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More "Saturnine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking restless and anxious, he sent her to the kitchen to get her dinner with Joseph; and with the master of the house, grim and saturnine, and Hareton absolutely dumb, I made a cheerless ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Perona. Nareda's Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... of them to meet daily, to study and to ponder over. And types as far apart as the three points of a triangle; the man at her side, young, witty, agreeable; Cathewe, grave, kindly, and sometimes rather saturnine; Breitmann, proud and reserved; and each of them having rung true in some great crisis. If ever she loved a man . . . The thought remained unfinished and she glanced up and met Fitzgerald's eyes. They were sad, with the line of a ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... with a very small and saturnine clergyman decorated with a shock of ebon hair, who ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... then a child must have noted that something was wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally silent returns,—and more than once the ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... letters." May I ask Aristarchus how he would render "Sal'am" (vol ii. 24), which apparently he would confine to "Arabic MSS."(!). Or would he prefer A(llah) b(less) h(im) a(nd) k(eep) "W.G.B." (whom God bless) as proposed by the editor of Ockley? But where would be the poor old "Saturnine" if obliged to do better than the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... always lasted the whole morning), sitting in the center, or place of honor, taking snuff fiercely, talking liberal sentiments in a cracked voice, and apparently feeling extreme pleasure in making the respectable middle classes stare at her in reverent amazement. Also, two Royal Academicians—a saturnine Academician, swaddled in a voluminous cloak; and a benevolent Academician, with a slovenly umbrella, and a perpetual smile. Also, the doctor and his wife, who admired the massive frame of "Columbus," but said not a word about the picture itself. Also, Mr. Bullivant, the sculptor, and Mr. Hemlock, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... temperament, but defers his judgement to that of the physicians, who declare the Pope of a sanguine-choleric nature; or when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the victor of Ravenna, whom Giorgione painted and Bambaia carved, and whom all the historians describe, had the saturnine temperament. No doubt those who use these expressions mean something by them; but the terms in which they tell us their meaning are strangely out of date in the Italy of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... taken the kinks out of Judge Gatchell's joints, he came to see us—a tall, thin, punctilious, saturnine old gentleman with frosty Scotch eyes and the complexion of a pair of washed khaki trousers. Chaos reigned in Hynds House then, and he was forced to pick his way, like an elderly and cautious cat, between piled-up chairs, tables, and rolls of carpet. In the most stately manner he parted ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... strode Abdur Kad'r, a lean, saturnine Arab, who anathematized all his assistants indiscriminately, only varying his epithets according to the nationality of the man under the lash of ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Genoa, with instructions; his young wife and her sister Desiree accompanied him. Perhaps the new, variable impressions of the journey, perhaps her separation from Bonaparte, and her association with other officers less gloomy than the saturnine Napoleon, all this seemed to cool the love of Desiree Clary; she no more answered Napoleon's letters, and, in writing to his brother Joseph, he made bitter complaints: "It seems that to reach Genoa the River ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... proprietor, a crusty Kentish man with a crab-apple face, one or two of his servants, and another servant privately attached to Lord James Herries. He was a young Scotchman named Campbell, who looked much more distinguished than his bilious-looking master, having chestnut hair and a long saturnine face with large but fine features. He was probably the one really efficient person in ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... was rather tall than short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess, she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit, slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man, very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... finger-print expert was a police official of middle-age, Inspector Weyling, of the Sussex County Police. He was a saturnine sort of man, with a hooked nose, a skin like parchment, and a perfectly bald sugar-loaf head, surmounted at the top by a wen as large as a duck-egg. His deferential attitude and obsequious tone whenever Superintendent Merrington chose to address ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... not, I mean it," Nicky-Nan assured him, with a saturnine frown. "If you can give over holdin' your belly an' listen, I don't mind tellin' you my opinion o' this here War; which is, that 'tis a put-up job from start to finish, with no other object than to ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... Fleetwood speaks of standing at such times as if it were a singularity rather than otherwise.[1124] Hickes, on the other hand, writes in 1701, as if those who refused to stand at the singing of psalms and anthems were for the most part 'stiff, morose, and saturnine votists.'[1125] In fact, High Churchmen insisted on the one posture, while Low Churchmen generally preferred the other; and so the custom remained very variable, until the High Church reaction of Queen Anne's time succeeded in establishing, ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... unintelligence with which she received his reminiscences of travel. For the moment, the torturing stress was lifted from his soul; he wished that the breakfast in the miller's house might never come to an end; he explored the mill with Flavia; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine preference for steam power in the milling business; he made the others share his mood; he pushed far from him the series of tragic or squalid facts which had continually brought the end to him in reveries in which he found himself holding his breath, as if he might hold it till ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... in the house. He took to the winter hunting and snow-shoeing with vigor. Whenever he came indoors I used to see him watching Madame de Ferrier with saturnine wistfulness. She paid no attention to him. He would stand gazing at her while she sewed; being privileged as an educated Indian and my attendant, to enter the family room where the Pawnees came only to serve. They had the ample kitchen and its log fire to themselves. I ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... son with tidings. Well, Jack, have you found your sister?" he added, addressing a dark and somewhat saturnine young man who now rode up to them from over the ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... become known in the duchy, and though it begot no feeling against him in war-time, now that Bercy was in a neutral zone of peace there was much talk of the wrongs of Guida and the Countess Chantavoine. He became moody and saturnine, and saw few of his subjects save the old Governor-General and his whilom enemy, now his friend, Count Carignan Damour. That at last he should choose to accompany him to Vienna the man who had been his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said he, "the boy is a woman!" And though he had a saturnine and harsh countenance, his disposition was both merry and lenient. He teased her unmercifully, threatening to promote so fine a lad to a gentleman of his bed-chamber. He bade a woman bring some clothing suitable ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... yourself in that predicament. Is he, Ronald?' With the instinct of the well-trained female to draw into her circle any odd man hovering about on the periphery, Mrs. Freddy appealed to her brother-in-law. Lord Borrodaile turned in her direction his long sallow face—a face that would have been saturnine but for its touch of whimsicality and a singularly charming smile. 'My brother-in-law will bear me out,' Mrs. Freddy went on, quite as though breaking ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... with the pole labored in silence. At times he stopped just long enough to roll a huge cigar, and to feast his bright eyes upon the fair girl whom he silently adored. Lazaro, as patron, sat in the stern, saturnine and unimpassioned. The woman, exhausted by the recent mental strain, dozed throughout the journey. Carmen alone seemed alive to her environment. Every foot of advance unfolded to her new delights. She sang; ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With a bold effort, I flung open my door, hurried down the stairs, and reached the hall. The first person I met was a kind of pantry boy, a beast only lately emancipated from the plough, and destined after a dozen years' training as a ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... portico of a temple. The temple door is in the middle of the portico. A veiled and robed woman of majestic carriage passes along behind the columns towards the entrance. From the opposite direction a man of compact figure, clean-shaven, saturnine, and self-centred: in short, very like Napoleon I, and wearing a military uniform of Napoleonic cut, marches with measured steps; places his hand in his lapel in the traditional manner; and fixes the woman with his eye. She stops, her attitude expressing haughty amazement at his audacity. He ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... two days Io Welland lolled and lazed and listened to Miss Van Arsdale's music, or read, or took little walks between showers. No further mention was made by her hostess of the circumstances of the visit. She was a reticent woman; almost saturnine, Io decided, though her perfect and effortless courtesy preserved her from being antipathetic to any one beneath her own roof. How much her silence as to the unusual situation was inspired by consideration ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... said that we owe to the grave and saturnine Monarch, who extended his pardon to the seventeen convicted in 1633, that happy generalisation of the term, which appropriates honourably to the sex in Lancashire the designation denoting the fancied crime of a few miserable ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... sake of your excellency's coat buttons," said politely the saturnine Gonzales. "We found those of the dead mariner concealed on her person. But your excellency may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been done on ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... feeling. Gleams of an ethereal Love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity; he could clasp the whole Universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humour, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... pupils trooped obediently to school, Mary noted that they carried no flowers to their dear teacher, but that Ben, the oldest pupil, twenty-one years old, six feet four inches in height and deeply saturnine in manner, carried a six-shooter in his cartridge-belt. The teacher felt that she was the last to deny a pupil any reasonable palliative of the tedium of class-hours—the nearness of her own school-days inclined her to leniency in this particular—but she ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with this attack, which was the work of an unorganised and irresponsible band of ten or twelve thousand mountaineers gathered from the wilds of Virginia, North Carolina and Kentucky and Tennessee. They were moon-shiners, feudists, hilly-billies, small farmers and basket-makers, men of lean and saturnine appearance, some of them horse thieves, pirates of the forest who cared little for the laws of God or man and fought as ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... breathed in torment. It was like the sudden opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him vividly—his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... from his youth upwards. In the younger part of his life he had been wild and licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the vices of revenge and ambition, which continued, notwithstanding his religious professions, to exercise no small sway over his mind. Daring in design, precipitate and violent in execution, and going to the very extremity of the most rigid recusancy, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... themselves into ladies' affections: his exterior was against him, and he seemed too conscious of his disadvantages in that particular. Mrs. Warricombe found it difficult to shape a few civil phrases for the acceptance of the saturnine student. Sidwell, repelled and in a measure alarmed by his bilious countenance, could do no more than grant him her delicately gloved fingers. Peak, for his part, had nothing to say. He did not even affect an interest in these persons, and turned his eyes to follow the withdrawing Earwaker. Mr. ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... professor's moral feeling. Gleams of an ethereal love burst forth from him, soft wailings of infinite pity; he could clasp the whole universe into his bosom, and keep it warm; it seems as if under that rude exterior there dwelt a very seraph. Then, again, he is so sly, and still so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness, towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter, sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... in this one thing, which with my eyes I have seen, and what with my hands I have done. For what Philosophers say of themselves, I also have with my hands handled this Spark of the Eternal Wisdome, or this Saturnine Catholick Magnesia of Philosophers, a Fire of potency sufficient to penetrate Stones, yea, a Treasure of so great value, as 20 Tun of Gold cannot exceed the price thereof. What seek you? I believe what I have seen with the eyes of Thomas, and handled as he, (but in ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... walked steadily to and fro. The boat, propelled lustily by Godfrey of the saturnine smile, bounded towards the land. It grounded on a rapidly shelving beach on which they sprang ashore. Godfrey attached the boat to a stone, and gave her plenty of rope ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... feverish, nervous haste the Frenchwoman had packed her chosen belongings into the one little trunk the stage people would consent to carry, lo! there came to her a messenger from headquarters where Colonel Byrne, grim, silent, saturnine, was again in charge. Any attempt on her part to leave would result in her being turned over at once to the civil authorities, and Elise understood and raved, but risked not going to jail. Mullins, nursed by his devoted Norah, was sitting up each day ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... power over the reader as Tacitus. If by eloquence is meant the ability to persuade, then he is the most eloquent historian that ever existed. To doubt his judgment is almost to be false to the conscience of history. Nevertheless, his saturnine portraits have been severely criticised both by English and French historians, and the arguments for the defence put forward with enthusiasm as well as force. The result is, that Tacitus's verdict has been shaken, but not reversed. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance. We laugh at the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... fifty yards when Henry gave a signal to stop and Jim and Tom rested on their oars. Then they heard a burst of firing behind them, and a smile of saturnine triumph spread slowly but completely over ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... their Converse, easy; in their Dealings just; placable in their Resentments, in their Friendship steady:—They have neither the volatile Airyness of the Frenchman, the stated Gravity of the Spaniard; the supicious Jealousy of the Italian; the forbidding Haughtiness of the German; the saturnine Gloominess of the Flandrican, nor the sordid Parsimony of the Dutchman: In short, they are neither whimsical, splenetic, sullen or capricious:—And, as for Cunning, Craft, or Dissimulation, these are such sorry Guests ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke
... alienation (mania, melancholia, paranoia, circular insanity, dementia); mental alienation in conjunction with neurosis (epilepsy, hysteria, progressive general paralysis); alienation resulting from toxic influences (alcoholism, including forms produced by indulgence in absinthe and coca, saturnine encephalopathy, pellagra). An investigation is made into the etiology of these various forms with special reference to ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... a long time after this. A doctor was called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long saturnine face, slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and gave me medicine, which of course ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... plot they called in a saturnine, lank, drunken individual whose name was Hube Maloney. Maloney picked out two men of his own type as assistants. He stipulated only that plenty of "refreshments" should be supplied. According to instructions Maloney was to operate boldly and flagrantly in ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the Pantheon before, had never been inside a building with so great a dome. They stood under it now. She sent her glance up to its vast, dim, noble heights and brought it down to the saturnine, unsavory wreck at her side. She was regretting the impulse which had made her call out to him. What could she say to him now they were together? What word, what breath could be gentle enough, light enough not to be poison to that ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... clasps of steel. This book, whether accidentally or not, was so turned outwardly from the person as to discover the words "Rituel Catholique" in white letters upon the back. His entire physiognomy was interestingly saturnine—even cadaverously pale. The forehead was lofty, and deeply furrowed with the ridges of contemplation. The corners of the mouth were drawn down into an expression of the most submissive humility. There was also a clasping of the hands, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... is the best trick in the priest's game. Gravity is always mistaken by the multitude for wisdom. A round-faced merry fellow shall make a bright, sensible speech, and he will be voted frivolous; but a long-faced, saturnine fellow shall utter a string of dull platitudes, and he will be voted a Solon. This is well known to the clergy, who have developed a perfect art of dullness. They talk an infinite deal of nothing, use a multitude of solemn words to hide an absurdity or no meaning at all, and utter the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... bending from the car beneath his gently swaying canopy of liver-colour and pale blue, directed the proceedings with a mien of saturnine preoccupation. He may have been calculating the receipts. As I squeezed to the front, his underlings were shifting the pipe which conveyed the hydrogen gas, and the Lunardi strained gently at its ropes. Somebody with a playful thrust sent me staggering ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sat at tea there stalked into the kitchen a nondescript sort of dog, a creature of fairish size, of a rambling structure, so to speak, coloured a puzzling grayish brown with underlying hints of yellow, with vast drooping ears, and a long and most saturnine countenance. ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Saturnine. Friends, that haue beene Thus forward in my Right, I thanke you all, and heere Dismisse you all, And to the Loue and Fauour of my Countrey, Commit my Selfe, my Person, and the Cause: Rome, be as iust and gracious vnto me, As I am confident ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Thucydides is silent. The antique Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque details about the rookeries and the ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... (two years at the war), an envied, quoted and omniscient columnist since his return from France. Journalistically he could rise no higher, and none of the frequent distinguished parties given by the Sophisticates was complete without the long lounging body and saturnine countenance of Mr. Lee Clavering. As soon as he had set foot upon the ladder of prominence Mr. Clavering had realized the value of dramatizing himself, and although he was as active of body as of mind and of an amiable and genial disposition, ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... enjoy this moving tale with its lovely and ardent heroine, its frank, fearless hero, its glowing love passages, and its variety of characters, captivating or engaging humorous or saturnine, villains, rascals, and men of good will. A tale strong and interesting in plot, faithful and vivid as a picture of wild mountain life, and in its characterization full of warmth ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... as ready to advise and instruct; but there is reason to believe that his communication was rather useful than entertaining. He declares of himself that he was saturnine, and not one of those whose sprightly sayings diverted company; and one of ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... a wary eye upon him, although he was chewing, with as dully reflective an expression as a cow. Beside Rebecca sat a woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her. Rebecca paid no attention to either of them. She was tall and spare and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled up in a canvas bag, on her left hip, as if it had ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... of entertaining a notion in his head, so out of the common track,—that I fear the reader, when I come to mention it to him, if he is the least of a cholerick temper, will immediately throw the book by; if mercurial, he will laugh most heartily at it;—and if he is of a grave and saturnine cast, he will, at first sight, absolutely condemn as fanciful and extravagant; and that was in respect to the choice and imposition of christian names, on which he thought a great deal more depended than what superficial minds were capable ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... of his more accurate associates, some of my readers may anticipate me in pronouncing him to be Sir Harry Boyle. Upon his left sat a figure the most unlike him possible. He was a tall, thin, bony man, with a bolt-upright air and a most saturnine expression; his eyes were covered by a deep green shade, which fell far over his face, but failed to conceal a blue scar that crossing his cheek ended in the angle of his mouth, and imparted to that feature, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the length and breadth of Italy; but when you have seen one you have seen them all, for they all have the same expression. The eyes are generally large and ill shaped, the nose is long, the face is wan and meagre, and there is a peevish and almost saturnine expression in the wooden features which shows but slight affection for the Christ-child, and which could have afforded but scant comfort to any who sought to find there a gleam of tender pity. These pictures were generally half-length, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... been of the minority in Congress and have seen the Democrats kicked about, trampled upon, and otherwise manhandled by Republicans, so that I must confess it now gives me a saturnine pleasure to see the Democrats in a position to do the same thing ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... I cared for most, in those early days, the man or the woman. It had been with him that I first made acquaintance; we were both engaged on journalistic work, reporting, you know, on different papers—and we came across each other once or twice in that way. He was a saturnine, queer-tempered fellow, taciturn at times, and at other times possessed by a wry sense of humour which made him excellent company, though it kept one in a state of alert disquiet. He would say things with ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... a saturnine spirit, full of bitterness and envy, an ambitious, unscrupulous, gloomy, crafty man, who had acquired a great empire over my son. Gilbert made the mistake of confiding in him and asking his advice. That was the origin ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... Tokkaido sculptor copies the conventional artistic notion of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods—whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... hand on Jack's supporting arm and her eyes gazing dreamily at the deck planks. She took even more pleasure in Jack's society than she did in that of her husband and son, both of whom were at this time gloomy, saturnine, silent ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... purpose; and almost all the anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the saturnine poet smile—"That is the man who goes to hell whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which her companion observed—"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he has, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... flasks recently collected by Mrs. Norris. There were, additionally, a porcelain image of two farmers, dos a dos, one with rosy cheeks and flashing eye labelled "water," and the other, haggard and ill-favoured, labelled "gin"; also a brace of saturnine china cats. Above the mantel stretched an expanse of oak panelling which supported the portrait of Mrs. Norris's great-great-grandfather in a heavy gilt frame. The old gentleman, who looked amiably out from his starched neckcloth, ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... were at the corner of Kearney and California streets. Thither, with some half-formed mission in his mind, Francisco took his way. A saturnine man took him up in a little box-like elevator, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... time's old graveyard I return And scrape the moss from memory's pictured urn. Who, in these days when all things go by steam, Recalls the stage-coach with its four-horse team? Its sturdy driver,—who remembers him? Or the old landlord, saturnine and grim, Who left our hill-top for a new abode And reared his sign-post farther down the road? Still in the waters of the dark Shawshine Do the young bathers splash and think they're clean? Do pilgrims find their way ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... praises. He coaxed the jealous demon within him until he must have become a perfect pest to himself and all the friends round about him. He uttered jokes so deep that his simple mother did not know their meaning, but sate bewildered at his sarcasms, and powerless what to think of his moody, saturnine humour. ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... folk for the most part, returning to their villages, leading mules and donkeys slung with empty panniers, and shouting greetings through the bars of the gate to acquaintances who led in other mules laden with vegetables and provisions. Among these stood some priests, saturnine and silent, bent, doubtless, upon dark business of their own. A squad of Spanish soldiers waited also, the insolence of the master in their eyes; they were marching to some neighbouring city. There, too, appeared Foy van ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... of the big cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a small piece of paper. Some compromising scrap, I ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... over in my mind the disquieting conversation that had just passed between Dominguez and myself; then, my gaze happening to wander aft to the solitary figure at the tiller, I sauntered aft and endeavoured to strike up a conversation with him. The fellow, however, proved to be so boorish and saturnine in his manner that I quickly abandoned the attempt and, pitching my half-smoked cigar over the rail, retired below and tumbled, "all standing," into the bunk that Dominguez had indicated as mine, where, despite the food for serious reflection that the occurrences of the night ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... even by the Skipper, and the others watched him fascinated as he glared at his victim, and even the iron composure of the saturnine mate seemed to be moved partially aside. The Mexican began to whimper and moan as his eyes shifted to avoid the terrible ones of the Captain. He was not suffering any special violence, but a strange tremor filled the soul of the Mexican, in the grip ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... than ever. So she went, leaving behind her no tangible token, except a tiny pearl-colored glove, which Guy twisted rather pensively between his fingers as he stood on the hall steps, and watched the carriage disappear down the avenue. Mr. Bruce exulted after his saturnine fashion, and Isabel Raymond trembled; the one had lost a strong, unscrupulous ally, the other ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... for the Congress. Elected to the House, he was immediately greeted by connoisseurs of the best stamp— President Martin van Buren, "prince of good fellows;" Webster, another intellect, saturnine in repose and mercurial in activity; the convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings placed him under the trained politicians. ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... jacket opening to display his white shirt and flowing black silk necktie, and also, incidentally, a brace of revolvers, suggestively stuck in the broad elastic belt which girt his waist, and with a smile of insolent triumph upon his dark, saturnine, but otherwise rather good-looking face, stood alone at the break of the poop, with both hands thrust deep into his trousers pockets and his white-canvas-shod feet planted wide apart, watchfully regarding the ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... sapphire, stood the image of Saturn in elutian (Motteux reads 'Eliacim.') lead, with his scythe in his hand, and at his feet a crane of gold, very artfully enamelled, according to the native hue of the saturnine bird. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... obscure year 1598, while the star of Essex was setting, that of his natural rival did not burn more brightly. But although now, and for the brief remainder of Elizabeth's life, Raleigh was nominally in favour, the saturnine old woman had no longer any tenderness for her Captain of the Guard. Her old love, her old friendship, had quite passed away. There was no longer any excuse for excluding from her presence so valuable a soldier and so wise a courtier, but her pulses had ceased to thrill at his coming. ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... up a back number of "Punch," and reads the advertisements with deep interest. Meanwhile, the Loquacious Assistant has bowed out the Sympathetic Customer, and touched a bell. A Saturnine Assistant appears, still masticating bread-and-butter. The Second Customer removes his hat, revealing a denuded crown, and thereby causing surprise and a distinct increase of complacency in the Grizzled Gentleman, who submits himself to the Loquacious Assistant. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 19, 1892 • Various
... driver, who declared that last year a red-fox on the Slave stole a decoy duck and hunted with it for three seasons at the river-lip, placing it among the sedges and pouncing on the lured game. He was a serious-minded saturnine Scots-Slavi and told the story without moving ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... instead of becoming gay, waxed ever more portentous and sublime. When he was almost sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his face assumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors, the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his face you might know him, but it would ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of all of them grew saturnine at that announcement. For Chairman Presson was not recognized as the especial friend of prohibition by the fanatics of ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... presence and more inconsiderate in his dress. His lank limbs were clad, I might also say clutched, in very tight grey sleeves and pantaloons; he had a long, sallow, aquiline face which seemed somehow all the more saturnine because his lantern jaws were imprisoned in his collar and neck-cloth more in the style of the old stock; and his hair (which ought to have been dark brown) was of an odd dim, russet colour which, in conjunction with ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... stood talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empresse, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something ... something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than I could ever quite visualise hers. I wondered vaguely how Churchill could ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... by several years the junior of her husband, and in all respects different from him. Her hair and eyes were raven-black, her complexion dark and saturnine, and she wore an expression of care inconsistent with enjoyment. She had been for many years a childless wife, and it may be that early disappointment, occasioned by the want of children, uniting with a melancholy temperament, had imparted an appearance of dejection which the subsequent ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn't look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in London ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... nostrils large and strained: a face set to one tragic purpose. A man of few words, fewer gestures, and much significance. On the whole, interesting, and even attractive, but not friendly. He stands for a moment, saturnine in the ruddy light, to see who is present, looking in a singular and rather deadly way at Sir Howard; then with some surprise and uneasiness at Lady Cicely. Finally he comes down into the middle of the garden, and confronts Rankin, who has been glaring at him in consternation from the moment ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... smile that lighted up his somewhat saturnine features in a marvellous manner, "I must confess that there have been moments when I have had my suspicions. And I shall be by no means sorry if those suspicions turn out to be well founded; for she is an exceptionally ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... himself gazing at the gray saturnine countenance that had burnt itself into his memory. Urga—the Mercutian who had kidnaped Joan! His muscles tensed suddenly for a quick spring, then relaxed. He must ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... score with unmitigated justice. It is this feeling, unrivalled for poetic beauty, that gives color and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. With little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come into happier latitudes. Every strange visitor breathes love and forgiveness. The shade we meet is only charged with tidings of joy to the living, and messages of good ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... bound to believe in something or somebody. And the story she had heard of the Rev. Charles Jacomb's assiduous, earnest, uncomplaining labour in that big parish had at the very outset won for him her great regard. He did not understand how he was destroying her childlike faith in him by his saturnine little jokes. ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... whole found little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the bluff King Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only partially. They thought much better of her than they had of her saturnine sister, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... England in early manhood and remained away for some years. His family understood that he had gone to seek a fortune in the wilds of the earth. He reappeared—a saturnine silent man—as suddenly as he had gone away. In his wanderings he had gained a fortune but partly lost the use of one eye. The partial loss of an eye did not matter much in a country like England, where most people have two eyes and very ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... still looking the agreeable—so far as his saturnine features would admit of such expression—"to what happy circumstance am I indebted for the honour ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... holds a rosary, which may be significant of the piety attributed to Chaucer by Occleve, or may be a mere ordinary accompaniment of conversation, as it is in parts of Greece to the present day. The features are mild but expressive, with just a suspicion—certainly no more—of saturnine or sarcastic humour. The lips are full, and the nose is what is called good by the learned in such matters. Several other early portraits of Chaucer exist, all of which are stated to bear much resemblance to one another. Among them is one in ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... would be in on the first boat to personally oversee the clean-ups. The ex-missionary, Bill discovered, had the reputation of being a tight man, and meanly suspicious in money matters. He reposed no confidence in his superintendent, a surly, saturnine fellow known as Black Jack Berg, nor in Denny Slevin, his foreman. So much Laughing Bill gathered from ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... a temper admirably adapted to the circumstances in which he was placed. Of a cold and saturnine, rather than an arden disposition, he was never either so much elevated by good fortune or depressed by bad, as to lose for an instant the full possession of all his faculties. He saw that immediate escape ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... to accept this argument as conclusive, but some mischievous spirit put it into the breast of the saturnine Carolus to contradict her, notwithstanding the lesson he ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... translation of J. I. Hollandus, which is dated 1670, addresses the reader as follows: "Kind reader, the philosophers have written much about their lead, which as Basilus has taught, is prepared from antimony; and I am under the impression that this saturnine work of the present philosopher, Mr. Johann Isaak Hollandus, is not to be understood of common lead ... but of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... cost half a lira more), upon which and the damp sinister rooms where the place of execution and oubliette were situated, a saturnine custodian says all that is necessary. Let me, however, quote a warning from the little Venetian guide-book: "Everybody to whom are pointed out the prisons to which Carmagnola, Jacopo Foscari, Antonio Foscarini, etc., were confined, will ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... as his word. He got a French Chief with an aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him. Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was a count and ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... is no serdab; or if discovering it I find no lamps in it, what then?' He smiled grimly with that saturnine smile of his, so rarely seen for years ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... of the ill-starred combination under Chatham's nominal leadership—for during the next two years Chatham was absolutely incapacitated from all attention to business, his policy was reversed by his colleagues, and America taxed by Charles Townshend—he maintained an 'attitude of saturnine reserve,' amusing himself with landscape gardening at his villa at Highgate, doing its honours to Warburton, Hurd, Garrick and other friends, and corresponding among others with Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, to whom he had been introduced by his brother Sir Joseph. Gradually, ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... a man, and he babbled on, till I announced my intention of going to bed. If this was Amos's bagman, who had been seen in company with Gresson, I understood how idle may be the suspicions of a clever man. He had probably foregathered with Gresson on the Skye boat, and wearied that saturnine ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... When once he starts, it were too much to say He visibly gets farther on his way: But all allow, he ponders well his course— For future uses hoarding present force. The flippant deem him slow and saturnine, The summed-up phlegm of that illustrious line; But we, his honest adversaries, who More highly prize him than his false friends do, Frankly admire that simple mass and weight— A solid Roman pillar of the State, So inharmonious ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... of them grew saturnine at that announcement. For Chairman Presson was not recognized as the especial friend of prohibition by the fanatics ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... and that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light—one might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... looking fifteen years younger without his false beard. Then came a very black-looking man, with a face all eyebrows. Then a soldier in uniform. Then a little, wiry man, who jumped about as though excited—I could only see him when he jumped: he had an unpleasant, saturnine face, which frightened me. That, as far as I could see, was the whole company. When I first began to listen, the man in uniform was speaking to the handsome man at the head of the table. I knew at once, when he said Your Majesty, that he was talking to James, ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... and Julia were not made for each other. He was thriftless, idle, dissolute—the small roue of the neighbourhood: she was careful, industrious, virtuous. He was good-looking—of a dark, saturnine beauty, insidiously impressive, like the dangerous charms of a tempter; she was radiant and lustrous with the sweet graces of modesty, innocence, and intelligence. Julia, however, young and susceptible, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... wide by Indian runners, finding its way even to the Red River of the North. These, coupled with his oratory and mummeries, greatly enhanced an influence which was possibly added to by a gloomy and saturnine countenance, made more forbidding still by the loss of an eye. Unfortunately for Tecumseh's enterprise, the Prophet was more bent upon personal notoriety than upon the welfare of his people; and, whilst professing the latter, indulged his ambition, in Tecumseh's ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... on; the very gesture I had assumed for vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With a bold effort, I flung open my door, hurried down the stairs, and reached the hall. The first person I met was a kind of pantry boy, a beast only lately ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... lighted up the saturnine gloom of his present mood. "It was hardly worth mentioning," he answered, with bitter mirth. "Between five and six thousand shares were subscribed, all told. I think the withdrawals by telegraph brought it down to practically five thousand. We offered a hundred thousand, you know.—But let ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Scott Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong, cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to qualities naturally distasteful to him. It still seems strange to me that in ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... Kad'r, a lean, saturnine Arab, who anathematized all his assistants indiscriminately, only varying his epithets according to the nationality of the man under the lash of his ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... passengers participated in the information. On the seat beside him lay a large book in red binding, which proved to be another guide book, and to which he referred when the smaller one failed him. Immediately behind him sat a saturnine-looking gentleman (also provided with a railway guide), with whom he frequently conversed, addressing him as 'John,' and who seemed to be his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... melancholia, paranoia, circular insanity, dementia); mental alienation in conjunction with neurosis (epilepsy, hysteria, progressive general paralysis); alienation resulting from toxic influences (alcoholism, including forms produced by indulgence in absinthe and coca, saturnine encephalopathy, pellagra). An investigation is made into the etiology of these various forms with special ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... of Hazon's saturnine mouth drooped in ever so faint a grin as his keen eyes fixed themselves for a moment full upon the other's face. Laurence had forgotten the tell-tale imprint left in the centre of his forehead by the muzzle. "So? See here, Stanninghame, don't be ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... we find, every where, that the most Saturnine, the dullest, and stupidest, and lowest, are generally the fondest of this sort ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 7, May 14, 1870 • Various
... in it: he attires himself in tawdry sentiment as in a flowered waistcoat. What a difference between him, at this period, and his contemporary Benjamin Disraeli, who indeed committed similar inanities, but with a saturnine sense of humor cropping out at every turn which altered the whole complexion of the performance. We laugh at the one, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... accepted this proposition in a sort of panting silence, which remained unbroken while the lawyer crossed the floor, unlocked the cupboard and brought out before them a bottle which he held up before their eyes with a simulated glee almost saturnine. ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green
... chamber with his dark, saturnine face all flushed. "A brave woman!—a bold woman!" he kept saying. "An awful service she was like to have done me; and all to think that it was for love of poor Frank." For this Prince had known the Lord Francis well, and had ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... the year. Nor did it mean imparting his secret to others, for there was only Mrs. Cork's son, a widower, who being out at work all day would be easily outwitted, the more so as he was stone deaf and of a slow and saturnine disposition. To be sure there was little Polly, Mrs. Cork's granddaughter, but either Mr. Tebrick forgot her altogether, or else reckoned her as a mere baby and not to be thought ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... parts of this play, and particularly the garden-scene where Malvolio picks up the letter, if we were to say that his genius for comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters is more saturnine ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... for the sake of your excellency's coat buttons," said politely the saturnine Gonzales. "We found those of the dead mariner concealed on her person. But your excellency may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been done ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... a way our saturnine post had of pretending that he brought no letters and passing the door. Then he turned back. "Mistress McQumpha," ...
— A Window in Thrums • J. M. Barrie
... the play did not fascinate me. It was the middle of some jocular after piece; roars of laughter resounded round me. I could detect nothing to laugh at, and sending my keen eyes into every corner, I perceived at last, in the uppermost tier, one face as saturnine as my own.—Eureka! It was the Captain's! "Why should he go to a play if he enjoys it so little?" thought I; "better have spent a shilling on ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... last were off there was neither necessity nor occasion for the two surprised and rather pallid young people to renew civilities; but later, Destiny, the saturnine partner in the business, interfered; and some fool in the smoking room tried to introduce Selwyn to Ruthven. The slightest mistake on their parts would have rendered the incident ridiculous; and ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... impressive scene in the gloom of the big cellar. The man who personated the inspector (he was no stranger to the part) was speaking harshly, and giving bogus orders to his bogus subordinates for the removal of his prisoners. Evidently nothing enlightening had happened so far. Horne, saturnine and swarthy, waited with folded arms, and his patient, moody expectation had an air of stoicism well in keeping with the situation. I detected in the shadows one of the Hermione Street group surreptitiously chewing up and swallowing a small piece of paper. Some compromising ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... It was the underlying essence, the circumambient ether, in which alone the pulsations of existence had their being; it was the one eternal reality; men might come and men might go, but talk went on for ever. It is difficult, especially for those born under the Saturnine influence of an English sky, quite to realise the nature of such conversation. Brilliant, charming, easy-flowing, gay and rapid it must have been; never profound, never intimate, never thrilling; but also never emphatic, never affected, never languishing, and never dull. Madame ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... him; but something of art was wanting to the drama till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who succeeded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... I mean it," Nicky-Nan assured him, with a saturnine frown. "If you can give over holdin' your belly an' listen, I don't mind tellin' you my opinion o' this here War; which is, that 'tis a put-up job from start to finish, with no other object than to ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... distant sea, but when it came to securing passage, and in feverish, nervous haste the Frenchwoman had packed her chosen belongings into the one little trunk the stage people would consent to carry, lo! there came to her a messenger from headquarters where Colonel Byrne, grim, silent, saturnine, was again in charge. Any attempt on her part to leave would result in her being turned over at once to the civil authorities, and Elise understood and raved, but risked not going to jail. Mullins, nursed by his devoted Norah, was sitting up each day now, and had ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... man's saturnine features seemed to relax for a moment into something like a smile. But ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... heart; such romance as the Sunday-groomed youths who frequented the house on the hill might never satisfy. She'd read books, all sorts of books, but one of the plains she loved. In it a somewhat saturnine horseman, a son of the sage-brush, unlettered but tutored much by life, had wooed and won a prim little schoolmistress from the East. Whether she went with the hope of emulation in her heart or not none can venture to say. Maybe it was in ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... home and began an independent career at the boarding-school kept by the Reverend Mr. Quirk, at Methuen, Massachusetts. Here I remained for seven years, in the course of which both my parents died, victims of typhoid. I was cast upon the world utterly alone, save for the rather uncompromising and saturnine regard in which I was held by old Mr. Toddleham, my trustee. This antique gentleman inhabited a musty little office, the only furniture in which consisted of a worn red carpet, a large engraving of the Hon. Jeremiah Mason, and a table covered with green ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... reverence, *worthy, lofty Of which *I will you telle fand,* *I will try to tell you* Upon the pillars saw I stand. Altherfirst, lo! there I sigh* *saw Upon a pillar stand on high, That was of lead and iron fine, Him of the secte Saturnine, The Hebrew Josephus the old, That of Jewes' gestes* told; *deeds of braver And he bare on his shoulders high All the fame up of Jewry. And by him stooden other seven, Full wise and worthy for to neven,* *name To help him bearen up the charge,* *burden It was so heavy and so large. And, for they ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... And a saturnine smile, accompanied by the frowning bend of his white fuzzy eyebrows over his flashing black eyes, had produced such a withering, blistering effect on the soul of the unfortunate Englishman, whose ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... tangible token, except a tiny pearl-colored glove, which Guy twisted rather pensively between his fingers as he stood on the hall steps, and watched the carriage disappear down the avenue. Mr. Bruce exulted after his saturnine fashion, and Isabel Raymond trembled; the one had lost a strong, unscrupulous ally, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... state it, a proposition sufficiently absurd—yet we are indebted for it to the Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with a sense of the sublime—but no man is impressed after this fashion by the material grandeur of even "The Columbiad." Even the Quarterlies have not instructed ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... Reformation in Scotland. It extends from 1558-67. Its language is much more English than that spoken and written in Scotland at the time. It is of the highest historical value, and in style terse, vigorous, with flashes of a quiet, somewhat saturnine humour, and of vivid description—the writing of a great man of action dealing with the events in which he had been the leading actor. His own figure and that of the Queen are those round which the drama turns. The leading features of his character were courage and intense earnestness. ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... Welland lolled and lazed and listened to Miss Van Arsdale's music, or read, or took little walks between showers. No further mention was made by her hostess of the circumstances of the visit. She was a reticent woman; almost saturnine, Io decided, though her perfect and effortless courtesy preserved her from being antipathetic to any one beneath her own roof. How much her silence as to the unusual situation was inspired by consideration for her guest, how much due to natural ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... third passenger. He was a lean, saturnine individual who said little and kept to himself as much as possible. He was distantly polite in his relations with both crew and other passengers, and never showed the slightest spark of emotion ... until the day Quest squirted ...
— The Jupiter Weapon • Charles Louis Fontenay
... the other—too often proves 'the dead fly in the compost of spices', and any one is enough to unfit it for the precious balm of unction. For some mighty good sort of people, too, there is not seldom a sort of solemn saturnine, or, if you will, ursine vanity, that keeps itself alive by sucking the paws of its own self-importance. And as this high sense, or rather sensation of their own value is, for the most part, grounded on negative qualities, so they have no better means of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... shook hands warmly with a very small and saturnine clergyman decorated with a shock of ebon hair, who was ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... that at times I felt a little jealous—jealous of a man named Hammond Brake, who lived in our village. He was a weird, saturnine fellow, who made no friends among the young men of the neighborhood, but who loved to go alone, with his books and his own thoughts for company. He was a studious and, I believe, a learned young man, and there was no avoiding the fact that ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... the king, laying his hand on the monk's shoulder, and with a saturnine smile upon his countenance, "were religion silent in this matter, policy has a voice loud enough to make itself heard. The Jews demand equal rights; when men demand equality with their masters, treason is at work, and justice sharpens her sword. Equality! these wealthy usurers! ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book II. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... ectasy of facetious joy. Then jumping to his feet, he snatched the cleft stick from the Dodger; and, advancing to Oliver, viewed him round and round; while the Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a great number of low bows to the bewildered boy. The Artful, meantime, who was of a rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it interfered with business, rifled Oliver's ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... he get his qualities? In the earlier times the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to him from within or from without; from nature or from nurture; from ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... looks out on the little garden and the Park. He was a gaunt old man with, meagre mustache and hair, and a face like a death's head. He held out his hand and smiled. His hand was cold and his smile was half tearful and half saturnine. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... had been reading at a distant window, while the daylight sufficed to show him the type of his book. He now laid it by, and came forward into the redder circle of radiance cast by the burning logs. He was in his forty-third year, saturnine of visage, coldly monotonous in accent, a business machine that did its work in good, substantial style, and undertook no "fancy jobs." He had amassed a handsome fortune, built a handsome house, and married a handsome woman, all of which appendages to his consequence he contemplated with ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... youth upwards. In the younger part of his life he had been wild and licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the vices of revenge and ambition, which continued, notwithstanding his religious professions, to exercise no small sway over his mind. Daring in design, precipitate and violent in execution, and going to the very extremity of the most rigid recusancy, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since whether there may have been infection in ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... follow'd St. Cyprian's Advice; that holy Father charges him not to entertain himself with such lewd things as Plays, and he very dutifully reads a thousand as fast as he can; nay, scans and weighs 'em, and, no doubt, not without tickling satisfaction, at the present, for all his Saturnine Remarks at last. Now if his Answer to this is, That it belongs to his Office, as a Church-man, and that he could not reprehend the Vices in 'em without reading the Books themselves, I must tell him, That St. Cyprian, nor the rest of the Fathers, did not allow that, neither ...
— Essays on the Stage • Thomas D'Urfey and Bossuet
... was the only hotel in the town, although she remembered quite a number of others in the Directory. Even Vereker Sarle was there. Far down the long room she saw him sitting with two other men: one of them, Dick Nichols, looking very much at home; the other a distinguished, saturnine man with an English air to him, in spite of being burnt as black as the ace of spades. She was aware that Sarle saw her, and had a trembling fear that he might join her. It was almost a relief when Bellew ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... fell upon the Puritans as a deposed and unpopular party found stinging literary expression in one of the most famous of English satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in the employ (sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and nobles, one of whom, a Puritan officer, Sir Samuel Luke, was to serve as the central lay-figure for his lampoon. 'Hudibras,' which appeared in three parts during a period of fifteen years, is ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... as her manner was, and continued to observe him. How serious he was! The buoyant, tender, blithesome disposition which characterized his former self, had yielded to a temper of saturnine complexion, a mien of grave and thoughtful composure. He was analytic and she began to feel herself a simple compound in the hands of ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... he was eminently a man to whom she would turn in danger or trouble. Girl though she was, she could not mistake his great admiration of her, and by degrees, as the winter wore on, she trusted him more, though he still repelled her a little, for his saturnine calm was opposed to her violent vitality, as a black rock to a tawny torrent. Griggs had neither the manner nor the temper which wins women's hearts as a rule. Such men are sometimes loved by women when their sorrow has chained them to the rock of horror, and ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... that the general effect is gray, sombre and uncomfortable—that it is too much crowded with objects, and, though of admirable and enduring materials, suggests a spasmodic attempt to assimilate itself to the gala character of the occasion which called it forth. It is the saturnine one of the row. It is said that the pieces are numbered for re-erection in some ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... was by their side, dark, almost saturnine in his black evening clothes and tie. His presence had a chilling effect upon them both. ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... line, on the chapter of the first pillar, which was of sapphire, stood the image of Saturn in elutian (Motteux reads 'Eliacim.') lead, with his scythe in his hand, and at his feet a crane of gold, very artfully enamelled, according to the native hue of the saturnine bird. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... de los PP. de la Compaa de Jess, Cuaderno V, letter from Father Saturnine Urios, Patrocinio, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... that the honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest men may have everything their own way." Our Duke could not answer this, and therefore for the moment he yielded. But he was unhappy, saturnine, and generally silent except when closeted with his ancient mentor. And he knew that he was saturnine and silent, and that it behoved him as a leader of men to be genial and communicative,—listening to counsel even if he did not follow it, and at any rate appearing ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... his coat appeared conspicuously a small black volume fastened with clasps of steel. This book, whether accidentally or not, was so turned outwardly from the person as to discover the words "Rituel Catholique" in white letters upon the back. His entire physiognomy was interestingly saturnine—even cadaverously pale. The forehead was lofty, and deeply furrowed with the ridges of contemplation. The corners of the mouth were drawn down into an expression of the most submissive humility. There was also ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... decorated my skimpy wardrobe, and I could see at once that he was beaming with self-congratulation. He was one of the most faithful and constant fellows in the world, but as a general thing he was a little saturnine in temper. Any outward display of cheerfulness was rare with him, and such an outward sign of inward exultation as I read this morning ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... in, looking restless and anxious, he sent her to the kitchen to get her dinner with Joseph; and with the master of the house, grim and saturnine, and Hareton absolutely dumb, I made a cheerless meal, and bade ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Lincoln in conversation with several leather-legging gentry like himself, whom I knew from their costume and appearance to be backwoodsmen. All at once these saturnine characters commenced moving about the room, and entering into conversation with men whom they had ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... old man, bitterly; "I heard. I don't wonder at a lad of spirit resenting my harsh, saturnine ways. What a life for a lad like you! Well, you've made up your mind, and I'll be just to you, my lad. You shall be started well. When would you ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... Greko Perona. Nareda's Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume enveloped him. A ladies' courtier, this Perona ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... ministers of the city churches, and to whom he formed some attachment, as he speaks of him with kindness, and describes him as a devout, clever little man of mild manners, good-natured, and painstaking. His third instructor was a serious, saturnine, kind young man, named Paterson, the son of a shoemaker, but a good scholar and a rigid Presbyterian. It is somewhat curious in the record which Byron has made of his early years to observe the constant endeavour with which ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... was the most splendid period of the court. With the double purpose of recovering his popularity, and concealing his negotiations, Paul plunged into the most extraordinary festivity. Balls, masquerades, and fetes succeeded each other with restless extravagance. But the contrast of the saturnine Emperor with the sudden change of his court was too powerful. It bore the look of desperation; though for what purpose, was still a mystery to the million. I heard many a whisper among the diplomatic circle, that this whirl of life, this hot and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... yards when Henry gave a signal to stop and Jim and Tom rested on their oars. Then they heard a burst of firing behind them, and a smile of saturnine triumph spread slowly but completely over the face ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... man, and studied the black art. The same week (after) we went to see Mr. Evans. When we came to his house, he, having been drunk the night before, was upon his bed—if it be lawful to call that a bed whereon he lay.' 'He was the most saturnine man my eyes ever beheld either before I practised (astrology) or since: of middle stature, broad forehead, beetle browed, thick shoulders, flat nosed, full lips, down looked, black, curling, stiff hair, splay footed;' 'much addicted ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... and panting, on he ran, and on. His slobbering lips could only cry, "Christine! My Dearest Love! My Wife! Where are you gone? What future is our past? What saturnine, Sardonic devil's jest has bid us live Two years together in a puff of smoke? It was no dream, I swear it! In some star, Or still imprisoned in Time's egg, you give Me love. I feel it. Dearest Dear, this stroke Shall never part us, I will ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... the louder for such compliments, turned it on his broad thumb, shook it over his great head with its shock of sand-coloured and grey hair; making, as the more saturnine of his guests confided in each other, "a most ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... easy to see why it was, that in the obscure year 1598, while the star of Essex was setting, that of his natural rival did not burn more brightly. But although now, and for the brief remainder of Elizabeth's life, Raleigh was nominally in favour, the saturnine old woman had no longer any tenderness for her Captain of the Guard. Her old love, her old friendship, had quite passed away. There was no longer any excuse for excluding from her presence so valuable a soldier and so wise a courtier, but her pulses had ceased to thrill at his coming. If Essex ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and therefore he would be—in his own, less subtle manner—as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place—he had been insulted before her. But, even if the latter ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... trusty followers of Henry IV. The Prince de Marsillac was at first in great favour at Court, notwithstanding his father's misconduct, but he suddenly compromised himself in a very imprudent way. Closely intimate with that virtuous maid-of-honour, Marie de Hautefort, whom the saturnine Louis XIII. loved as passionately as his peculiar temperament permitted, and also with Mademoiselle de Chemerault, as lovely as she was witty, he was by them hurried into a blind devotion to the cause of their unhappy mistress and queen, Anne of Austria, ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... him. Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man- haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... boy is a woman!" And though he had a saturnine and harsh countenance, his disposition was both merry and lenient. He teased her unmercifully, threatening to promote so fine a lad to a gentleman of his bed-chamber. He bade a woman bring some clothing ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... conversation with the Marquis of Falutin, P.T.O., Q.T., R.S.V.P., the famous diplomat, whose recent intervention in the Nice imbroglio had saved the European situation. Aurora could see the flashes of his wit illuminating Sir John's saturnine countenance. Her further progress was barred by Lady Highflyer, who nodded to her, and said to Cecil, whose petite intimite with all this great ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... prevailed, but the traditions of a soldier's experience of the sex have informed his ballads with strange touches of irony, that help him to his (so to say) philosophy, which is recklessness. The Tyroler's 'Katchen' here, was a saturnine Giulia, who gave him no response, either of eye ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... to the English residents at Meerut, still belong to the widow of his last descendant. This territory, nominally assigned for the maintenance of the troops under the adventurer's command, was valued in those days at six laths of rupees annually; so that the blood-stained miscreant, whose saturnine manners had given him a bad name, even among the rough Europeans of the Company's battalion, found his career of crime rewarded by an income corresponding to that of many such petty sovereigns as those of ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... on Dakota. He arose and noiselessly moved his chair back from the table and she saw a saturnine smile on his face, yet in his eyes there shone a glint of intolerance that mingled oddly with ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... a little as she spoke. That name usually brought an answering smile, particularly from the men of Sour Creek. But Sinclair's saturnine face showed ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... heralded by a smile, as a yacht driven by a favoring breeze carries a wreath of sparkling foam before her, are born with their happiness ready made. They cannot help being cheerful any more than their saturnine fellow-mortal can help seeing everything through the cloud he carries with him. I give you the precept, then, Be cheerful, for just what it is worth, as I would recommend to you to be six feet, or at least five feet ten, in stature. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... copies the conventional artistic notion of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods—whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... amorous advances, often made a precipitate retreat out of the hut, not being aware at the time that by avoiding Sylla, they ran a great risk of failing into Charybdis. The widow Laddie, although huge, fat, and deaf, was by no means of a cold, phlegmatic or saturnine disposition—many a wistful look she cast towards Lander, but he either would not or could not comprehend their meaning, and to punish him for his stupidity, she took care that he should not comprehend any of the significant glances, which were cast towards ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... wryly and against his will. It was plain that we were taking a certain saturnine enjoyment out of the situation. We could hate each other well, and we were doing it, but we were both starved for men's ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... entirely in dirt and braid, carries pine-apples in a covered basket. Tall, grave, melancholy Frenchman, with black Vandyke beard, and hair close-cropped, with expansive chest to waistcoat, and compressive waist to coat: saturnine as to his pantaloons, calm as to his feminine boots, precious as to his jewellery, smooth and white as to his linen: dark-eyed, high-foreheaded, hawk-nosed - got up, one thinks, like Lucifer or Mephistopheles, or Zamiel, transformed into ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... an instant impression of capability. He stood on the threshold, entirely composed, saturnine, serene eyed, absolutely sure of himself. He was arrayed in high heeled boots, minus spurs; the bottoms of a pair of dust-covered overalls were tucked into the boot legs; a woolen shirt, open at the throat, covered a pair of admirable shoulders; a scarlet handkerchief was knotted around his neck; ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... him, the fingers clenched. His eyes searched her face with an alert, intense gaze. His embarrassment was gone; his expression was saturnine, his eyes narrowed with a slight mockery. And his ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... by the saturnine necessity that sneers at our puny resolutions, Lancelot began to meditate surrender. For surrender of some sort must be—either of life or ideal. After so steadfast and protracted a struggle—oh, it was cruel, it was terrible; how noble, how high-minded he had been; ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... replied in order; first the Pythagoreans, next the Socratics, and afterwards the rest: but among them there was a certain Platonist, who spoke last; and his opinion prevailed, which was to this effect; That the men of the saturnine or golden age knew and acknowledged that they were forms receptive of life from God; and that on this account wisdom was inscribed on their souls and hearts, and hence they saw truth from the light of truth, and by truths ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Loyola. What their Society is to the Jesuit, his own individualism is to Mr. Gladstone. He supports his own interests as much from intellectual zeal as from self-love. A shrewd observer is quoted: 'looking on Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney Herbert sitting side by side, the former with his rather saturnine face and straight black hair, and the latter eminently handsome, with his bright, cold smile and subtlety of aspect, I have often thought that I was beholding the Jesuit of the closet really devout, and the Jesuit of the world, ambitious, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his own ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... reflect on what he had next to perform. As the eye of the injured man slowly passed from the body of the seducer to the partner and victim of his crime, who had sunk down to his feet, which she clasped without venturing to look up, his features, naturally coarse and saturnine, assumed a dignity of expression which overawed the young Templars, and repulsed the officious forwardness of Richie Moniplies, who was at first eager to have thrust in his advice and opinion. "Kneel not to me, woman," he said, "but kneel to the God thou hast offended, more ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... demanded, staring up aghast at the wheel-chair and the wrinkled, saturnine face bending over the railing with a leer of triumph, "how in God's ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... so loud at my reply I could not understand, but I supposed that in spite of his saturnine appearance he was a man of jovial temperament and I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... February, 1605; all the biographers of our poet have observed, that his father was a man of a grave disposition, and a gloomy turn of mind, which his son did not inherit from him, for he was as remarkably volatile, as his father was saturnine. The same biographers have celebrated our author's mother as very handsome, whose charms had the power of attracting the admiration of Shakespear, the highest compliment which ever was paid to beauty. As Mr. Davenant, our poet's father, kept a tavern, Shakespear, in his journies ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally silent returns,—and more than once the broken heads and bandaged arms that coincided so oddly with ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... now said Cromwell, still looking the agreeable—so far as his saturnine features would admit of such expression—"to what happy circumstance am I indebted for the honour ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... ill-looking ruffians lay about on the floor, handcuffed. They were most of them of the usual convict stamp, dark, saturnine looking fellows, though one offered a strange contrast by being an Albino, and another they could not see plainly, for he was huddled up in a dark corner, bending down over a basin of water, and dabbing his face. The greater part of them cursed and blasphemed desperately, as ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... The thought of how well he had come to know her in the last three weeks surprised him. When he had first met her in Egypt she had been the young, very pretty wife of Colonel Crofton, an elderly "dug-out," odd and saturnine, whose manner to his wife was not always over-kindly. No one out there had been much surprised when she had decided to brave the submarine ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... gray curls and cap-strings flying behind her. She heard a colloquy in the distance in broad Westmoreland dialect, and as she turned the corner of the house she nearly ran into her tall cook, Sarah, whose impassive and saturnine countenance bore ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who was introduced to me was not such a ruddy man, being, in fact, somewhat saturnine in appearance; but I could quite understand that he was, as he described himself, brimful of electricity. His chevelure was like that on the little man we stick on the conductor of an electrical machine and make each particular hair stand on end like ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... about which Thucydides is silent. The antique Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... came to admire, some to scoff, and all to speculate. Among the scoffers, of course, was Ralph Hambleton, who stood with his hands in his pockets and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities. Ralph was always a superior boy, tall and a trifle saturnine and cynical, with an amazing self-confidence not wholly due to the wealth of his father, the iron-master. He was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. "But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... found in almost every church throughout the length and breadth of Italy; but when you have seen one you have seen them all, for they all have the same expression. The eyes are generally large and ill shaped, the nose is long, the face is wan and meagre, and there is a peevish and almost saturnine expression in the wooden features which shows but slight affection for the Christ-child, and which could have afforded but scant comfort to any who sought to find there a gleam of tender pity. These pictures were generally half-length, against a background of gold ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... the great basis of Christian virtue. He considered every one's temperament like his own; or at least he made them conform to it. His character and habits had an influence over the fraternity of which he was superior. A more gloomy, saturnine set of beings were never assembled together. The convent, too, was calculated to awaken sad and solitary thoughts. It was situated in a gloomy gorge of those mountains away south of Vesuvius. All distant views were shut out by sterile volcanic heights. A mountain stream raved beneath ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... considerately made no inquiries; if it was a caprice of Count Victor's to venture in dancing shoes and a borrowed jacket through dark snow-swept roads, it was his own affair. And the Count was so much interested in the new cheerfulness of his host (once so saturnine and melancholy) that he left his own affairs unmentioned for a while as the woman worked. It was quite a light-hearted recluse this, compared with that he had ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... tree-trunk across Hunt's pleasant stream, and banked it up with philosophical doubts and objections at every interval of the speaker's joyous progress. But the unmitigated Hunt never ceased his overflowing anticipations, nor the saturnine Carlyle his infinite demurs to those finite flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of hopefulness and of the unhopeful. The contest continued with all that ready wit and philosophy, that mixture ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
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