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More "Simplicity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have been the language of a people with few thoughts to express, but such thoughts as they had were beautiful in their simplicity and charm, sometimes wise and shrewd, and not rarely full of feeling. Thus laa-noo is old Manx for child, and it means literally half saint—a sweet conception, which says the best of all that is contained in Wordsworth's wondrous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... as a balance for the heavy measures of the foreground and the interest is drawn back into the picture and to the upper left hand corner by the two cloud forms, over which is sharply thrown a barricade of cloud which turns the vision back into the picture. The simplicity of the three broad tones is appropriate to the sentiment of vastness which the picture contains. The figure seated in revery before this expanse supplies the mental element to the subject, the antithesis of which is the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... place he went on to another and found changes, and new erections, and some device for throwing away money everywhere. It angered him to think that there was so little of simplicity left in the world that a man could not entertain his friends without such a fuss as this. His mind applied itself frequently to the consideration of the money, not that he grudged the loss of it, but the spending of ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... simplicity. There are four wheels on wooden axles, with rough but strong 'reaches.' A body, shaped something like an old-fashioned baby-cart, rests upon the reaches or on poles fixed over them. The hood protects against wind and rain from behind, and the best of the vehicles ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... the simplicity of her dress was in almost too great contrast with its elegance—a contrived simplicity that left no room for any trace of careless youth or girlishness. Slender and rather delicate-looking, she had brown eyes, regular features, and soft, light-brown hair waving loosely about her face and hanging ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... other hand, heat being capable of rendering all these substances fluid, they may be, with the greatest simplicity, transported from one place to another; and they may be made to concrete altogether at the same time, and distinctly separate in any place. Hence, for the explanation of those natural appearances, which are so general, no further conditions are required, than the supposition of a sufficient ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... this subject, parallel with these modern accusations (p. 116) of Henry on the ground of "cajoling hypocrisy" we may lay the testimony borne by his contemporary, Walsingham,[92] to the unsuspecting simplicity of his mind, which exposed him to the (p. 117) overreaching designs of the unprincipled and crafty. In his Ypodigma Neustriae, a work expressly written for the use and profit of Henry, and with a view of putting him upon ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... might have spent his, days in the cloister, rather than in the din of hammering up hearths for the Anglo- Saxon. Perhaps it was that he had talked so long to the hills of Oceana, catching their simplicity and music. You were reminded of the measured English of an old and lovable book, just as you grew used to read in his face what he was to say, before the words had begun to flow. Never was there a face more quick to reflect the mind, more pliable to humour, more luminous at some ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... mysterious to us, whose very name and tongue are quite unknown. Their works still live all around us in Ireland, spread evenly through the four provinces, a world of the vanished past enduring among us into the present; and, so mightily did these old builders work, and with such large simplicity, that what they built will surely outlast every handiwork of our own day, and endure through numberless to-morrows, bridging the morning and evening twilight of ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... from the comparative simplicity of the bodies and forces with which it has to deal, and the approximate regularity of the paths of the heavenly bodies, may be regarded as the science in which the greatest possible certainty is attainable. It opens at once the widest field to the imagination, and the noblest ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... psychology which would be a kind of physiology of the internal sense and might possibly be capable of explaining the phenomena of that sense. But it could never be available for discovering those properties which do not belong to possible experience (such as the quality of simplicity), nor could it make any apodeictic enunciation on the nature of thinking beings: it would therefore ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... vividly recalls the simplicity of method employed in the complete restoration to health of one of olden time whose story has come ringing down the ages in the Book of Books. Naaman, captain of the host of the king of Syria, a mighty man of valor and honorable in the sight of all men, turned away in a rage when Elisha, the prophet ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... grandee. It must be confessed, that the grandee loved the estaminet where he could play billiards with the first comer; that he had a passion for the gambling-house; that he was a loose and disorderly nobleman: but, in whatever company he found himself, a certain kindness, simplicity, and politeness distinguished him always. He bowed to the damsel who sold him a penny cigar, as graciously as to a duchess; he crushed a manant's impertinence or familiarity as haughtily as his noble ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... instances in which he ever differed with his friend, Mr. Fox, occurred during this session, upon the subject of a Bill which the latter introduced for the Repeal of the Marriage Act, and which he prefaced by a speech as characteristic of the ardor, the simplicity, the benevolence and fearlessness of his disposition, as any ever pronounced by him in public. Some parts, indeed, of this remarkable speech are in a strain of feeling so youthful and romantic, that they seem more fit to be addressed to one of those Parliaments of Love, which were held during ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... smile and partial closing of the eyes which always distinguishes Spenser Hale when he places on the table a problem which he expects will baffle me. If I said he never did baffle me, I would be wrong, of course, for sometimes the utter simplicity of the puzzles which trouble him leads me into an intricate involution entirely ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... wilderness. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that to our veteran borderer the field of literature should remain a "terra incognita." It is our army that unites the chasm between the culture of civilization in the aspect of science, art, and social refinement, and the powerful simplicity of nature. On leaving the Military Academy, a majority of our officers are attached to the line of the army, and forthwith assigned to duty upon our remote and extended frontier, where the restless and warlike habits of the nomadic tribes render the soldier's life almost as unsettled ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... read of the monthly ten thousand dollars which our ambassador will lavish upon Brook House! In justice to Mr. Reid it must be owned that he is simplicity itself, and by no one is it supposed that either he or Mrs. Reid have part in the publication of these details. He showed wisdom in a preference for his own household over the proffered royal quarters which would have been assigned him. He is chosen for his fitness, ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... the front and sides; which objection is finally obviated by the introduction of that rich and exquisite composition, the Corinthian capital. Thus is obtained an order of the most elegant and ornamented character, but possessing a happy simplicity and regularity of composition which renders it more easy of application than any other. In like manner in the later, which has been called the florid style of Gothic architecture, there are buildings astonishingly rich and elaborate; but we ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "He knows! he knows!" What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we then believed to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not in the original German, but in lectures and in translations. Reasoning from these inadequate premises, it seemed to me that Hegel ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... that we owe the progress of this [anti-slavery] revolution in America, and the formation of the Society in London." He speaks of the impressions he received in attending the meetings of these societies. "What serenity in the countenances of the members! What simplicity in their discourses; candor in their discussions; beneficence and energy in their decisions! With what joy they learned that a like Society was formed in Paris! They hastened to publish it in their gazettes, and likewise a translation of the first discourse [his own] pronounced in that society. ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... look of veneration. We must not take upon us to affirm that this was a mistake, although the Face may have looked no more kindly at Ernest than at all the world besides. But the secret was, that the boy's tender and confiding simplicity discerned what other people could not see; and thus the love, which was meant for all, ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... ears of a generation like ours, in which senseless luxury, the result of wealth which has increased faster than the power of rightly using it, has attained such enormous proportions, and is threatening, in commercial communities especially, to drown all noble aspirations, and Spartan simplicity, and Christian self-devotion, in its muddy flood. Surely never was Gideon's test more wanted for the army of the Lord of hosts ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... that's their profession, And not simplicity, as they suggest.— The plagues of Egypt, and the curse of heaven, Earth's barrenness, and all men's hatred, Inflict upon them, thou great Primus Motor! And here upon my knees, striking the earth, ...
— The Jew of Malta • Christopher Marlowe
... my arm and walked me up to his sanctum, a fine spacious chamber, beautified with that simplicity which throws a wonderful dignity over all, and tends to show how in omission so much more refinement is to be discovered than in ornament. Touches of the vicar's keen discernment of those things which are worthy ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... books for girls, written by popular authors. These are charming stories for young girls, well told and full of interest. Their simplicity, tenderness, healthy, interesting motives, vigorous action, and character painting will ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and appreciative house to welcome the rentree of Madame ALBANI, who was simply perfection and the perfection of simplicity as the self-sacrificing heroine Elizabeth. From a certain Wagnerian-moral point of view, no better impersonator,—dramatically at least, if not operatically,—of the sensual Falstaffian Knight ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 25, 1891 • Various
... is of more consequence, works truly excellent and capable of enlarging the understanding, warming and purifying the heart, and placing in the centre of the whole being the germs of noble and manlike actions, would have been the common diet of the intellect instead. For the first condition, simplicity,—while, on the one hand, it distinguishes poetry from the arduous processes of science, labouring towards an end not yet arrived at, and supposes a smooth and finished road, on which the reader is to walk onward easily, with streams murmuring by his side, and trees and flowers and human ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... for the Bishop as he stood close by Hare's couch. The Bishop put his hands into the bowl, anointing them with fragrant oil; then he placed them on the young man's head, and offered up a brief prayer, beautiful in its simplicity and ...
— The Heritage of the Desert • Zane Grey
... To a reader of our age and country this inconsistency is, at first, perfectly bewildering. The whole man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villainy and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... will render the solid ones absolutely useless; nay, such is the present turn of the world, that some valuable qualities are even ridiculous, if not accompanied by the genteeler accomplishments. Plainness, simplicity, and quakerism, either in dress or manners, will by no means do; they must both be laced and embroidered; speaking, or writing sense, without elegance and turn, will be very little persuasive; and the best figure in the world, ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... she said simply, the simplicity lying merely in the broad outlines of her manner and speech. There were the semitone of voice and half-hidden expression of eyes which tell the initiated how very fragile is the ice of ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... performance I saw him in his box, "sitting still," as he said, watching with the singular grave intensity with which he watched life. It struck me then that he was the only person there sufficiently simple to be really interested in living people; and that it was this simplicity which gave him his charm. He found the life in a man very well worth wonder, even though the man were a fool, or a knave, or just down from Oxford. At the end of the play I saw him standing in his box, gravely watching the actors ...
— John M. Synge: A Few Personal Recollections, with Biographical Notes • John Masefield
... enclose the ashes of the illustrious departed. Upon one is inscribed, 'Here repose the mortal remains of the ever-famed Jerry Abershaw'; upon another, 'Sacred to the memory of Poor Johnny Greenacre.' A third is remarkable for its touching simplicity—'Alas! Poor Thurtell!' Another, somewhat more elaborate, gives us 'Burke and Hare! As they were loving friends in life, so in death are they undivided! Erected by their affectionate disciples, Bishop ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... men become accustomed to the risks of military life, to danger and to death, and yet how their hearts cling to their fields and to the occupations of country life. The horrors of war are described with simplicity, and almost with enjoyment. But in the midst of these accounts one finds such phrases as these: "What crop do you intend to sow in such a field next year?" "How is the mare?" "Has the cow a fine calf?" ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... please. To adopt the metaphor of his nonsensical phrase, he laid brick upon brick on the tall chimney of his devoirs until, at length, the structure was stable and complete. The manners of the best society come around finally to simplicity; and as the girl's way was that naturally, they were on a mutual plane ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... talked so much about himself. Van Torp, he was sure, was in love with the singer; that was his weak side, and in whatever affected her he might behave like a brute or a baby, but would certainly act with something like rudimentary simplicity in either case. In Logotheti's opinion Northern and English-speaking men might be as profound as Persians in matters of money, and sometimes were, but where women were concerned they were generally little better than sentimental children, unless they were mere animals. ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... organism, with six or eight curves, and capable of movement in space. Its place in the scheme of existence is not wholly certain, but the probability seems that it is a protozoan, belonging to the lowest form of animal life. Its very simplicity makes it appalling; we do not understand how anything so innocent in appearance, can occasion such terrible ravages. In the course of the evolution of life how came it into being? We can only surmise. But once having gained a foothold in the body of a human being, the minute organism begins to ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... with quite well, Rosa Tilofsky Oswald says that Hainfeld bores him to death and that he shall get a friend to invite him somewhere. Nothing will induce him to spend the whole holidays here. His name for Ada is: "Country Simplicity." If he only knew how much she knows. Rosa T. he calls a "Pimple Complex" because she has two or three pimples. Oswald has some fault to find with every girl he comes across. He says of Dora: She is a green frog, ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... April ere it bloomed. It was thy voice, thy smile, Thy poisoned glances bright, Which taught me to revile The semblance of delight. Thy grace of girlish years Murdered my peace, my sleep. If I lose faith in tears, 'T is that I saw thee weep. I yielded to thy power A child's simplicity. As to the dawn the flower, So oped my heart to thee. Doubtless this helpless heart Was thine without defence. Were 't not the better part To spare its innocence? Shame! thou who didst beget My earliest, youngest woe. The tears are streaming yet Which first thou madest flow. ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... new atmosphere and one very different from that in which we passed our stormy youth, for no sentiment of this kind softened life in earlier days or affected our Spartan simplicity. The very sight of a newcomer in a speckless suit, with an irreproachable tie and both tails on his glengarry bonnet, excited a profound emotion in the school and carried it beyond self-control. What could be expected of a fellow so bedecked ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... Tresillack house (I must explain) was simplicity itself. To the left of the hall as you entered was the dining-room; to the right the drawing-room, with a boudoir beyond. The foot of the stairs faced the front door, and beside it, passing a glazed inner door, you found ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... enchanting combination of opposites rarely blended into harmony. Her ignorance of much that girls know before they number half her years was so relieved by candid, innocent simplicity, so adorned by pretty fancies and sweet beliefs, and so contrasted and lit up by gleams of a knowledge that the young ladies we call well educated seldom exhibit,—knowledge derived from quick observation of external ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Vandyke, by which it had been made familiar to us. It is true that the minds of the spectators of this interesting sight were well prepared to receive this impression; but it is also certain that such a facility of belief had been occasioned by the simplicity and truth of Mr. Herbert's narrative, every part of which had been confirmed by the investigation, so far as it had advanced; and it will not be denied that the shape of the face, the forehead, an eye, and the beard, are the most important ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... somewhere; not all the way; but still somewhere. Without advertisement, without patronage, without a cent I could call my own, I put my wares on the market. I became Governor of Virginia in spite of everything you did, or did not do, to prevent it." There was a strange effectiveness in the simplicity of the man's speech. It was natural; it was racy; it was like nothing that Stephen had ever heard before. He wondered if it could be traced back to the phraseology of the circus? "Of course you think I am an extremist," concluded Gideon ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... The simplicity of this narration justifies its quotation here, as illustrative of the taste and manners that prevailed a hundred years ago. The lively emotion provoked by the "Nouvelle Heloise" is scarcely more foreign to our ideas and experience than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... (1566-72) in memory of his predecessor. In his youth the future Pope joined the Order of St. Dominic, and for years had acted as professor of theology, master of novices, and prior. He was noted specially for his simplicity and holiness of life, a holiness which it may be remarked had nothing in common with the morose rigour of Paul IV., for his humility, his love of silence and meditation, and for his kindness towards the poor and the suffering. As a man of ...
— History of the Catholic Church from the Renaissance to the French • Rev. James MacCaffrey
... charm for the young Englishman, surfeited with the affectation of English girls, lay in her natural simplicity. ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... the Royal Palace of Hampton Court, and yeoman of the robes to Charles II., described by Evelyn as "page of the back stairs, a very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature," contributed L1,000. However simple this man was, his simplicity manifested itself in a commendable direction. He is said to have given away his whole fortune in charity. It is to him we owe the statue of Charles II. in Roman dress which stands in the centre of the Hospital court. This statue is made of bronze, and there is a companion one of James II., a gift ...
— Chelsea - The Fascination of London • G. E. (Geraldine Edith) Mitton
... sir, not at all. It is my manner of doing business, now for thirty years or more. Moles and fools, sir, work under-ground, and only get traps set for them; I travel entirely above-ground, and go ten miles for their ten inches. My strategy, sir, is simplicity. Nothing puzzles rogues so much, because they can ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... artist sees things too clearly as they are not to see also what they will be. He therefore skips the ignoble interlude of prevarication, quibble, and intrigue, and gives us Uncle Sam happy at last in his recovered simplicity. So we see him here, enjoying himself, as only a white man can, in a wholehearted spurning ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... understand how she was passing out of childhood. Yet while in stature she was like a child; in intellect, in force of character, in strength of clinging affection, she was a woman. There might be much of the simplicity of a child about her, there was little of the undeveloped girl, varying from day to day like an April sky, careless as to which way her own character is tending. So the two young people sat with their elders, ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... thirteenth century the 'Trovatori della transizione,' as they have been recently named, mark the passage from the Troubadours to the poets— that is, to those who wrote under the influence of antiquity. The simplicity and strength of their feeling, the vigorous delineation of fact, the precise expression and rounding off of their sonnets and other poems, herald the coming of a Dante. Some political sonnets of the Guelphs and Ghibellines (1260-1270) have about them ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... genuinely modern though as yet still imperfect conception of the marriage relationship was destined to emerge. The early Reformers in this matter acted mainly from an obscure instinct of natural revolt in an environment of plebeian materialism. The Puritans were moved by their feeling for simplicity and civil order as the conditions for religious freedom. Milton, in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published in 1643, when he was thirty-five years of age, proclaimed the supremacy of the substance of marriage over the form of it, and the spiritual autonomy of the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... again she answered with straightforward simplicity. 'Just before you came in, he said—; I don't know what he ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... huts and in marble halls— From Shepherdess up to Queen— Cared little for bonnets, and less for shawls, And nothing for crinoline. But now simplicity's not the rage, And it's funny to think how cold The dress they wore in the Golden Age Would seem in the ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... act with a certain note of gentleness, a quality mixed of spontaneity and intelligence. This is necessary for wholesome life in any age, but particularly amidst confused affairs and shifting standards. Genuineness is not mere simplicity, for that may lack vitality, and genuineness does not. We expect what we call genuine to have pith and strength of fiber. Genuineness is a quality which we sometimes mean to include when we speak of individuality. Individuality is lost the moment you ...
— On Being Human • Woodrow Wilson
... thought at first. Somehow, to bring a chugging, smelling, snorting automobile up to Sunnyside to stay seemed an insult to the peace and beauty and simplicity of his little tucked-away home. But when Jerry pleaded and even Mrs. Travis admitted it would be nice and reminded him that Silverheels was growing old, he yielded, and Uncle Johnny promised to order one immediately—he ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... broke the engagement, and Rodney, after relieving himself of more heretical opinions of spiritual simplicity and mystic madness, stalked unmelodiously away, slamming her door, and his ...
— Sunny Slopes • Ethel Hueston
... performance. When we consider the frailness of the ships, the immeasurable, extent of the unknown, the mutinies that were prevented or quelled, and the hardships that were endured, we can have no hesitation in speaking of Magellan as the prince of navigators. Nor can we ever fail to admire the simplicity and purity of that devoted life, in which there is nothing that seeks to be ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... "sudden angry gray arrow,"—imagine an angry gray arrow,—or by "flaming out into crimson anger," or "with wreathed neck and flaming cheek," or "with enkindled eye and vermeil cheek," both of which expressions we would recommend to lovers of simplicity. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... even go along together for a little way, his business is to follow the path of the latter after it diverges, and to show her floundering in the bog at the end of it. Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her, that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine. The danger of the satirist is, that continual use may deaden his sensibility to the force of language. He becomes more and more liable to strike ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Andrew Burnaby, who travelled in New England in 1759-1760, says that though it may "at first appear to be the effects of grossness of character, it will upon deeper research be found to proceed from simplicity and innocence." To this assertion, after some research, I can give—to use Sir Thomas Browne's words—"a staggering assent to the affirmative, not without some fear of the negative." Rev. Samuel Peters, in his General History of Connecticut, speaks at length upon the custom, and apparently ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... the old world—a world made up apparently of a little land and a little water—we turn to an old papyrus, the oldest in existence, which tells us in familiar words, unsurpassed for their exquisite poetry and wondrous simplicity, of that great dateless time so full of ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... angry, because the song will not really be for me," Victoria answered with the simplicity which had often disarmed and disconcerted Maieddine. "And I shall be pleased, because in the desert it is ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Isabel, as they went upstairs, "and I sha'n't have one. I think I owe it to myself, and to the maids, Sue, to take that responsibility entirely!" Susan recognized the unchanged sweetness and dutifulness that had marked the old Isabel, who could with perfect simplicity and reason seem to make a virtue ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added to one's life. Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre shells—good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity, homely ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... in these mountains as well as out of them to prepare the food of the household. The Circassian still retaining much of the patriarchal simplicity of living, eats when he is hungry, without regard to set hours; nor is there any gathering of the family around the social board, every member generally taking his meals by himself, and the males under no circumstances eating with the females. The flesh of sheep and goats is the ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... elasticity of her movements. As M. de Richelieu had already remarked, she had adopted the costume best calculated to hide either graces or defects. She was dressed as a bat—a costume much in vogue, and very convenient, from its perfect simplicity, being composed only of two black skirts. The manner of employing them was at the command of everybody. One was fastened, as usual, round the waist; the masked head was passed through the placket-hole of the other. ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... the 6th of February to take the field with an army amounting, it is said, to thirty or forty thousand men, provided with a powerful artillery and accompanied by an immense baggage-train, wherein Charles delighted to display his riches and magnificence in contrast with the simplicity and roughness of his personal habits. At the rumor of such an armament the Swiss attempted to keep off the war from their country. "I have heard tell," says Commynes, "by a knight of theirs, who had ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... laughed. A laugh at such a time, and a laugh so full of simplicity and amusement brought the other ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II. No. 5, February, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... Compositions for more than one Voice ought to be sung strictly as they are written; nor do they require any other Art but a noble Simplicity. I remember to have heard once a famous Duetto torn into Atoms by two renown'd Singers, in Emulation; the one proposing, and the other by Turns answering, that at last it[95] ended in a Contest, who ...
— Observations on the Florid Song - or Sentiments on the Ancient and Modern Singers • Pier Francesco Tosi
... Genestas are met with now and again in the French army; natures that show themselves to be wholly great at need, and relapse into their ordinary simplicity when the action is over; men that are little mindful of fame and reputation, and utterly forgetful of danger. Perhaps there are many more of them than the shortcomings of our own characters will allow us to imagine. Yet, for all that, any one who believed that Genestas ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... introduces many refinements and subdivisions according to the predominance of the four humors, the harmonious combination of which means health, or eucrasia, while their perversion or improper combination leads to dyscrasia, or ill health. In treatment he had not the simplicity of Hippocrates: he had great faith in drugs and collected plants from all parts of the known world, for the sale of which he is said to have had a shop in the neighborhood of the Forum. As I mentioned, he was an eclectic, held himself aloof from the various schools of the ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... do not indeed find in any part of his voluminous Memoirs either deep reflection or vivid painting. But the narrative is distinguished by clearness, conciseness, good sense, and a certain air of truth and simplicity, which is singularly graceful in a man who, having done great things, sits down to relate them. On the whole, however, none of his writings are so agreeable to us as his Letters, particularly those which are written with earnestness, and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... soon we put to shame those who tried to interrupt us—and not only we ourselves, but other boys who did the same, were from that time never interfered with. Sure I am that our prayers were heard, and that the blessings we prayed for in earnestness and simplicity were given us. When we rose from our knees we found our courage much increased. The occasion had made us serious, and reminded us of our duties. I wish that it had been always so, that it were still always ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... has a double claim upon our attention as the inventor of the hygrometer and as the pioneer of the snow-peaks. He climbed the Buet as early as 1770, and wrote an account of his adventures on its summit and its slopes which has the true charm of Arcadian simplicity. He came to England, was appointed reader to Queen Charlotte, and lived in the enjoyment of that office, and in the gratifying knowledge that Her Majesty kept his presentation hygrometer in her private apartments, to the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... (he allowed himself at this point the more formal endearment), "I thought I was disgracefully transparent—I'm limpidity, simplicity itself. I've only one idea and one subject of conversation. Ask Edith. ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... Deux Mondes, M. Jules Janet records the following experiment which, although simplicity itself, gives us a very vivid glimpse of a most ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... much invincible innocence of mind, to play the veteran well. The time to measure him best, to taste (in the old phrase) his gracious nature, was when he received his class at home. What a pretty simplicity would he then show, trying to amuse us like children with toys; and what an engaging nervousness of manner, as fearing that his efforts might not succeed! Truly he made us all feel like children, and like children embarrassed, but at the same time filled ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gradually fell into the habit of confiding her romance to Charlotte, who listened in perfect good faith to the fascinating details which Beth poured forth from day to day. Beth did not at first intend to impose on her credulity; but when she found that Charlotte in her simplicity believed the whole story, she adapted her into it, and made her as much a part of it as Hector the hero, and Dr. Angus Ambrose Cleveland, the confidential agent on whom their safety depended. Charlotte was Beth's ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the Rose. Many flowers are in certain senses more beautiful, but as, among women, she who charms is not always the most highly gifted with conventional attractions, so it is with the Queen of the Garden, whose proud simplicity is delicately blended with a familiar, friendly grace, which wins by the tenderest spell ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 220) says that 'Swift's delight was in simplicity. That he has in his works no metaphor, as has been said, is not true; but his few metaphors seem to be received rather by necessity than choice. He studied purity.... His style was well suited to his thoughts.... He pays no court to the passions; he excites neither surprise nor ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the preparation of this substance have been published, almost all of which, however, appear to complicate and mystify a process that is all simplicity. ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... As Henry IV. wished every man to have his pot au feu, so Sir Sedley Beaudesert, if he could have had his way, would have every man served with an early cucumber for his fish, and a caraffe of iced water by the side of his bread and cheese. He thus evinced on politics a naive simplicity which delightfully contrasted his acuteness on matters of taste. I remember his saying, in a discussion on the Beer Bill, "The poor ought not to be allowed to drink beer, it is so particularly rheumatic! The best drink in hard work is dry champagne,—not vtousseux; I found that out when ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... means; and this is especially the case with communities, because the stakes played for are the highest, freedom or empire, and, when all are acting together, each man irrationally magnifies his own capacity. In fine, it is impossible to prevent, and only great simplicity can hope to prevent, human nature doing what it has once set its mind upon, by force of law or by ...
— The History of the Peloponnesian War • Thucydides
... political intrigue, and then natural faculties in this way had not lain dormant or been injured by want of practice. In Pauline this finesse was partially concealed by a languor and indecision of manner and an occasional assumption of 'niaiserie'; or almost infantine simplicity; but this only threw people the more off their guard, and made her finesse the more sure in its operation. Pauline was handsome too, uncommonly graceful, and had all that power of fascination which has been attributed to the Bonaparte ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... is being more and more used, especially on the North Western. There is less use of brasswork for domes and fittings, although it is claimed for brass that it looks brighter and can easily be kept clean. There is greater simplicity of design generally, and the universal substitution of coal as coke for fuel, with its consequent economy; and last, but not least, the adoption of standard types of engines, are among the changes which have taken place in locomotive practice ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 458, October 11, 1884 • Various
... had spoken, Mrs. Betts knew that it was spending her breath in vain to contradict; and Bessie went down to the drawing-room with an air of inexpensive simplicity very becoming to her beauty, and that need not alarm a poor gentleman who might have visions of her as a wife. Lady Latimer instantly accused and convicted her of that intention in it—in her private thoughts, ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... member of my family; and, indeed, all such vain gauds and toys, however suitable or necessary to the dignity of the British aristocracy, would be completely out of place among those who have been brought up on the severe, and I believe immortal, principles of republican simplicity. Perhaps I should mention that Virginia is very anxious that you should allow her to retain the box as a memento of your unfortunate but misguided ancestor. As it is extremely old, and consequently a good deal out of repair, you may perhaps think fit to comply with her ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... implicit in the natural badness of men, while Locke assumed their goodness and made his contract essential to their opportunity for moral expression. Nor did he, like Rousseau, seize upon the organic nature of the State. To him the State was always a mere aggregate, and the convenient simplicity of majority-rule solved, for him, the vital political problems. But Rousseau was translated into the complex dialectic of Hegel and lived to become the parent of theories he would have doubtless been the first to disown. Nor was Locke aided by his philosophic ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... unattainable, if possible, than heretofore. He knew little of women's dress, but in the style and cut of this particular gown there existed an indefinable something that warned him off. No mortal woman in such attire could fail to realize her own perfection. He also knew that the apparent simplicity of the hat and gown ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... storms;—wherein, I take it, the spirit of childhood is wiser than the spirit of the grown, until the latter learn that wisdom which men like my grandfather call faith, and so draw near again to the trustful simplicity of the earlier days. ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... had hoped so much from the energy and business acumen of his own countrymen, found that the conditions at home differed not much from those which he had found so exasperating abroad. Praise in plenty for the beauty and simplicity of his invention, but no money, either public or private, to enable him to put it to a practical test. His associates had left him to battle alone for his interests and theirs. F.O.J. Smith was in Portland, Maine, attending to his own affairs; Professor ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... as she was concerned. She was at least seeing things from Shaw's point of view. Her resentment was not against the policy of her brother, but the overbearing, petulant tyranny of her American sister-in-law. From the beginning she had disliked Evelyn; now she despised her. With the loyal simplicity of a sister she absolved Cecil of all real blame in the outrage of the morning, attributing everything to the cruelty and envy of the despot who held the purse-strings from which dangled the pliable fortunes of Bazelhurst. The Bazelhursts, one ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... no subject on which opinions differ so widely as this matter of finding the way to a place. To the man who knows, it is simplicity itself. Probably he really does imagine that he goes straight on, ignoring the fact that for him the choice of three roads, all more or less straight, has no perplexities. The man who does not know feels as if he were ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... because of the farewell which had to follow. With all his habits of self-control, he had never been able to feel quite sure that the word too much would not be said, that the glance too long would not be given. Her own simplicity, he told himself, had saved him from disaster. She showed her affection so fearlessly—with such tender and discerning trust—that his worst struggles were in solitude—not in her presence at all. It was when he was away from her immediate peaceful ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Fifth Avenue house was left behind; here simplicity and quiet comfort held sway. Even the china wore no glitter, but was enamelled with green wreaths of vine-leaves; and the vases held only plumy ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of former ages, a certain peevishness and undue fastidiousness towards the present, from which there seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism which ignores tradition and in the search after originality achieves only the eccentric. But in such vandalism there is none of the simplicity and spontaneity out of which great art springs: theory is still the canker in its core, and insincerity destroys the advantages of a ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... met or wrote every week. Raphael, Esther never met nor heard from directly. She found Addie a sweet, lovable girl, full of frank simplicity and unquestioning piety. Though dazzlingly beautiful, she had none of the coquetry which Esther, with a touch of jealousy, had been accustomed to associate with beauty, and she had little of the petty malice of girlish gossip. Esther summed ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... The soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are proofs of Shakespeare's skill in human ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... the Angel Steeple above the roof-line where it had been left by Chillenden. The arch has been called a disfigurement, and as it was not originally intended such an opinion may be justifiable, and yet the beauty of the reticulated stonework and the consummate skill which conceived the bold simplicity of design is so satisfying that it is scarcely possible to wish that it were absent. Beneath this flying arch appears the splendid western screen, approached by the flight of steps necessitated by the crypt or undercroft, for, being on perfectly level ground, there would have been no need ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home
... the compass of discourses like the present, only give a very meagre and inadequate notion of the entire phenomena connected with the moon which the tides will explain. We have not unfrequently, for the sake of simplicity, spoken of the moon's orbit as circular, and we have not even alluded to the fact that the plane of that orbit is inclined to the ecliptic. A comprehensive theory of the moon's origin should render an account of the eccentricity of the moon's orbit; it must also involve the obliquity of the ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... "She's simplicity itself—it's her great quality. Vain complications don't exist for her, because she doesn't see them... that's what my people ...
— Coming Home - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... courage of the gaolers who had him at their mercy, the narrator had not attempted to better his tale by the invention of perils. The history of the desperate project that had been planned and carried out five years before was related with grim simplicity which (because it at once bears the stamp of truth, and forces the imagination of the reader to supply the omitted details of horror), is more effective to inspire sympathy than elaborate description. The ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... of the author's manner, the unaffected elevation of his style, the conciseness, perspicuity and simplicity of his diction, are everywhere suited to his subject, which is solemn, novel, luminous, affecting,—a subject perhaps the most universally interesting to the human race that has ever been presented to their contemplation. It takes the most liberal and comprehensive view ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... "palace" of the mikado, but we must warn our readers not to associate ideas of splendor or magnificence with this word. The Emperor of Japan dwells not in grandeur, but in simplicity. From the earliest times the house of the emperor has resembled a temple rather than a palace. The mikado is himself half a god in Japanese eyes, and is expected to be content with the simple and austere surroundings of the images of the gods. There are no ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... cut bloom the daisy is charming in glass trays on a bed of moss, or even in small bouquets, mixed with the foliage of pinks, carnations, and rosemary. Such an arrangement has at least the merit of sweet simplicity, and somehow has also the effect of carrying our thoughts with a ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... came over me, for a childlike simplicity characterized the other ringleaders in this expedition. Clark had had acumen once, and lost it; St. Gre was a fool; Nick Temple was leading purposely a reckless life; the Citizens Sullivan and Depeau had, to say the least, a limited knowledge ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... endeavours to drown reflection in draughts of destructive poison. This, added to the contagious company of women of her own description, vitiates her mind, eradicates the native seeds of virtue, destroys that elegant and fascinating simplicity, which gives additional charms to beauty, and leaves, in its place, art, affectation, ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... "The simplicity is beyond question." Blount returned the list of stockholders and fell back upon the pencil-sharpening. "It is quite elementary, as you say; but there is another phase of the transaction which seems to have escaped you. Are you aware that the present arrangement which you have so accurately ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... patriciate, now extinct in the control of the city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is still insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once and their simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never so good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its best. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... people were present, sitting, kneeling, or walking about,—a freedom that contrasts very agreeably with the grim formalities of English churches and our own meeting-houses. Many persons were in their best attire; but others came in, with unabashed simplicity, in their old garments of labor, sunburnt women from their toil among the vines and olives. One old peasant I noticed with his withered shanks in breeches and blue yarn stockings. The people of whatever class are wonderfully tolerant of heretics, never manifesting any displeasure ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to feel pleasure from the sight and from the examination of the finest pictures of the great painters; that she may be able to draw a flower that happens to please her; and that she may unite in her dress elegance and simplicity. I should wish that her talents might be such, that they should neither excite the admiration of others, nor inspire her with vanity; I should wish that she should please by the general effect of her ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... to-day," as Henriette Fuerth truly says ("Erotik und Elternpflicht," Am Lebensquell, p. 11), "have not yet attained that beautiful naturalness out of which in these matters simplicity and freedom grow. And however willing we may be to learn afresh, most of us have so far lost our inward freedom from prejudice—the standpoint of the pure to whom all things are pure—that we cannot acquire it again. We parents of to-day have been altogether wrongly ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... Balboa, dressed in a suit of pajamas engaged in superintending the roofing of a house. The officer, brilliant in silk and satin and polished armour, was astonished at the simplicity of Vasco Nunez's appearance. He courteously delivered his message, however, to the effect that yonder was the fleet of Don Pedro Arias de Avila, the new ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... old bush echoed to "Way Down Upon the Swanee River" and more modern songs, which aren't half so sweet as the old Christy Minstrel ditties. After they had exhausted all the choruses they knew, Harry "obliged" with one of Gordon's poems, recited with such boyish simplicity combined with vigour that it quite brought down the audience, who applauded so loudly that the orator was thankful for the ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... window, looking down, he were able to watch some shore, from whose security men were forever launching little cockleshell boats upon a limitless and angry sea.... From his height he can follow their fortunes, their brave struggles, their fortitude to the very end. He admires their courage, the simplicity of their faith, but his irony springs from his knowledge of the ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... not be referred to here; for he himself has related them in clear, life-like, homely terms which reveal one of the sources of his personal influence. Englishmen admire a man who is active without being fussy, who combines greatness with simplicity, whose kindliness is as devoid of ostentation as his religion is of mawkishness, and with whom ambition is ever the handmaid of patriotism. The character of a commander perhaps counts for more with British troops ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... his simplicity of manner, was a man of powerful and practical understanding. He had been an eminent scholar at his university, and was in a fair way for all its distinctions, when he thought proper to fall desperately in love. This, of course, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs. Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call her on the whole the best. I can't imagine a ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... his kindly, gentle way, and his fine large eyes beamed benevolence. Nor was this any assumption or trick of manner, as Henry soon learned. The man's nature was one of absolute simplicity and generosity. With a vast knowledge of the woods and a remarkable experience, he was ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to me there is poetry in thy very name, and so would it be to all who delight in honesty, bonhommie, simplicity, and ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... educated at Eton College and Oxford University. He was fond of the classics and took up Demosthenes as he did the speeches of Lord Chatham. As an orator he was much indebted to the study of the Greek writers, for the simplicity of his tastes, his entire abstinence from everthing like mere ornament, the terseness of his style, the point and stringency of his reasonings, and the all-pervading cast of intellect which distinguishes his speeches even in the most vehement bursts ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... them all about it in the truthful simplicity of a man of God, and, thank God, they bad sense enough—yes, and love enough, charity enough, to accept his explanations, and to glorify God. Would to God we could get as much sense and charity ...
— Godliness • Catherine Booth
... period of Salerno who had not yet been disturbed by Arabian culture or scholasticism, we cannot but admire the clear, charmingly smooth, light-flowing diction, the delicate and honest setting forth of cases, the simplicity of their method of treatment, which was to a great extent dietetic and expectant, and while we admire the carefulness and yet the copiousness of their therapy, we cannot but envy them a certain austerity in their pharmaceutic formulas ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... The story of Hercules seems of great antiquity, as appears from the simplicity of his dress and armour, a lion's skin and a club; and from the nature of many of his exploits, the destruction of wild beasts and robbers. This part of the history of Hercules seems to have related to times before the invention ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... For other fare than jonakin and mush. And though men fared and lodged very hard, Yet innocence was better than a guard. 'T was long before spiders and worms had drawn Their dingy webs, or hid with cheating lawn New England's beauties, which still seemed to me Illustrious in their own simplicity. 'T was ere the neighboring Virgin Land had broke The hogsheads of her worse than hellish smoke; 'T was ere the Islands sent their presents in, Which but to use was counted next to sin; 'T was ere a barge had made ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... this belief, read the manifesto of Professor Eucken, who represents such a large section of German opinion, and note the absolute sincerity of its tone—as well as its simplicity. ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... steadily in the face for about thirty seconds. His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant. I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... greatest interest to the layman and to the general anthropologist. We are informed that the Bantu languages "constitute a very distinct type of speech which, as contrasted with others amongst the group of Negro tongues, is remarkable as a rule for Italian melodiousness, simplicity and frequency of its vowel sounds, and the comparative ease with which its exemplars can be acquired and spoken by Europeans" (p. 15). "This one Negro language family now covers the whole of the southern third of Africa, with the exception of very small areas in the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... made to talk a good deal of her journey; and she told the story with so much simplicity, speaking with unfeigned gratitude and affection of the friendships she had made, and touching with quiet mirthfulness upon the droll events, as if she hardly knew herself that they were droll, that all—and ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... understood at the time, in order that the disciples might stretch up towards what was above them, and, by stretching up, might grow. I do not think that it is good to break down the children's bread too small. A wise teacher will now and then blend with the utmost simplicity something that is just a little in advance of the capacity of the listener, and so encourage a little hand to stretch itself out, and the arm to grow because it is stretched. If there are no difficulties there is no effort, and if ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... It is a rule, without any exception, in all kinds of composition, that the principal idea, the predominant feeling, should never be confounded with the accompanying decorations. It should generally be distinguished from them by greater simplicity of expression; as we recognise Napoleon in the pictures of his battles, amidst a crowd of embroidered coats and plumes, by his grey cloak and his hat without a feather. In the verses of Petrarch it is generally ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... painted clearly in his heart. She was girlishly slim. He had observed that her eyes were beautifully clear and gray in the sunlight, and her exquisitely smooth dark hair, neatly coiled and luxuriant crown of beauty, reminded him of puritanism in its simplicity. At times he doubted that she was twenty-three. If she had said nineteen or twenty he would have been better satisfied. She puzzled him and roused speculation in him. But it was a part of his business to see many things which others might ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... play till our own time had given us, in the author of Tragaldabas, one who could alternate without confusing the woodland courtship of Eliseo and Caprina with the tavern braggardism of Grif and Minotoro. The sweetness and simplicity of lyric or elegiac loveliness which fill and inform the scenes where Adriana, her sister, and the Syracusan Antipholus exchange the expression of their errors and their loves, belong to Shakespeare alone; ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... varied raptures of millinery, and with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of feature ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... seeming, a thing to look at, to go get bravely had come into his mind in little pictures, like prints in a book. A thing of simplicity, simple as the sea, and as colorful and as wholesome and as beautiful. He thought of a little thatched and whitewashed house with a cobbled yard clean as a ship's decks, and a garden where the bluish green stalks and absurdly pretty flowers of ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... to know what became of the slaves after they had crossed the salt water. I told them, that they were employed in cultivating the land; but they would not believe me; and one of them putting his hand upon the ground, said with great simplicity, "Have you really got such ground as this to set your feet upon?" A deeply rooted idea that the Whites purchase Negroes for the purpose of devouring them, or of selling them to others, that they may be devoured hereafter, naturally makes the slaves contemplate a journey towards the Coast with ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... (you may depend upon it); and again seemed to me as, in several respects, the one perfectly Human Voice I had heard among my fellow-creatures for a long time. And then the "style," the treatment and expression,—yes, it is inimitable, best—Emersonian throughout. Such brevity, simplicity, softness, homely grace; with such a penetrating meaning, soft enough, but irresistible, going down to the depths and up to the heights, as silent electricity goes. You have done very well; and many will know it ever better by degrees.—Only one thing farther I will note: How ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... design, and they are almost always beautiful. It is melancholy to have to confess that in this, as in all their art, the Greek taste is inimitable; yet we may profit by the lessons it teaches us. These are: variety without redundancy; grace without affectation; simplicity without poverty; the appropriate, the harmonious, and the serene, rather than that which is astonishing, painful, or awe-inspiring. These principles were carried into the smallest arts, and we can trace them in the shaping of a cup ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... your politics and policies are summed up in the one intention to do well for yourself, great simplicity is given to your theories, if not to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the most elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worship corresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service with its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society which produced them elements both of high formality and conscious reverence which they could not possibly offer to our luxurious, sophisticated and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... you like simplicity That sucks its cheeks to make the dimple. But this domestic bourgeoisie You hate,—because ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... eye shall see," and seeing, recognise his divine dignity. In the next verse he is styled God, not to identify him, but as a matter of course in the narrative.—No sooner did the Judge take his seat, than "the earth and the heaven fled away." The simplicity and sublimity of this language are inimitable by human genius; and rarely if at all equalled, even by those who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The first inspired writer uses language very ...
— Notes On The Apocalypse • David Steele
... photographs, and industrial work, and a few by written work alone. In subject-matter and original thought, South Dakota's work compared favorably with that of other schools of like age and conditions, especially in simplicity and originality. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... commenced relieved him of any embarrassment in regard to dispensing with military guards and sentries; but all pretentious accompaniments of authority were foreign to his nature, and he always showed, by the severe simplicity of his life, that he felt he was one of the people, and that it was his duty as well as his pleasure to permit all who had any occasion to see him to have free access to him, without the necessity of going through any ...
— Wilmot and Tilley • James Hannay
... Italian women for the simplicity of their church-attire: their black dresses and lace veils make a picturesque contrast with the gorgeous ceremonials of the high altar. But there was something in this quiet toilet, so fresh and simple and girl-like, that struck me as the one touch ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... light than the sudden flash of a shirt-front or the tremor of a lock of hair. The goddess reigned. And round about the hall, the guardians of decorum, the enemies of Aphrodite, enchanted too, watched with the simplicity of doves the great Aphrodisian festival, blind to the eternal verities of a satin slipper, a ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... properly called apologetic. Unless we fall back into quietism which would tell us to read a Kempis and say our prayers and wait, we must address ourselves first of all to making Christianity attractive; and then to making it intelligible. And if we do not find it against Gospel simplicity to address ourselves, as we continually do, to the intelligence of the semi-educated, we cannot allege that scruple as a reason why we should not address ourselves to the fully educated,—to those who eventually form and guide the ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... evening they arrived at a house built with equal elegance and simplicity, where nothing favored either of prodigality or avarice. The master of it was a philosopher, who had retired from the world, and who cultivated in peace the study of virtue and wisdom, without any of that rigid and morose severity so commonly ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... making the reformation complete; and the rather, as in the present series and the one to be proposed, there would be so many points of very near approximation, as, aided in the same manner by tables, would not increase their difficulties, perhaps, indeed, would lessen them by the greater simplicity of the links by which the several members of the system are connected together. Perhaps, however, I was wrong in this supposition. The representatives of the people in Congress are alone competent to judge of the general disposition of the people, and to what ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... have the two enormous superiorities: first, that the Irish Protestant rioters really believe in Protestant theology; and second, that the Irish Protestant rioters do really riot. Among these people, if anywhere, should be found the cult of theological clarity combined with barbarous external simplicity. Among these ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... bordered with the principality, Gerolstein, an extinct grand duchy, among the number. On the south it marched with the comparatively powerful kingdom of Seaboard Bohemia, celebrated for its flowers and mountain bears, and inhabited by a people of singular simplicity and tenderness of heart. Several intermarriages had, in the course of centuries, united the crowned families of Grunewald and Maritime Bohemia; and the last Prince of Grunewald, whose history I purpose to relate, drew his descent ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man, in simplicity a child," nothing gloomy, narrow, or pharisaical entered into the composition of Eugene Field. Like Jack Montesquieu Bellew, the editor of the Cork Chronicle, "his finances, alas! were always miserably low." This followed from his learning how to spend money freely before he was forced to earn it ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... most ardent wishes attend you, good Sir, that you may find in this land a virtuous simplicity, a happy recess from the intriguing politics and vitiating refinements of the European world. That your patriotic virtues may add to the vigour of our happy Constitution and that the blessings of this country may be abundantly remunerated into your ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... character in every feature, attitude, and movement, and carries his seventy years as easily as most men carry fifty. The other person is his only son and heir, a dreamy-eyed young fellow, who looks about twenty-six but is nearer thirty. Candor, kindliness, honesty, sincerity, simplicity, modesty—it is easy to see that these are cardinal traits of his character; and so when you have clothed him in the formidable components of his name, you somehow seem to be contemplating a lamb in armor: his name and style being the Honourable Kirkcudbright ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... coat, and a toque of dark Russian sable, with a sweeping feather at one side. The price of these two garments alone would equal the whole of Claire's yearly salary, but it had the effect of making the wearer look clumsy and middle-aged compared with the graceful simplicity of the other's French-cut costume. Janet Willoughby was not thinking of clothes at that moment, however; she was looking at reddened eyelids, and remembering the moment when she had seen a kneeling figure suddenly shaken with emotion. The sight of those tears had wiped away the rankling ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and minority. The world has an instinct for recognizing its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life. From qualities, for instance, of childlike simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, the world does and must turn away its face toward grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect; and not otherwise in literature, nor at ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... it is only a convention and that she will not be deceived by it. I have never bent my knee to the ground when my heart did not go with it. So that class of women known as facile is unknown to me, or if I allow myself to be taken with them, it is without knowing it, and through innate simplicity. ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... he never liked the boy? Harvey, so far as anyone could perceive, had no affection, no good feeling, no youthful freshness or simplicity of heart; moreover, he exhibited precocious arrogance, supported by an obstinacy which had not even the grace of quickening into fieriness; he was often a braggart, and could not be trusted to tell the truth where his ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... where it was, as if to a solemn festival, in order to gaze at the marvels of Leonardo, which caused all those people to be amazed; for in the face of that Madonna was seen whatever of the simple and the beautiful can by simplicity and beauty confer grace on a picture of the Mother of Christ, since he wished to show that modesty and that humility which are looked for in an image of the Virgin, supremely content with gladness at seeing the beauty of her Son, whom she was holding with ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... prove the high repute in which he was held, even out of France. One day a watch, to the construction of which he had given his whole attention, happened to fall into the hands of Arnold, the celebrated English watchmaker. He examined it with interest, and surveyed with admiration the simplicity of its mechanism, the perfection of the workmanship. He could scarcely be persuaded that a specimen thus executed could be the work of French industry. Yielding to the love of his art, he immediately ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 432 - Volume 17, New Series, April 10, 1852 • Various
... which had been the weariness of his youth, he might reflect that while Rome had reconciled itself to the Renaissance, the Protestant principle in art had cut off Germany from the supreme tradition of beauty. And yet to that transparent nature, with its simplicity as of the earlier world, the loss of absolute sincerity must have been a real loss. Goethe understands that Winckelmann had made this sacrifice. Yet at the bar of the highest criticism, perhaps, Winckelmann may be absolved. The insincerity ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... account of Remizov's many-sided genius, of his Tales of the Russian People, of his Dreams (real night-dreams), of his books written during the War and the Revolution (Mara and The Noises of the Town). In his later work he tends towards a greater simplicity, a certain "primitiveness" of outline, and a more concentrated style. Remizov's disciples, as might be expected, have been more successful in imitating the grotesqueness of his caricatures and the vivid and intense concentration of his character ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... a mad I bundle of contradictions—old as a judge when up against the Realities, young as Crumpet the puppy when staring at Romance. Give him bread and you have him of cast-iron—stern, cold, hard of muscle, grim frown, stiff back, no smiles. Give him jam and you have credulity, simplicity, longing for friendship, tenderness, devotion to a small girl in a black frock, a heart big as the world. See him on Good Friday afternoon, laughing, eagerly questioning, a boy—see him on Good Friday night, grim, legs stiff, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... the 18th century was rich in Italian Violinists and writers for the instrument, of whom the chief was Giuseppe Tartini, born 1692. Dr. Burney says of his compositions: "Though he made Corelli his model in the purity of his harmony and simplicity of his modulation, he greatly surpassed that composer in the fertility and originality of his invention; not only in the subjects of his melodies, but in the truly cantabile manner of treating them. Many of his adagios want nothing but words to be excellent ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... Acknowledgment of the Good which he Received from Cicero and Plato—The Important Elements which Platonism Lacked, and which were Found Only in the Gospel of Christ—The Great Secret of Power in the Early Church Found in its Moral Earnestness, as Shown by Simplicity of Life, and especially by Constancy even Unto a Martyr's Death—The Contrast between the Frugality of the Early Church and the Luxury and Vice of Roman Society—The Great Need of this Element of Success at the Present Time—The Observance of a Wise Discrimination ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... afraid that the profession of letters interferes with the elemental feelings of life; and I am afraid, too, that in the majority of cases this interference is not justified by its results. The entireness and simplicity of life is flawed by the intrusion of an inquisitive element, and this inquisitive element never yet found anything which was much worth the finding. Men live by the primal energies of love, faith, imagination; and happily it is not given to ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Terebra, from New Caledonia. They are extremely tapering cones, attaining almost nine inches in length. Their surface is smooth and quite plain, without any of the usual ornaments, such as furrows, knots or strings of pearls. The spiral edifice is superb, graced with its own simplicity alone. I count a score of whorls which gradually decrease until they vanish in the delicate point. They are edged with ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... no farther. The hands in his wrenched themselves free and sought his shoulders. The very frankness and simplicity of the gesture sent a chill ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... more to be recommended to healthy, hearty, fun-loving girls of fifteen than is its extreme of gayety and indulgence, but it had its effect in those bad old days of dissipation and excess, and the simplicity and soberness of this wise young girl's life in the very midst of so much power and luxury, made even the worst elements in the empire respect and ...
— Historic Girls • E. S. Brooks
... where, with little modesty, and less courtesy, he styles the commentators on Shakspeare—naming in particular, KNIGHT, COLLIER, and DYCE, and including SINGER and all of the present day—criticasters who "stumble and bungle in sentences of that simplicity and grammatical clearness as not to tax the powers of a third-form schoolboy to explain." In order to bring me "within his danger," he actually transposes two lines of Shakspeare; and so, to the unwary, makes me appear to be a very ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... force but of singular charm of character. In 1833 he became incumbent of a church at Hereford in the gift of the Simeon trustees, and lived there till his death in 1890, having resigned his living about 1870. He had the simplicity of character of a Dr. Primrose, and was always overflowing with the kindliest feelings towards his relatives and mankind in general. His enthusiasm was, directed not only to religious ends but to various devices for the physical advantage of mankind. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... very laborious; besides the care of housekeeping, they work the tent coverings of goats hair, and the woollen carpets, which are inferior only to those of Persian manufacture. Their looms are of primitive simplicity; they do not make use of the shuttle, but pass the woof with their hands. They seem to have made great progress in the art of dyeing; their colours [p.640] are beauitful. Indigo and cochineal, which they purchase at Aleppo, give them their blue, and red dyes, but the ingredients of all ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... were intended for fighting at close quarters, and can be described here in a few lines because of their guileless simplicity. They consisted of conical explosive bombs on the ends of broom handles! A strong man could whirl one of them round his head, like a two-handed sword or battle-axe, and, when the momentum was sufficient, hurl it over the water for ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... told that they must believe, they call it empty talk, and ask, Who does not believe what is true? This they say because they see truth in the light of their own heaven; therefore, to believe what they do not see they call either simplicity or foolishness. These are they who constitute the lung region of ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... grey, was as thick and strong as if he had been but twenty; his person was still muscular and active; and, moreover, he yet retained, in all their freshness, the feelings of his youth, and no small portion of the simplicity of his childhood. I loved David, not only because he was a good man, but because there was a great deal of character or originality about him; and though his brow was cheerful, the clouds of sorrow had frequently rested upon it. More than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... by heretics, who are wont to corrupt the faith of simple people in such questions. If, however, it is found that they are free from obstinacy in their heterodox sentiments, and that it is due to their simplicity, it is ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... a feeling of regret, such as stirs one's heart at parting with a dear friend, that I turned the last page of Irving's most delightful visit to Abbotsford, which he has given us in language so beautiful from its simplicity, so graphic in its details, and so heart-deep in its sincerity, that with him we ourselves seem to be partakers also of the hospitality and kindness of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... rooms in the north wing of the Louvre, in Paris, rooms having windows facing across the Rue de Rivoli toward the Palais Royal, where men must have sat in the comfortable leather-covered chair of the High Official and laughed at the astounding simplicity of the French people. But he laughs best who laughs last, and the People will assuredly be amused in a few months, or a few years, at the very sudden and very humiliating discomfiture of a gentleman falling ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... smiling tacitly at her native simplicity, "as it would mean permanent work in superintending and so forth, I see no reason ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... the kind seemed to him to be probable. Had there been any moment in which the duty had seemed to him to be a duty, he would have done it, even though it had been necessary to caution the Earl to take his son away from Bowick. But there had been nothing of the kind. He had acted in the simplicity of his heart, and this had been the result. Of course it was impossible. He acknowledged to himself that it was so, because of the necessity of those Oxford studies and those long years which would be required for ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope
... arms; and at some little distance were seated, rather below him, his other sister and his wife, the wife opening and eating some rock-oysters, and the sister suckling her child, Kah-dier-rang, whom she had taken from Bennillong. I cannot omit mentioning the unaffected simplicity of the wife: immediately on her stepping out of her canoe, she gave way to the pressure of a certain necessity, without betraying any of that reserve which would have led another at least behind the adjoining bush. ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... silent garden by the river groves; again shall we sit upon the moss-grown seats in the still evening hours; again shall we utter those wild words that caused our hearts to vibrate with mutual happiness! Zoe, pure and innocent as the angels." The child-like simplicity of that question, "Enrique, what is to marry?" Ah! sweet Zoe! you shall soon learn. Ere long I shall teach you. Ere long wilt thou be mine; ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... apparel: on holidays he wore a suit of black. Forty years old ere he began to mix in the circles of polished life, he never attained a knowledge of the world and its ways; in all his transactions he retained the simplicity of the pastoral character. His Autobiography is the most amusing in the language, from the honesty of the narrator; never before did man of letters so minutely reveal the history of his foibles and failings. He was entirely unselfish ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... till some hypothesis be discovered, which by penetrating deeper into human nature, may prove the former affections to be nothing but modifications of the latter. All attempts of this kind have hitherto proved fruitless, and seem to have proceeded entirely from that love of SIMPLICITY which has been the source of much false reasoning in philosophy. I shall not here enter into any detail on the present subject. Many able philosophers have shown the insufficiency of these systems. And I shall take for granted ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... on our giving half a franc and thinking ourselves exceedingly stingy for not giving a whole one, they shouted out "Voila les Anglais, voila la generosite des Anglais," with evident sincerity. I thought to myself that the less we English corrupted the primitive simplicity of these good folks the better; it was really refreshing to find several people protesting about one's generosity for having paid a halfpenny more for a bottle of wine than was expected; at Monetier we asked whether many English came there, and they told us yes, a great ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... know it is true," returned Fan with strange simplicity; and this imprudent speech quickly brought on her a tempest of anger. When the heart is burdened with a great anguish which cannot be expressed there is nothing like a burst of passion to relieve it. Tear-shedding is a weak ineffectual remedy compared ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... lesser pangs. For Sylvia's sake she shook hands with him, for Sylvia's sake she sat down in the chair he offered. But for no living human being's sake could this determined Old Lady infuse any cordiality into her manner or her words. She went straight to the point with Lloyd simplicity. ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beauty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit; unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct; it will be a contemplation full of horror, and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the restaurant does not merely live by reputation but an excellence of cuisine testifies in itself to some master-hand. The waitresses at most of these Russian establishments are often women of society, and some of them very beautiful in the simplicity of uniform. There is a fascinating added pleasure in being waited upon by such gracious women, but the heart aches for the fate of some of them. On each table is a ticket with the name and patronymic of the waitress, thus, Tatiana Mihailovna, or Sophia Vladimirovna. ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... I love. If they have spoiled me, it is not my fault, but yours. Now I will show you that I have been very good for one who has shown herself sensible and kind, Madame Hatzfeld. When I showed her her husband's letter, bursting into tears, she said to me with, great emotion, and simplicity: 'It is certainly his hand-writing!' As she read it, her accent touched my heart and gave me real distress, I said to her: 'Well, Madame, throw that letter into the fire, I shall not be strong enough ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... the neck. Those acts that are done from vanity, are said to be unproductive of fruit. Those acts, on the other hand, O monarch, that are done from a spirit of renunciation, always bear abundant fruits.[26] Tranquillity, self-restraint, fortitude, truth, purity, simplicity, sacrifices, perseverance, and righteousness,—these are always regarded as virtues recommended by the Rishis. In domesticity, it is said, are acts intended for Pitris, gods, guests. In this mode of life alone, O monarch, are the threefold aims to be attained.[27] The renouncer that ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... single stone, and that, too, very plain, with a name deeply cut. This announced to us that we were standing over the grave of William Wordsworth. He chose his own grave, and often visited the spot before his death. He lies in the most sequestered spot in the whole grounds, and the simplicity and beauty of the place was enough to make one in love with it, to be laid so far from the bustle of the world, and in so sweet a place. The more one becomes acquainted with the literature of the old world, the more he must love her poets. Among the teachers of men, ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... jewelled robes, with a crown of gold weighing on his temples? or whether he went bare-legged and bare-armed, with his bare locks flowing in luxurious wildness to the breeze? We request an answer to this in full simplicity. We observe that even in Ireland now, a fellow six feet high, and stout in proportion, is called a "prince of a fellow," although he has not wherewithal to buy a paper of tobacco to supply his dhudeen: and, arguing from this fact, ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat
... ability to compress much information into a few words. It is a rich treat to read such a book as this, when there is so much beauty and force combined with such simplicity."—Eastern Press. ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... few fine works may crop up, but they will be accidents, and will not affect the general tendency of the exhibitions nor the direction in which the Academy is striving to lead English art. Under the guidanceship of the Academy English art has lost all that charming naivete and simplicity which was so long its distinguishing mark. At an Academy banquet, anything but the most genial optimism would be out of place, and yet Sir Frederick Leighton could not but allude to the disintegrating ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... nicely paved, well-shaded avenues in the western part of that beautiful city. It is a plain, substantial two-and-a-half story brick house of thirteen rooms, with modern conveniences, and belongs to Miss Mary. It is furnished with Quakerlike simplicity but with everything necessary to make life comfortable. In the front parlor are piano, easy chairs and many pictures and pieces of bric-a-brac, given by friends. Over the mantel hangs a fine, large painting of the Yosemite, presented to Miss Anthony in 1896 ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... wife a wise man must reckon the lustre of her birth and not of her beauty. Therefore, if he were to seek a match in a proper spirit, he should weigh the ancestry, and not be smitten by the looks; for though looks were a lure to temptation, yet their empty bedizenment had tarnished the white simplicity of many a man. Now there was a woman, as nobly born as himself, whom he could take. She herself, whose means were not poor nor her birth lowly, was worthy his embraces, since he did not surpass her in royal wealth nor ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... sent her to live, and perhaps to die, here on the edge of the wilderness. He made the same observation with regard to the man who sat with his back to the window. He was in informal evening dress—a circumstance that, in this land of more or less primitive simplicity, spoke of a sense of exile. He was slight and middle-aged, and though his face was hidden, Ford received the impression of having seen him already, but from another point of view. His habit of using a magnifying-glass as, with some difficulty, he read a newspaper ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... simple farmer's house, and congratulated him on his good fortune, in such cunning words, pretending to have heard all about it, that before long the farmer found himself telling the whole story-all except the secret of blowing the conch, for, with all his simplicity, the farmer was not quite such a fool ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... prove the unity of God in the two senses of the term; unity in the sense of simplicity, and unity in the sense of uniqueness. Unity as opposed to composition—the former sense of the term—is neither the same as the essence of a thing, nor is it an accident added to the essence. It cannot be essence, for in ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... more interested in her, resolved yet more firmly to see more of her. With a natural simplicity he used his skill in woodcraft to compass his end, and availed himself of the covert afforded by the common to watch Colet House. Thanks to this simple device he was able to meet or overtake Mrs. Dangerfield, somewhere in the first half-mile of her ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... in a slightly more elaborate manner than in the original text; while again, in rare cases, others which depend on allusions entirely unfamiliar to the non-Indian reader, have been omitted rather than spoil by an over-elaboration the simplicity and naturalness which is the ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... be to go over again. And with it all was joined her natural reluctance to give an honest gentleman pain, only heightened by her sense that, for the first time in her knowledge of the man, the evident sincerity of his purpose had given simplicity to his speech. He for once had been neither formal nor absurd, and the uniqueness of the fact, taken in conjunction with her share in it, seemed to have given him a claim on her consideration. He had cast aside the armour of self-conceit at which she could have thrown a dart without remorse, ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... and many of them did not know what to make of it. The originality of his thoughts, the consummate beauty of the language in which they were clothed, the calm dignity of his bearing, the absence of all oratorical effort, and the singular directness and simplicity of his manner, free from the least shadow of dogmatic assumption, made a deep impression on me. Not long before this I had listened to a wonderful sermon by Dr. Chalmers, whose force, and energy, and vehement, but rather turgid eloquence carried, for the moment, all ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... elders, as well as the rest of the city, saw and heard all that passed. Nor was there any thing shameful in this nakedness of the young women; modesty attended them, and all wantonness was excluded. It taught them simplicity and a care for good health, and gave them some taste of higher feelings, admitted as they thus were to the field of noble action and glory. Hence it was natural for them to think and speak as Gorgo, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... King were both of one mind, that this was hard measure. So it was. Man's measure always is either over hard or over soft, because he cannot see all sides at once. Now they saw Paul's side, his simplicity, and his suffering; the chaplain had only seen the chances of his conveying the seeds of ungodly teaching to the workhouse children; he could not tell that the pitch which Paul had not touched by his own will, had not stuck by him—probably owing ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... above temptation, holding positions which are coveted by all lawyers. That it is so is enough for us; and as the good thence derived comes to us so easily, we forget to remember that we might possibly be without it. The law courts of the States have much in their simplicity and the general intelligence of their arrangements to recommend them. In all ordinary causes justice is done with economy, with expedition, and I believe with precision. But they strike an Englishman at once as being deficient in splendor and ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... or more, there will be no call for surprise, when our young men are pictured in their true colors. The mind need not hesitate to enquire, when it views youth and manhood, beautiful and blase, attractive and cynical, credulous to simplicity in many things, and infidels in the one great act of ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... all hearts. His war steed pranced proudly as if conscious of the royal burden he bore, and of the victories he had achieved. Leopold was an ungainly man at the best. Conscious of his inability to vie with the hero, in his personal presence, he affected the utmost simplicity of dress and equipage. Humiliated also by the cold reception he had met and by the consciousness of extreme unpopularity in both armies, he was embarrassed and deject. The contrast was very striking, adding to the renown of Sobieski, and sinking ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... than when attired for a ball. With what would be termed high dress in other parts of the world, they are little acquainted; but reversing the rule of Europe, where the married bestow the most care on their personal appearance, and the single are taught to observe a rigid simplicity, Grace now seemed sufficiently ornamented in the eyes of the fastidious baronet, while, at the same time, he thought her less obnoxious to the criticism just mentioned, than most of her ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... naivete. Such a life was all the more meritorious because the abbe was possessed of an erudition that was vast and varied, and of great and precious faculties. Delicacy and grace, the inseparable accompaniments of simplicity, lent charm to an elocution that was worthy of a prelate. His manners, his character, and his habits gave to his intercourse with others the most exquisite savor of all that is most spiritual, most sincere in the human mind. A lover of gayety, he was never priest in a salon. ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... assorted in kind and quantity, her alert, lively movements carrying her from one group to another, with something pleasant and appropriate to say to all, bringing smiles and animation with her wherever she went. Not that Edmund did not prefer his cousin's severe simplicity, and admire it as something grand; but that stern grandeur was not all that fitted the place; and though he thought her beautiful, he was ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... prophet of this great simplicity. He speaks straight to the heart of Islam, and it's an honourable message. But for our sins it's been twisted into part of that damned German propaganda. His unworldliness has been used for a cunning political move, and his creed of space and simplicity for the ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... Swanee River" and more modern songs, which aren't half so sweet as the old Christy Minstrel ditties. After they had exhausted all the choruses they knew, Harry "obliged" with one of Gordon's poems, recited with such boyish simplicity combined with vigour that it quite brought down the audience, who applauded so loudly that the orator was thankful for the darkness to ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... he won the confidence of the nation by the display of great abilities; and gave universal satisfaction of the pure patriotism of his heart, in all he said, or did. He was distinguished, as minister to France, for his open candor and simplicity of manners—so much so, as to cause Napoleon to remark of him "that no Government but a republic could create or foster so much truth and honest simplicity of character as ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... people, he proceeds to point out that moral corruption arising from material prosperity is also a powerful factor in producing physical degeneracy. He singles out one canton—the canton of Luchon—as being the victim of its own prosperity. In this canton, he says, that the old simplicity of life has departed, in consequence of its prodigious prosperity. "Vices formerly unknown have penetrated into the country; the frequenting of public houses and the habit of keeping late hours have taken ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... said—horse-witches and the like. I questioned him once or twice upon the matter, and even threatened him, but it was of no use; he put on a look as if he did not understand me, a regular Irish look, just such a one as those rascals assume when they wish to appear all innocence and simplicity, and they full of malice and deceit all the time. I don't like them; they are no friends to old England, or its old king, God bless him! They are not good subjects, and never were; always in league with foreign enemies. When I was in the Coldstream, long ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... expect nothing from him but the plain, simple truth, without addition or ornament and without vanity. He will tell you the wrong things he has done and thought as readily as the right, without troubling himself in the least as to the effect of his words upon you; he will use speech with all the simplicity of ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... the English rite, and a very solemn and important part of it. It should, therefore, be done very carefully and accurately, and should not be obscured by any additional ceremonial, that all men may recognise the far-reaching simplicity of our Lord's prohibition of dissolution of marriage, extending to all human action, except that of the Church, whatever civil authority such other ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown
... to the expedient of a Constituent Convention. Cromwell told the story of this unlucky assembly some years after with an amusing frankness. "I will come and tell you a story of my own weakness and folly. And yet it was done in my simplicity—I dare avow it was. . . . It was thought then that men of our own judgement, who had fought in the wars, and were all of a piece on that account—why, surely, these men will hit it, and these men will do it to the purpose, whatever can be desired! And surely we did think, and I ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... the finest illustration of the fact that the Gothic style survived in Oxford when it was being rapidly superseded elsewhere. (3) No building in Oxford (very few buildings anywhere) owe their effect so completely to their simplicity and their absence ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... impression of a very energetic, powerful, and wealthy young Viking, capable of strong affections and disaffections, foremost in games and fights requiring physical force, and with a vast number of habits and customs. It is a history that interests through its simplicity." ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... Pope, how of old time his bishopric had been vacant upwards of a hundred years, during which period almost all the revenues were seized by the seculars; and although in process of time there had been several bishops instituted, yet, by their simplicity or negligence, the former dilapidations were not recovered, but, on the contrary, the remainder was almost quite alienated; so that, for near ten years, a proper person could not be found to accept ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... merely needed to convince the girl that she was actually the party sought, and she would go forward, playing the game he desired, believing herself right, totally unconscious of any fraud. The very simplicity of it rendered the plot the more dangerous, the more difficult to expose. Hawley had surely been favored by fortune in discovering this singer who chanced to resemble Hope so remarkably, and who, at the same time, was in such ignorance as ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... For a second he stood towering over him, eye to eye. Then he turned his back, and thrust out one great arm horizontally across the other's body, as though to warn him back while he spoke to Elia. There was nothing blustering in his attitude, nothing even forceful. There was a simplicity, a directness that was strangely compelling. And Will found himself obeying the silent command in ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... lines of the building, except those of the roof, are either horizontal or perpendicular. The most complicated Greek columnar buildings known, the Erechtheum and the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, are simplicity itself when compared to a Gothic cathedral, with its irregular plan, its towers, its wheel ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... but she bore the look. She was speaking the simple truth. Loss of fortune did seem "a mere trifle" now, when he was safe back again, and she sat in his presence, he talking to her as gently as in the olden time. Her simplicity in worldly things was so extreme that even Nathanael passed it over ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful, and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben was not usually given to concerning himself much as to ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... for his own literary projects, he was ever ready to extend his sympathy and assistance to those of others. His reputation as a scholar was enhanced by the higher qualities which he possessed as a man, - by his benevolence, his simplicity of manners, and unsullied moral worth. My own obligations to him are large; for from the publication of my first historical work, down to the last week of his life, I have constantly received proofs from him of his hearty and most efficient interest in the prosecution ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... property might be supplied by a similar substitution. [154] But the power of the testator expired with the acceptance of the testament: each Roman of mature age and discretion acquired the absolute dominion of his inheritance, and the simplicity of the civil law was never clouded by the long and intricate entails which confine the happiness ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... God is pleasant is pleasant to God," the reverse also holds good; and certainly the major proposition is true with regard to man. Addison says of cheerfulness, that it lightens sickness, poverty, affliction; converts ignorance into an amiable simplicity, and renders deformity itself agreeable; and he says no more than the truth. "Give us, therefore, O! give us"—let us cry with Carlyle—"the man who sings at his work! Be his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... side of his genius; but another, and profounder, appears in the eloquent simplicity of such a passage as the following, against our fears of lessening ourselves in the ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... spiritual world . . . is just as simple as living in the natural world; and it is the same kind of simplicity. It is the same kind of simplicity for it is the same kind of world—there are not two kinds of worlds. The conditions of life in the one are the conditions of life in the other. And till these conditions are sensibly grasped, as the conditions ...
— Beautiful Thoughts • Henry Drummond
... in face of the typical absence of protest or compliment there was nothing the most critical could find fault with in the invitation or the refusal. The old man was dressed in very curiously-patched jean, but he was almost stately in his simplicity, and nothing could have been more apposite than the little nod with which Alton made his affirmation. It implied a good deal more than ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... was given by the young workman with so much modesty and simplicity that I was quite affected by it. Genevieve cried; Michael pressed his son to his heart, and in a long embrace he seemed to ask his pardon for ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... the sultan retire, and all the people depart, judged rightly that he would not sit again that day, and resolved to go home. On her arrival she said, with much simplicity, "Son, I have seen the sultan, and am very well persuaded he has seen me, too, for I placed myself just before him; but he was so much taken up with those who attended on all sides of him that I pitied him, and wondered at his patience. At last I believe he was heartily tired, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Anonymous
... people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress, he liked to "turn himself out to grass," as he called it: to put on old clothes and a straw hat, and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... disabilities. As to the Presidential nomination, there was no division,—it was given unhesitatingly, unanimously, heartily, to General Grant. His steadfastness and success in war had been matched by his magnanimity in victory and his prudence in the troubled times that followed. Of manly simplicity and solid worth, sagacious and successful wherever he had been tried, he seemed at once an embodiment of past victory and an assurance of future safety. Of the thirty-four States that voted, all but eight were for Grant and Colfax. Seymour had New York, New ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the Swiss. Here follows what Daniel Eremita, a very learned man, who published a description of their country, has said of them. "[8]They have the same simplicity in drinking, but they do not keep the same moderation. Wine is what they place their delight in, and they prefer it to all things in the world. At their assemblies, both for pleasure and business, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... Mersenne, "I can hardly form an idea of what he may have written concerning conics." Desargues seems to have boasted that he owed nothing to any man, and that all his results had come from his own mind. His favorite pupil, De la Hire, did not realize the extraordinary simplicity and generality of his work. It is a remarkable fact that the only one of all his associates to understand and appreciate the methods of Desargues should be a ...
— An Elementary Course in Synthetic Projective Geometry • Lehmer, Derrick Norman
... and achievements. This abundance is connected with a peculiarity in the author's talent. He does not exhaust his subject; the psychology of his characters is emphasized by two or three expressive traits only, and this epitome is enough to make the theme of a story, the simplicity and naturalness of which demand, nevertheless, a high degree of art. The author is not interested in outlining the details, but the picture that he has sparingly conjured up stands out lifelike; he is always in a hurry to observe and to tell. ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Not so much of an innocent as may seem to you. I am far from being an innocent; I understand everything and am able to experience everything. But, do you see, there is a difference in tastes. Clearness, simplicity, harmony, these are what I like, ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... merchant, Mr. Davy, who resided in the ill-fated city at that time, and was an eye-witness of the whole catastrophe, survived the event and wrote to a London friend the following account of it. The narrative reproduced herewith brings the details before the reader with a force and simplicity which leaves no doubt of the exact truth. Mr. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... have seen and examined all these buildings, as well as many sculptures of these times, particularly at Ravenna, but I have never found any memorial of the masters, and frequently not even the date when they were erected, so that I cannot but marvel at the simplicity and indifference to fame exhibited by the men of that age. But to return to our subject. After the buildings just enumerated there arose some persons of a more exalted temper, who, if they did not succeed in lighting upon the good, at least ...
— The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors & Architects, Volume 1 (of 8) • Giorgio Vasari
... read in books or heard from their parents' lips. The magic mirror is as old as literature. The inability to restore the stolen voice is foreshadowed in the Arabian Nights, when the "Open Sesame" is forgotten. The act of catching the voice has a simplicity which stamps it as original, the only analogy of which I can at present think being the story of later date, of the words which were frozen silent during the extreme cold of an Arctic winter, and became audible ...
— The Conjure Woman • Charles W. Chesnutt
... too, yet still retain the charm of their up-bringing, the traditions of their families, and their intense love of "the home back yonder." Whose daughters, though brought up, "raised," they often say, in the simplicity of country life, and more often than not having very limited financial resources, are in the truest sense of that beautiful old word, the gentlewomen we picture, prepared to grace their homes, or the outer world and ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... is a sweet simplicity about that little story which prepossesses me in favor of these New Zealanders, although they were once such horrible cannibals. Do they ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... processes are, in a real gasworks, usually separated, but for simplicity's sake we will combine them. Finally, the storage of the gas has to be ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... which remain I have traced thus far Webster's early life and education, but it is fair to find in his subsequent career traces of the influence which New England surroundings cast about every New England boy. The simplicity of life which characterized a province so uniform in its character was especially evident in the Connecticut Valley. Here, longer than in the cities and on the sea-board, native English and Puritan stock retained the form ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... knowledge of Gospel truth to this poor African," said the lieutenant to himself; and a blush rose on his own cheeks. "No time shall be lost, though," he added; and he unfolded in language suited to his comprehension, and in all its simplicity, the grand scheme of redemption whereby sinning man can be accepted by a holy and just God as freed from sin, through the great sacrifice offered ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... my late forced visit to my estate, I am so pleased with it, that I am resolved to live and die upon it. I am every day abroad among my acres, and can scarce forbear filling my letter with breezes, shades, flowers, meadows, and purling streams. The simplicity of manners which I have heard you so often speak of, and which appears here in perfection, charms me wonderfully. As an instance of it, I must acquaint you, and by your means the whole club, that I have lately married one of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume III (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland I • Francis W. Halsey
... dishonest. "It may seem difficult," says Richard Sharp, "to steer always between bluntness and plain dealing, between merited praises and lavishing indiscriminate flattery; but it is very easy—good humor, kindheartedness, and perfect simplicity, being all that are requisite to do what is right in the right way." At the same time many are impolite, not because they mean to be so, but because they are awkward, and perhaps know no ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... shared, and far more liberal than the tory majority in the house of lords. Great he certainly was not, and he never affected the royal dignity which partially concealed the littleness of his predecessor. But in honesty and simplicity he was no unworthy son of George III., and the greater pliability of his nature contributed, at least, to make the seven years of his reign more fruitful in reforms than all the sixty years during which the old king occupied ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... at twenty-seven. His black mane-like hair lay entangled over his very low forehead, and his sallow mask, ugly almost to ferociousness, was lighted up by a pair of childish eyes, bright and empty, which smiled with winning simplicity. The son of a stonemason of Plassans, he had achieved great success at the local art competitions, and had afterwards come to Paris as the town laureate, with an allowance of eight hundred francs per annum, for a period of four years. In the capital, however, he had found ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... poor Homer is only puzzled about his choice. However, he gives the preference particularly to a little female peasant, a very harmless, innocent creature, who enjoys a fine flush of health, and cuckolds her husband with a simplicity that has infinitely more merit than the witty malice of the most experienced ladies. This play cannot indeed be called the school of good morals, but it is certainly the school of wit ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire
... number of different types made and used, but for gas-engine use perhaps that known as the magneto ignition is the most satisfactory. With this form, neither accumulators, dry batteries, or spark coils are required, and consequently a greater simplicity is arrived at than ...
— Gas and Oil Engines, Simply Explained - An Elementary Instruction Book for Amateurs and Engine Attendants • Walter C. Runciman
... delicate, is easily destroyed by over-cooking; a dry, quick pan of the "mushroom bells" retains the best flavor; while the more dense Agaricus campestris requires long, slow cooking to bring out the flavor, and to be tender and digestible. Simplicity of seasoning, however, must be observed, or the mushroom flavor will be destroyed. If the mushroom itself has an objectionable flavor, better let it alone than to add mustard or lemon juice to overcome it. Mushrooms, like many of the more succulent vegetables, ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... composed his 'Chronicle' in the prison of the Stinche, where he was unjustly incarcerated for a debt to the Commune of Florence. Vespasiano da Bisticci contributed a series of most valuable portraits to the literature of Italy: all the great men of his time are there delineated with a simplicity that is the sign of absolute sincerity, Poliziano was present at the murder of Giuliano de' Medici in the Florentine Duomo. The historians of the sixteenth century will be noticed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... and wanting some things that should be laid ready for my dressing myself I was angry, and one thing after another made my wife give Besse warning to be gone, which the jade, whether out of fear or ill-nature or simplicity I know not, but she took it and asked leave to go forth to look a place, and did, which vexed me to the heart, she being as good a natured wench as ever we shall have, but only forgetful. At the office ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... tested the several weapons submitted to him for approval; finally selecting a six-shot magazine rifle, which was not only a most excellent weapon in all other respects, but one especially commending itself to him on account of the simplicity of its mechanism, which he believed would prove to be a very strong point in its favour when put into the hands of such comparatively unintelligent persons as he strongly suspected the rank and file of the Cuban insurgents would ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... romantic kind, and at the same time an interesting and minutely accurate account of the old Icelandic families, their homes, their mode of life, their superstitions, their songs and stories, their bearserk fury, and their heroism by land and sea. The story is told throughout with a simplicity which will make it attractive even to the very young, but the clearness is really secured by a close personal knowledge, not only of the whole saga-literature, but of the places in which the events occurred. It will on this account ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... blemish upon it; for it shows that underlying all our depravity (and God knows and you know we are depraved enough) and all our sophistication, and untarnished by them, there is a sweet germ of innocence and simplicity still. When a stranger says to me, with a glow of inspiration in his eye, some gentle, innocuous little thing about "Twain and one flesh" and all that sort of thing, I don't try to crush that man into the earth—no. ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... said, "I read the history of the human race, and trace the dark record of wars and carnage, of tyranny, robbery and injustice in every shape, which have been the fruits of State-churchism in every age; when I observe the degenerating effect which it has ever had on the purity and simplicity of the Gospel of Christ, turning men's minds from its great truths, as a religion of the heart, to the mere outward tinsel, to the forms and ceremonies on which priestcraft flourishes; when I see that at ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... never use a long word, even, where a short one would answer the purpose. I know there are professors in this country who "ligate" arteries. Other surgeons only tie them, and it stops the bleeding just as well. It is the familiarity and simplicity of bedside instruction which makes it so pleasant as well as so profitable. A good clinical teacher is himself a Medical School. We need not wonder that our young men are beginning to announce themselves not only as graduates of this or that College, but also as ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and he felt that her rustic simplicity possessed a charm above the amenities of culture. "The old clergyman—that was before Mr. Mullen's day—when we all went to the church over at Piping Tree—used to say that the mercy of God would have to exceed his if He was ever going to redeem him. I remember hearing him ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... thy father!" GIBBON betrayed none of the force and magnitude of his powers in his "Essay on Literature," or his attempted "History of Switzerland," JOHNSON'S cadenced prose is not recognisable in the humbler simplicity of his earliest years. Many authors have begun unsuccessfully the walk they afterwards excelled in. RAPHAEL, when he first drew his meagre forms under Perugino, had not yet conceived one line of that ideal beauty which one day he ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Hercules-worship in Rome. It was reinforced at an early date by no less than three temples of Hercules in the more or less immediate neighbourhood, all of which were characterised by the same relative simplicity of ritual. Centuries later Herakles became known to the Romans through direct Greek channels, and it was recognised that this new Herakles was akin to the old Hercules, so that he too was called Hercules. There was nothing surprising in this ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which, united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow, are inexpressibly pathetic. Beatrice Cenci appears to have been one of those rare persons in whom energy and gentleness dwell together ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... cousin's nonsense, Anthony answered his uncle with great simplicity, "Dear uncle, what can I ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... to the question: Because the author had a deep, practical knowledge of the stage. Because he disdained all stage tricks. Because he had the wit to select for his hero one of the world's greatest and finest characters. Because he had the audacity to select a gigantic theme and to handle it with simplicity. Because he had the courage of all his artistic and moral convictions. And of course because he has a genuine dramatic gift. Finally, because William J. Rea plays Lincoln with the utmost ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... hands at sailing a boat and knocking down obtrusive foreigners, Mr. Black has not since 'A Daughter of Heth' done so dramatic a piece of writing as the story of the Earl's death and Coquette's flight. The "Daughter of Heth," with her friendly simplicity and innocent wiles, and Madcap Violet, the laughter-loving, deserve perhaps a kinder fate than a broken heart and ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... evening, just at the time of the promenades which occupied the king so much. Chicot could see the simplicity of the royal manners by the ease with which he obtained an audience. A valet opened the door of a rustic-looking apartment bordered with flowers, above which was the king's antechamber and sitting-room. An officer or page ran to find the king, ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... grenadiers and old guard. They will not consent to be beaten every night, even in play; to be pursued in hundreds, by a handful of French; to fight against their beloved Emperor. Surely there is fine hearty virtue in this, and pleasant child-like simplicity. ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... that perfect tale were true Which ages have not made old, Of the endless many makes one anew, And simplicity manifold! ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... them hold their places in the concert-rooms of to-day, and they seem likely to live as long as there are people to appreciate clear and logical composition which attempts nothing beyond "organized simplicity." [See W. J. Henderson's How Music Developed, p. 191: London, 1899]. In this department, as Goethe said, he may be superseded, but he ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... them love. An old theme, one which poets themselves have often wearied of, but which, like death, remains one of the imperishable themes on which is made the poetry that has moved men's hearts through all ages. In her ingenuously wrought verses, through sheer simplicity and spontaneousness, Mrs. Johnson often sounds a note of pathos or passion that will not fail to waken a response, except in those too sophisticated or cynical to respond to natural impulses. Of the half dozen or so of colored women writing ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... subjects; but as their oath had been accompanied by a promise, or at least a clear understanding, that they should not be required to take arms against Frenchmen or Indians, they had become known as the "Neutral French." This name tended to perplex them, and in their ignorance and simplicity they hardly knew to which side they owed allegiance. Their illiteracy was extreme. Few of them could sign their names, and a contemporary well acquainted with them declares that he knew but a single Acadian who could read and write. [Footnote: Moise des Derniers, in ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... facts which modern research has established; but when the student seeks for an explanation of them from the supporters of the received hypothesis of the origin of species, the reply he receives is, in substance, of Oriental simplicity and brevity—"Mashallah! it so pleases God!" There are different species on opposite sides of the isthmus of Panama, because they were created different on the two sides. The pliocene mammals are like the existing ones, because such was the plan of creation; ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... with a mixture of modest evasiveness and adorable simplicity, that she had sometimes seen gentlemen angling from a meadow-bank about a quarter of a mile below her flower-garden. I risked everything in my usual venturesome way, and asked if she would show me where the place was, in case I called the next morning with my fishing-rod. She looked dutifully at ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... dignity remained untarnished. The nicknames and cruel taunts flung at him, in the earlier months, apparently by his own ministers, recoil now on their heads, as the petty insults of unmannerly politicians; indeed, the accusations which they made of simplicity and honesty, simply reinforce the impression of quixotic high-mindedness, which was not the least noble feature in Metcalfe's character. His generosity had been unaffected by his difficulties; and there are few finer things ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... three months since. We annex two late paper-pellets of his brain; and must ask the reader to admire with us the fervent feeling of new paternity wreaked upon expression in the first, and the ease and simplicity of style which mark the unstudied sketch that succeeds it: 'HAVE you ever any nervous days, my kind EDITOR? Nervous, beyond publishing days, or the want of copy; beyond excesses, the reaction of excitement, fast-days, and the giving of thanks?—for ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... de Sponde was among the first to perceive the secret unhappiness this marriage now brought to the private life of his beloved niece. The character of noble simplicity which had hitherto ruled their lives was lost during the first winter, when du Bousquier gave two balls every month. Oh, to hear violins and profane music at these worldly entertainments in the sacred old ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... the dwelling itself was small and plain. It consisted mainly of a hall, having a dais with a lacquered chair for important visitors; an apartment for women; a servants' room, and a kitchen, heat being obtained from a hearth sunk in the floor. Austere simplicity was everywhere aimed at, and it is related that great provincial chiefs did not think the veranda too lowly for a sleeping-place. The use of the tatami was greatly extended after the twelfth century. No longer laid on the dais only, these mats were used to cover the whole of the floors, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... compliance with custom, though disavowed by the heart, in consequence of nature. His wishes upon this occasion are the best that are the best turned; you do not, I am sure, doubt the truth of mine, and therefore I will express them with a Quaker-like simplicity. May this new year be a very new one indeed to you; may you put off the old, and put on the new man! but I mean the outward, not the inward man. With this alteration, I might justly sum up all my wishes for ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... "'Simplicity itself, ma'am,' I answered. 'She could hardly have done less. And from Eaton Square to Pimlico, what is it but a step? . . . Or, you may put it down to a brain-wave. Yes, ma'am. And I'm going to ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... poet; does Mr. Irving say so? If he does, and finds the air of the city death to his piety, why does he not return home again? But if he can breathe it with impunity, and still retain the fervour of his early enthusiasm, and the simplicity and purity of the faith that was once delivered to the saints, why not extend the benefit of his own experience to others, instead of taunting them with a vapid pastoral theory? Or, if our popular and eloquent divine finds a change in himself, that flattery prevents the growth of grace, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Essay upon Wit, in which I endeavoured to detect several of those false Kinds which have been admired in the different Ages of the World; and at the same time to shew wherein the Nature of true Wit consists. I afterwards gave an Instance of the great Force which lyes in a natural Simplicity of Thought to affect the Mind of the Reader, from such vulgar Pieces as have little else besides this single Qualification to recommend them. I have likewise examined the Works of the greatest Poet which our Nation or perhaps any other has produced, and particularized most ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... her work with the fine appreciation and discrimination that made him quick to discern the quality of her talent as well as of her personality, and he was no doubt attracted by her almost transparent sincerity and singleness of soul, as well as by the simplicity and modesty that would have been unusual even in a person not gifted. He constituted himself, in a way, her literary mentor, advised her as to the books she should read and the attitude of mind she should cultivate. For some years he corresponded with her very faithfully; his letters are full ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... thousand, shares in addition would be offered. What stock could support itself against such a flood as that? When the bottom was reached, and the time was ripe, the pool would gather in the harvest. It was a beautiful plan; the more beautiful because of its simplicity! ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... a nice boy, Harry," she said. There was something in his charming simplicity and muscular strength that reminded her of,—but she refused to let ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... pictures were great because they reached the soul, and she came to see, and this is what few do see, that the soul which is reached is not less great than the soul which has spoken. She too could have been one of the souls to speak; she accepted that in the simplicity with which we receive the indisputable, but it was good to think that she would not have failed utterly in fulfilling herself, if at the end, no matter through what, she made for harmony, and ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... may serve as a standard. The state of agriculture and the populousness of a country have been considered as nearly connected with each other. And, as a rule, for the purpose intended, numbers, in the view of simplicity and certainty, are entitled to a preference. In every country it is a herculean task to obtain a valuation of the land; in a country imperfectly settled and progressive in improvement, the difficulties are increased almost to impracticability. ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... want with me?" he asked, with astonishing indifference. Lieut. D'Hubert could not imagine that in the innocence of his heart and simplicity of his conscience Lieut. Feraud took a view of his duel in which neither remorse nor yet a rational apprehension of consequences had any place. Though he had no clear recollection how the quarrel had originated (it was begun ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
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