. He was thrilled and carried away, and he was moreover intensely curious to know what had happened to her, by what unfathomable art she had managed ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... O father, do men attain to those superior regions whence there is no return to earthly life? Is it by asceticism or by knowledge? How also can one gradually attain to felicitous regions? Asked by me, O answer it ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... opposite to the young mistress of the house (Lord Saxingham, as the reader knows, was a widower and Lady Florence an only child); and Maltravers was that day in one of those felicitous moods in which our animal spirits search and carry up, as it were, to the surface, our intellectual gifts and acquisitions. He conversed generally and happily; but once, when he turned his eyes to appeal to Lady Florence for her opinion on some point in discussion, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said Mrs. Arrowpoint, rising; and presently bringing him to Gwendolen, she left them to a dialogue which was agreeable on both sides, Herr Klesmer being a felicitous combination of the German, the Sclave and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair floating in artistic fashion, and brown eyes in spectacles. His English had little foreignness except its fluency; and his alarming cleverness was made less formidable just ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... heard the preacher, and who found satisfaction in the first-rate or the second-rate, without being moved by the arts of oratory. Indeed, the book is one that must everywhere be welcome, both for its manner and for its matter. The application of the "Truths" is generally enforced by a felicitous apologue or figure; in some cases the lesson is conveyed in a beautiful metaphor standing alone. The extracts are brief, and the point, never wanting, is moral, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... complacent superiors to be called in. Garth's, unfair and violent though it is, nowhere offends against decency. As a work of art it cannot be ranked high, and is now deservedly forgotten, although it has many good lines and some felicitous satire. Garth lived to see the apothecaries gradually emancipate themselves from the ignominious regulations to which they consented when their vocation was first separated from the grocery trade. Four years after his death they obtained legal acknowledgment of ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to listen to Scott's oral narrations, whether gay or serious, or to the felicitous fun with which he parried absurdities of all sorts, without discovering better qualities in his talk than wit—and of a higher order; I mean especially a power of vivid painting—the true and primary sense of what is called Imagination. He was like Jaques—though ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... are younger than I, and perhaps that's a natural wish. But to me it seems a felicitous combination not often met with. I confess that your interest in our family before you knew me lent a stability to my hopes that otherwise they ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... with men which would be a great hindrance to him in his calling. But much argument is not required to guide the public, still less a formal exposition of that argument. What is mostly needed is the manly utterance of clear conclusions; if a statesman gives these in a felicitous way (and if with a few light and humorous illustrations, so much the better), he has done his part. He will have given the text, the scribes in the newspapers will write the sermon. A statesman ought to show his own nature, ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Prayer-Booklet. The part On Confession was newly translated from the German edition of the Catechism of 1531. The textual changes which were made in Sauermann's translation for the Concordia of 1584 "show that he was careful and usually felicitous, and are partly to be explained as combinations of the first and ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... Werner's friends—if I could write down but one such conversation, and at all express its vivacity, its quick flashes of thought and logic, its real desire for truth and knowledge, its friendly fearlessness, its felicitous illustrations, its unpremeditated wit, such a record, taken fresh from the life, would be worth all that I shall ever write. But youth flies, and as she flies all the bright colours fade from the wings of thought, and the bloom vanishes from the ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... loved such characters. Endued with brilliant wit and a rich fund of information, G——— possessed the art of ingratiating himself with all around him; he enlivened every circle in which he moved by his felicitous humor, and infused life and spirit into every subject that came before him. The prince had discernment enough to appreciate in another those virtues which he himself possessed in an eminent degree. Everything which G——— undertook, even to his very sports, had ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... substance that the Chinese official concerned was extremely busy, that to his deep regret it would not be possible to grant an immediate conference, but that as soon as possible he would have pleasure in selecting a "felicitous day'' on which they could hold a "pleasant interview'';[49] and when the envoys, worn out by the never-ending procrastination, finally gave up in disgust and announced their intention of returning home, the typical Chinese official blandly replied, as the notorious Yeh did to United States ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... adequate, is a great beauty of the art which it so deftly conceals. Her embodiment of a woman's loveliness, such as, in Portia, should he at once stately and fascinating and inspire at once respect and passion, was felicitous beyond the reach of descriptive phrases." Then, on her appearance in "Much Ado About Nothing:" "She permeates the raillery of Beatrice with an indescribable charm of mischievous sweetness. The silver arrows of her pungent wit have no barb, for evidently she ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... cannot wound others—those are the people whose sharp pangs we feel in our breasts as we read the stories of Tchehov. The people who wound—it is they whom he paints (or, rather, as Mr. Garnett suggests, etches) with such felicitous and untiring irony. But, though he often makes his people beautiful in their sorrow, he more often than not sets their sad figures against a common and ugly background. In Anyuta, the medical student and his mistress live in a room disgusting in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... by Gleim maintain so high a rank among German poems, because they arose with and in the achievements which are their subject; and because, moreover, their felicitous form, just as if a fellow-combatant had produced them in the loftiest moments, makes us feel the most ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... commands. In the afternoon we raised the "stars and stripes" in front of his tent, after which three cheers were given for the flag and three for the Union. Kilpatrick was then called upon for a speech, and responded in his usually felicitous style. He is certainly an orator as well as a warrior. He speaks, too, as he fights, with dash and daring. What he has to say he says with such perspicuity that no one doubts his meaning. Frequently there are flashes of ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... with that felicitous simplicity and eloquence of diction which characterize all Mr. Woodworth's efforts ...
— The Diving Bell - Or, Pearls to be Sought for • Francis C. Woodworth
... judgment: intuitive, clever, expressed with felicitous charm—infallible. A judgment that has nothing to do with justice. The critic and the judge seems to think that in those distant lands all joy is a yell and a war dance, all pathos is a howl and a ghastly grin of ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... perhaps the most noted and broadly honored divine ever known on the Pacific Coast, visited Lake Tahoe, and on his return to San Francisco preached a sermon, entitled: "Living Water from Lake Tahoe." Its descriptions are so felicitous that I am gratified to be able to quote them from Dr. King's volume of Sermons Christianity and Humanity, with the kind permission of the publishers, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... friends, however, whose dreams are always troubled and disturbed. They wake fatigued and bruised, and they tell me that they would give a kingdom for one dreamless night. There is one friend who declares that she has never had a felicitous dream in her life. The grind and worry of the day invade the sweet domain of sleep and weary her with incessant, profitless effort. I feel very sorry for this friend, and perhaps it is hardly fair to insist ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... are, in one sense, accomplished; that consummation substantially is realized. Sedition has, at last, countermined itself, and conspiracy we have seen in effect perishing by its own excesses. Yet still, ingenuously speaking, we cannot claim the merit of a felicitous foresight. That result has come round which we foreboded; but not in that sense which we intended to authorize, nor exactly by those steps which we wished to see. We looked for the extinction of this national scourge by its ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... strong, swift, dashing, and decisive. Nor does it want deep and subtle touches. His pictures of Shaftesbury and Buckingham are as delicately finished, as they are powerfully conceived. He flies best at the highest game; but even in dealing with Settles and Shadwells, he can be as felicitous as he is fierce. No satire in the world contains lines more exquisitely inverted, more ingeniously burlesqued, more artfully turned out of their apparently proper course, like rays at once refracted and cooled, than those which thus ominously ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... from a second-hand bookseller arrived during dinner. Among them were the nine volumes of Pietro Gianone's Istoria Civile del Regno di Napoli, a copy of which I ought to have possessed long ago. It is dedicated to the "Most Puissant and Felicitous Prince Charles VI, the Great, by God crowned Emperor of the Romans, King of Germany, Spain, Naples, Hungary, Bohemia, Sicily, etcetera." Is there a living soul in God's universe who has a spark of admiration for ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... to go to the "highways and hedges" for their omens, to the felicitous encounters of the common road for their auguries and inspirations. They will listen reverently to the chatter of very simple people, and catch the shadow of the wings of fate falling upon very homely heads. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... merciless directness. He had an abounding sense of humor, and always employed it in illustration of his argument—but never for the mere sake of provoking merriment. In this respect he had the wonderful aptness of Franklin. He often taught a great truth with the felicitous brevity of an Aesop fable. His words did not flow in an impetuous torrent, as did those of Douglas; but they were always well chosen, deliberate ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... composers, men whose names are known, were before me in thinking—that he had already done great things, that the songs he had already published were achievements. They seemed to us original in conception, accomplished and felicitous in treatment; they were full of melody and movement, full of harmonic surprises; they had style and they had 'go.' One would have imagined they must please at once the cultivated and the general public. I could never ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... not the master-hand of Tolstoy in the management of a dramatic scene, an episode. When it comes to rendering a piece of action Balzac's art is not particularly felicitous, and if we only became acquainted with his people while they are talking and acting, I think they might often seem rather heavy and wooden, harsh of speech and gesture. Balzac's general knowledge of them, and his power of offering an impression of what he knows—these ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... remarked with truth, that the projects of crime are frequently aided by those melancholy but felicitous contingencies, which, though unexpected and unlooked for, are calculated to enable the criminal to effect his wicked purposes with more facility and less risk. Gillespie, on the occasion in question, not only met Fenton ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... impatient and uncurbed mind feels? Why cannot my form accompany the bold flights of my mind and satisfy the craving I feel to resolve the vexed question that ever rises to my lips—"Is he alive?" O soul of mine, be patient, thou hast a felicitous tranquillity, which other men might envy thee! Sufficient for the hour is the consciousness thou hast that thy mission is a holy one! Onward, ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... unskillful counterpoint, may in vain be looked for throughout the entire range of his compositions; the prevailing characteristics of which, are, a feeling as uncommon as beautiful, a treatment as original as felicitous, a melody and a harmony as new, fresh, vigorous, and striking, as they are utterly unexpected and out of the common track. In taking up one of the works of Chopin, you are entering, as it were, a fairyland, untrodden by human footsteps, a path hitherto unfrequented but by the great composer himself; ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... they took care to couple with their "remarks" an apologetic laugh, which was intended to convey that the joke, though carried far, was just a joke. The wags—the species was not yet extinct—were especially felicitous. They treated the subject as a very original piece of humour indeed. Their treatment of it gained them an occasional cuff in the ear, and they had to be discriminative in their choice of victims. Everybody was not to be wished "returns of ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... very moment we have received sure tidings of the capture of Camerino. We beg that you will do honour to this message by an immediate improvement, and inform us of it, because, tormented as we are to know you so ill, nothing, not even this felicitous event, can suffice to afford us pleasure. We beg you also kindly to convey the present to the Illustrious Lord Don Alfonso, your husband and our beloved Brother-in-law, to whom ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges. So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements. A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... extreme versatility of his mind, his lively imagination, his great sensitiveness, his inexhaustible richness of expression, which was never at a loss for a word or tone to suit any circumstances or mood, his felicitous memory, his splendid voice and impressive figure, all contributed to render him a powerful speaker. He himself left nothing undone to attain perfection. Not until he had spent a long time in laborious study and preparation did he make ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... with an alert and felicitous air. How could he help the falling out of this? Of course he could not ride upon the wagon and leave a farm-boy ...
— The Other Girls • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... performer at the house of a mutual acquaintance, the couple quickly became enamored of each other. A brief engagement of less than a month was followed by marriage, and so Moscheles entered into a relation singularly felicitous in all the elements which make domestic life most blessed. After a brief tour in the Rhenish cities, and a visit to Paris, Moscheles proceeded to London, where he had determined to make his home, for in no country had such genuine and unaffected ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... most fanatical worshipers, who asked him which he considered his best comic opera; when, with a burst of joyous laughter, he named "Il Matrimonio Secreto," Cimarosa's enchanting chef-d'oeuvre, from which, doubtless, Rossini, after the fashion of great geniuses, had accepted more than one most felicitous suggestion, especially that of the admirable finale to the second act of the "Barbiere." It was during this visit of his to London, while Weber lay disappointed and dying in the dingy house in Great Portland Street, that this same Duchess of Canizzaro, ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the young girl who finds her lot is cast among the good influences of a cultured home. She has at hand the material from which to select all that she may need to build the fine character the world shall observe and admire. Such felicitous surroundings should teach her, first of all, to be very charitable and lenient toward others whose early years are lived among less advantageous surroundings. For if her culture does not in some ways influence and soften and modify her heart as well as her mind, its true purpose ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... not a felicitous one. It was not long before Mr. Tretherick discovered that the sentiment he had fostered while freighting between Stockton and Knight's Ferry was different from that which his wife had evolved from the contemplation of California scenery and her own soul. Being ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... facts now stated, however, when taken into consideration, must increase their admiration of Binning, his copiousness, his variety, both in regard to matter and style, the beauty of his imagery, the grandeur of his conceptions, his felicitous application of the language of scripture, being all the more wonderful, when viewed in connexion with the unfavourable circumstances in which his sermons ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... antiquity." On only one of the previous occasions that the question was raised was the stage of discussion passed, and that was in the eighteenth century when the monument was placed in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The issue was not felicitous. The memorial in the Abbey failed to satisfy the commemorative aspirations of the nation; it left it open to succeeding generations to reconsider the question, if it did not impose on them the obligation. Most of the poets, actors, scholars, and patrons of polite learning, who in 1741 ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... of it! Instead of the attack I supposed it to be, from my foolish friend's account, the notice is outrageously eulogistical, a stupidly extravagant laudation from first to last—and in three other articles, as my sister finds by diligent fishing, they introduce my name with the same felicitous praise (except one instance, though, in a good article by Chorley I am certain); and with me I don't know how many poetical cretins are praised as noticeably—and, in the turning of a page, somebody is abused in the richest style of scavengering—only ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
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