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More "Fluent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many strange incidents and feelings, and then turning for consolation in his perplexities to the enchanting vision on which he still could gaze. Nor was Miss Temple either in her usually sparkling vein; her liveliness seemed an effort; she was more constrained, she was less fluent than before. Ferdinand, indeed, rose more than once to depart; yet still he remained. He lost his cap; he looked for his cap; and then again seated himself. Again he rose, restless and disquieted, wandered about the room, looked at a picture, plucked a flower, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the "Born Thrall," published in The Revolution, gave evidence of thought, experience, and deep feeling. The songs of the sisters have a new sweet sadness, now that Alice is singing hers on the other side of the river of life. Grace Greenwood has done good service with her fluent pen and voice through the press and on the platform. Mary L. Booth, with her rich culture and her unsurpassed practical ability, her skill as a translator of Martin's great History of France, and numberless other works, has given aid to the cause with her pen, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... as in strategy he took the advice of Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, so too in political matters he employed the talents of Galerius Trachalus.[200] Some people even thought they could recognize Trachalus' style of oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood but of her ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the plan of the universe. So is the least part of nature in its bearings referred to all space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as the Alleghanies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general direction of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself. Even the clouds, with their thin bars, fall into the same direction by preference, and such even is the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Mr. Davidson, which I can not entirely commend. It is fluent, to be sure, but it lacks variety. A true artist would have interspersed those finer shades and gradations of meaning which go to express the numerous and clashing emotions which must necessarily agitate your venerable ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... is first-hand. In the woods, one day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or less unsatisfactory. "Ye-es," droned Phelps: "I never could see much speckerlation in that expression the Trinity. Why, they'd a good deal ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... final consonant evaded after the Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... election to the Senate. His training and culture are far beyond that ordinarily implied by the possession of a college diploma. His mind has been enriched by the study of books and disciplined by controversy at the Bar and in the Senate. As a speaker he is fluent and eloquent, but perhaps too much given to severity of expression. He possesses in marked degree the dangerous power of sarcasm, and in any discussion which borders upon personal issues Mr. Ingalls ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to aid in quickly acquiring the power of correct and fluent speaking of the German language this work has no equal."—Scientific American, Nov. 11, 1893, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... admiring. The signorino's thin white hands made a delicate, fluent melody, reminding her of running water under the rippled shade of trees, and, like a high, sweet bird, the thin, penetrating notes of the singer rose, swelled, and died away, admirably true and just even in this latter ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... he in his vile but fluent French, "I beg you to dismiss your fears. Aboard this ship you shall be treated with all honour. So soon as we are in case to put to sea again, we steer a course for Tortuga to take you home to your father. And pray do not consider that I have bought you, as your brother has just said. All that I ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... armorial equipage, wherein Dozed dowagers: on unbonneted dames In open chariots, toying daintily With dark hidalgos, as they sipped the scene In languishing contentment, and between Responsive glances, showing hidden fire, With fluent breath of Spanish repartee. There lounged senoras, fat officials' wives, From their soft cushions casting cool disdain On the mestiza, who, in hired hack, Blooming in beauty of commingled blood, And robed in slippery tissue, rainbow-bright, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... believers count by millions, and include many more eminent men than her infallible psychic societies, the lady has permission to withdraw the charge, for it is obviously only the lapsus linguae of a too fluent tongue. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... remarkably well, would say haive, and shaul (for shall), when she sung her hymns. But it was not so well in reading lectures at the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was not so fluent; and on political and religious matters he tried hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspicions of his leaning to his native side in politics; and daring Bonaparte's triumph, he could not contain his enthusiasm ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... women, and one of them was dressed as a nun. Quite by accident I saw her face. It was that of a beautiful girl. I observed she kept aloof from the others. I suspected a disguise, and, when opportunity afforded, spoke to her, offered my services. She replied to my poor efforts at Spanish in fluent English. She had fled in terror from her home, some place down in Sinaloa. Rebels are active there. Her father was captured and held for ransom. When the ransom was paid the rebels killed him. The leader of these rebels ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... spoken of his favourites, let me also speak of his dislikes; Racine, whom he cannot bear; Molire, whom he does not really like; Buffon, whom he frankly detests for his too fluent prose, his ostentatious style, and his vain rhetoric. The only naturalist whom he might really have delighted in, had he possessed his works and been able to read them at leisure, is Audubon, the enthusiastic painter of the birds of America. In him he felt the presence of a mind and a temper almost ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that made the journey across the desert ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... I am certain the Hermanns knew what they wanted when they bought the whole point and perched their house on the very top of the hill, where all the winds of heaven might visit it as roughly as they pleased, but where nothing could rob the outlook of its ever-changing splendor and mystery, its fluent wonder and ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of this city ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... two measures of the cheapest wine and a loaf of bread. Here they sat for some time, listening to the conversation of the peasants who frequented the wine shop. Sometimes a question was asked of the wayfarers. Gerald replied, for his companion's Spanish although fluent was not good enough to pass as that of a native. He replied to the question as to where they had received their hurts that they were survivors of the Armada, and grumbled that it was hard indeed that men who had fought in the Netherlands ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... purpose of extorting money from the passengers, which he regularly spent every night in the wine-shops of Badajoz. To those who gave him money he returned blessings, and to those who refused, curses; being equally skilled and fluent in the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... his hand. Instead of accepting the proffered assistance as she had done when they descended, Helen apparently failed to notice the hand, and the homeward journey was not pleasant to either of them. Helen did not parade her displeasure, but Geoffrey was sensible of it, and, never being a fluent speaker upon casual subjects, he was not successful in his conversational efforts. When at last they reached the villa, he shook his shoulders disgustedly as he recalled some of ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by hundreds of peasants in Ireland, but is very rare indeed on the printed page. And, mingling with the broad farce there is a deal of excellent comedy—for instance, in the person of old Mrs. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... of these nations are reflected also in their methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... my old friend, the beech-tree, all along the route. His bole wore the same gray and patched appearance it does at home, and no doubt Thoreau would have found his instep even fairer; for the beech on this side of the Atlantic is a more fluent and graceful tree than the American species, resembling, in its branchings and general form, our elm, though never developing such an immense green dome as our elm when standing alone, and I saw no European tree that does. The European elm is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... deal of fluent talk, and much dexterous handling of the cards, in a way that seemed clear enough to everybody, and that showed that everybody's guess was right as to the place of the ace, the near-sighted gentleman, who had drunk with Norman, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... accompany him, or—stay and tend store. We accepted the latter proposition, as we were in no travelling kelter, and had no taste for performances on the tight rope. Having officiated for Captain V—— on several former occasions, we had the run of his "grocery" and postal arrangements quite fluent enough to take charge of all the trade likely to turn up that day; so the captain and his friends started, promising a return ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... leaders, Morris?" asked one of the listeners, as the speaker, a fluent, energetic young man, closed his recital of the atrocities he had witnessed. "Did they escape, or are they ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... who had seen many changes, And always changed as true as any needle; His polar star being one which rather ranges, And not the fix'd—he knew the way to wheedle: So vile he 'scaped the doom which oft avenges; And being fluent (save indeed when fee'd ill), He lied with such a fervour of intention— There was no doubt he earn'd ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... 1533 joined the Anabaptist movement under Johann Matthysz (Matthyszoon), baker of Haarlem. He had little education, but some literary faculty, and had written plays. On the 13th of January 1534 he appeared in Muenster as an apostle of Matthysz. Good-looking and fluent, he fascinated women, and won the confidence of Bernard Knipperdollinck, a revolutionary cloth merchant, who gave him his daughter in marriage. The Muenster Anabaptists took up arms on the 9th of February 1534 (see ANABAPTISTS). On the death of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... you no," Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal translation into Spanish. "Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into the lungs with the point. I've tried it: ten times. Never stick the back. The chances are he moves, and you ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Wendell Phillips and George William Curtis, or Anna Dickinson and Phoebe W. Couzins. John Bright is without a peer among his countrymen, as are Mrs. Bessant and Miss Helen Taylor among the women. Miss Tod, from Belfast, is a good speaker. The women, as a general thing, are more fluent than the men; those of the Bright family in all its branches have deep, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... three times with unabated zest. I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland's state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker. He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures. But ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... mechanically) employed, while the individual is at the same time called on to exercise his powers of speech and hearing on something else, this faculty of extemporaneous speaking is cultivated, and rendered more easy and fluent. Whereas, on the contrary, the most extensive acquaintance with words, even when combined with much knowledge, has but little influence in making a ready speaker. Many of the most voluble of our species have but a very scanty vocabulary, and still less knowledge; ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... honour it had been all arranged; and she called up Philip Sidney for especial thanks, and, tapping him on the shoulder, bid him repair to the banqueting-hall and discourse some sweet music on his mandoline, and converse with the French Ambassadors. For, she said, speaking herself in fluent and excellent French,— ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... the conversation at table happening to turn, as it often turned, upon St. Sebald's Church, a young Frenchman, who was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound. In the midst of this triumphant exposition the irritated vanity of the Frenchman could do nothing ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I do recall that he said Poe wrote too much in a dark cellar, and that music was his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Havillan, our Book would be thought to be imperfect, so terse and fluent was his Verse, of which we shall give you two Examples, the one out of Mr. John Speed his Description of Devonshire, speaking of the ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... adopted son of Pliny the Elder. He was a voluminous correspondent. We have nine books of his letters, relating to a large number of subjects, and presenting vivid pictures of the times in which he lived. Their diction is fluent and smooth. ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... he resigned himself to a long, tedious hour. The room was hot and airless, the lawyer very prosy and unnecessarily fluent; but he seemed a straightforward, honest man, and gave them good counsel. Malcolm was soon put into possession of all the Strickland bequest, and after this it was all ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... brown or black. The pattern need by no means be elaborate. A wreath of ivy simply out-lined in sepia or india-ink, or a group of figures sketched with the same, produces a very pleasing and harmonious effect. "Prout's Brown," a sort of fluent ink of a burnt-umber tint, will be found excellent for drawing purposes. For designs, our own ST. NICHOLAS will furnish excellent examples. Scarcely a number but holds something which a clever artist can adapt ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... felt it a part of his duty to console and soothe the ruffled feelings of his zealous and fluent parishioner, and to Virginia's pride his offer of escort to Willow Bluff was ample reparation for the untoward interruption of her oratory. She delivered into his hands, with sensitive upward glance, the receptacle containing her manuscript, and set a brisk pace, at which she insured the passing ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... science, not from what it really is in itself, but from some of those miserable treatises which only caricature the subject, and of which it is rather an advantage to be ignorant. But who is so destitute of good sense as to deny, that a graceful and easy conversation in the private circle, a fluent and agreeable delivery in public speaking, a ready and natural utterance in reading, a pure and elegant style in composition, are accomplishments of a very high order? And yet of all these, the proper study of English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in Our Fighting Services (Cassell), begins with the Battle of Hastings and ends with the Boer War there is no gainsaying the fact that his net has been widely spread. To assist him in the compilation of this immense tome the author has a fluent style and—to judge from the authorities consulted and the results of these consultations—an inexhaustible industry. The one should make his book acceptable to the amateur who reads history because he happens to love it, and the other should make it invaluable to professionals who handle books ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... arm round her, and pressed her close. Then he plunged into fluent talk about the afternoon's events, and his accepted offer of service, till Mrs Elton, resplendent in flame-coloured ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... realised by the archdeacon's speech, which went round in a circle, as if he could not find his way out of it. Lord Cosham was fluent, but a great many words went to very small substance; and no wonder, thought Ethel, when all they had to propose and second was the obvious fact that missions were very ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... 'Copious indeed, Drances, and fluent is ever thy speech at the moment war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, and the trenches ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... the road, and an extra allowance for expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. He thus describes his feelings: "It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-House, and, the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion of the mail soon laid me asleep. It is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... effectually determine during the progress of the debate just what arguments are preferable and what their arrangement should be. A debater must also have some ability as a speaker. He need not be graceful or especially fluent, though these accomplishments are of service, but he must be forceful. Not only his words, but also his manner must reveal the earnestness and enthusiasm he feels. His argument, clear, irrefutable, and to the point, should go forth in simple, burning words that enter into ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... glowing eyes fixed on the ground, tracing lines and circles on the pavement with the stick he held in his hand, while the excited old man, his uncle, urgently addressed Apollodorus in a vehement but fluent torrent of words. Apollodorus, however, shook his head from time to time at his speech and frequently met ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... your Miss Whitney," he said slowly. His English was not fluent "But she has not the tact of her pretty mother. She would never have shown her avoidance of Captain Miller quite so plainly as ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... sages may reason, the fluent may talk, But they ne'er can compute what we owe to the chalk. From the embryo mind of the infant of four, To the graduate, wise in collegiate lore; From the old district school-house to Harvard's proud hall, The chalk rules ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile ignoramus, and himself as ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... comes the ghost and prowling about espies the heap of yams and taro. At sight of the devastation wrought in his field he flies into a passion, and curses and swears in the feeble wheezy whisper in which ghosts always speak. In the course of his fluent imprecations he expresses a wish that the miscreants who have wasted his substance may suffer so and so at the hands of the sorcerer. That is just what the men in hiding have been waiting for. No sooner ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and with some honour. During his course he had managed to read an amazing amount of English literature, and no man was readier or had a keener taste in such things than he. He had a pleasing personal appearance, a fluent and persuasive manner, an unblemished character. Every morning he came to his office from one of the most pleasant little cottage homes in the world; and if you had opened the little front gate, and gone up through the shrubbery ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the captain could speak, turned to the silent Commander, addressed him in a dozen phrases of fluent and courteous Spanish, and once more ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... gathered round him in a circle, and he held forth. It would be no easy matter to describe a discourse which lasted a couple of hours, or indeed to say very precisely what it was about. It was a rambling, desultory reference to his travels and adventures in fluent and sometimes eloquent language, and not without an occasional dash of humour and drollery. He illustrated the truth of the Scriptures by examples drawn from his personal observation and the habits, expressions, and belief ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... languages was very great, and when in the south of France, rambling daily over the pretty property he possessed at Hyeres, I used to be amazed at the fluent way in which he talked with the workmen; whether it was the carpenter, the plasterer, mason, or gardener, he talked with each in the terms of their respective occupations and trades, quite unhesitatingly. Provencal talk is certainly puzzling, but he seemed as if born to it; and ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... I have seen face to face once or twice. She is very clever—very accomplished—with talents and tastes of various kinds—a musician and linguist, in most modern languages I believe—and a writer of fluent graceful melodious verses, ... you cannot say any more. At least I cannot—and though I have not seen this last poem in the 'Book of Beauty,' I have no more trust ready for it than for its predecessors, of which Mr. Landor said as much. It is the personal feeling which speaks in him, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no "babbling gossip of the air," fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... daughter; and the former seeing how entranced we were with each other's company, like a prudent parent, left us to ourselves. My French was much purer and more grammatical than hers, hers much more fluent than mine. Yet, notwithstanding this deficiency on both sides, we understood each other perfectly, and we had not been above two hours together alone, before I told her that I loved her for her very ignorance, and she had confessed to me that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Beth discovered a line of carriages drawn up back of the station. The drivers were mostly asleep inside them, although several stood in a group arguing in fluent Italian the grave question as to whether Signora Gani's cow had a black patch over its left shoulder, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... the village tailor, is taken in our part of the country by the hemp-dresser and the wool-carder, two professions which are unusually combined in one. He is present at all ceremonies, sad or gay, for he is very learned and a fluent talker, and on these occasions he must always figure as spokesman, in order to fulfil with exactitude certain formalities used from time immemorial. Traveling occupations, which bring a man into the midst of other families, without allowing ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the papal bull announcing his canonization, the claim is distinctly set forth of his possession of miraculous power. He is represented as having raised a Japanese girl from the dead; as possessing the gift of tongues, that is, as being able to speak in fluent Japanese, although he had not learned the language; as having given an answer which when heard was a satisfactory reply to the most various and different questions,(148) such as, "the immortality of the soul, the motions of the heavens, the eclipses of the sun and moon, the colors of the rainbow, ...
— Japan • David Murray
... which possessed the English ministry upon learning how Massachusetts had parried the attack made upon her liberties, some immediate victim was indispensable; and as Franklin was there present, they fell upon him. A fluent and foul-mouthed young barrister, Alexander Wedderburn by name, had by corrupt influence secured the post of solicitor-general; and he made use of the occasion of Franklin's submitting the petition for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver, to make a personal attack ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... of them had a working knowledge of English; their captain spoke it with fluent inaccuracy; and before any of them had gone aft to Kettle, who stood at the wheel, they heard the whole story of the ship being found derelict, and (very naturally) were anxious enough by some means or another to finger a share of the salvage. Even a ragged Portuguese baccalhao ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of a Poet is a rare genius. And most happily it is so; for elevated taste and high-toned morality are not, by any means, the common heritage of man. Anacreon and Burns were genuine Poets. They uttered, in fine style, many truths; and were not merely fluent in their respective languages, but affluent. But, perhaps, like some other men of mighty parts and grand proportions, better for mankind they had never been born. A Cowper and a Byron, in their whole career of song, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of the boy's hands and ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin and Smith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally, emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy in fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And the Turkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praise from Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to all who came into contact with him, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... put it all behind him. Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege. His promises were fluent always and alluring. Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of independence. Bolivar was alert, dauntless, brilliant, impetuous, vehemently patriotic, and yet often capricious, domineering, vain, ostentatious, and disdainful of moral considerations—a masterful man, fertile in intellect, fluent in speech and with pen, an inspiring leader and one born to command in state and army. Quite as earnest, equally courageous, and upholding in private life a higher standard of morals, San Martin was relatively calm, cautious, almost taciturn in manner, and slower ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... us to consult five minutes among ourselves. He withdrew; and the fluent agent remarked the sum was a trifle: but, trifling as it was, he had no doubt but feelings of delicacy and honor would dictate that it ought to be jointly paid, by ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... words I knew; turned, returned, and arranged them, so as to enable me to express my thoughts through their medium. I know nearly one thousand words, which is all that is absolutely necessary, although I believe there are nearly one hundred thousand in the dictionaries. I cannot hope to be very fluent, but I certainly should have no difficulty in explaining my wants and wishes; and that would be quite as much as I should ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... public duties, Hamilton was actively employed in his profession in the higher courts of the State. The late Chancellor Kent afterward recalled his "clear, elegant, and fluent style and commanding manner. He never made any argument in court without displaying his habit of thinking and resorting at once to some well-founded principle of law, and drawing his deductions logically from his premises. Law was always treated by him as a science, founded on established ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... of history. So sensitive, physically, that he had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses of the people against the wealth, the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to address the crowd, albeit—acting on my father's hint—in more moderate tones, and even, as I thought, somewhat tepidly. Her theme was what she called convictions of sin, of which by her own account she had wrestled with a surprising quantity; but in the rehearsal of them, though fluent, she seemed to lose heart as her ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... two days were passed he could not go down the village street without lifting his cap at least a dozen times. Bourcelles was so very friendly; no room for strangers there; a new-comer might remain a mystery, but he could not be unknown. Rogers found his halting French becoming rapidly fluent again. And every one knew so much about him—more almost ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished litterateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, on leaving the cafe, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for contrast ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... whom the Doctor engaged as housekeeper, was the youngest daughter of an honest shoemaker, who formerly flourished at Belfield Green, where he was noted for industry, a fondness for reading, a tenacious memory, a ready wit, and a fluent tongue. In politics he was a radical, and in religion a schismatic. The little knot of Presbyterian Federalist magnates, who used to assemble at the tavern to discuss affairs of church and state over mugs of flip and tumblers of sling, regarded him with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... response. He kicked the instrument over and danced round it impotently. Littimer had never seen him in such a raging fury before. The language of the man was an outrage, filthy, revolting, profane. No yelling, drunken Hooligan could have been more fluent, more ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old Japanese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow basso. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the face. An ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... wide, which effectually put a stop to all further fishing operations on the part of Goliath and his merry men for that day, at any rate. It was all so quiet, and so tame and so stupid, no wonder Mistah Jones felt savage. When Captain Slocum's fluent profanity flickered around him, including vehemently all he might be supposed to have any respect for, he did not even LOOK as if he would like to talk back; he only looked sick ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties would issue a father's curse, an orphan's ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... parents, kind and loving souls, could read and write, and the children were happy, obedient and respectful. To be sure, it would have been very hard for the best schoolmaster of the county to parse some of Mrs. Danby's fluent sentences, or to read at a glance Mr. Danby's remarkable penmanship. But that same learned instructor would have delighted in the cleverness of the sons and daughters, had he been so fortunate as to direct their studies. True, the poor little ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... harmonizing the basic continuity of the Post's attitude, and minimizing the change in present angle or point of view. His fertile mind played about it, strengthening it, building it up, polishing and perfecting; and in time he began to write, at first slowly, but soon with fluent ease. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... fluent for one of his color—too fluent the other man felt. Ambrose was sizing him up ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... before 1730 appears in volume two (1711) of a three-volume translation of Boileau's works. This, however, is not the same translation as the one accompanying Harte's Essay; it is noticeably less fluent and lacks (as does the French) the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... that day, Peter and myself sat alone beneath the oak. We fell into conversation; Peter was at first melancholy, but he soon became more cheerful, fluent and entertaining. I spoke but little, but I observed that sometimes what I said surprised the good Methodist. We had been silent some time. At length, lifting up my eyes to the broad and leafy canopy of the trees, I said, having nothing better to remark, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... swords and gold lace, I maintained my innocence and heard Jack Herriott, on his opportune arrival, pour forth in weird, but fluent, Italian an account of me that must have surrounded me in the eyes of all present with a golden halo, and that firmly established me in their minds as the probable next President of the United States. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... like a magnet. He had not begun to think of giving up the search. Discouragement, failure, mutiny, were to him but incidents. The silver was there, somewhere, and have it he would, if perseverance would avail. From Jamaica he sailed to Hispaniola. There his fluent persuasiveness came again into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Matthew Adams. He invited him to his library and loaned him books. The lad's Uncle Benjamin, in England, who was very fond of composing rhymes which he called poetry, sent many of his effusions to his favorite nephew, and opened quite a brisk correspondence with him. Thus Benjamin soon became a fluent rhymester, and wrote sundry ballads which were sold in the streets and became quite popular. There was a great demand at that time for narratives of the exploits of pirates, the doom of murderers, and wild love adventures. It is said ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may be thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no menace of a breeze—the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... intensely Irish, it was not the gorilla-like countenance so common in the Irish peasant- priest—the priest one sees every day in the streets of Dublin. He was, perhaps, of a better class, as his features were all good. A heavy man as well as a big one, he was not so amusing and so fluent a talker out of school as his predecessor, nor, as we were delighted to discover, so exacting and tyrannical in school. On the contrary, in and out of school he was always the same, mild and placid in temper, with a gentle sort of humour, and he was also very absent-minded. He would forget all ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... whose ducal father made his money by inventing a fluent pill, or who gained his great wealth through relieving humanity by means of a lung pad, a liver pad, a kidney pad or a foot pad, fox-hunting ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... what better can prevail, Or from the fluent tongue produce the tale, Than when two friends, alone, in peaceful place Confer, and wines and cates the table grace; But most, the kind inviter's cheerful face? Thus might we sit, with social goblets crown'd, Till the whole circle of the year goes round: Not the whole circle of ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... write out. Strictly nautical terms and phrases I have sought to avoid: first, because I believed them of no great interest to the general reader; second, because, with this my first sea-trip, I have not become adept enough in their use to "swing" them with the fluent grace of your true-going, irresistible old salt; and from any other source they are, ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of the people which his class are studying. He is aware that the pupil should experience something more than a kaleidoscopic view of isolated facts. He recognizes the folly of requiring four years of high school English for the purpose of cultivating clear, fluent, and accurate expression, only to relax the effort when the student comes into the history class. He knows that the precision, logic, and habit of definite thinking exacted by the pursuit of the scientific ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... that the one or two eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation, and before many moments Rachel's replies were infected with an approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... few words on a subject on which all men are supposed to be fluent, and none agreeable?—Self. I have written much, and published more than enough to demand a longer silence than I now meditate; but, for some years to come, it is my intention to tempt no further the award of "Gods, men, nor columns." In the present composition ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... suffered from an over-fluent tongue rather than a resolute will, was determined to make himself heard. He addressed the driver again. Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... Paradise Lost by heart, and thought it probable that he could rewrite Sir Charles Grandison from memory. In his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation—for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a stretch—he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and passages quoted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... exaggerated reputation for some little while, but had already begun to be forgotten, and in a private room up two pair of stairs, the three companions made a very elegant supper, and drank three or four bottles of champagne, talking the while upon indifferent subjects. The young man was fluent and gay, but he laughed louder than was natural in a person of polite breeding; his hands trembled violently, and his voice took sudden and surprising inflections, which seemed to be independent of his will. The dessert had been cleared away, and all three had ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no words for that first moment, the fluent Carter. He could only hold both her hands and look ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... a prolonged repetition of precisely the same stimulus or the same set of stimuli may make responses dissatisfying to the degree of pain. Ideal activity, biologically, would be one where every impulse was just sufficiently frequently called upon to make response easy, fluent, and satisfactory. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... her lip curled, but she still kept silence. Hugo thought that her eye rested with some complacency upon the silver beads; but she did not express a tithe of the pleasure and surprise which flowed so readily from Mrs. Heron's fluent tongue. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... has long been a desideratum. This river, although in common seasons fordable, and in dry seasons scarcely fluent, is liable, after heavy falls of rain in the mountains, to rise suddenly to a great height, and cut off the communication between the public buildings on the one side, and the peopled suburbs and great road from Sydney on the other. The country beyond the Macquarie affords excellent sheep-pasturage, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... de Leon should have been guilty of occasional lapses. He is said to have been impetuous as well as vindictive;[121] he had the dangerous gift of pulpit eloquence[122] and may have acquired the trick of saying rather more than he meant. His evidence against Luis de Leon, though fluent and clear, is not what we should expect from a man of talent, who recognized the gravity of the charges against the prisoner. His testimony, such as it is, has less intellectual substance than the testimony of Castro and Medina; it turns mainly on petty personal questions or ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... "great man," was the titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll, had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the author of Pasquin, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the "Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... secret embarrassment in the smile, a constraint in the manner, a care, an effort to be gracious in the language, a caution, a rounding of the periods, a recurrence to technical phrases of compliment and amity, a want of the free fluent language of the heart; language which, as it flows, whether from sovereign or subject, leaves a trace that the art of courtier or of monarch cannot imitate. In all attempts at such imitation, there is a want, of which vanity ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... educated people, I found that the Russian I had picked up by Kamchatkan camp-fires and in Cossack izbas on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea resembled, in many respects, the English that a Russian would acquire in a Colorado mining camp, or among the cowboys in Montana. It was fluent, but, as General Kukel said, "quaint—bizarre," and, at times, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... at temperance meetings. A few years ago, when this question was first agitated in Canada, a meeting was held in a school-house on the English line, in the township of Dummer. The lecturer, on that occasion, was an itinerant preacher of the Methodist persuasion. After descanting some time in a very fluent manner, on the evils arising from intemperance, and the great numbers who had lost their lives by violent means, "for my part," said the lecturer, "I have known nearly three hundred cases of ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... and majestic of presence, with large quadrangular face, austere, blue eyes looking authority and command, a vast forehead, and a grizzled beard. Of fluent and convincing eloquence with tongue and pen, having the power of saying much in few words, he cared much more for the substance than the graces of speech or composition. This tendency was not ill exemplified in a note of his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... whose parents were alive and at hand and in a good position, and my father's name stifled scandal. Most of the others were orphans, being cheaply educated by distant relatives or guardians, or else the sons of poor widows who were easily bamboozled by Snuffy's fluent letters, and the religious leaflets which it was his custom to enclose. (In several of these cases, he was "managing" the poor women's "affairs" for them.) One or two boys belonged to people living abroad. Indeed, the worst bully in the school was a half-caste, whose ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those in Dauber. Had Mr. Noyes written Drake without the songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the Songs, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is past," could have been written only by a poet. In Forty Singing Seamen there is displayed an imagination quite superior ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... should it be given to all the fellows I know to be in the thick of real fighting—a life which anyone should be proud to live—while to me, aged twenty, standing six feet, about forty inches round the chest, Rugby footballer, swimmer, fluent French speaker, and Balliol scholar, it is given to load up rations? Loathing this Supply work, I have already applied for a transfer to the Horse Transport Section. Oh! that I had only obeyed the dictates of my own conscience and enlisted in the H.A.C. at the start of the war, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... I was already surfeited with the angelic metropolis, and my thoughts began to turn in the direction of Manfredonia once more. At a corner of the street, however, certain fluent vociferations in English and Italian, which nothing would induce me to set down here, assailed my ears, coming up—apparently—out of the bowels of the earth. I stopped to listen, shocked to hear ribald language in a holy town like this; then, impelled by curiosity, descended a long flight ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the correlative of that in Greek clay, in Greek marble, as you walk through the British Museum. But observe it, above all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his naturally fluent and luxuriant genius, in Plato himself. His prose is a practical illustration of the value of that capacity for correction, of the effort, the intellectual astringency, which he demands of the poet also, the musician, of all true citizens of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... within the player himself that sets the vibrato current in motion. It is an inner, psychic vibration which should be reflected by the intense, rapid vibration in the fingers of the left hand on the strings in order to give fluent expression to emotion. The vibrato can not be used, naturally, on the open strings, but otherwise it represents the true means for securing warmth of expression. Of course, some decry the vibrato—but the reason is often because the vibrato is too slow. One need only listen to Ysaye, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the sky, then shifted to its upper end, a jagged point reaching to the hills. He had heard of it on the ranches where he had been picking fruit—"It's easy traveling till you reach the tules, but it's some pull round them." He gauged the distance round the point, and oaths, picturesque and fluent, came from him. He had sixteen dollars in the lining of his coat, and for days as he tramped and worked, he saw this hoard expended in San Francisco—a bath, clean linen, and a dinner, a dinner in a rotisserie with ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... that she would suffer in no kind of way, that we must use her school for a week or so and that any loss or damage that she incurred would of course be made up to her. She was then, of a sudden, immensely fluent, explaining that her husband—"a most excellent husband to me in every way one might say"—had been dead fifteen years now, that her two sons were both fighting for the Austrians, that she looked after the school assisted by her ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... hard, secret as a wall, wrinkled as an old banner. He was a hale, thick-set man, dressed in breeches of corduroy, and a sleeved waistcoat down to his knees of the same material. His fur cap was on the carpet beside his pack; and he had a fluent tongue in praise of his wares, as he hung his silks over Lettice's outstretched arm, or arranged the ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... I was kept waiting, then a fluent waiter appeared to recommend the most desirable dishes of the day. His eloquence was in full tide, when a man paused before the entrance of my arbor, hesitated, and went ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... things, which, when we did them, we thought remarkably good, and much better than the doings of ordinary men, we now discern, on calmly looking back, to have been extremely bad. That time, you know, my friend, when you talked in a very fluent and animated manner after dinner at a certain house, and thought you were making a great impression on the assembled guests, most of them entire strangers, you are now fully aware that you were only making a fool of yourself. And let this hint of one public manifestation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... glad growing grass!- I climb the air with lissome mien; Unsheathing keen The vivid sheen Of springing green, I thrill the crude, exalt the crass Fine-flex'd and fluent from Earth's mass. ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... Thomas's first and firmest conviction is that he is a profound Orientalist and a fluent speaker of Hindustani. As a matter of fact, he depends largely ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... upon and every whit as reckless in their horsemanship, rode Dade and Jack. If their hearts were not as light, their faces gave no sign; and their tongues flung back the good-humored jibes of their fellows in Spanish as fluent ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... ring Seen, from behind, round a conjuror Doing his pitch in the street. High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones, Round, square, and angular, serry and shove; While from within a voice, Gravely and weightily fluent, Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly (Look at the stress of the shoulders!) Out of a quiver of silence, Over the hiss of the spray, Comes a low cry, and the sound Of breath quick intaken through teeth Clenched in resolve. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the Wallencamp youth was not yet prepared for the introduction of new and advanced methods, I examined my pupils preparatory to giving them lessons and arranging them in classes, in the ordinary way. I found that they could not read, but they could write in a truly fluent and unconventional style; they could not commit prosaical facts to memory, but they could sing songs containing any number of irrelevant stanzas. They could not "cipher," but they had witty and salient ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step—the step of levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did that page in return (I speak not ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... fourth personage to appear. She was badly dressed in black, wore a tam-o'-shanter with a huge black-headed pin thrust through it, clung to a bag, smiled with amiable patronage as she emerged, and at once, without reason, began to address Amedeo and the porters in fluent, incorrect, and too carefully pronounced Italian. Amedeo knew her—the Tabby who haunts Swiss and Italian hotels, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. Nor is the Englishman deliberately hypocritical; but his tenacity, combined with his powerlessness to express his feelings, often gives him the appearance of a hypocrite. He is inarticulate, has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman is unfortunately so unable to express himself, even to himself, that he has never realized this truth, much ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... insisted that never, either in single conflict or when receiving the assault of the senatorial leaders of a whole party, had he been discomfited. His style was bold, vigorous, and aggressive; at times even defiant. He was ready, fluent, fertile in resources, familiar with national and party history, severe in denunciation, and he handled with skill nearly all the weapons of debate. His iron will and restless energy, together with great personal magnetism, made him the idol of his friends and party. His long, brilliant, and almost ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... yet prepared to part with the book. He proceeded instead, in fluent speech and not inappropriate language, to set forth, not the power of the poem—that he both took and left as a matter of course—but the beauty of those phrases, and the turns of those expressions, which particularly pleased him—nor failing to remark that, according to the strict ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... outer to cut short, And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist: Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile's Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight, Like forms in running water, oft when smiles, When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight: But never with the slayer's malice fired: As little as informs an infant's fist Clenched at the sneeze! Thou wouldst but have us be Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... country attorney very often united the functions of solicitor and counsel. As a result of this double life, the attorney acquired the peculiar intellectual defects of the barrister, and retained the heavy responsibilities of the attorney. He grew talkative and fluent, and lost his lucidity of judgment, the first necessity for the conduct of affairs. If a man of more than ordinary ability tries to do the work of two men, he is apt to find that the two men are mediocrities. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... refuse grumpily—and that would have made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet, unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr. Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his prayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact that they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr. Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, as people afterwards ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... conversation which is laid down as the proper thing in polite society at quadrille, during the intermissions between the figures of the dance. And, also, the long-legged, aged Roly-Poly wandered over the room, sitting down now next one girl, now another, and entertaining them all with his fluent chatter. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... sat down Fisker made his speech, and it was fluent, fast, and florid. Without giving it word for word, which would be tedious, I could not adequately set before the reader's eye the speaker's pleasing picture of world-wide commercial love and harmony which was to be produced by ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... describe elsewhere. His disposition was naturally cheerful and mild, his temper even, and not easily provoked. Although somewhat inclined to taciturnity, yet when drawn out to converse upon any subject he was acquainted with, he was naturally fluent, and in his language pure and correct. He was a universal favorite with the youth of both sexes in his native town, and, during the intervals between his voyages, was always in demand when a Thanksgiving ball was contemplated, or a sleigh-ride, or a "frolic," as all such parties of pleasure ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... aisle with the plate on the Sabbath day, had become part of St. Cuthbert's ritual—and we all thought it beautiful. He was one of the two, referred to in the opening of our story, who had been sent to spy out the land, and to report upon the propriety of my conjugal enterprise. The fluent panegyric in which his report was made is already recorded and need ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... good sense and judgment. He had managed even to win the good opinion of Miss Sarah Pemberton, who was not in general inclined to think well of young men especially of officers in the army, whom she designated generally as an impudent, profligate set, with fluent tongues and insinuating manners, whose chief occupation in life was to break the hearts of young girls foolish enough ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... mistress. He was popular in this city of questionable morals at that time. She was beautiful and developed remarkable talents as a singer, and was a bright, witty, fascinating conversationalist. She worked hard at her studies, and became a fluent speaker of the Italian language. Hamilton had great consideration for her, and never risked having her affronted because of the liaison. Her singing was a triumph. It is said she was offered L6,000 to go to Madrid for three years and L2,000 for a season ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... one of her fluent Spanish oaths and, springing to her feet, stood with her body slightly bent forward, her hands on her hips, gazing at him with her narrow, gleaming eyes. Her apathy was gone, she was alive now to her ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... made his speech, and it was fluent, fast, and florid. Without giving it word for word, which would be tedious, I could not adequately set before the reader's eye the speaker's pleasing picture of world-wide commercial love and harmony which was to be produced by a railway from Salt Lake City to Vera Cruz, nor explain the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious - and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... then, however. I admired it with all my heart; applauded the nursery eloquence of these sucking Mirabeaus and Camille Desmoulins as frantically as their own vanity could desire; and was even secretly chagrined that my own French was not yet fluent enough to enable me to take ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... the spirit can get through. We can play more sympathetically, more fluently, and with finer effect on a beautiful "grand" than on a jangly upright instrument: the one is a better vehicle of expression than the other. So also we can secure more fluent expression with a fountain pen than with one that continually interrupts the free flow of ideas by demanding to be dipped in the inkpot. We have two typewriters of the same manufacture, but one is an early model and the other a modern machine: there is a vast difference in the ease of expressing ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... the second occasion of her going with Minna to see Dr. Dieckel. Minna, as they were walking quietly along together had suddenly begun in a broken English which soon turned to shy, fluent, animated German, to tell about a friend, an apotheker, a man, Miriam gathered—missing many links in her amazement—in a shop, the chemist's shop where her parents dealt, in the little country town ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... but coldly to the whilom prima donna, "will you do me the honor to explain this? We have some doubts as to the authority upon which this invitation was issued." He spoke fluent English, for the ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady,' he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; 'and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... development of the people which his class are studying. He is aware that the pupil should experience something more than a kaleidoscopic view of isolated facts. He recognizes the folly of requiring four years of high school English for the purpose of cultivating clear, fluent, and accurate expression, only to relax the effort when the student comes into the history class. He knows that the precision, logic, and habit of definite thinking exacted by the pursuit of the scientific subjects should not ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... When he attacked her one day with the brusque exclamation, "Well, Mattie, what's all this blame foolishness your ma's being tellin' me ?" she answered him with a cool decision and energy that startled and alarmed him. She stood straight and terribly tall, he thought. She spoke with that fluent clearness of girls who know what they want, and used words he had never met with before out of a newspaper. He felt himself no match for her, and ended the discussion by saying: "That's all moonshine—you shan't go! D'ye hear me?" but he felt dismally sure that she would ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... time a dozen newspapers in the State. With all of them had Bartlett to do battle for the cause in which he had enlisted, and right valiantly did he do it. He was a fluent and most caustic writer, and was always ready, not only to write, but to fight for his party, and would with his blood sustain anything he might say or write. Like most party editors, he only saw the interest of his party in what he would write, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... you yourself be one of those to enter your name in such a list as I speak of? You are young; you have great talents; you have a clear head; you have a natural, fluent, and unforced elocution; your ideas are just, your sentiments benevolent, open, and enlarged;—but this is too big for your modesty. Oh! this modesty, in time and place, is a charming virtue, and the grace of all other virtues. But it is sometimes the worst enemy ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... with shy, queer manners—one of those beings of whom people say the hand of God is upon them. He had the same business as my father and Nastasa: he was also a private "agent" and commissioner, but as he had neither an imposing exterior nor a fluent tongue, nor much self-confidence, he could not make up his mind to act independently, and so formed a partnership with my father. His handwriting was wonderful, he had a thorough knowledge of law, and was perfectly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XVII. No. 101. May, 1876. • Various
... courses of medical lectures. His memory was perfect and his reading embraced everything relating to his profession. A good lecturer requires not only a clear perception of his subject, but a lucid and fluent presentation of it. Dr. Delamater never wrote lectures. His memoranda were of the most meagre kind. They were frequently nothing more than a few hieroglyphics made on the margin of a newspaper drawn ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... The negotiations with the bird-man had lasted a little longer than one would have expected. But then, of course, M. Feriaud was a foreigner, and Roland's French was not fluent. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... member, in advising and directing our measures in the Northern war. As a speaker, he could not be compared with his living colleague and namesake, whose deep conceptions, nervous style, and undaunted firmness, made him truly our bulwark in debate. But Mr. Samuel Adams, although not of fluent elocution, was so rigorously logical, so clear in his views, abundant in good sense, and master always of his subject, that he commanded the most profound attention whenever he rose in an assembly, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... unable to address them either in the French or Flemish language, and was therefore obliged to ask their attention to the Bishop of Arras, who would act as his interpreter. Antony Perrenot accordingly arose, and in smooth, fluent, and well-turned commonplaces, expressed at great length the gratitude of Philip towards his father, with his firm determination to walk in the path of duty, and to obey his father's counsels and example in the future administration of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the face only seemed familiar because it was the type of a class of faces all more or less alike, all intensely respectable and not without refinement, expressing a grave reticence that did not agree with the fluent speech, and a polite reserve at odds with the inquisitive ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Whirl and bewilder and flutter and fascinate! Faith, it's so killing you are, you assassinate— Murder's the word for you, Barney McGee! Bold when they're sunny, and smooth when they're showery— Oh, but the style of you, fluent and flowery! Chesterfield's way, with a touch of the Bowery! How, would they silence you, Barney machree? Naught can your gab allay, Learned as Rabelais (You in his abbey lay Once on the spree). Here's to the smile of you, (Oh, but the ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... Melinda was speechless. But Uncle Joe was likely to be fluent when he got started. He cleared his throat and turned mild, suffused, half-shamed blue eyes on his shrinking niece. "Yes, your piece has come out in the paper, Melinda, and your folks are all-fired pleased with you. I told Lucy this ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... and, interesting novel from the pen of Lord Normanby. His writings evince great knowledge of the world, the work-o'-day world, as well as the beau monde; yet there is no bitterness in his satire, which is always just and happily pointed. His style, too, is easy, fluent, and polished, without being disfigured by the slightest ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... eloquence at the Dragon of Wantly. At the White Horse, meanwhile, the friends of the de Courcy interest were treated perhaps to sounder political views; though not expressed in periods so intelligibly fluent as those of ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... that crowd of men went to the extraordinary length of grim smiles. Suddenly I recognized the trick of that Arab cheapjack. It may be seen at work in Poplar, my native parish to which the ships come, when a curious and innocent Chinaman joins the group about the fluent quack in ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... intellectual but simple, sometimes metaphysical and always interesting technically in its fluent and variable rhythms. A collection of his best verse up to 1919 was published under ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... in the two boys. The elder, who was about fifteen, seemed older than he was, not only from his height, but from the darkness of his complexion, and a certain proud, nay, imperious, expression upon features that, without having the soft and fluent graces of childhood, were yet regular and striking. His dark-green shooting- dress, with the belt and pouch, the cap, with its gold tassel set upon his luxuriant curls, which had the purple gloss of the raven's plume, blended perhaps something prematurely manly in his own tastes, with the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... a sofa, and quite unfit to cope with a hard bad man like Farmer Tester, and a fluent plausible lawyer. They told their story all their own way, and the farmer declared that the man had tempted the pony into the allotment with corn. And the lawyer said that the constable had no right to keep the pony in the pound, that he was liable to all sorts of punishments. ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... and with Dick and Henry for audience made an impassioned speech in defence of vested interests and the sacred rights of property. Never in his life had he been so fluent or so inventive, and when he wound up a noble passage on the rights of the individual, in which he alluded to Sam as a fat sharper, he felt that his case ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... joined Flavia, but neither yet had spoken, watching the cousins. They had not the fluent familiarity of intercourse possessed by the two who looked and acted very like a pair of handsome boys. Moreover, Gerard distrusted himself, fearing to say too much, too soon. He was approaching Flavia carefully and delicately ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... wall, and she seemed perfectly at home, laughing and chattering, in the best spirits imaginable, to Hareton—now a great, strong lad of eighteen—who stared at her with considerable curiosity and astonishment: comprehending precious little of the fluent succession of remarks and questions which her tongue never ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... keep life fixed and constant, and all about her she found life fluent and changing. Or perhaps life was constant, and the fluency was in her. Or perhaps the difficulty was all in this man, about whom she had never been able to take any position that he did not shortly oust her from it. Considering her resolution only last night, she too had thought, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... it is, as usual, very fluent, very picturesque and very full of colour. Here and there, however, it is really irritating. Such a sentence as 'the tavern had the defects of its quality' is an awkward Gallicism; and when Mr. Symonds, after genially comparing Jonson's ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Lawton, tall, bronzed, commanding, taciturn—but fluent when he did speak—or Kent, or Sumner, or little Jerry Carter himself. And once, a soldier stepped into the circle of firelight, his heels clicking sharply together; and Crittenden thought an uneasy movement ran around the group, and that the younger men looked furtively up as though ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... It is not easy to say what a panegyrist of that period intended by 'a complete knowledge of Greek,' or 'fluent Greek writing,' in a Prince. I suspect, however, that we ought not to understand by these phrases anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... At first his words came slowly, with some stiffness and self-consciousness. This passed; he forgot himself, thought only of his subject, and utterance became quiet, grave, and fluent. He did not speak as though he were addressing a jury. Gesture was impossible, and his voice must not carry beyond the blue room. He spoke as to himself, as giving reasons to a high intelligence for the invalidity of murder. For an infusion of sentiment and rhetoric ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... realised the companionship of both children as very dear just then. He had a great deal to say, and wanted to say it all at once, but words never came to him too easily; he had missed many an opportunity in life for the want of fluent and spontaneous address. He stammered and halted somewhat in his delivery. A new language with but a single word in it would have ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... before thee." The Caliph looked at Miriam and saw that she was slender and shapely of form and stature, the handsomest of the folk of her tide and the unique pearl of her age and her time; sweet of speech[FN19] and fluent of tongue, stable of soul and hearty of heart. Thereupon she kissed the ground between his hands and wished him permanence of glory and prosperity and surcease of evil and enmity. He admired the beauty of her figure and the sweetness of her voice and the readiness of her replies ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... probably a fitful game, and since the days of the Brontes there has not been a large family without its magazine. The weak point of all this literature is its commonplace. The child's effort is to write something as much like as possible to the tedious books that are read to him; he is apt to be fluent and foolish. If a child simple enough to imitate were also simple enough not to imitate he might write nursery magazines that ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... general literary subjects I know, but the main theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I do recall that he said Poe wrote ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... flat, hard, secret as a wall, wrinkled as an old banner. He was a hale, thick-set man, dressed in breeches of corduroy, and a sleeved waistcoat down to his knees of the same material. His fur cap was on the carpet beside his pack; and he had a fluent tongue in praise of his wares, as he hung his silks over Lettice's outstretched arm, or arranged ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position, restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing, fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... time after his election, he began to take part in the debates. He was not a fluent speaker; indeed he was hesitating, and sometimes his sentences were much involved; but, as he never spoke except upon topics with which he was perfectly familiar, he was listened to with the respect and attention which are always, in the ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... days were passed he could not go down the village street without lifting his cap at least a dozen times. Bourcelles was so very friendly; no room for strangers there; a new-comer might remain a mystery, but he could not be unknown. Rogers found his halting French becoming rapidly fluent again. And every one knew so much about him—more almost than ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... fellow, thought Stephen, and a fluent talker. Already his eloquence had brought quiet to the room and caused those who were fumbling with the papers to let them fall motionless in their laps. But what a knave! Here he was deliberately playing upon ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... unfamiliar with French. I do not know, indeed, to what degree this is true of you, but reading is in any case a way to keep what you have and to acquire more. If it pleases you, we shall find a way for you to become more fluent in talking, than, as you say, you are now. If you do not like it, rely with entire confidence on ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... careful manner in which the man selected his dinner, his instructions to the maitre d'hotel as to the manner the entree was to be made, and the infinite pains he took over the exact vintage he required. He spoke in French, fluent and exact, and his manner was entirely that of ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... often heard it said by the Persians and Tatars who live along the Lower Volga that there is no language to swear in like the Russian; and I must admit that they illustrated and proved their assertion when occasion offered in the most fluent and incontrovertible manner; but I am convinced, after having heard the curses of experts in all parts of the East, that for variety, ingenuity and force the profanity of the Caucasian mountaineers is unsurpassed. They are by no means ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... attitudes she made you think of some smooth and balanced mechanism which, however it turned, or went, or stopped, was still in no danger of going awry. She could stand still and sit still, and to see her do either was good for the eyes. She was not fluent in speech, but when she began you might be sure she would get to the end of what she set out to say and stop when she got to the end. The simplest things took a rhythmical quality in her mouth, and clung to the memory with ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 7 • Various
... invention, "than which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... their victory. The managers of the Colonization Society resolved, if possible, to capture that sentiment, and with it the pecuniary aid the British Abolitionists might render. It was always a tremendous beggar. They, accordingly, selected a fluent-tongued agent and sent him to England to advocate their cause. He did not hesitate to represent that the Colonization Society was the especial friend of the negro, working for his deliverance from bondage, and, in addition, that it had the support of "the wealth, the respectability, ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... certain the Hermanns knew what they wanted when they bought the whole point and perched their house on the very top of the hill, where all the winds of heaven might visit it as roughly as they pleased, but where nothing could rob the outlook of its ever-changing splendor and mystery, its fluent wonder and abiding charm. ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... around the camp fire evenings were highly interesting too, for Big Pete was a fluent talker with a wealth of stories of the Great West at his tongue's end. Indeed, the story of his family and their migration west was one that fascinated me. His father had been a trapper in the old days; he had done his share of roaming the mountains, prospecting and making his ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... went a little too far when he claimed to have found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile ignoramus, and himself as ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... important document penned at the instance of the Duke of Florence by Vasari to Buonarroti, not long before the old man's death in Rome. This epistle has so weighty a bearing upon the matter in hand that I shall here translate it. Careful study of its fluent periods will convince an unprejudiced mind that the sacristy, as we now see it, is even less representative of its maker's design than it was when Vasari wrote. The frescoes of Giovanni da Udine are gone. It ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... murmured the Princess, in an Arabic much more soft and fluent than the original gum. "So ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... dreadful anxiety in these seven or eight weeks of absence, of his sleepless nights, of his self-accusings, of his anguished affection, the senior warden could find nothing to say; but for anger and disappointment and contempt he had fluent and searing words. Such words were only the recoil from anxiety; but Sam could not know that; he only knew that he was a disgrace to his family. The information left him apparently unmoved. He did not betray—very likely he really did not recognize in himself—the moral let-down that ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... given me, I know I shall win your gratitude, which I much desire. It is a little disheartening and a justification of my pessimism that neither of these men has received anything like the same general recognition as our fluent Mr. Perchance, that interpreter of literature to the American bourgeoisie. I will slip in also a volume or two of Matthew Arnold, as a good touchstone to try them on. Now that you are becoming a professional weigher of books yourself, you ought to ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... doors. [759] The substance of the debates has consequently been preserved in a report, meagre, indeed, when compared with the reports of our time, but for that age unusually full. Every man of note in the House took part in the discussion. The bill was opposed by Finch with that fluent and sonorous rhetoric which had gained him the name of Silvertongue, and by Howe with all the sharpness both of his wit and of his temper, by Seymour with characteristic energy, and by Harley with characteristic ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... who were such a singular contrast to one another, and who were evidently the important persons of the cavalcade. They swung themselves lightly from their saddles, and returned the polite greetings of the generals; the one in fluent German, the other in equally flowing words, but in a language which no one understood, and to which the only answer was a few murmured words, a smile, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... minute or two she was badly frightened. Then, watching him, she suddenly came to the conclusion that she had nothing to fear—that he was telling her something he wanted her to know. She listened, trying hard to catch some word in the flood of fluent foreign speech, and twice she thought she made out the name of Ram Das. Then he finished abruptly with almost the one word of Hindustani she knew, since it was one the old hawker had taught her. "SUMJA," ("Do you understand?") ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... abjectness; nothing that asked for pity. When Diana last caught sight of them, Marion had a contadino's child on her knee, in the corner of a third-class carriage, and Frobisher opposite—he spoke a fluent Italian—was laughing and jesting with the father. Marion, smiling, waved her hand, and ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of ideas was probably designed or conceived by him as affording an explanation also of the community of Knowledge. He emphasised the fluent instability of the sensible impression, and as we have already pointed out, sensation in itself labours also under this drawback that it contains and affords no common nexus whereby the conceptions or perceptions of one ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... under Johann Matthysz (Matthyszoon), baker of Haarlem. He had little education, but some literary faculty, and had written plays. On the 13th of January 1534 he appeared in Muenster as an apostle of Matthysz. Good-looking and fluent, he fascinated women, and won the confidence of Bernard Knipperdollinck, a revolutionary cloth merchant, who gave him his daughter in marriage. The Muenster Anabaptists took up arms on the 9th of February 1534 (see ANABAPTISTS). On the death of Matthysz ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... more mortified, when talking in a company with fluent vivacity, and, as he flattered himself, to the admiration of all who were present; a German who sat next him, and perceived Johnson rolling himself, as if about to speak, suddenly stopped him, saying, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... results. There appear to be some dangers involved which it may be well to consider. Useful work may be hindered owing to, first, the time and attention required for the meetings and discussions of the various councils, and the risk that clever and fluent talkers may prolong debate and generate friction and may perhaps exercise an undue influence. Probably this will not be found a serious danger. Experience over a considerable district shows that those who are chosen by the Trade Unions to represent them are usually clear-headed ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... compliments and good wishes from Rupert Vivian." Kitty read the inscription; her lip curled, but she still kept silence. Hugo thought that her eye rested with some complacency upon the silver beads; but she did not express a tithe of the pleasure and surprise which flowed so readily from Mrs. Heron's fluent tongue. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... after, the Jerusalem Church was scattered. Then, by degrees, came elders and deacons. People fancy that there is but one rigid, unalterable type of Church organisation, when the reality is that it is fluent and flexible, and that the primitive Church never was meant to be the pattern according to which, in detail, and specifically, other Churches in different circumstances should be constituted. There are great principles which no organisation must break, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... amazement fell upon all. For myself, the wild incongruity of this foreign tongue from lips which I had heard utter such fluent and flute-like English ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... aim shows itself in the fluid nature of the term "results"; to some teachers it signifies readiness for promotion, or a piece of work that presents a satisfactory external appearance, such as good writing, neat handwork, an orderly game, fluent reading. To others it means something deeper, which they discover in some chance remark of a child's that marks the growth of the spirit, or the awakening of the interest of a child whose development is late, or the quickened power of a child to express; or evidence ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... Mahbub Ali had incautiously driven home the sharp-edged stirrup. (He was not the new sort of fluent horse-dealer who wears English boots and spurs.) Kim drew his own conclusions ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... from one to the other and mixed up the two with a ready familiarity. He went much into London society, and though entirely serious and without having, so far as I know, a gleam of humor, he was a fluent and ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... reassuring conversation with Sir Sydney Shippard this evening. He is a most intelligent man, and speaks with such fluent decisiveness that all he says carries conviction. I am told that Sir Jacobus's speech was a rambling, poor affair and weak; the crowd showed a restlessness that at one time threatened to become dangerous. He was fortunately ...
— A Woman's Part in a Revolution • Natalie Harris Hammond
... plan. The summer days were all very delightful, but the presentation of the little play promised that agreeable variety without which all pleasures pall. Indeed, Lucy's expression of gratitude, fervent if not fluent, rendered Priscilla ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... forget the learned Havillan, our Book would be thought to be imperfect, so terse and fluent was his Verse, of which we shall give you two Examples, the one out of Mr. John Speed his Description of Devonshire, speaking ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... wife puts kindred before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive list than ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... that there has never been in Europe a fluent script so beautiful and legible as that of our very best English writers of to-day. But their aesthetic mastery has come from loving study of the forms that conscious artistry had perfected, and through a constant practice ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... suspect his other-world muteness. William was closing his first Sunday night service. The congregation was large and in the front midst of it sat Brother A. Immediately behind him sat Brother B, a fluent and enthusiastic steward. I was in the Amen Corner as usual, because it is only from this vantage ground that a preacher's wife can keep her eye properly upon his congregation and be able to estimate the ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... innocent, Count," said Lucian, in reply to the fluent, incorrect English of the Italian, "appearances are against you. However, you can prove yourself ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... be very glad to see the noble Athenian in his own city. His fame for eloquence and prudence is already in Tyre and Babylon," spoke the stranger, never taking his steel-blue eyes from the orator's face. The accent was Oriental, but the Greek was fluent. The prince—for prince he was, whatever his nation—pressed his hand closer. Almost involuntarily Democrates's hand responded. They clasped tightly; then, as if Lycon feared a word too much, the unknown released his hold, bowed with inimitable though silent ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... weep—and laugh. Perhaps no step in the evolution of beauty went farther than our human power of making a continuous fabric; soft and mobile, showing any color and texture desired. The beauty of the human body is supreme, and when we add to it the flow of color, the ripple of fluent motion, that comes of a soft, light garment over free limbs—it is a new field of loveliness and delight. Naturally this should have filled the whole world with a new pleasure. Our garments, first under right natural selection developing perfect use, under right sex ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... (1) Fluent, affluent, influence, influenza, superfluous, fluid, influx, flush (rush of water), fluctuate; (2) confluent, mellifluous, flux, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... early life; his face genial looking, with good humor lurking in every corner of its innumerable angles. Judge Douglas once said, "I regard Lincoln as a kind, amiable and intelligent gentleman, a good citizen and an honorable opponent." As a speaker he was ready, precise, fluent and his manner before a popular assembly was just as he pleased to make it; being either superlatively ludicrous or very impressive. He employed but little gesticulation but when he desired to make a point produced a shrug of the shoulders, an elevation of the eyebrows, a ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... (1767), which in a quarter of a century went through six editions, was thought by Helvetius superior to Montesquieu, though Hume himself, as always the incarnation of kindness, recommended its suppression. At least Ferguson read enough of Montesquieu to make some fluent generalities sound plausible. He knows that the investigation of savage life will throw some light upon the origins of government. He sees the folly of generalizing easily upon the state of nature. He insists, probably after conversation ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... forgot any thing that he had read. He could repeat the whole of Paradise Lost by heart, and thought it probable that he could rewrite Sir Charles Grandison from memory. In his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation—for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a stretch—he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and passages quoted verbatim from his multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... the cause of independence. Bolivar was alert, dauntless, brilliant, impetuous, vehemently patriotic, and yet often capricious, domineering, vain, ostentatious, and disdainful of moral considerations—a masterful man, fertile in intellect, fluent in speech and with pen, an inspiring leader and one born to command in state and army. Quite as earnest, equally courageous, and upholding in private life a higher standard of morals, San Martin was relatively calm, cautious, almost taciturn in manner, and slower in thought and action. He ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... remarkable occurred this evening, we may as well explain this Mr. Clinton. He was a speculator, and above all a setter on foot of rotten speculations, and a keeper on foot a little while of lame ones. No man exceeded him in the art of rose-tinting bad paper or parchment. He was sanguine and fluent. His mind had two eyes, an eagle's and a bat's; with the first he looked at the "pros," and with the second at the "cons" of ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... Montmorencys.' Jeanne had her respectable friends, as Becky had the Sedleys; like Becky, she imprudently married a heavy, unscrupulous young officer; her expedients for living on nothing a year were exactly those of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley; her personal charms, her fluent tongue, her good nature, even, were those of that accomplished lady. Finally she has her Marquis of Steyne in the wealthy, luxurious Cardinal de Rohan; she robs him to a tune beyond the dreams of Becky, and, incidentally, she drags to the dust the royal head of the fairest and ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally, emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy in fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And the Turkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praise from Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to all who came into contact with him, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... having secured such a prize as his friend Gibson, but said nothing about his long neglect of duty. Molly, who by this time knew the few strong expressions of his countenance well, was sure that something was the matter, and that he was very much disturbed. He hardly attended to Mrs. Gibson's fluent opening of conversation, for she had already determined to make a favourable impression on the father of the handsome young man who was heir to an estate, besides his own personal agreeableness; but he turned to Molly, and, addressing her, said—almost in a low voice, as ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... and fluent is ever thy speech at the moment war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... who, as was natural, were very much despised by the women of the tribe. The pieces of fine sentiment and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great "Ha'," the wild legends served every necessary purpose equally well. The "Ha'" in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and the frosts set in, was a genial place; and so attached was my cousin to its distinctive principle—the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... own girls were not ready writers, and their mother generally sent their messages for them. Nancy and Kitty did not yet write nearly as well as they talked, but they contrived to express something of their own individuality in their communications, which were free and fluent, though childlike and crude. ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... speech. Reuben Ring, who was a man of many solid and valuable qualities, would most probably have been exercising the military functions of his brother-in-law, at that very moment, had he been equally gifted with a fluent discourse. But his feats lay rather in doing than in speaking, and the tide of popularity had in consequence set less strongly in his favor than might have happened had the reverse been the case. The present, however, was a moment when it was necessary to overcome his natural reluctance ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... opinion, though he refused to do or say anything but grunt, as The Pilot said to me afterwards, in a rage. It is true, Williams, the storekeeper just come from "across the line," did all the talking, but no one paid much attention to his fluent fatuities except as they represented the unexpressed mind of the dour, exasperating little Scotchman, who sat silent but for an "ay" now and then, so expressive and conclusive that everyone knew what he meant, ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor
... behind her a foot long by six inches wide, which effectually put a stop to all further fishing operations on the part of Goliath and his merry men for that day, at any rate. It was all so quiet, and so tame and so stupid, no wonder Mistah Jones felt savage. When Captain Slocum's fluent profanity flickered around him, including vehemently all he might be supposed to have any respect for, he did not even LOOK as if he would like to talk back; he only looked sick and ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... beauty—a circumstance that has never been sufficiently noticed by either poet or painter. Willows are now beautiful objects in the landscape; they are like rich masses of arborescent silver, especially if stirred by the breeze, their light and fluent forms contrasting finely with the still and sombre ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... slightly in his broad beard, made him look older than his real age, which was forty-six. He stooped a little in the shoulders. His manners were usually gentle and grave; but a pair of large and very lively eyes and an occasional impulsive eagerness of speech, wherein he was ready and fluent at all times, showed that there was more fire and life in his character than appeared on the surface. Those who knew him well were aware that his temper was impetuous and precipitate, and on given occasions might be ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... which they condemned. He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians at the famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Book of Common Prayer. His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, and impassioned. "They spent," as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days in logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a couple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... on the miseries of famine as experienced in Ireland,—talked much of their own glorious and free country—("Looking out for a few niggers this morning?" occurred to me),—and made some severe reflections—not, I admit, altogether undeserved—on the Government of England. This man was fluent, though turgid. He seemed resolved to act the orator throughout, and certainly to me appeared in point of talent far—far a-head of Henry Clay. Bravos and hoohoos in abundance greeted Mr. Prentiss. He spoke long; but the noise of the suburbs prevented my ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... to himself, much after the haranguing way; he was no stranger to the rules of art, and knew well how to make his matter subservient to the subject he handled. His diction and language was easy and fluent, void of all affectation and bombast, and has a kind of undesigned negligent elegance which arrests the reader's attention. Considering the time he lived in, it might be said, that he carried the orator's prize from his contemporaries ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... the air with a jarring, hasty laughter, at which his goat-like beard began to tremble in an uncomely manner. It took Foma a long time to obtain a categorical answer; the old man, contrary to his habit, was restless and irritated; his speech, usually fluent, was now interrupted; he was swearing and expectorating as he spoke, and it was with difficulty that Foma learned what the matter was. Sophya Pavlovna Medinskaya, the wealthy architect's wife, who was well known in the city for her ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... his life was in danger came to Sarpi from Caspar Schoppe, the publicist. Scioppius (so his contemporaries called him) was a man of doubtful character and unsteady principles, who, according as his interests varied, used a fluent pen and limpid Latin style for or against the Jesuit faction. History would hardly condescend to notice him but for the singular luck he had of coming at critical moments into contact with the three chief Italian thinkers of his time. We know already that a letter of this man is the one contemporary ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... became aware of an effect away between the white-stemmed trees towards the house as if the Cambridge boat-race crew was indulging in a vigorous scrimmage. Drawing nearer this resolved itself into the fluent contours of Lady Beach-Mandarin, dressed in sky-blue and with a black summer straw hat larger than ever and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... came out of their temporary retirement, and helped Bradley's cause simply because he was young and a dissenter. They were a power, for most of them were deeply read on the tariff and on the railroad problem; in fact, were all round radicals and fluent speakers. ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... to me my duty, and I will sustain it in the best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of this city centuries of history abound? Does your heart blush at ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... raised head Feels the full flower of morning shed And fluent sunrise round him rolled That laps and laves his body bold With fluctuant heaven in water's stead, And urgent through the growing gold Strikes, and sees all the spray flash red, And his soul takes the sun, and yearns For joy wherewith the sea's ...
— Songs before Sunrise • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Beside him, the other officials look very small: indeed the first impression of him is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old Japanese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow basso. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... attention to her story of the shooting of the stag, Stephen's feat when a boy of fourteen; she did not of course know as much of the history of the Archdales as did the petted young beauty to whom he had been talking before dinner, and she in the midst of her fluent account wondered in her own mind where she had heard it all, and remembered that it had been one of Katie's stories when they ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... wended his way up the hill to Mr. Anderson's with very much the aspect of a man who is going to be hanged. And his attempts at conversation with the maiden were not at all what might have been expected from the young minister whose graceful presence and fluent eloquence had been the boast of Magdalen. On her part the embarrassment was equally great. At length they were married,—a marriage based on a false idea of duty on each side. But no idea of duty, however strong or however false, could blind the eyes of this married ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... ordinary things of design and decoration have sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal and leaf—the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by rote—are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... but was interrupted by a sudden uproar outside, fluent swearing coming towards the house. The door opened with a bang, admitting a white-faced, big-eyed man with one leg jammed through the box he had landed on ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... who suffered from an over-fluent tongue rather than a resolute will, was determined to make himself heard. He addressed the driver again. Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the lieutenant, smiling. And in the same tongue he continued, with fluent ease: "Indeed I do, Effendi. Yes, yes, I learned it in Algiers and all the way south as far as the headwaters ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Villoria in Castilla, and professed in the Dominican convent of San Pablo at Valladolid. On going to the Philippines he was sent first to the mission of Bataan, where his labors were uninterrupted and severe. He became fluent in the Tagil language, after Which he was assigned to the Chinese mission near Manila; and he composed and published several devotional treatises in both those languages. He was elected prior of Manila, but before his three years in that office were finished, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVII, 1609-1616 • Various
... elevated, and poetical. In fact, the language of passion is almost always pure as well as vehement, and it is no uncommon thing to hear a Scotchman, when overwhelmed by a countryman with a tone of bitter and fluent upbraiding, reply by way of taunt to his adversary, "You have ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... so it is with the Englishman from sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. Nor is the Englishman deliberately hypocritical; but his tenacity, combined with his powerlessness to express his feelings, often gives him the appearance of a hypocrite. He is inarticulate, has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman is unfortunately so unable to express himself, even to himself, that he has never realized this truth, much less ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the spoiled child do not vanish with childhood or even with adolescence. A university training does not necessarily transform petulance into ripe wisdom. Literary ability may only give fluent ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... when young greatly feared the people. He had a certain personal likeness to the despot Peisistratus; and as his own voice was sweet, and he was ready and fluent in speech, old men who had known Peisistratus were struck by his resemblance to him. He was also rich, of noble birth, and had powerful friends, so that he feared he might be banished by ostracism, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... the others use the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with the same weapons. It ain't much trouble to travel with the high-flyers after you find out their gait. I got along fine. I was feeling cool and agreeable, and pretty soon I was talking away fluent as you please, all about the ranch and the West, and telling 'em how the Indians eat grasshopper stew and snakes, and you never saw ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... not a single person, whether high or low, has there been who has not looked up to her with regard: with the result that Mr. Lien himself has, in fact, had to take a back seat (lit. withdrew 35 li). In looks, she is also so extremely beautiful, in speech so extremely quick and fluent, in ingenuity so deep and astute, that even a man could, in no way, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... creature, this Amilcare Passavente, his own paradox. Quick as a bird of prey he was, and at times as inert; dark as night, eagle-faced, flat-browed, stiff and small in the head, clean-featured, with decisive lips. A very fluent speaker, hoarse in voice, but cunning in the vibrations he could lend it, he was in action as light and fierce as a flame; at rest as massive as a block of stone, impervious to threats or prayers or tears. Women loved him easily, men followed ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language. The habit of discussing questions in this way necessarily reacts on the intellects of our ablest men, particularly of those who are introduced into parliament at a very early age, before their minds have expanded to full maturity. The talent for debate is developed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... generous imagination, the grasp of a profound statesmanship, the enthusiasm of a noble nature,—these no practice could educe from the eloquence of Lumley Lord Vargrave, for he had them not; but bold wit, fluent and vigorous sentences, effective arrangement of parliamentary logic, readiness of retort, plausibility of manner, aided by a delivery peculiar for self-possession and ease, a clear and ringing ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was a man who had seen many changes, And always changed as true as any needle; His Polar Star being one which rather ranges, And not the fixed—he knew the way to wheedle: So vile he 'scaped the doom which oft avenges; And being fluent (save indeed when fee'd ill), He lied with such a fervour of intention— There was no doubt he earned his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... a member of Parliament, who was lamenting that he had failed to win the ear of the House. He was puzzled by the failure. He was a fluent speaker; he knew his subject with great thoroughness, and his character was irreproachable; and yet when he rose the House went out. He was like a dinner-bell. He couldn't understand it. Yet everybody else understood it quite well. It was because he was always "telling you," ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... upon to make the formal exposition of his political opinions. Randal Leslie, indeed, was not one of those speakers whom either modesty, fastidiousness, or conscientious desire of truth predisposes towards the labour of written composition. He had too much cleverness to be in want of fluent period or ready commonplace,—the ordinary materials of oratorical impromptu; too little taste for the Beautiful to study what graces of diction will best adorn a noble sentiment; too obtuse a conscience to care if the popular argument were purified from the dross which the careless flow ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the commander in Spanish that was more fluent than elegant or precise,—his name was Peleg Scudder. He was master of the schooner General Court, of the port of Salem, in Massachusetts, on a trading voyage to the South Seas, but now driven by stress of weather into the bay of San Carlos. He begged permission ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... many things but suggested none, while Raffles turned this much of his statement into sufficiently fluent Italian. But when he faced me again his face ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... hastily on other matters, an art in which he was an adept, for it was his gift to be fluent on anything or nothing. But although Archie had the grace or the timidity to suffer him to rattle on, he was by no means done with the subject. When he came home to dinner, he was greeted with a sly demand, how things were looking "Cauldstaneslap ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Morris?" asked one of the listeners, as the speaker, a fluent, energetic young man, closed his recital of the atrocities he had witnessed. "Did they escape, or are they among the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... coffee for him, Chino," Rennie called. Herrera brought over a tin cup from the fire now blazing. As the Mexican took it awkwardly with his left hand, still watching Rennie glassily over the brim, the latter used fluent Spanish, only a word or two of ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... best come right over!' the fluent but kind voice said persuasively. 'It's all spilin' to be eat. An' what kin you do? There ain't no fire here to warm you, and it'll take a bit of a while before you kin get one; an' you're all tired out. ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner
... the Convent of the Ursulines, dressed in the ordinary costume of a French soldier, got from the wife of Jean Labrouk. In manner and speech though I was somewhat dull, my fellows thought, I was enough like a peasant soldier to deceive them, and my French was more fluent than their own. I was playing a desperate game; yet I liked it, for it had a fine spice of adventure apart from the great matter at stake. If I could but carry it off, I should have sufficient compensation for all my miseries, in spite ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... other rapturously on receipt of the news, but they were not fluent or expressive, either of them, and they could only underline and put in a reckless number of exclamation points. "Gee," wrote Jimsy King, "isn't it immense? Skipper, I can't tell you how I feel—but, by golly, I can show you when I ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation, and before many moments Rachel's replies were infected with an approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... insatiable ambition, founded on a vanity which made him think himself capable of filling the highest situation; and therefore gave him daring, when to dare is frequently to achieve. He mixed a false and overstrained, but rather fluent species of bombastic composition, with the grossest flattery to the lowest classes of the people; in consideration of which, they could not but receive as genuine the praises which he always bestowed on himself. His prudent resolution to be satisfied with possessing ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... pleasant parlour, where Mrs Rose sat spinning. She was a comely, comfortable-looking woman of middle height, round-faced and rosy, with fair hair like her daughter's, but grey eyes. Isoult had forgotten her foreign origin till she heard her speak. Her English, however, was fluent and pleasant enough; and she told her visitors that she came from a town in Flanders, close to ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some; To him indiff'rent whether grief or joy. Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks, Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet With tears, that trickled down the writer's cheeks Fast as the periods from his fluent quill. Or charged with am'rous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive, equally affect His horse and him, unconscious of them all. But oh the important budget; usher'd in With such heart-shaking music, who can say What are its tidings? have our troops awak'd? ...
— MacMillan's Reading Books - Book V • Anonymous
... was scarce able to sit up; so only alluded to my guest of all this month, the Tongan, Tomas, and to Simele, partly for the jest of making him translate compliments to himself. The talking man replied with many handsome compliments to me, in the usual flood of Samoan fluent neatness; and we left them to an afternoon of singing and dancing. Must stop now, as my right hand is very bad again. I am trying ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said," replied Asako, her Japanese becoming quite fluent with the return of her light-heartedness. "Perhaps a joke is being made. It would be possible ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... The Secessionists were fluent in argument that the framers of the Constitution intended only a partnership of States, dissoluble by any at will. However difficult to prove that the original builders purposed only such a temporary edifice, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... grades of probation and preparation by which the Jesuit is trained for his arduous work, and was ordained priest in the year 1825. Being a ripe scholar, well versed in literature, ancient and modern, an able theologian, a fluent and impressive speaker, he soon took a foremost place amongst the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... renown are all comprised in thee; By them may Fortune never cease thy bounder slave to be! Munificence and knowledge sure, glory and piety, Fair fluent speech and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... application of the strongest arguments in their proper places. Added to this moral and intellectual superiority was the "magic power of his language, majestic and simple at the same time, rich yet not bombastic, strange and yet familiar, solemn and not too ornate, grave and yet pleasing, concise and yet fluent, sweet and yet impressive, which altogether carried away the minds of his hearers." His orations were most highly prized by the ancients, who wrote innumerable commentaries on them, most of which are lost. Sixty of the great productions of his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... and after teaching at Newburyport for a short time, she accepted a call to fill a vacancy in the academy at Elizabeth City, N. C., where she continued an earnest and appreciated teacher for a number of years. She became a fluent French scholar while at that institution, and her leisure hours were devoted to the fine arts. Her paintings and drawings were much admired for their correctness in outline, subdued coloring, and ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... whence this danger threatened. But nixies—even when burdened by cares of state—are just nixies; those three seem to have lived to laugh before all else—to laugh and chase one another and play in the cool green element, singing all the while a fluent, cradling song whose sweetness might well ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... benignity of his face. On the end of his nose grew a tuft of long hairs, which he seemed to prize as a natural mark of royalty, or chieftainship. Indeed, there was a popular legend afloat that he was of true royal blood—a stray Bourbon, or something of the sort. His speech was singularly fluent and elegant. The Emperor was one of the celebrities that no visitor failed to see. It is said that his mind was unhinged by a sudden loss of fortune in the early days, by the treachery of a partner in trade. The sudden ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... returned to their sockets; and he had a sudden outburst of fluent German. He did not think that any of his hearers could understand that portion of his native tongue he was using; he hoped they could not; he could not help ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... whereon he rose, or rather tried to, felt for his hat, which, of course, had gone, with the idea of taking it off, and instantly addressed her in his beautiful and fluent Arabic, saying how glad he was to have this unexpected honour, and ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... the sentence must be flexible if it is to ease the thought. We can learn its elasticity, we can practice the flow of clauses, until the wooden declaration which leaves half unexpressed gives place to a fluent and accurate transcript of the mind, form fitting substance as the vase the water within it. This technique has to do with paragraphs. The critic knows how few even among our professional writers master ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... developed, was a fluent and persuasive talker, a man of the broadest worldly experiences and wit. He was younger than Calvin, but older than Wilmer Deakon, and a little fat. He had a small mustache cut above his lip, and closely shaved ruddy cheeks with a tinge of purple about his ears. Drawing out his monologue ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... distributed and the experiment can show this clearly. It is also well known from practical life that some men can easily go on dictating to a stenographer while they are affixing their signature to several hundred circular letters, or can continue their fluent lecture while they are performing experimental demonstrations. With others such a side activity continually interrupts the chief function. Then some succeed better than others in securing a certain automatism of the accessory function to such a point that its special acts ...
— Psychology and Industrial Efficiency • Hugo Muensterberg
... drubbing, as if innumerable fairy carpenters were nailing on the shingles. The invalid water-spout had a hard time of it; it was racked, shaken, and bullied, and continually choked itself with the volubility of its fluent utterances, which were instantly swallowed up in the bottomless depths of the waste-barrel. A strong, cool, earthy odor rose from the garden, and was wafted past the professor's nostrils, and into the heated house. ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... for, as his good angel had prophesied, his one word of English met every requirement and he got the assignment. Since that time, I might add, he has acquired a fluent command of the English language. Francqui has always been willing to take a chance and ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the soft air along, While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong Kept up among the guests discoursing low At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow; But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains, Louder they talk, and louder come the strains Of powerful instruments—the gorgeous dyes, The space, the splendour of the draperies, ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... gentleman, who was employed on the medical staff of the U.S. army, I believe, as a supernumerary, or candidate for a commission as a surgeon. He was a most agreeable companion, of good natural parts, fluent in conversation, intelligent in remark, free from egotism, and well educated, I believe, at Cambridge, in England. We soon became attached to each other. He accompanied me in my rambles, and we were almost inseparable companions during my stay. He was one of those beings, in ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... rapid rise to distinction are not far to seek. Her wonderful talent for conversation at once proved an attraction to both men and women. But she was not merely a fluent talker, never at a loss for a word, a phrase or a metaphor; had this been her crowning recommendation, Dr. Johnson's long-standing friendship would never have been gained. Her talk was always sensible—the outcome of a well-furnished, ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... ill-feeling!—true religion, too, for these Lestrigonians were most seriously in earnest in their chapelling. Yet no doubt they fomented the row, for the pastor himself was much too clever a man to proceed to such extremities. By nature he was a fluent speaker, rising to eloquence as eloquence is understood among that kind of audience. He carried them with him, quite swept them away. They came to hear him from miles round about; there were plenty of other chapels, but no one like the man ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... Thrall," published in The Revolution, gave evidence of thought, experience, and deep feeling. The songs of the sisters have a new sweet sadness, now that Alice is singing hers on the other side of the river of life. Grace Greenwood has done good service with her fluent pen and voice through the press and on the platform. Mary L. Booth, with her rich culture and her unsurpassed practical ability, her skill as a translator of Martin's great History of France, and numberless other works, has given aid to the cause with her pen, one of the best ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... his life. That he was not of Roman birth (perhaps a native of N. Africa) is probable from the foreign colouring of his language at the outset, which in the later books becomes more smooth and fluent from ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... effect critically. To the boy, with his senses sharpened to an almost feverish subtilty by the incessant stimulus of his imagination, Audrey was the epitome of everything most completely and joyously alive. Roses, sunlight, flame, with the shifting, waving lines of all things most fluent and elusive, were in her face, her hair, the movements of her limbs. Her body was like a soul to its clothes; it animated, inspired the mass of silk and lace. He could not think of her as she was—the creature of the day and the hour, modern from the surface to the core. Yet never ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... Corcelle, is to me my duty, and I will sustain it in the best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of this city centuries of history abound? Does your heart blush ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... furtively the sunlight seems to grieve, And the spring-laden breeze Out of the gladdening west is sinister With sounds of nameless battle overseas; Though when we turn and question in suspense If these things be indeed after these ways, And what things are to follow after these, Our fluent men of place and consequence Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase, Or for the end-all of deep arguments Intone their dull commercial liturgies— I dare not yet believe! My ears are shut! I will not hear the thin satiric praise ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... deficient. Tall, slender, elderly, with a fine bald head, a mild countenance, a most insinuating address, and a general air of faded gentility, Mr. Thomas Long was exactly the foreman to give respectability to his employer; whilst bold, fluent, rapid, loud, dashing in aspect and manner, with a great fund of animal spirits, and a prodigious stock of assurance and conceit, respectability was, to say the truth, the precise qualification which Mr. Joseph ...
— Mr. Joseph Hanson, The Haberdasher • Mary Russell Mitford
... the Indians was after the manner of a great "Pow-wow." The Indians are fluent and eloquent speakers, though they indulge ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... bring a recognition on the part of the child of the sensation of vibration that accompanies voice, and they will give facility, coupled with the normal and natural intonations that have been acquired when he was not conscious of any effort, that will prepare him for a better and more fluent speech when the time comes for more ...
— What the Mother of a Deaf Child Ought to Know • John Dutton Wright
... plumes and swords and gold lace, I maintained my innocence and heard Jack Herriott, on his opportune arrival, pour forth in weird, but fluent, Italian an account of me that must have surrounded me in the eyes of all present with a golden halo, and that firmly established me in their minds as the probable next President of the United States. Thanks to these exaggerations ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... 'the blood of the Montmorencys.' Jeanne had her respectable friends, as Becky had the Sedleys; like Becky, she imprudently married a heavy, unscrupulous young officer; her expedients for living on nothing a year were exactly those of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley; her personal charms, her fluent tongue, her good nature, even, were those of that accomplished lady. Finally she has her Marquis of Steyne in the wealthy, luxurious Cardinal de Rohan; she robs him to a tune beyond the dreams of Becky, and, incidentally, she drags to the dust the royal ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... only a limited education, and some use only simple words, and scarcely ever a comparison or a flowery figure; whereas, certain other animals have a large vocabulary, a fine command of language and a ready and fluent delivery; consequently these latter talk a great deal; they like it; they are so conscious of their talent, and they enjoy "showing off." Baker said, that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays were ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Polish beauty who had captivated his senses a day or so before, brought to him quite by accident in an hotel where the patron furnished his clients with such pleasure as the town and his address book afforded.... I knew the patron myself, a fluent, amusing sort of person, who had been a cuirassier and who resembled Mayol ... a cafe-concert proprietor of an hotel.... It was his boast that he had never disappointed a client and it is certain that he would promise anything. Some have said that his stock ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... Even this fluent discharge of Italian did not bring the soap at once, but there was a good reason for it. There was not such an article about the establishment. It is my belief that there never had been. They had to send far up town, and to several different places before they finally ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... were best, the gigolos all agreed, and they paid well, though they talked too much. Gedeon Gore was a favourite among them. They thought he was so foreign looking, and kind of sad and stern and everything. His French, fluent, colloquial, and bewildering, awed them. They would attempt to speak to him in halting and hackneyed phrases acquired during three years at Miss Pence's Select School at Hastings-on-the-Hudson. At the cost of about ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... concatenation in the links that make up the process of historic evolution, to investigate how one stage succeeds another in the development of society, the facts and forms of human life and history not being stable and stereotyped things, but the ever-changing manifestations of the fluent and unresting real, the course of which it is the duty of ...
— Feuerbach: The roots of the socialist philosophy • Frederick Engels
... people, and of your house, for your grandfather,' (and she named my mother's father) 'was a stone-cutter; and both your uncles had good name through me: and if you will keep yourself well clear of the sillinesses and fluent follies that come from this creature,' (and she pointed to the other woman) 'and will follow me, and live with me, first of all, you shall be brought up as a man should be, and have strong shoulders; and, besides ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... of himself. It is not necessary to regard him as wholly disinterested in his conduct; it is unjust and absurd to regard him as a glorified Tartuffe.[152] Such a supposition is adequately refuted by his writings. It is easy for a writer at once so fluent and so brilliant to give the impression of insincerity; but the philosophical works of Seneca ring surprisingly true. We cannot doubt his faith, though his life may at times have belied it. He reveals a warmth of human ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... shaul (for shall), when she sung her hymns. But it was not so well in reading lectures at the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was not so fluent; and on political and religious matters he tried hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspicions of his leaning to his native ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... and, in fact, in all situations where a man sustains the relation of an advocate or orator before the public, is really a great advantage, other things being equal. As a speaker, Judge Abbott is fluent, persuasive, and effective. He excites his own intensity of feeling in the jury or audience that he is addressing. His client's cause is emphatically his own. He is equal to any emergency of attack or defence. If he believes in a person or cause, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... must daily say the eighteen prayers." R. Joshua said "a summary of the eighteen." R. Akivah said, "if his prayer be fluent in his mouth, he says the eighteen; if not, a summary of ...
— Hebrew Literature
... father's name stifled scandal. Most of the others were orphans, being cheaply educated by distant relatives or guardians, or else the sons of poor widows who were easily bamboozled by Snuffy's fluent letters, and the religious leaflets which it was his custom to enclose. (In several of these cases, he was "managing" the poor women's "affairs" for them.) One or two boys belonged to people living abroad. Indeed, the worst bully in the school was a half-caste, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... to be the case with some of the birds. The common fowl of our poultry yards has a variety of distinct calls, each understood by its mates, while special modulations of some call or cry are not uncommon among birds. The mammalia are not fluent in vocal powers, their range of tones being limited, yet they certainly convey definite information to one another. Recent observers have come to the conclusion that the apes do, to a certain extent, ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... leading feature of the Sunday magazine should be the biggest topic that will be before the public on the Sunday that the newspaper is printed. It should be written by one who thoroughly knows his subject, who is forceful in style and fluent in words, who can make a picture that his readers can see, and seeing, realize. So every other feature of the Sunday magazine should have points of human interest, either by contact with the news of the day or with men and women who are doing something ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... London Tower Bridge. When before this, temerarious anticipators have written of the mighty buildings that might someday be, the illustrator has blended with the poor ineffectual splutter of the author's words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted simply to something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of the onion, and L'Art Nouveau. But here, it may be, the illustrator ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... his face a moment. "God keep you!" said she, with a surprising fervor in one not over-fluent at her prayers. "God reward you for showing this mercy to an old woman—who does not ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... pertinacious resistance to the repeal; and no one was more feared by the intellectual giants of that party than was Bright. His severe wit, his plain, blunt manner of exposing the defects of his opponents, and his impulsive and overwhelming declamation, were hardly exceeded by the fluent exuberance of Stanley and the keen sarcasm of the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... great favorite with all the girls; but, though she was very patient and persevering, she did not succeed in making any of them fluent English speakers, and learned their language far better than they learned hers. Her three special friends were not among the pupils, but among the teachers. Dear old Mme. Lemercier, with her good-humored black eyes, her kind, demonstrative ways, and her delightful stories about the ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... good wishes from Rupert Vivian." Kitty read the inscription; her lip curled, but she still kept silence. Hugo thought that her eye rested with some complacency upon the silver beads; but she did not express a tithe of the pleasure and surprise which flowed so readily from Mrs. Heron's fluent tongue. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the individual to be of the first importance, male and female equal, the body to be revered no less than the soul. For the promulgation of this philosophy, some worthy literary form was needed—poetry, since that was the noblest form, but poetry stripped of conventions and stock phrases, as "fluent and free as the people and the land and the great system of democracy which it was to celebrate." With some such idea as this, not outlined in words, nor, perhaps, very clearly understood even by himself, Whitman set to work, and the result was the now famous "Leaves of Grass," ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... her. Beneath the blue curtain she stood talking to her partner after the dance; and he did not go to speak to her, but remained looking. They only danced together twice; and that evening was realized by him in a strangely intense and durable perception of faint scent and fluent rhythm. The sense of her motion, of her frailness, lingered in his soul ever afterwards. And he remembered ever afterwards the moments he spent with her in a distant corner—the palm, the gold of ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... there was a long outpouring of strange indistinguishable sounds, which caused the Ancient Mariner to stop smoking and expectorate into Lake Algonquin with a disgusted "Huh!" For Lawyer Ed's Gaelic, though fluent, was a thing ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... Mr. Matthews, to have you sitting so mysteriously in Dizful—and refusing to call on me, but occasionally calling on nomad chiefs. I confess that you don't look to me like a spy. Spies are generally older men than you, more cooked, as Gaston would say, more fluent in languages. It does not seem to me, either, that even an English spy would go about his affairs quite as you have done. Still, I regret to have to repeat that I dislike your idea of a lark. And not only because you upset nomad chiefs. You upset other people as well. You ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... conversation, he had an intellect that would at times emit flashes so brilliant as to blind those who knew him best to his faults. He was the very type of one of the wayward cavaliers who survived the death of Charles the First, to shine in the court of Charles the Second. He was a ready and fluent speaker—an orator, in fact—and had the gift of charming an audience ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd
... abandoned the painters and sculptors to their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin and Smith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally, emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy in fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And the Turkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praise from Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to all who came into contact with him, a ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... bump up and down the sandy plain again, so a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a "stuck-vat" upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All right!" but it leads to our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest and lunch and then stroll about up the hill spurs, through myrtle hedges ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... forty-six. He stooped a little in the shoulders. His manners were usually gentle and grave; but a pair of large and very lively eyes and an occasional impulsive eagerness of speech, wherein he was ready and fluent at all times, showed that there was more fire and life in his character than appeared on the surface. Those who knew him well were aware that his temper was impetuous and precipitate, and on given occasions might be ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... through the various grades of probation and preparation by which the Jesuit is trained for his arduous work, and was ordained priest in the year 1825. Being a ripe scholar, well versed in literature, ancient and modern, an able theologian, a fluent and impressive speaker, he soon took a foremost place amongst the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... they tore and gorged and quarreled till, some fifteen minutes later, their last foothold sank beneath them. Then, with dripping beaks and talons, they all flapped back to their cliffs; and slowly the fluent sand smoothed itself to shining complacency over the tomb of the diplodocus, hiding and sealing away the stupendous skeleton for half a ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... wondered whether he had ever seen the man before, or whether the face only seemed familiar because it was the type of a class of faces all more or less alike, all intensely respectable and not without refinement, expressing a grave reticence that did not agree with the fluent speech, and a polite reserve at odds with the ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... most of their stay abroad in residence at Gozlar; and he appears, in short, to have made in every way the best use of his time. On 24th June 1799 he gave his leave-taking supper at Gottingen, replying to the toast of his health in fluent German but with an execrable accent; and the next day presumably he started on his ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... 1708, he was educated at Eton and at Oxford, then traveled in France and Italy, and was elected to Parliament when twenty-seven years old. His early addresses were not models either of force or logic, but the fluent speech and many personal attractions of the young orator instantly caught the attention of the people, who always listened to him with favor; and it was not long before his constant participation in public affairs developed the splendid talents which ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... of Miss Wooler,' writes Miss Nussey, 'are, that she was short and stout, but graceful in her movements, very fluent in conversation and with a very sweet voice. She had Charlotte and myself to stay with her sometimes after we left school. We had delightful sitting-up times with her when the pupils had gone to bed. She would treat us ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of the Discourse that I have discovered before 1730 appears in volume two (1711) of a three-volume translation of Boileau's works. This, however, is not the same translation as the one accompanying Harte's Essay; it is noticeably less fluent and lacks (as does the French) the subtitle "arraigning ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Barsetshire. "It will probably be necessary for you to review the connection which still exists between, and which binds together, the Church and the State." Mr. Daubeny's words had of course been more fluent, but the gist of the expression was the same. He had been quite in earnest when addressing his friends in the country. And though there had been but an interval of a few weeks, the Conservative party in the two Houses ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... the metamorphosis of that periodical into a newspaper. With youthful ambition, Mr. Dowdell is resolved to furnish the United with the latest items of interest concerning amateurs. While the general style of the paper is fluent and pleasing, we believe that "Bruno" might gain much force of expression through the exercise of a little more care and dignity in his prose. For instance, many colloquial contractions like "don't", "won't", or "can't" might be eliminated, ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... drily, that the female to whom he had addressed himself was mute; and the others, on whose eloquence there was no immediate demand, were fluent: on this the voices stopped, and the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... Here the three Graces in gay vesture gowned Assisted the delivery of a queen. Not in four ages in this earthly round Was ever born a boy so fair of mien. Jove, Venus, Mars, and Mercury renowned For fluent speech, about the child are seen: Him have they strewed, and stew with heaven's perfume, ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... judgment. He had managed even to win the good opinion of Miss Sarah Pemberton, who was not in general inclined to think well of young men especially of officers in the army, whom she designated generally as an impudent, profligate set, with fluent tongues and insinuating manners, whose chief occupation in life was to break the hearts of young girls foolish ...
— Clara Maynard - The True and the False - A Tale of the Times • W.H.G. Kingston
... on the second occasion of her going with Minna to see Dr. Dieckel. Minna, as they were walking quietly along together had suddenly begun in a broken English which soon turned to shy, fluent, animated German, to tell about a friend, an apotheker, a man, Miriam gathered—missing many links in her amazement—in a shop, the chemist's shop where her parents dealt, in the little country town in Pomerania ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... Mr Ernest to deliver an address: 'Women in Politics,'" I said, "that is his particular subject. He is a most fluent speaker, and loves speaking in public, nothing ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... dinner with the most appetizing viands were walking jauntily down the street, talking fluent china. ...
— The Royal Book of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... lady (married to an Italian count) plied him with numerous questions in fluent French, spoken with an atrocious accent. Finally, she wished to hear the Abbe's views upon Melchisedech! In the midst of other questions and answers, the kindly little man managed to turn round to her with a cheery "Ah, Madame la Comtesse! pour le Melchisedech—nous ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... of fluent heat began, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, The home of seeming random forms, Till, at the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... some reason, that on the longer tramp to the south his presence with me would introduce a danger which would be absent if I were alone. For his English was not fluent, and he spoke it with an accent that would betray him at once. He even suggested our parting, if we ever did succeed in getting out—he to take his chance eastward, while I went south, lest he should prove a drag on me. But this I would not hear ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... road unwound itself before them, a dun-white band flung across the darkening down. A veil of grey air was drawn across the landscape. To their left the further moors streamed to the horizon, line after line, curve after curve, fluent in the watery air. Nearer, on the hillside to their right, under the haze that drenched its green to darkness, the furze ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... vales snuff the morning air. How fresh! how breathing! Every draught I take Seems filled with healthiest life, and sends the blood Rushing and tingling through my quickened veins, Like inspiration! How the fluent air, Fanned into motion by thy breezy wings, O, fragrant Morning! blows from off the earth The congregated vapors, dank and foul, By yesterday coagulate and mixed! Miasmas steaming up from sunless fens; The effluvia of vegetable death; Disease ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... accident I saw her face. It was that of a beautiful girl. I observed she kept aloof from the others. I suspected a disguise, and, when opportunity afforded, spoke to her, offered my services. She replied to my poor efforts at Spanish in fluent English. She had fled in terror from her home, some place down in Sinaloa. Rebels are active there. Her father was captured and held for ransom. When the ransom was paid the rebels killed him. The leader of these rebels was a bandit ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... bishop of Nueva Segovia is Don Fray Jose Hevia Campomanes, a religious of the Order of St. Dominic—who is most fluent in the Tagal language, and had been, for many years before, parish priest of Binondo, which parish he enriched with a fine cemetery. He took possession of his see June 19, 1890, but was made a prisoner at the outbreak of the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... maiden had raised her head slightly above the water, and now was gazing at him with eyes the like of which he had never seen before. "I 'opes she understands Carnish," he added to himself, "for 'tis the only langwidge I'm fluent in." ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... a new guise. He affected to be enraptured with Spartan manners, cropped his hair, lived on black broth, exercised diligently, and by his fluent tongue made himself a favorite in that austere city. But at length, by an idle boast, he roused Spartan enmity, and had to fly again. Now he sought Asia Minor, became a friend of Tissaphernes, the Persian satrap, adopted the excesses of Persian luxury, and sought to break the alliance ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... and seemed to await his speech. Reuben Ring, who was a man of many solid and valuable qualities, would most probably have been exercising the military functions of his brother-in-law, at that very moment, had he been equally gifted with a fluent discourse. But his feats lay rather in doing than in speaking, and the tide of popularity had in consequence set less strongly in his favor than might have happened had the reverse been the case. ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... news threw the party into deeper consternation than before. The little ex-burglar was not a fluent talker at best, but he now excelled himself in brevity. In three minutes he had concluded his story, and preparations were well under ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... There appear to be some dangers involved which it may be well to consider. Useful work may be hindered owing to, first, the time and attention required for the meetings and discussions of the various councils, and the risk that clever and fluent talkers may prolong debate and generate friction and may perhaps exercise an undue influence. Probably this will not be found a serious danger. Experience over a considerable district shows that those who are chosen by the Trade Unions to represent them are usually clear-headed ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... to England, or simply thrown into the Po. I made rapid progress in my Italian studies that day; and had it been my hap to be arrested a dozen days on end by the papal authorities, I should by that time have been a fluent Italian speaker. The result of much questioning and explanation was, that if I liked to forward a petition to the authorities in Ferrara, accompanied by my passport, I should be permitted to wait where ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... has neither rivers, woods, banks, towns, nor mountains. In mild weather it is one hammered plain. Stratagems, like those of disciplined armies—ambuscades, like those of Indians, are impossible. All is clear, open, fluent. The very element which sustains the combatants, yields at the stroke of a feather. One wind and one tide at one time operate upon all who here engage. This simplicity renders a battle between two men-of-war, with their ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... spite of his foreign accent, was considered fluent, and his writing very good. To the questions put to him he answered in a way to obtain the approbation of the Doctor, and he was forthwith sent to take his place in the lower school. Ernst found that each class contained sixteen boys. The one who was at the head of his class had a little seat ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... "Holy League" was already born, though the times were not yet ripe for the promulgation of such tenets. The advocate-general was a fluent speaker, and he had been attended many a weary mile by an enthusiastic escort. Parliamentary counsellors, municipal officers, clergy, an immense concourse of the lower stratum of the population—all were at Gaillon, ready to applaud his well-turned sentences. But he had chosen an unlucky moment ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... Northern war. As a speaker, he could not be compared with his living colleague and namesake, whose deep conceptions, nervous style, and undaunted firmness, made him truly our bulwark in debate. But Mr. Samuel Adams, although not of fluent elocution, was so rigorously logical, so clear in his views, abundant in good sense, and master always of his subject, that he commanded the most profound attention whenever he rose in an assembly, by which the froth of ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... understand our language well, for he immediately turned with gentle urbanity, and discerning, perhaps, something in my face which assured him of my sympathy and respect, entered into a fluent conversation with me that at once increased my admiration and awakened my pity. For I saw that his nature was strong and his feelings deep, and as the future could have nothing but shame and misery, I instinctively felt oppressed by the ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... been said in these days of the charm of fluent writing. We hear it complained of some works of genius, that they have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the mountain peaks in the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one range. We should consider that the flow ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... journey's destination. But soon I shall be with you (the fifth of next month, after all; the arrangements as planned). Then we will begin to know each other, and we will no longer be tormented by the irksomeness of writing. Therefore, until easier and more fluent times, to the heart ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... you men make of us," she replied. "How you fool us to the top of our bent; and of all men you clergymen are the most fluent of your honeyed, caressing words. Now look me in the face, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... indicated deep love for poetry, and a keen sense of the beautiful, her conversation, fluent and admirable, showed her to be eminently practical and sensible, without a touch of sentimentality. Her first work in life seems to be the making of her two brothers happy in the home. She usually spends her forenoons in writing. She does her literary work thoroughly, keeping ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... moral and intellectual superiority was the "magic power of his language, majestic and simple at the same time, rich yet not bombastic, strange and yet familiar, solemn and not too ornate, grave and yet pleasing, concise and yet fluent, sweet and yet impressive, which altogether carried away the minds of his hearers." His orations were most highly prized by the ancients, who wrote innumerable commentaries on them, most of which are lost. Sixty of the great productions of his ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... the fluent conversation and compliments, the gossip and jokes he had been saving up to tell her, died away on his lips. He saw she had been crying. He sat down further away ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... of this inner circle, and in many respects associated with it, was the Rev. Francis Hodgson, a ripe scholar, good translator, a sound critic, a fluent writer of graceful verse, and a large-hearted divine, whoso correspondence, recently edited with a connecting narrative by his son, has thrown light on disputed passages of Lord Byron's life. The views entertained by the friends on literary matters were almost identical; they both ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... will allow me," began Dete again, in her usual fluent manner, "I myself had lost count of her exact age; she is certainly a little younger, but not much; I cannot say precisely, but I think ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... dreadfully, no doubt, would in time have listened to consolation from some other young man,—possibly from the young poet whose verses he had been admiring. Easy-crying widows take new husbands soonest; there is nothing like wet weather for transplanting, as Master Gridley used to say. Susan had a fluent natural gift for tears, as Clement well knew, after the exercise of which she used to brighten up like the rose which had been washed, just washed in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Woman up to Man Wins "Constitutional" support and votes From a "majority" of Tory throats! Mrs. LYNN LINTON, how this vote must vex, That caustic censor of her own sweet sex! Wild Women—with the Suffrage! Fancy that, O fluent Lady, at tart nick-names pat! Girls of the Period? They were bad enough, But what a deal of skimble-skamble stuff Will Mrs. FAWCETT's Middle-aged Ones talk When these eight hundred thousand hens o' the walk Cackle for Order, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 5, 1891 • Various
... and of joy to some; To him indifferent whether grief or joy. Houses in ashes, and the fall of stocks, Births, deaths, and marriages, epistles wet With tears that trickled down the writer's cheeks, Fast as the periods from his fluent quill, Or charged with amorous sighs of absent swains, Or nymphs responsive, equally affect His horse and him, unconscious of them all. But oh, the important budget! ushered in With such heart-shaking music, who ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... have seen face to face once or twice. She is very clever—very accomplished—with talents and tastes of various kinds—a musician and linguist, in most modern languages I believe—and a writer of fluent graceful melodious verses, ... you cannot say any more. At least I cannot—and though I have not seen this last poem in the 'Book of Beauty,' I have no more trust ready for it than for its predecessors, of which Mr. Landor said as much. It is the personal feeling which speaks in him, I fancy—simply ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Other fluent ninnies shared gain, and even fame, and were called 'penmen,' in Triplet's day. Other ranters were quietly getting rich by noise. Other liars and humbugs were painting out o' doors indoors, and eating mutton instead of thistles for drenched stinging-nettles, yclept trees; for block-tin clouds; for ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... want to know why, and how, and by which of us these poems were written,—curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... the wings there was no one save the author and three or four of his friends. The opening scenes were received as usual with indifference; the following ones with a little more cordiality; the versification was fluent and polished, and, as you know, the public appreciates sugar-coated phrases. At last the moment arrived for Clotilde's entrance, and a faint murmur of curiosity and expectation ran through the audience. She spoke her lines discreetly, but without much warmth; it was easy to see ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... abruptness of a flash of light there he was again, on the surface now, driving himself forward toward the bank. And there he sat again on his rock, the water flung from him to flash and mingle with the falling spray, his head back, his throbbing little throat pouring out his fluent melody. Gloria laughed happily and went back to King and the fire with ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... a picturesque woman, and a fluent talker, and she held a tolerably high station among the Parvenus. Her English was fair enough, as a general thing—though, being of New York origin, she had the fashion peculiar to many natives of that city of pronouncing ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... all thy powers, And wreak them on the verse that thou dost weave, And in thy lonely hours, At silent morning or at wakeful eve, While the warm current tingles through thy veins, Set forth the burning words in fluent strains. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... been sent down alone. Hence there had been great scrambling to gather together on the Zone men enough who spoke Spanish—and with no striking success. Most noticeable of my fellow-enumerators, being in uniform, were three Marines from Bas Obispo, fluent with the working Spanish they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, and flush-cheeked with the prospect of a full month on "pass," to say nothing of the $4.40 a day that would be added to their daily military income of $.60. Then there were four of darker hue,—Panamanians and ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... next tree a fluent Cockney lad of sixteen or eighteen years was declaiming his bitter experiences with the Salvation Army. He had been sheltered in one of its beds which was not to his taste, and it had found employment for him which he had to walk twenty-two miles to get, and which was not to his liking when ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... was subsidiary to a faithful translation of the Word of God into the Arabic language. Yet he did not neglect the regular preaching of the gospel, which he regarded as the first duty of every missionary; and having early become a fluent speaker in the Arabic, this was ever his delight. "Almost as a matter of course, his preaching was expository and didactic. In clear, lucid, logical exposition of divine truth, he had few equals. His language, though ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson
... announced. Both Corona and her husband were surprised at his imposing appearance, as well as at the dignity and self-possession he displayed. His southern accent was not more noticeable than that of many Neapolitan gentlemen, and his conversation, if neither very brilliant nor very fluent, was not devoid of interest. He talked of the agricultural condition of the new Italy, and old Saracinesca and his son were both interested in the subject. They noticed, too, that during dinner no word escaped him which could ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... much interest—Mother, oh, yes, Mother. Six crossed pages of St. Louis gossip and wanderingly fluent advice. She sets herself to read it, though, dutifully enough—she is under ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... orders, he signified his regret that he was unable to address them either in the French or Flemish language, and was therefore obliged to ask their attention to the Bishop of Arras, who would act as his interpreter. Antony Perrenot accordingly arose, and in smooth, fluent, and well-turned commonplaces, expressed at great length the gratitude of Philip towards his father, with his firm determination to walk in the path of duty, and to obey his father's counsels and example in the future administration ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Michael would tell her what he had against Stuyvesant Carter she could explain it satisfactorily. Her flattered little head was almost turned at this time with the adoration she had received. She thought she knew almost everything that Stuyvesant Carter had ever done. He was a fluent talker and had spent many hours detailing to her incidents and anecdotes of his eventful career. He had raced a good deal and still had several expensive racing cars. There wasn't anything very dreadful about that except, of course, it was dangerous. ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... the rifle, rolled rapidly around the corner of the barn. He endeavored to stand, but could not. Johnny, hearing rapid and fluent swearing, came out. ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... No one will contest your right to it, Herman Stueler; and besides, your French, fluent as it is, still possesses the Teutonic burr. Yes, Herman Stueler; very ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... crossed knees into his chair and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine times out of ten some corresponding mental warp? Bernard's fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true—it was not in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into "meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was he laying a trap?—Not misled: the ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... House three-quarters full-say three thousand people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at him in forty ways and having a world of ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... age, of middle height, well formed, with an intelligent countenance, and a fine eye; and was in all respects a fine looking man. He was the most graceful public speaker I have ever known; his manner was most dignified and easy. He was fluent, and at times witty and sarcastic. He was quick and ready at reply. He pitted himself against Colonel Pickering, whom he sometimes foiled in argument. The colonel would sometimes become irritated and lose his temper; ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... couplet. Dryden's mastery of this couplet was marvelous. He did not attain to the perfect polish of Pope a score of years later, but he possessed more vitality; and to this strength must be added a fluent grace and a ready sequence which increased the beauty of the measure and gave to it a nervous energy of movement. The great danger that attends the use of the distich is monotony; but Dryden avoided this. By a constant variation of cadence, he threw the natural pause now near the start, now ...
— Palamon and Arcite • John Dryden
... general for the United States to Liberia. Mrs. Curtis lived in Monrovia, Liberia, until her husband's death there. She had also lived in France, where she studied domestic art for two years. Being a fluent speaker of the French language, her appointment ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... spent an hour, and sometimes more, pursuing his studies, under the direction of Florence. At first his attention was given chiefly to improving his reading and spelling, for Dodger was far from fluent in the first, while his style of spelling many ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... procession of courses the dinner attained to birds, a famous editor of the Middle West, who had been consuming wine with diligence to the end that he be fluent, addressed the table's head. He recited the public interests; then, paying a tribute to their party as the guardian of those interests, he wound up in words of fire with the declaration that Senator Hanway must be the next standard-bearer of that party. The cheering was tremendous, considering ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... few moments I was kept waiting, then a fluent waiter appeared to recommend the most desirable dishes of the day. His eloquence was in full tide, when a man paused before the entrance of my arbor, hesitated, and went ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... de Bougainville I sat down on a bench on which was an old European. He was reading a tattered number of "Simplicissimus," and held the paper close to his watery eyes. I said, "Good morning" and he replied in fluent though accented English. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... who had become a socialist when a student in Zurich, and who had long before translated from the German Engel's "Conditions of the Working Class in England," although at this time she had been read out of the Socialist Party because the Russian and German Impossibilists suspected her fluent English, as she always lightly explained. Although thus diversified in social beliefs, the residents became solidly united through our mutual experience in an industrial quarter, and we became not only convinced of the need for social control ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... and dabbling in chemistry, Shelley was not wholly neglectful of Etonian studies. He acquired a fluent, if not a correct, knowledge of both Greek and Latin, and astonished his contemporaries by the facility with which he produced verses in the latter language. His powers of memory were extraordinary, and the rapidity with which he read a book, taking in seven or eight lines at a glance, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... is moved, and {then}, in fact appears what eloquence can do; and the fluent man receives the arms of a brave one. He, who so often has alone withstood both Hector, and the sword, and flames, and Jove {himself}, cannot {now} withstand his wrath alone, and grief conquers the man that is invincible. He seizes his sword, and he says:— "This, at ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... notion that the small party required to make up for the thinness of their members by the strength of their eloquence. Practice makes perfect, and it is not to be wondered at therefore if a large proportion of The Twenty had become fluent. But more were wanted, and of our friend O'Mahony's fluency there could be no doubt. Therefore he was sent for, and on the very day of his arrival he proved to the patriotic spirits of Dublin that he was the man for Cavan. Three days afterwards he went down, and Cavan obediently accepted ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... was not fluent to-day. She sat up and repeated, "I have not forgotten old times either, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... mind freely and without fear of betrayal concerning the war that was soon to be waged between the rival factions of our oppressors and the means that were to be used to turn their strife to our own account, and this he did, speaking in fluent Spanish and in short, clear sentences, as a man of action ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... of fact, if she did differ in opinion from her brother and his wife, the children would never have been able to guess it from the invariably restrained tones of her fluent and agreeable speech, so different from the outspoken virulence with which people in that house were accustomed to defend their ideas. But, indefinable though it was to Sylvia's undeveloped powers of analysis, she felt that the advent of her ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... suite our first proceeding was to elect a Captain of our barrack. Selection fell upon Mr. K——, as he was an ideal intermediary, being fluent in the language. We turned in, the majority being too tired to growl at their lot, but there was precious little sleep. During the day, the heat at Sennelager in the summer is intolerable, but during the night it is freezing. Our arrival not having been anticipated, we had nothing ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... "than which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, sonorous, or boldly fanciful; ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... gone in there by the wallow, and Judge Henry will understand." With his eyes watching imaginary objects, he rode and rambled and it was now the girl who was silent, except to keep his mind from its half-fixed idea of the sorrel. As he grew more fluent she hastened still more, listening to head off that notion of return, skilfully inventing questions to engage him, so that when she brought him to her gate she held him in a manner subjected, answering faithfully the shrewd unrealities which she devised, whatever makeshifts ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... their work leaves on me a strangely potent sense of personality. Such subtle intermingling of seer with thing seen is the outcome only of long and intricate brooding, a process not too favoured by modern life, yet without which we achieve little but a fluent chaos of clever insignificant impressions, a kind of glorified journalism, holding much the same relation to the deeply-impregnated work of Turgenev, Hardy, and Conrad, as a film bears to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in his perplexities to the enchanting vision on which he still could gaze. Nor was Miss Temple either in her usually sparkling vein; her liveliness seemed an effort; she was more constrained, she was less fluent than before. Ferdinand, indeed, rose more than once to depart; yet still he remained. He lost his cap; he looked for his cap; and then again seated himself. Again he rose, restless and disquieted, wandered about the room, looked at a picture, plucked ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... He who has been dipt in the Shannon is presumed to have obtained, in abundance, the gift of that "civil courage" which makes an Irishman at ease and unconstrained in all places and under all circumstances; and he who has kissed the Blarney stone is assumed to be endowed with a fluent and persuasive tongue, altho it may be associated with insincerity; the term "Blarney" being generally used to characterize words that are meant neither to be ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... Alliance by making the most of this opportunity for social fraternising. But where was the Japanese community in London? Nobody knew. Perhaps there was none. There was the Embassy, of course, which arrived smiling, fluent, and almost too well-mannered. But Lady Everington had been unable to push very far her programme for international amenities. There were strange little yellow men from the City, who had charge of ships and banking interests; there were strange little yellow men from beyond the West ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... speak it," replied the child in fluent enough English, but with a marked accent. His pronunciation ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... been too saved, I see, Too rescued; fear too dim to me That I could spell the prayer I knew so perfect yesterday, — That scalding one, "Sabachthani," Recited fluent here. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... Sublime Koran and the ordinances of Al-Islam and the Canons of the True Faith; and calligraphy and poetry and mathematics and archery. On this wise he became the union-pearl of his age and the goodliest of the folk of his time and his day; fair of face and of tongue fluent, carrying himself with a light and graceful gait and glorying in his stature proportionate and amorous graces which were to many a bait: and his cheeks were red and flower-white was his forehead and his side face ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... introducing artfully his rugged lines, and to serve a particular purpose, had probably seldom, and never but by accident, composed a smooth one. Such has been the versification of the earliest poets in every country. Children lisp, at first, and stammer; but, in time, their speech becomes fluent, and, if they are ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... French. I do not know, indeed, to what degree this is true of you, but reading is in any case a way to keep what you have and to acquire more. If it pleases you, we shall find a way for you to become more fluent in talking, than, as you say, you are now. If you do not like it, rely with entire confidence on the preface to ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... Bay, I had become acquainted with a Scotch gentleman, who was employed on the medical staff of the U.S. army, I believe, as a supernumerary, or candidate for a commission as a surgeon. He was a most agreeable companion, of good natural parts, fluent in conversation, intelligent in remark, free from egotism, and well educated, I believe, at Cambridge, in England. We soon became attached to each other. He accompanied me in my rambles, and we were almost inseparable companions during my stay. He was one of those beings, in fine, who seem ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... pillar of cloud and fire, in the church, we did not suspect his other-world muteness. William was closing his first Sunday night service. The congregation was large and in the front midst of it sat Brother A. Immediately behind him sat Brother B, a fluent and enthusiastic steward. I was in the Amen Corner as usual, because it is only from this vantage ground that a preacher's wife can keep her eye properly upon his congregation and be able to estimate the causes and effects of his discourse. I have ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... were from not being among his friends, or some other cause, the Baron was certainly not in his usual spirits this day at dinner. Conversation, which with him was generally as easy as it was brilliant, like a fountain at the same time sparkling and fluent, was evidently constrained. For a few minutes he talked very fast, and was then uncommunicative, absent, and dull. He, moreover, drank a great deal of wine, which was not his custom; but the grape did not inspire him. Vivian found amusement in his next ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... this undoubtedly represented an asset to the country during the period that he was War Minister. His actual phraseology and his accent might peradventure not have been accounted quite faultless on the boulevards; but he was wonderfully fluent, he never by any chance paused for a word, and he always appeared to be perfectly familiar with those happy little turns of speech to which the Gallic tongue so particularly lends itself. The ease with which he took ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... plenty of idle young New Yorkers and Bostonians too, hovering round Lucy and Jean, overweighted by their faultless London coats and trousers and fluent French. But they deceived nobody; they all had that nimble brain, and that unconscious swagger of importance and success which stamps the American in every country. Prince Hugo, in his old brown suit, came ...
— Frances Waldeaux • Rebecca Harding Davis
... "messes," and soon adopted the current dissipations of the field,—late hours, long stories, incessant smoking, and raw spirits. There were some restless minds about me, whose funds of anecdote and jest were apparently inexhaustible. I do not know that so many eccentric, adventurous, and fluent people are to be found among any other nationality of soldiers, not excepting ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... at all this should not make us lose sight of the antecedent facts which have built up this force of mischief. Mr. Gladstone is Prime Minister by the favour of the Irish party, and this party is the outcome of Mr. Gladstone's own policy. Whether the fluent rhetorician foresaw his present position, whether perched on his slender ledge of power he now enjoys it, we need not stop to consider. What we would remind our readers is that for nearly twenty years past he has, in the main ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... Presbyterian friends to the Episcopal bench, to enforce that very liturgy which they condemned. He was the chief speaker for the Presbyterians at the famous Savoy Conference, summoned to advise and consult upon the Book of Common Prayer. His antagonist was Dr. Gunning, ready, fluent, and impassioned. "They spent," as Gilbert Burnet says, "several days in logical arguing, to the diversion of the town, who looked upon them as a couple of fencers, engaged in a discussion which could not be brought to an end." In themselves considered, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... descriptive passages are fine, the pictures of the terrible storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those in Dauber. Had Mr. Noyes written Drake without the songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the Songs, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is past," could have been written only by a poet. In Forty Singing Seamen there is ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... apprenticed to a glove-maker in Salisbury, but subsequently entered the employment of a tallow-chandler. He picked up a fair knowledge of mathematics and geography, but theology was his favourite study. His habit of committing his thoughts to writing gave him a clear and fluent style. He made his first appearance as an author in the Arian controversy. A dispute having arisen about Whiston's argument in favour of the supremacy of the one God and Father, he wrote an essay, The Supremacy of the Father ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... Macleod's editorship has at the same time been singularly able and judicious. Although Dr. Macleod never aspired to rank as a theological writer, he has in his way been a prolific and successful author. His works may be said to have merits peculiarly their own. His graceful, easy, fluent style; his admirable capacity for illustration; his graphic delineations of scenery and character; and, above all, his unfailing use of simple, terse, homely Saxon, have combined to place him in the front rank of ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... primarily, some of the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second through ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... be very fluent in that, for, inspired by love of Aurelia, I attacked it with extraordinary passion. All Italy, and above all Tuscany, took sacred air from her; there grew to be an aureole about everything which owned kinship with her. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... Dutch-built stone house, Theodore Weld and the famous daughters of South Carolina gave us a welcome. There was nothing attractive at first sight in those plain, frail women, except their rich voices, fluent language, and Angelina's fine dark eyes. The house with its wide hall, spacious apartments, deep windows, and small panes of glass was severely destitute of all tasteful, womanly touches, and though neat and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
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