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More "Lucidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... science, that dissipated materialism forever, that revealed to us the ghostly unity of all existence, that reestablished all ethics upon an immutable and eternal foundation,—the mind that could expound with equal lucidity, and by the same universal formula, the history of a gnat or the history of a sun—confessed itself, before the Riddle of Existence, scarcely less helpless than the mind of ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and salutary lesson for ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... faith—the spectacle of a man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... be made too easily intelligible to the common people. At all periods, moreover, hieroglyphic writing was a branch of decorative art, and it may have been that the ancient Egyptian, like the modern Turk, resented too much lucidity, and liked his literary compositions to be veiled in a certain obscurity. The alphabet devised by the Egyptians consisted of twenty-four letters. Egyptologists are at variance on the question whether this alphabet was the original, or had any influence upon the development ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... one great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except Messer Simone of the one part, and Messer Griffo of the other part, ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... ordinary thinking about the instinct and the marvellous behaviour of brutes. One recognizes reason there not in the brutes but in him who created them. I am, then, of the general opinion in this respect; but I hope that my explanation will have added clearness and lucidity, and even a more ample ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... the mere transition from one thought to another gives his prose a curious air of disjointedness as if he flitted arbitrarily from one thing to another, and jotted down anything that came into his head. His writing has clarity and lucidity, it abounds in terseness of expression and in exact and discriminating phraseology, and in the minor arts of composition—in the use of quotations for instance—it can be extraordinarily felicitous. But it lacks spaciousness and ease and rhythm; it makes too inexorable a demand on the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Gertrude's company, that person was Jack also. Jack never had been able to see why the priest should visit his master, and had on several occasions expressed his opinion on that point with much decision and lucidity. If, therefore, Mr Bastian would keep away from the house until Gertrude started on her eventful walk, he was not very ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... a feeling that they were neither of them gaining any ground. She blamed herself for her lack of lucidity. She began again, taking up the matter at a fresh point. She said that her life at present wasn't full, that it was only half a life, that it was just home and marriage and nothing else; he had his business, he went out into the world, he had politics ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... she said with the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable lucidity of apprehension. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... if not from the Creator of things himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the water-brooks! To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life—this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul—"a filosofia e necessario amore." There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... Louisiana, had a very high reputation as a lawyer, and my acquaintance with him in the Senate had impressed me with the lucidity of his intellect, his systematic habits and capacity for labor. He was therefore invited to the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... thwarted, shut out from the paradise that seemed to open all about him; it was the face of one who had found satiety in pleasure, and sorrow in the very heart of joy. There was no taint of grossness or of luxury in the face, but rather a strength, an intellectual force, a firm lucidity of thought. I confess that the sight moved me very strangely. I felt a thrill of the deepest compassion, a desire to do something that might help or comfort, a yearning wish to aid, to explain, to cheer. The silence, the stillness, the hopelessness of the pathetic figure woke in me the intensest ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... handle a subject which has an obvious controversial side with strength, and there are convincing qualities as well as lucidity in the views so ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... 1748. He does not refer to Anthony Collins' essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic divine, Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of New Jersey, ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... were purple with laughter. And even now most of the reviewers seemed not to understand where G.K. stood or what was his philosophy. "Bernard Shaw," says one, "whom as a disciple* he naturally exalts." This, after a series of books in which G.K. had exposed, with perfect lucidity and a wealth of examples, a view of life differing from Shaw's in almost every particular. One reviewer clearly discerned the influence of Shaw in The Napoleon of Notting Hill, "but without a trace of Shaw's wonderful ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... sufficient fulness to illustrate the influence of sea power in its broadest sense upon the general history. Bearing, as it does, strong indications of a full use of accessible accounts, contemporary with the events narrated, I know no naval work superior to it for lucidity and breadth of treatment. Campbell was he of whom Dr. Johnson said: "Campbell is a good man, a pious man; I am afraid he has not been inside a church for many years; but he never passes a church without pulling off his hat. This shows ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... is really so, the Chancellor and the Treasury seem to have curiously narrow limitations in their capacity for clearness. Very few accountants, I imagine, consider the official figures, as periodically published, as models of lucidity. Nevertheless, we can at least claim that in this respect the figures furnished to us by the Government during the war have been quite as lucid as those which used to be presented in time of peace, and it is greatly to the credit of the ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... as incapable of taking her from the hands of such patrons as of receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long, lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law. The Law of Nature overleapt all provincial and municipal boundaries; it disregarded all distinctions between noble and burgess, between burgess and peasant; it gave the most exalted place to lucidity, simplicity and system; but it committed its devotees to no specific improvement, and did not directly threaten any venerable or lucrative technicality. Natural law may be said to have become the common law of France, or, at all events, the ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... leading for the Crown, could have marshaled the facts with such lucidity and fairness as Furneaux during that saunter to ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... on the Second Advent of Christ, shared his fate. Kuhlmann also wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit I ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting one unduly ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... symbolism. But when it was given to me (this marvellous brochure furnished with strange illustrations and wonderful tassels), I thought it absurdly obscure. Since then, however, it has been rendered by force of contrast with the brain-curdling enigmas the author has since published a marvel of lucidity; and were I to read it now I should appreciate its many beauties. It bears the same relation to the author's later work as Rienzi to The Walkyrie. But what is symbolism? Vulgarly speaking, saying the opposite to what you mean. For example, you want to say that music ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... or Sydney Smith, or Coleridge. Very laughable stories are told, of course, of a man who would talk three hours without pause, and undoubtedly there were many people sadly bored by him in his day; but to those who could appreciate the remarkable stores of information he possessed, and the lucidity with which he could deal them forth,—to say nothing of his rhetorical splendors,—those discourses of his were never tedious, but full of supreme interest. To be sure, Sydney Smith sneered at his "wonderful stores of very accurate—misinformation," but he was one who did not like a rival near ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... afternoon of the latter date, while engaged in a conference of the first magnitude, I was seized with an overwhelming desire to dance a quadrille at a public ball. I found it impossible to concentrate my attention on the case concerning which I was consulted; I could no longer express myself with lucidity. Outwardly sedate, reliable, I sat at my desk dizzied by such visions as pursued St. Anthony to his cell. No sooner was I free than I fled from Vernon, dined in Paris, bought a false beard, and ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... of the day was spent in seeing more visitors and in philosophical and moral talks, in which Sand developed his social and religious theories with a lucidity of expression and an elevation of thought such as he had, perhaps, never before shown. The governor of the prison from whom I heard these details, told me that he should all his life regret that he did not know shorthand, so that he might have noted all these thoughts, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... the human consciousness. I had long suspected that Bluebeard was the victim of a similar fatality. All the circumstances of his life, as I found them related, were far from satisfying my mind, and from gratifying that craving for logic and lucidity by which I am incessantly consumed. On reflection, I perceived that they involved insurmountable difficulties. There was so great a desire to make me believe in the man's cruelty that it could not fail to make ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... life. "I was saying that a person's age is different according to circumstances," he explained, with dignity, if not lucidity. "You take Genesis's father. Well, he was married when he was sixteen. Then there was a case over in Iowa that lots of people know about and nobody thinks anything of. A young man over there in Iowa that's seventeen years old began shaving when he was ...
— Seventeen - A Tale Of Youth And Summer Time And The Baxter Family Especially William • Booth Tarkington
... tightening of his heart. He rose, animated by an overwhelming necessity to get the ketch under way, to leave at once, for ever, the invisible shore of the bay. He gently folded her again in the blanket, but she resisted him. "I'd rather stay up," she said with a sudden lucidity. "It's nice here; I wanted to come before, but he ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... how she had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded by marriage, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... par, as regards lucidity and logic, with the explanations which we are given of the alleged case ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... answered Charley, with engaging lucidity, "if she were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could stand it ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Himself, who has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation, not less than the soul of man, longs for God, "as the hart for the water- brooks"! To unite oneself to the infinite by largeness and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life- -this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul. A filosofia e necessario amore. There would be degrees of progress ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... phase of sentiment. Like the costume of the period, it strikes us now as 'artificial' because it was at the time so natural. It was worked out by the courtly and aristocratic class, and was fitted to give a certain dignity and lucidity, and to guard against mere greatness and triviality of utterance. At any rate it saved Pope from one enormous difficulty. The modern translator is aware that Homer lived a long time ago in a very different state of intellectual and social development, and yet feels ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... been read, and the scherzo is approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks the first B flat octave. It is a pregnant beginning. The second bar I have never heard ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... mannered archaism:—above all, no sickly sweetness, no subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity, lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,—the only genuine note,—of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please for long.' ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick
... not in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... he stated with his usual lucidity; but the case was one in which his course could have been safely predicted by a person familiar with his character. The need for the proposed action was evident. "The whole of the necessity of stopping all the vessels is comprised in a very few words: that, if we will not stop supplies of corn, ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... surgical treatise, the 30th and last in al-Zahr[a]w[i]aEuro(TM)s encyclopedic work al-Ta[s.]r[i]f Liman aEuroAjiza aEuroan al-TaaEuro(TM)l[i]f, is founded on certain merits. The text is characterized by lucidity, careful description, and a touch of original observation of the surgical operations to which the treatise as a whole is devoted.[4] Al-Zahr[a]w[i] furnishes his own drawings of the surgical and dental instruments he used, ...
— Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise • Sami Hamarneh
... monastic vows, all weighed heavily upon his heart. Benedetto's mystic fervour, his great and unconscious humility, his progress in comprehending the Faith according to the ideas originating with Signor Giovanni, a new lucidity of thought which flashed from him in conversation, the growing strength of their mutual affection, had awakened in him hopes of a revelation of Divine Grace, of Divine Truth, of Divine Power for the saving of souls, to be made, at no distant period, through ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... with succinct lucidity, grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock, while I climb up the rope-ladder and close ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... legislate. These excepted, the Justinian code, with some necessary modifications, prevailed. Few changes have been made since Gregory the Sixteenth's time, and they are codified with such perfect scientific lucidity as to be available to practitioners. This is one of the special labors of the Council of State, which is aided by a commission consisting of the most eminent and learned jurists of Rome. The distinguished statesman (Baron ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... Leon has his weak points. He does not attain to the angelic melody of St. John of the Cross. He is apt to be indifferent to sheer beauty of form; though he often reaches it, this success seems with him to be a happy accident. Lucidity is not his main object; though he uses simple terms, his immense range of knowledge tempts him at whiles to indulge in allusions which it might tax all the ingenuity of commentators to explain. Commentators of Luis de Leon have ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... I said; "but remember your head has not grown a particle larger since the Spring of 1844, nor your body less; but had the same idea of Ethics been then presented to you, you would certainly not have seen its lucidity." ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... of love—yielded to or not, as may be. The entries were scattered—as if put down when the stress of feeling had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... sprouts theatres as a natural garden sprouts flowers, was jewelled with lights, lights that in the clear air of this continent shone with a lucidity that we in England do not know. Before the least lighted of these buildings the Prince stopped. He had arrived at the austere temple of the high arts, ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... these learned men, the lucidity with which they expressed their views, and the earnestness with which they defended them, captivated my attention, and opened to me a new world ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... attacks upon the teleological argument and the nature of the present attack, would be briefly to review the reasonable objections to which all the previous attacks were open. Very opportunely a work on Theism has just been published which states these objections with great lucidity, and answers them with much ability. The work to which I allude is by the Rev. Professor Flint, and as it is characterised by temperate candour in tone and logical care in exposition, I felt on reading it that the work was particularly ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... intellect. This was peculiarly the case in the instance of Mr. Lowndes. As the disease progressed, attenuating and debilitating the physical man, his intellectual faculties grew brighter, and brighter, assuming a lucidity almost supernatural. At length he passed from time while yet young, leaving a vacuum which in South Carolina has never been filled. His death was at a time his services were most needed, and as with Clay, Jackson, and Webster; his ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... pumpkin and brains or not—Apicius in this dish reveals himself as the consummate master of his art that he really is—a cook for cooks; Moreover, the lucidity of his diction in this instance is equally remarkable. It stands out in striking contrast to his many other formulae which are so obscured. Many of them perhaps were precepts of likewise striking originality as ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... be lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of thought. "He who would be Caesar anywhere," says Kipling, "must know everything everywhere." Nearly everything comes to the man who is always ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... this ease and lucidity that Sir John deals with scientific subjects of the greatest importance,—his genius resembling the elephant's trunk, which can balance a straw or rend an oak. In private life he displayed a simplicity of manner in harmony with the general unassumingness of his character. In his books ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... atmosphere, and the woods and lake were all seen under that softened light which immediately precedes his appearance, and which perhaps is the most witching period of the four and twenty hours. It is the moment when every thing is distinct, even the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, the hues appearing gray and softened, with the outlines of objects defined, and the perspective just as moral truths that are presented in their simplicity, without the meretricious aids of ornament or glitter. In a ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... as follows," replied Tibby, who had at times a pedantic lucidity. "The facts are that she has been in England for three days and will not see us. She has forbidden the bankers to give us her address. She refuses to answer questions. Margaret finds her letters colourless. There are other facts, but these are ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... questions should be submitted to a searching examination, and that the doctrine of the Catholic Church should be formulated in such a way as to make cavilling and misunderstanding impossible. This work was done with admirable lucidity and directness in the fifth and sixth sessions of the Council of Trent, but nevertheless these decrees of the Council did not prevent the theories of Luther and Calvin being propagated vigorously, and from ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... in without a tremor. He felt himself invulnerable—raised far above the shallowness of common judgment. Though he saw the Prince looking at him with black displeasure, the lucidity of his mind, of which he was very conscious, gave him an extraordinary assurance. He was not asked ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... prevent them from eliminating.[12] We may thus oscillate between decorative and structural motives, and only in one point, for each style, can we find the ideal equilibrium, in which the greatest strength and lucidity is ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... "Anatol," but then he was not yet ready for the realism that must be counted the highest of all: the realism that has no tendency and preaches no lesson, but from which we draw our own lessons as we draw them from life itself in moments of unusual lucidity. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... mountain-bred, if they but knew the ear-marks of that people—almost a race apart. The sight of the old cave-mouth plainly stirred in him a horde of memories not wholly pleasant. Leathern as his face was, it none the less showed his emotions with remarkable lucidity now that he was off his guard. Now sly cunning dominated it, with, possibly, a touch left of the early fear ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... business. "Perhaps it was not on the business that you think," said the policeman. "If you knew what I think!" Don Rocco did not know, and in his humble placidity did not wish to know. He never bothered himself with the thoughts of others. It was sufficiently difficult for him to get a little lucidity into his own. They asked him a few more questions, and then left, carrying with them the only object that they found in the cellar, a corkscrew, which the scrupulous Don Rocco was not willing, through the uncertainty of his memory, to claim as belonging to him, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... us to anticipate any parallelism of the history of 1915-45 with 1815-45 is the greater lucidity of the general mind, the fact that all Western Europe, down to the agricultural labourers, can read and write and does read newspapers and "get ideas." The explanation of economic and social processes that were mysterious ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... agreements had unfortunately not foreseen. Hermia was mistaken—that was all. And yet—why this pursuit? It all seemed a little too deep for his comprehension at the present moment. His mind groped for lucidity, failed, and then ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... become interested in the subject if it were treated in the same informal manner into which one naturally falls in giving lectures to young people. I have endeavoured to bear this in mind without sacrificing that lucidity in the arrangement of topics which is always the supreme consideration. For many years I have been in the habit of lecturing on history to college students in different parts of the United States, to young ladies in private schools, and occasionally to ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... entrance to the main companionway. With his collar turned up and his hat drawn over his forehead, he succumbed to the state of drowsiness characteristic of sea trips, in which, despite the heaviness of one's eyelids, one feels and perceives with a restless lucidity of the inner vision. Images chase through one's mind, a kaleidoscopic stream, shifting incessantly, going and coming, and finally reducing the soul to a state of torture. The sybaritic meal with its clatter of plates, its talking and music, was still whirling ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... should think that I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not conscious, did not perfectly know my state, if I did not fathom it by analyzing it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a reasonable man who was laboring under a hallucination. Some unknown disturbance must have been excited in my brain, one of those disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to note and to fix precisely, and that ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... a flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart's desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade her that at least half a dozen numbers of the regular ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... immediate departure, for it helped nobody to see the martyred St. Sebastian, and it was merely odious for St. Sebastian himself. In fact, at this moment, when Michael was rowing them back across the full-flooded estuary, Francis was explaining this with his customary lucidity. ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... artistic form is a quality that is finite. As a matter of fact, it is infinite; it cannot be bound up with any particular mode of expression; it is elastic, and so elastic that certain critics cannot adjust their minds to such lucidity. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Annet again; "that was just the reason." She was speaking frankly, as a child can speak; but children have their own code of honour, and it forbids them to give away a friend. "Jan was telling us, only the other day," she explained with careful lucidity, "how his father had once caught a mermaid in a pool there. We wanted very much to see one, and so we planned to go. But afterwards, when father rowed us home, we did not like to tell him about it. We were afraid he would laugh at us; and we were frightened, too; ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... wading in deeper and deeper, inch by inch, the cautious minister was fast finding himself too far advanced to retreat. He was rarely decided, however, and never lucid; and least of all in emergencies, when decision and lucidity would have been more valuable than ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and I have often thought his clients never understood their own cases until ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... the case, stated with beautiful lucidity, of the somewhat ghoulish dilettantism which, enjoying tombs, would condemn all mankind to breathe their atmosphere. It is not, however, in order to discuss that view that the passage is quoted, but because of its relevancy to what Cavour attempted and what he did. Never was there a mind which ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... flashed through his brain he lost no time, not even in lighting a lamp, though the room was dark. What there was to be done must be done promptly, and with the same extraordinary lucidity of mind he remembered every simple remedy there was at his disposal. He ran upstairs, three steps at a time, for the blankets off his own bed. He had made up the kitchen fire, as was his wont, that evening, for the Boy to cook if it pleased him, and fortunately it was burning brightly ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... so the keelmen hailed in the following terms, "Like-a-goose-and-not-a-goose, ahoy!" They were much disappointed by the inattention of the crew. The keelman is religious in his way, but his ideas lack lucidity. Two friends had left their keel aground up the river and were walking across a field, when they were chased by a savage bull. They fled to a tree, and the fleeter-footed man got to the first fork. The second had swarmed ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... Mrs. Lowder—that he was already in a sense possessed of what he wanted. There was more to come—everything; he had by no means, with his companion, had it all out. Yet what he was possessed of was real—the fact that she hadn't thrown over his lucidity the horrid shadow of cheap reprobation. Of this he had had so sore a fear that its being dispelled was in itself of the nature of bliss. The danger had dropped—it was behind him there in the great sunny space. So far she was ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire counts for so ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... phases separating these two emotions. His bag of gold was beside him, yet he seemingly dared not touch it; perhaps he feared that the instant his hand went forth toward it, it would melt like the dream-gold which vanishes during that period of progressive lucidity which separates profound ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... century. He had a mental equipment of the foremost order, great intellectual curiosity, immense vigour and many-sidedness, combined with a firm grasp of a subject, perfect clearness of thought, and absolute lucidity of expression. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... reverse. But I had to congratulate myself subsequently on having been moderate in the expression of my wishes; for, as my father explained to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the margravine was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his plans. She could actually affect to wink at them that she might gain her point, and have her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously beguiling a hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... offered us afternoon instruction in trigonometry and spherical geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Joergen Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him. I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject, became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was very well ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... uphold the dignity of man—a matter of great importance, as anyone can see; still one cannot help feeling that a certain amount of sincerity would not be wholly blamable. To state, then, with studied moderation a belief that in unfortunate moments of lucidity is irresistibly borne in upon most of us—the blind agitation caused mostly by hunger and complicated by love and ferocity does not deserve either by its beauty, or its morality, or its possible results, the artistic fuss made over it. It may be consoling—for ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... by side with such faults go an exceptional lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse and a directness of conclusion wherewith ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... counsel; it certainly brings calm, and cool reflection gives lucidity to the mind. At last I persuaded myself that what had occurred was after all in no way extraordinary, and that I would certainly have considered it at first a very common occurrence if I had not been dazzled ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... in him. He then no longer restrained the impulse of his oratory, but became the mouthpiece of God, the interpreter to themselves of all that host. In a fiery crescendo, never flagging, never losing firmness of grasp or lucidity of vision, he ascended the altar steps of prophecy, and, standing like Moses on the mount between the thunders of God and the tabernacles of the plain, fulminated period after period of impassioned eloquence. The walls of the church re-echoed with sobs ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... doubting the sincerity of her companions, asked permission to read them a poem of the master’s which she found beyond her comprehension. When the reading was over the opinion of her friends was unanimous. “Nothing could be simpler! The lines were lucidity itself! Such close reasoning etc.” But dismay fell upon them when the naughty lady announced, with a peal of laughter, that she had been reading alternate lines from opposite pages. She no longer disturbs ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... to my question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance the political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to pierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written abundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity, candour, and charm. Especially his Philosophical Essays and his little book on The Problems of Philosophy can be read with pleasure by any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Lincoln's Inn, was made prebendary of Canterbury in 1670 and dean in 1672. William III regarded him with high favor, and he succeeded the nonjuring Sancroft in the arch-see of Canterbury. His sermons are characterized by stateliness, copiousness and lucidity, and were long looked upon as models of correct pulpit style. He died ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... release from her fears restored Lily to immediate lucidity. The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and she heard herself, in a voice that was her own yet outside herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the order for a hansom, directing him to put her in ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... life, which does not cease, Whose secret is not joy, but peace; That life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd If birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain, The life he craves—if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity of soul. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—"the idea,"—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... States had been able to cure him. He had seen in the paper an advertisement of a patent medicine, and thought there'd be no harm in trying it. That man was as strong as ever he'd been in his life after two bottles. But his illness had given Captain Butler a lucidity which was new and strange, and while they talked he seemed to read their minds. They thought he was dying. And when they left him ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... perplexity, is a challenge to the exploring eye. It may well be that effective composition on such a scale is impossible, but it is not so easy to say exactly where Tolstoy fails. If the total effect of his book is inconclusive, it is all lucidity and shapeliness in its parts. There is no faltering in his hold upon character; he never loses his way among the scores of men and women in the book; and in all the endless series of scenes and events there is not one ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... over us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My guardian's gray head rose before ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... would have swept her away on some rich current of emotion, now seemed to island her in her own thoughts, to create an artificial solitude in which she found herself more immitigably face to face with her fears. The silence, the recueillement, about her gave resonance to the inner voices, lucidity to the inner vision, till she seemed enclosed in a luminous empty horizon against which every possibility took the sharp edge of accomplished fact. With relentless precision the course of events was unrolled before her: she saw Dick yielding ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... the Samouprava of November 12 the whole case was discussed with his usual lucidity by Dr. Lazar Markovi['c], one of the ablest and most philosophic men in Yugoslavia. This ex-Professor of Law is now the Minister of Justice, and it is to be hoped that he will eventually succeed in the ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... who is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not think that ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... wishy-washy England. They won't take my things as they stand, and I'm not going to write 'Tales of my First Feeding Bottle' to please them. So I'm going over to Paris. I shall turn my MSS. into French and publish them there. The language lends itself to perfect lucidity, and the Paris press allows men to write as men. Besides, the French admire word-painting, which is my particular vein. The English don't. They like composition. Here an author's pen must remain always a stick ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross
... Bonaparte, who had imbued himself with the principles of the art of war, as they had been expounded by the best strategists of the old French army, and who had thus thought out with unprecedented lucidity the method of conducting campaigns. His mastery of the art of generalship was revealed by his success in 1796, and as the conflict with Europe continued, he became the leader and eventually the master of ...
— Britain at Bay • Spenser Wilkinson
... evil, and sees himself more and more clearly as the most complex of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... gave an exclamation of horror. Two hundred years later, under Louis XV, well-bred persons would have laughed at this sally. But perhaps at the beginning of an orgy the mind had still an unusual degree of lucidity. Despite the heat of the candles, the intensity of the emotions, the gold and silver vases, the fumes of wine, despite the vision of ravishing women, perhaps there still lurked in the depths of the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... was hardly cheered by the sight of her writing. He tore her note open and took in the few lines—she seldom exceeded the first page—with the lucidity of apprehension that is the ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... "fugitive slave," as "a chattel," as "a thing" that could talk and give an interesting account of the cruelties of slavery. As a narrator he had few equals among the most polished white gentlemen of all New England. His white friends were charmed by the lucidity and succinctness of his account of his life as a slave, and always insisted upon his narrative. But he was more than a narrator, more than a story-teller; he was an orator, and in dealing with the problem of slavery proved himself to be a thinker. The ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... "I declare you should have been a lawyer. We haven't a pleader of such parts and such lucidity ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... Museum, or such collections as that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index could be housed quite comfortably on one side of Northumberland Avenue, for example. It is only a reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the French mind to suppose the central index housed in a vast series of buildings at or near Paris. The index would be classified primarily by some unchanging physical characteristic, such as we are told the thumb-mark and finger-mark afford, and to these would be added any other physical ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... put by Hume, and was handled by him with singular lucidity; but his answer, though very near the truth, was not so expressed as to set the ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... or Rome, or the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,—this was ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... Mr. Tylor's "Primitive Culture," [156] one of the few erudite works which are at once truly great and thoroughly entertaining. The learning displayed in it would do credit to a German specialist, both for extent and for minuteness, while the orderly arrangement of the arguments and the elegant lucidity of the style are such as we are accustomed to expect from French essay-writers. And what is still more admirable is the way in which the enthusiasm characteristic of a genial and original speculator is tempered by the patience and caution of a cool-headed critic. Patience and caution are nowhere ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... to say against the lucidity of the paragraph, nor any thing to urge, at all likely to avail, against the prosecution of Van's designs upon the lady's hand and fifteen thousand florins, with "two months' conge and other advantages." No possible sophistry, to which I was equal, could prove the marriage to be against his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... confessed all that he owed, as a writer, to geometry, whose severe discipline forms and exercises the mind, gives it the salutary habit of precision and lucidity, and puts it on its guard against terms which are incorrect or unduly vague, giving it qualities far superior to all the "tropes ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... not "when;" Swede is quite astray!—And indeed we will here leave off, and shut down this magazine of rubbish; right glad to wash ourselves wholly from it (in three waters) forevermore. Possibly enough the Prussian Dryasdust will, one day, print it IN EXTENSO, and with that lucidity of comment and arrangement which is peculiar to him; exasperated readers will then see whether I have used them ILL or not, according to the opportunity there was!—Here, at any rate, my reader shall he free of it. Indeed he may perceive, the negotiation was by this time come to a safe ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... over critically, stood him up and measured heights and even felt his arm for muscle. Then he made a remark that while lacking lucidity was nevertheless conclusive. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... pendant la Guerre de l'Independence Americaine, 1877, Histoire, etc., sous la premiere Republique, 1886, most valuable works; a third vol., Hist., etc., sous le Consulat. M. le Capitaine DESBRIERE, Projets de Debarquement, 2 vols., 1901, a phase of the great war told with all the care and lucidity which distinguish the best French ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except Messer ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... had consumed his milk and biscuits. The light had come back to his eyes and the colour to his cheeks, as he set himself with great vigour and lucidity to explain the situation. ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... else. He, not Tolstoi or Turgenieff, is the typical Slav writer. But the chief peculiarity of the Russian soul is that it is not ashamed to express what all men feel. And this is why Dostoievsky is not only a Russian writer but a universal writer. From the French point of view he may seem wanting in lucidity and irony; from the English point of view he may seem antinomian and non-moral. But he has one advantage over both. He approaches the ultimate mystery as no Western writer, except, perhaps, Shakespeare and Goethe, has ever approached it. He writes with human nerves upon parchment made of human ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. He knew absolutely what he was about, understood ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... reputation of Sir Robert Ball as a writer on astronomy at once popular and scientific is in itself more than sufficient recommendation of his newly published 'Atlas of Astronomy.' ... The introduction is written with Sir Robert Ball's well-known lucidity and simplicity of exposition, and altogether the Atlas is admirably adapted to meet the needs and smooth the difficulties of young and inexperienced students of astronomy, as well as materially to assist the researches of those that are ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was too crude a way of putting it Similar incidents ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Prof. Sherman's great work Roman Law in the Modern World, Boston, 1917. The learned author has laid philosophical lawyers of all countries under heavy obligations by this splendid book, as noted for its lucidity as ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... clearness of vision and truthfulness of presentment of Burns, growing out of them it may be, is that graphic power in which he stands unexcelled. He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the least of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity, which is a rare combination in letters; his phrasing is as beautiful and fine as it is forcible, which is a distinction rarer still. Hundreds of examples of his pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see them in the poems. Many have become everyday expressions, and ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... us and shrieked away into the distance; and again the man beside me flinched, but I did not. I was thinking, with odd lucidity, of many things, among them Dunny and his old house in Washington, into which I should never again let myself with my latch-key, sure of a welcome at any hour of the day or night. My guardian's gray head rose before me. My heart tightened. The finest, ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of thought. "He who would be Caesar anywhere," says Kipling, "must know everything everywhere." Nearly everything comes to the man ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... of a happy life are the same, as Plato insisted. [Footnote: See, for example, The Gorgias, 503, 504.] In order to yield satisfaction, the different parts of life must exemplify identity of motive, continuity and orderliness in the fulfillment of purpose, lucidity of relation, yet diversity for stimulation and totality. There must be a selective scheme to absorb what is congenial and reject the unfit. This sense for form in life may lead to the same results as morality, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... Barber, the point on the Nile nearest to the Red Sea, and thence up the river to Gordon; but, after considerable hesitation, the military authorities decided that this was riot a practicable plan. Upon that, he foresaw, with perfect lucidity, the inevitable development of events. Sooner or later, it would be absolutely necessary to send a relief expedition to Khartoum; and, from that premise, it followed, without a possibility of doubt, that it was the duty of the Government to do so at once. This he ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... Presbyterianism; her answers to the questions given her when arraigned before the Sessions for having left the Church; her conversation on Orthodoxy with some Hicksites who called on her, and her arguments on silent worship. They all show remarkable reasoning power, great lucidity of thought, and great faculty of expression for so ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... there to be reckoned with. What is it then, this persistent, obscure, unnameable Thing? What is it? The question haunts the mind; it will not be put aside; and the Greek at last, like other men under similar conditions, only with a lucidity and precision peculiar to himself, makes the reply, "it is something like myself." Every power of nature he presumes to be a spiritual being, impersonating the sky as Zeus, the earth as Demeter, the sea as Poseidon; from generation ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... qualified by nature for an historian than for a dramatist. He was formed to excel in all departments of literature, and the admirable lucidity of style and soundness and impartiality of judgment displayed in his historical writings will not easily by surpassed, and will always recommend them as popular expositions of the periods of ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... took up a corner of the big white apron she insisted upon wearing, and pleated it between her fingers as she told her grace everything with a surprising lucidity. ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... Battles &c. of this War, "BY THE ROYAL STAFF-OFFICERS"—which, for the last thirty or forty years, is used as Text-Book, or Military EUCLID, in the Prussian Cadet-Schools,—appears to possess the fit professorial lucidity and amplitude; and, in regard to all Official details, enumerations and the like, is received as of CANONICAL authority: it is not accessible to the general Public,—though liberally enough conceded ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... one of mine, or rather of my family. I have no such materials as you, and (our objections already made) your attack fills me with despair; it is direct and elegant, and your style is always admirable to me - lenity, lucidity, usually a high strain of breeding, an elegance that has a pleasant air of the accidental. But beware of purple passages. I wonder if you think as well of your purple passages as I do of mine? I wonder if you think as ill of mine as I do of yours? I wonder; I can tell you at least what is wrong ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the day was spent in seeing more visitors and in philosophical and moral talks, in which Sand developed his social and religious theories with a lucidity of expression and an elevation of thought such as he had, perhaps, never before shown. The governor of the prison from whom I heard these details, told me that he should all his life regret that he did not know shorthand, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... and the scherzo is approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks the first ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... and the woods and lake were all seen under that softened light which immediately precedes his appearance, and which perhaps is the most witching period of the four and twenty hours. It is the moment when every thing is distinct, even the atmosphere seeming to possess a liquid lucidity, the hues appearing gray and softened, with the outlines of objects defined, and the perspective just as moral truths that are presented in their simplicity, without the meretricious aids of ornament or glitter. In a word, it is the moment when the ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... editions is witness to its extraordinary popularity among intelligent minds, and hardly supports the belief that his scientific work has been forgotten. Nor can this popularity be a matter of much surprise, for few travellers have possessed Wallace's powers of exposition, his lucidity and charm of style. Professor Strasburger of Bonn has declared that through "The Malay Archipelago" "a new world of scientific knowledge" was unfolded before him. "I feel it ... my duty," he adds, "to proclaim ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences Vol 2 (of 2) • James Marchant
... case the sacrament should be bestowed on them if there be fear of danger otherwise it is better to wait until the time when they are sane, so that they may receive the sacrament more devoutly. But if during the interval of lucidity they manifest no desire to receive Baptism, they should not be baptized while ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... Monty Merriweather, with succinct lucidity, grinning at his comrades. "Say, fellows, you know how Hicks dreads a cold shower-bath; well, some of you rage at him from the other side of the rock, while I climb up the rope-ladder and close with him! Then some of you prehistoric pachyderms ascend, and ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Purchas appears to have greatly relished Ramusio's comparative lucidity: "I found (says he) this Booke translated by Master Hakluyt out of the Latine (i.e. among Hakluyt's MS. collections). But where the blind leade the blind both fall: as here the corrupt Latine could not but yeeld a corruption of truth in English. Ramusio, Secretarie to the Decemviri ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... singular vividness; then the difficulty has ceased to exist. And thus, in two successive stages of study, the same reader may justly censure Sordello for its obscurity of style, and justly applaud it for a remarkable lucidity in swiftness. Intelligent, however, as Browning was, it implied a curious lack of intelligence to suppose that a poem of many thousand lines written I in shorthand would speedily find decipherers. If we may trust the words of Westland Marston, recorded by Mr W.M. Rossetti ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... then express it in words that give it forth clearly. No verbiage, no fog or clouds, no jargon, but simplicity, lucidity, vividness, and power. ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... Stainer, Mus. Doc. New edition of a standard text-book which presents the principles of harmony with conciseness and lucidity. 1 ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... He does not refer to Anthony Collins' essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic divine, Jonathan ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... wrote a volume of verses, entitled The Berlin and Amsterdam "Kuhl- festival" at the Gathering of Lutherans and Calvinists, which sufficiently attests his insanity. The following is a specimen of the lucidity of his works: "The more I continued my doctrines, the more opposition I received, so that also the higher world of light with which I am illuminated, in their light I was enlightened, or shadowed, when I proceeded, and in their light lit I up ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... out that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... to Gertrude's company, that person was Jack also. Jack never had been able to see why the priest should visit his master, and had on several occasions expressed his opinion on that point with much decision and lucidity. If, therefore, Mr Bastian would keep away from the house until Gertrude started on her eventful walk, he was not very ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt
... historians is in the first rank, and if the vast scale of his work and the enormous mass of detail involved in it are considered along with the learning and research employed in accumulating the material, and the breadth of view, lucidity of arrangement, and sense of proportion which have fused them into a distinct and splendid picture, his claims to the first place cannot be lightly dismissed. His style, though not pure, being tinged with Gallicisms, is one of the most noble in our literature, rich, harmonious, ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... discussion as to the formation of the membranes of the human stomach, in which they used words that were over a foot long by actual measurement. I have never heard such splendid words in my life; but such were their grandiloquent profundity, and their far-reaching lucidity, that I understood rather less about it when they had finished than I did when ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 4 • Charles Farrar Browne
... that publication, perhaps the most wonderful in the whole world, entitled a "Compendium of the Census of the United States," issued with every decade. These volumes, accessible to everybody, and arranged with marvelous skill and lucidity, offer to the social observer a complete, accurate, and suggestive survey of every field comprised within the vast domain of the national interests. An evening's address would not more than suffice to indicate the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never ...
— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... great structural tendencies, or energies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. Let ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... it seemed at least possible, the retreating lady had been smartly punished. Serve her right—oh, serve her right a thousand times for having dared to trifle! Desire wasted no pity on her. But what of him? With merciless lucidity Desire's busy brain created the missing acts which might have brought the professor's tragedy of errors to a happy ending. It would have been so simple—if Benis had only waited. Even pursuit would not ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... mouth to whose lips divine kindness lent its sweetness. They were wholesome, full, red lips, finely wrinkled, sinuous, mobile, by which nature had given expression to noble feelings; lips which spoke to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes, and his shambling gait. His life answered to ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... indebted for all knowledge of this anomalous tractate to the "Agricultural Biography" of Mr. Donaldson, who seems disposed to give a sheltering wing to the curious theory broached, and discourses upon it with a lucidity and coherence worthy of a state-paper. I must be permitted to quote Mr. Donaldson's language:—"The author's ideas are no romance or chimera, but a very feasible entertainment of the undertaking, when a social revolution permits the fruits of all climes to be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... important details of style that women's work falls short, but in qualities even more vital. Fashion, to refer again to that branch of journalism, is a complicated and difficult subject, requiring for its adequate treatment the utmost orderliness and lucidity. Yet fashion articles are seldom arranged with any skill, and seldom lucid. The subject is usually handled after a haphazard method resulting in misty paragraphs of which often not even the writers could explain ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... court, and could mention one who has done them all in a single decision, and that not a very long one. The amazing feature of the matter is that all these methods are lawful—made so, not by legislative enactment, but by the judges. Language can not be used with sufficient lucidity ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... owes George MacDonald gratitude it will never repay;—such spiritual souls are never paid in the coin of this world. In "Robert Falconer," he taught his time with a lucidity and sweetness that none but Tennyson and Browning have equaled, and that not even they have surpassed, that a "loving worm within its clod were lovelier than a loveless God upon his Throne," and in "Thomas Wingfold" he has traced ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Caracci invented fresh attitudes and showed complete mastery of the human form, their types remained commonplace. Though their chiaroscuro was accurately based on that of Correggio, it lacked his aerial play of semitones. Though they went straight to Titian for color, they never approached Venetian lucidity and glow. There was something vulgar in their imagination, prosaic in their feeling, leaden in their frigid touch on legend. Who wants those countless gods and goddesses of the Farnese Gallery, those beblubbered saints and colossal Sibyls of the Bolognese Pinacoteca, those ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... opera, 'Oberon,' is one of the few works written in recent times by a foreign composer of the first rank for the English stage. The libretto, which was the work of Planche, is founded upon an old French romance, 'Huon of Bordeaux,' and though by no means a model of lucidity, it contains many scenes both powerful and picturesque, which must have captivated the imagination of a musician so impressionable as Weber. The opera opens in fairyland, where a bevy of fairies is watching the slumbers of Oberon. The fairy king ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... reason with a quickness that surprised Madame Rameau. He was, indeed, one of those men in whom excess of drink, when slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the effect of nervous exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to his mother, seemed a propitious lucidity ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the bar whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and I have often thought his clients never understood their own ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... knowledge of a subject without being able to impart any information about it. Successful action, as in arts, crafts, games, sports, and the like, must needs have subtle and accurate knowledge behind it; but the possessor of such knowledge is seldom able to impart it with any approach to lucidity. On the other hand, it frequently happens that one who has a retentive memory is able to impart information glibly and correctly, without possessing any real knowledge of ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... made him restless in the thought that she was accusing him of ingratitude—perhaps of behaviour unworthy a gentleman. Yes, there was the true sting. Dyce Lashmar prided himself on his intellectual lucidity, but still more on his possession of the instincts, of the mental and moral tone, which are called gentlemanly. It really hurt him to think that anyone could plausibly assail ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he had ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... not entirely melted before the commencement of the ensuing winter. In the summer months they are consequently filled with vast masses of ice broken up into a thousand fantastic forms, and presenting by their lucidity a singular contrast to the sombre vaults and massive ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... will experience the same pleasure as I do when you take them up, and you will at once compare them with some one of the old masters whose rival indeed he is. You will find even greater charm in the style of his historical compositions, in its terseness, its lucidity, smoothness, brilliancy and stateliness, for there is the same vigour in the historical harangues as there is in his own orations, only rather more ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... he produced two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author as ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... by a worn-out civilisation, has had to wait six centuries for life to be put into it by a finer-strung people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called spirit: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and details: this spiritual quality affects us in their carved and inlaid marbles, ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... at his convent of St. Mary of the Angels (Portiuncula), October 4, 1226, in perfect lucidity of mind, with patience and simple resignation, while giving good counsel to his brethren. Of death he spoke gently as "our sister death;" and when, during his illness, his physician was obliged to cauterize him with a red-hot ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... long hidden from them. I can scarcely open a chapter, in the Old Testament, that some passage does not strike me as going to prove this identity, between the red men and the Hebrews; and, were they all collected together, and published in a book, mankind would be astonished at their lucidity and weight. As for scalping, it is a horrid thing in our eyes, but it is honorable with the red men; and I have quoted to you the words of the Psalmist, in order to show the manner in which divine wisdom inflicts penalties on sin. Here is plain justification of the practice, provided ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... are pro-German as well as those who are not, could go to Berlin and learn something, not only of the language and intellectual history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of her people—and of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of conception. Nowhere else in Germany that I know of is this to be studied so advantageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat of Government, the headquarters of Real-politik, and it seems to me most apparent among the ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... guests at the house were dressing for dinner, Rnine handed the deed to Hortense. She seemed dazed by all that she had heard; and the thing that bewildered her even more than the relentless light shed upon her uncle's past was the miraculous insight and amazing lucidity displayed by this man: the man who for some hours had controlled events and conjured up before her eyes the actual scenes of a tragedy which no one ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... event—there were advantages without doubt in the circumstance which subjected one to being perpetually pointed out as a daughter of a multi-millionaire. As this argued itself out for her with rapid lucidity, she bent and kissed Rosy once more. She even tried to do it lightly, and not to allow the rush of love and pity in her soul ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and meet with the dungeon or the stake as the reward of contumacy. In the end everybody seems to be indifferent, satisfied with vacuity, enamored of insipidity. The brightest episode in this dreary period is the emergence of modern music with incomparable sweetness and lucidity. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... country people are going to get on at all. Here we find that by talking with great emphasis in the very broadest Scotch—by simply calling soap sape and a church a kirk you can quite frequently bring it off and make yourself understood. I had a most exhilarating hour of mutual lucidity with the one that makes furniture in the carpenter's shop. It seemed to me that he called a saw a zog, which was surely quite good enough; and when he referred to a hammer as a hamer it might surely be said to be equivalent to calling a spade ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various
... himself to be drawn into these mysteries. He had time for everything. It afforded him relaxation, and a means of observation. On one occasion, he followed the refugee to a garden where a person of "perfect lucidity" prophesied. The sibyl was a believer as well as a seer and pretended to communicate with God in person. I do not know exactly what supernal secrets the woman revealed, while she slept, but ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my explanation with uncompromising lucidity——" ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... a subject which has an obvious controversial side with strength, and there are convincing qualities as well as lucidity in the views so ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... misleading the minds of Germany, Wagner was still young: that he guessed, or rather fully grasped, that the only thing which Germans take seriously is—"the idea,"—that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, wonderful; that among Germans lucidity is an objection, logic a refutation. Schopenhauer rigorously pointed out the dishonesty of Hegel's and Schelling's age,—rigorously, but also unjustly, for he himself, the pessimistic old counterfeiter, was in no way more "honest" ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... persistency than William Law, but it can hardly be doubted that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... Mrs. Lie is, in a certain way, the complement to her husband. She possesses what he has not; and he possesses what she, in her modest self-extinction, would never dream of laying claim to. The spirit of order, adjustment, and lucidity is strong in her; while he, in his fanciful exuberance, is often overwhelmed by his material, and is unable to get it into shape. Then she quietly steps in and separates the dry land from the water in his ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... great poem but of Christian Apologetics down to our own day, when Pope Leo XIII directed that all Catholic seminaries and universities implant the doctrine expounded by Thomas, Angel of the Schools. A philosopher whose breadth and lucidity of mind gave such perennial interest to a system of thought that it is still followed more generally than that of any other school of philosophy—taught in the regular course even at Oxford, Harvard, Columbia—such a philosopher could have left the impress of his ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... working for a repeal of the odious stamp law, and at length got a hearing at the bar of the House of Commons, where he was extensively and exhaustively examined upon American affairs. In this famous examination he won respect for the lucidity of his statements and his conciliatory address. It soon became evident that the Stamp Act could not be enforced. No one could be compelled to buy stamps or pay tariff taxes if he preferred to withdraw from ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... Then he suspected that the strength of his patients came in part from the fever his treatment produced in them. But he was only a pioneer; the method would improve later. Was it not already a miracle to make the ataxic walk, to bring consumptives back to life, as it were; even to give hours of lucidity to the insane? And at the thought of this discovery of the alchemy of the twentieth century, an immense hope opened up before him; he believed he had discovered the universal panacea, the elixir of life, which was to combat ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire counts for so much and is ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... OF THE EXCHEQUER'S Budget statement was praised by his predecessor for its ability and lucidity. Personally, I thought rapidity was its most notable characteristic. Unhampered by manuscript (save a couple of sheets of notepaper containing a few of the principal figures) and relying upon his exceptional memory, he rattled through his thousand-million ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... is really, for the civilised world at this day, what Petrarch has been too enthusiastically declared to be—the first of the moderns. He is so as against even the great Rabelais, because Rabelais misses directness, misses universality, misses lucidity, in his gigantic mirth; he is so as against Petrarch, because he is emphatically an impressionist where Petrarch is a framer of studied compositions; he is so against Erasmus, because Erasmus also is a framer of artificial compositions ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... contemporaneous with his incumbency of the Greek professorship at Lund (1812-1824). In this period he enriches Swedish literature with a series of lyrics which still rank among the best both in point of lucidity of thought and brilliance of diction. Only a few that stand out most prominently in a list of about one hundred poems from this ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... elegance and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,—incoherence by reason of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations were subject ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... sweet features, her figure, her hand, so finely modelled, closer than when he accompanied his friend in their wild rush through the streets, he was struck by the surprising phenomenon of the moral second-sight which a man exalted by love invariably finds within him. With what lucidity had Michel Chrestien read into that soul, that heart, illumined by the fires of love! Thus the princess acquired, in d'Arthez's eyes, another charm; a ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... Ferrara, the friends of Don Juan, and the prince himself gave an exclamation of horror. Two hundred years later, under Louis XV, well-bred persons would have laughed at this sally. But perhaps at the beginning of an orgy the mind had still an unusual degree of lucidity. Despite the heat of the candles, the intensity of the emotions, the gold and silver vases, the fumes of wine, despite the vision of ravishing women, perhaps there still lurked in the depths of the heart a little of that respect for things human and divine which struggles until the ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... of restoring lucidity and clearness to his judgment. He turned his eyes towards the soup which the jailer had brought, rose, staggered towards it, raised the vessel to his lips, and drank off the contents with a feeling of indescribable pleasure. He had often heard that ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... are made with great lucidity. The result is the throwing of an additional flood of light on the already dazzling truths of Holy Writ. The uses of such a work are self-obvious; and when we add that the plan is carried out with all the ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... by day he heard him go over the same ground again and again. His life in Egypt for the last few months was expressed in broken sentences and vivid declarations, uttered sometimes with astonishing gravity and lucidity. At times Abdul was deceived into thinking that he was conscious, that his reasoning powers had returned, that he was quite sensible. But he was soon undeceived by a sudden breaking-off in the continuity of the words, or a return to confused, half-meaningless sentences. It ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... jurisprudence; for she did not know how to spend her days when she had reviewed her flower-beds and given her orders to the gardener. Gifted with an excellent memory, and the talent which some women have for hitting on the right word, she could talk on any subject with the lucidity of a studied style. And so men came from Cosne, from la Charite, and from Nevers, on the right bank; from Lere, Vailly, Argent, Blancafort, and Aubigny, on the left bank, to be introduced to Madame de la Baudraye, ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... judgment of ideas, and rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... Father Brown, with lumbering lucidity, "as you wouldn't leave any tracks for the police, of course somebody had to. At every place we went to, I took care to do something that would get us talked about for the rest of the day. I didn't do much harm—a splashed wall, spilt apples, a broken ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... question is whether a word for word version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... The waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses of the La Batie woods,—all and everything delighted me. It seemed to me as though the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... thought as she brushed out her hair and put it up in a big, gleaming knot. Here she had been engaged for a whole hour and a half, and was getting calmer every minute, instead of the reverse. She astonished herself by the lucidity of her brain, although it only worked by snatches—there being lacunae when she could not have told what she was doing. And yet, as she had approached the house, sitting again beside the Colonel, she had looked with a new thrill of interest at its imposing battlemented facade. The great ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... interrupted at this point by the appearance of a buffalo, which showed that we were drawing near to the scene of action. But as Makarooroo's description is not remarkable for lucidity, I may explain here that the hopo, or trap, consists of two parts; one part may be termed the conducting hedges, the other the pit at their termination, and into which the game is driven. The conducting hedges ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... the facts which by general consent in the present stage of psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple people[1] in a rudimentary form, and in a more developed ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... wandering from the immediate point of discussion, and her anxiety to avoid involving herself or her husband in trouble, had created a chaotic confusion in her mind, which somewhat interfered with the lucidity of her statements. Little by little, however, Maryllia extracted a sufficient number of facts from her hesitating and reluctant evidence to gain considerable information on many points respecting the management of her estate, and she began to feel that her return home was providential and had ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... green fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... things at their worst, if we take, in view of the most formidable hypothesis, the necessary precautions, let us keep the lucidity of our spirit, the firmness of our reason. To judge from all the common elements, it does not seem that the international situation is desperate. To be sure, it is grave, but all chances of an amicable adjustment ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... Monday, March 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... clustered cupolas assist the general effect of roundness aimed at by the architect. Such a church as this proves how much may be achieved by the happy distribution of architectural masses. It was the triumph of the best Renaissance style to attain lucidity of treatment, and to produce beauty by geometrical proportion. When Leo Battista Alberti complained to his friend, Matteo di Bastia, that a slight alteration of the curves in his design for S. Francesco at Rimini would 'spoil his music,' cio che tu muti discorda ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... contemporary one we possess. He traces her malady from its incipiency, through the successive disquieting manifestations of hysteria, melancholia, and fury, broken by periods of partial and even complete mental lucidity. Such intervals became rarer and briefer as time ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
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