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More "Subtle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... introduction of new trade risks, and the cutting off of transportation, both internal and foreign, make up a sum of items which cannot be measured, but which may exceed those which can. Last, but not least, is the impairment of that subtle but vital basis of business, ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... poetical, and by giving him the patience to be minute, enables him to throw a wonderful reality into his most unreal fancies. A monomania he paints with great power. He loves to dissect one of these cancers of the mind, and to trace all the subtle ramifications of its roots. In raising images of horror, also, he has strange success, conveying to us sometimes by a dusky hint some terrible doubt which is the secret of all horror. He leaves to imagination the task of finishing ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of that one-time subtle confidant of the deposed king, now the patron of republicanism, Saint-Prosper once ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... believe, from inductive processes of thought, that when Mr. Balfour gets into his room of a night he locks the door—and smiles. Not the urbane smile that fascinates and undoes even Radical journalists—quite another smile. Never could this private smile have been more subtle than on the night of the day when he permitted himself to be elected a member of the British Academy. Further, let it not be said that our Academy excludes novelists and journalists. We novelists are ably represented by Mr. ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in the Memoir, and from it the reader will see that the scene is laid at a new watering-place,[358] which is being exploited by two of the leading characters. In the twelve chapters which she wrote, the dramatis personae are sketched in with vigour and decision; but there is little of the subtle refinement which we are accustomed to associate with her work, and certainly nothing of the tender sentiment of Persuasion. It is unfair, however, to judge from the first draft of a few introductory ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... of all the grosser forms of hurry we find in ourselves other hurry habits that are finer and more subtle, and gradually our standards of quiet, deliberate ways get higher; we become more sensitive to hurry, and a hurried way of doing things grows more and more disagreeable ...
— Nerves and Common Sense • Annie Payson Call
... preferred silence. Cameron understood that. He laughed grimly and bent a keener gaze upon the furrowed, shadowy face. Another of those strange desert prospectors in whom there was some relentless driving power besides the lust for gold! Cameron felt that between this man and himself there was a subtle affinity, vague and undefined, perhaps born of the divination that here was a desert wanderer like himself, perhaps born of a deeper, an unintelligible relation having its roots back in the past. A long-forgotten sensation ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... a sympathy not of manners, but of feelings. The personal character may happen to be very opposite: the vivacious may be loved by the melancholic, and the wit by the man of learning. He who is vehement and vigorous will feel himself a double man by the side of the friend who is calm and subtle. When we observe such friendships, we are apt to imagine that they are not real because the characters are dissimilar; but it is their common tastes and pursuits which form a bond of union. POMPONIUS LAETUS, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... a less subtle kind. Neither boys nor masters interested her particularly as yet; but there were a thousand-and-one other ways of livening things up, and she tried them all, sometimes getting off scot free, and sometimes finding herself uncomfortably ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... distinguished from professional malefactors. But when they stopped coaches, extorted ransom from travellers and shot constitutional priests and purchasers of the national property, the distinction became too subtle. There was no longer any room for it in the year VIII and IX when, vigorous measures having almost cleared the country of the bands of "chauffeurs" and other bandits who infested it, the greater number of those who had escaped being shot ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... and, gazing on thy face, Hears thee discourse with eloquent lips, And marks thy lovely smile. This, this it is that made my heart So wildly flutter in my breast; Whene'er I look on thee, my voice Falters, and faints, and fails; My tongue's benumbed; a subtle fire Through all my body inly steals; Mine eyes in darkness reel and swim; Strange murmurs drown my ears; With dewy damps my limbs are chilled; An icy shiver shakes my frame; Paler than ashes grows my cheek; And Death seems nigh ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... into the magnetic state, and become en rapport with spiritual conditions, to find himself inspired—inflated with the divine magnetic current which flows from the spirit world to the inhabitants of earth. If a player desires to represent a certain character,—let it be the subtle, fiend-like Richard III. or the crafty Richelieu,—the customary mode of studying such characters is to endeavor to imagine one's self to be the person. That is the first step towards mediumship; for it is one degree from the natural, towards the superior state. Usually, through ignorance, ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... quivered. The incredible situation paralyzed her. She—the Aunt Caroline's niece, and engaged to Eustace Medlicott, the Bishop's junior chaplain, to be listening to a grotesque- looking foreigner making subtle speeches of an insinuating character, and, far from feeling scandalized and repulsed, to be conscious that she was thrilled and interested—it was hardly to ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... a seriousness of impression, a conscientious severity of argument, an habitual fervour and enthusiasm in their mode of handling almost every subject. The debates of the schoolmen were sharp and subtle enough; but they wanted interest and grandeur, and were besides confined to a few: they did not affect the general mass of the community. But the Bible was thrown open to all ranks and conditions "to run ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... entreated Eleonora, in a breathless whisper, and he signed consent, as both felt how those two spirits must have been entwined, since these long years had never broken that subtle link of sympathy which ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the assassin's dagger at 'Lias's feet, or Napoleon walking restlessly up and down the deck of the 'Bellerophon,' 'Lias rated them every one. He was lord of a shadow world, wherein he walked with kings and queens, warriors and poets, putting them one and all superbly to rights. Yet so subtle were the old man's wits, and so bright his fancy, even in derangement, that he preserved through it all a considerable measure of dramatic fitness. He gave his puppets a certain freedom; he let them state their case; and threw almost as much ingenuity into the pleading of it as into the refuting ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wrongly assumed to be the outcome of harmonious physical and mental health. There is a pathetic exception in the outward lives of so many men of genius, the bloom being, to the instructed eye, only the indication of some subtle nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay." The overmastering cerebral agitation that obsessed Wagner's life, was as with Chopin a symptom, not a sickness; but in the latter it had not yet assumed a ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... be true, that thoughts are living forces, then it seems to me that the subtle power and influence of a national maxim must be far-reaching and powerful in its effect on the ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... is to reconcile Humanity and Nature. I propose to show (on an immense scale) how Nature (in her grandest aspects) can adapt herself to the spiritual wants of mankind. In your joy or your sorrow, Nature has subtle sympathies with you, if you only know where to look for them. My pictures—no! my poems in color—will show you. Multiply my works, as they certainly will be multiplied, by means of prints—and what does Art become ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... and the fourth dimension of space was quite obvious. Men of science would have only two alternatives before them. Either the terrestrial and the nebular facts must be brought into harmony by such feats of subtle sophistry as the human mind is always capable of performing when driven into a corner; or science must throw down its arms in despair, and commit suicide, either by the admission that the universe is, after ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... carry him where it listed. "Ah! the crowd must have emphatic warrant," as Browning sang. Its suffrages are not for the cool, collected observer, whose eyes no glitter can dazzle, no mist suffuse. The many cannot but resent that air of lofty intelligence, that pale and subtle smile. But he will hold a place forever among that limited number, who, like Lucretius and Epicurus—without range or defiance, even without unbecoming mirth, look deep into the tangled mysteries of things; refuse credence to the absurd, and allegiance to arrogant authority; sufficiently ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... made them wakeful, and though tired, they sat long in the doorway, smoking, thinking. Small talk seemed to them profanation, and of that which was uppermost in each man's mind, none cared first to speak. A subtle understanding, called telepathy, was making of their several ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... had her there. As much as he wanted. And there would be Ethel Reeves, in a new blouse, looking on from a back seat, subtle and sullen, or handing round cups and plates without speaking to anybody, like a servant. I used to think she spied on them for Lena. They were always mouching about the garden together or sitting ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... on. Drayton's bounden civility to his wife, and to the other woman, must make him present himself as a target. He knew it, his wife knew it; as yet the other woman but dimly suspected it—not being over subtle—and it smote me in the face continuously. The puppet always feels the most cut up at times like these. In a way, it is because his vanity is being seared. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... "in him the genius of an artist struggled with that of a philosopher, and not unfrequently the latter got the worst of the contest." He speaks too of his "minute accuracy in observation and boundless memory for details and imagination which absolutely rioted in the scenting out of subtle and often far-fetched analogies.") Parker was hard at work on Birds, a subject in which his friend and leader also was deeply interested, and was indeed preparing an important book ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... unconventional. I remembered that the last time I had seen him at repast, just about forty-eight hours past, he had speared a croquette of chicken with disdain, and I decided not to apologize for the meal even in the most subtle way. Also the spectacle of father polishing off the small bones, when I remembered the efforts of devoted Henri to tempt his appetite with sophisticated food, filled me with a queer primitive feeling that made it possible for me to fall upon my series of the ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... universal gravitation. Scarcely one Rule is there that does not involve self-restraint, modesty, habitual consideration of others, and, to a large extent, living for others. Yet other Rules draw on the profounder deeps of wisdom and virtue, under a subtle guise of handsome behaviour. If youth can be won to excellence by love of beauty, ...
— George Washington's Rules of Civility - Traced to their Sources and Restored by Moncure D. Conway • Moncure D. Conway
... wish to draw subtle inferences say that all the terms of the Romans connected with agriculture may be referred to a Greek source, while the terms expressive of war and hunting are non-Hellenic. The induction fails completely in both ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... The second wife of the Protector Somerset, Ann Stanhope, is described in no flattering terms, one biographer attributing some of the Duke's later troubles to 'the pride, the haughty hate, the unquiet vanity of a mannish, or rather of a divellish, woman.' Haywood says she was 'subtle and violent in accomplishing her ends, and for pride, monstrous.' It can easily be imagined, therefore, that she persuaded the Duke to set aside her stepson in favour of her own eldest son; but all the honours that should have passed to him were forfeited by the attainder of the Duke. ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... was John Joachin; he was kept as secret as might be, that no man had intelligence of his repair; for he was no Frenchman, but an Italian born, a man before of no estimation in France, or known to be in favour with his master, but to be a merchant; and for his subtle wit, elected to entreat of such affairs as the king had commanded him by embassy. This Joachin, after his arrival here in England, was secretly conveyed unto the king's manor of Richmond, and there remained ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 48, Saturday, September 28, 1850 • Various
... that the unnatural engagement with Ed Caspian was "off." There I was disappointed. Not a word was said either by the girl or the man; yet something happened during that walk in the rain, I was still sure. Both were different afterward, in a way too subtle to define. But nothing is too ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... thought are limited. At least, in real life they are so. As regards a ballet, it is difficult to say what is not explainable by pantomime. I have seen the bad man in a ballet convey to the premiere danseuse by a subtle movement of the left leg, together with some slight assistance from the drum, the heartrending intelligence that the lady she had been brought up to believe was her mother was in reality only her aunt by marriage. But then it must be borne in mind that the premiere danseuse is a lady whose quickness ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... And stifle, dark, the feebly-bursting cry: Mark Ruffian Violence, distained with crimes, Rousing elate in these degenerate times, View unsuspecting Innocence a prey, As guileful Fraud points out the erring way: While subtle Litigation's pliant tongue The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong: Hark, injur'd Want recounts th' unlisten'd tale, And much-wrong'd Mis'ry pours ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... contending also for principles which would affect for the future the whole groundwork of religious conviction. They were not yet in a position to see that henceforward authority could take only a secondary place, and that they were installing in its room either reason or a more subtle spiritual faculty superior even to reason in the perception of spiritual things. It was not until near the end of the seventeenth century that the mind began to awaken to a full perception of the freedom it had won—a freedom far more complete ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... hope so. I have no doubt that the Sprouts and the Sprugeons have been given to understand by the Lococks and the Pritchards what are the Duchess's wishes, and that it has also been intimated in some subtle way that the Duke is willing to oblige the Duchess. There are ever so many ways, you know, of ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... lusts! You deprive yourself of meat, of wine, of stoves, of slaves, and of honours; but how you let your imagination offer you banquets, perfumes, naked women, and applauding crowds! Your chastity is but a more subtle kind of corruption, and your contempt for the world is but the impotence of your hatred against it! This is the reason that persons like you are so lugubrious, or perhaps it is because they lack faith. The possession of the truth gives joy. Was Jesus sad? He used to go about surrounded by friends; ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... perceive his eyes with a kind of greediness to pull unto them this image of beauty, and carry it to the heart: shall observe himself to be somewhat incensed with this influence, which moveth within: when he shall discern those subtle spirits sparkling in her eyes, to administer more fuel to the fire, he must wisely withstand the beginnings, rouse up reason, stupefied almost, fortify his heart by all means, and shut up all those passages, by which it may ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... flashing flame, and then holding the fire in its glowing heart all through the night. Its bark is the most serviceable of all the products of the wilderness. In Russia, they say, it is used in tanning, and gives its subtle, sacerdotal fragrance to Russia leather. But here, in the woods, it serves more primitive ends. It can be peeled off in a huge roll from some giant tree and fashioned into a swift canoe to carry man over the waters. It can be cut into square sheets to roof ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... attacking the Coalition Government. In a subtle speech he supported the idea of splitting Russia up into a large number of petty states, insisting that the formula, "self-determination of peoples," applied to the separatist movement in the Ukraine. He insisted that ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... unsteady with its tremor of delight and young eagerness upon the vitta and it slipped off her hair. As it dropped, the subtle warm fragrance of the heavy locks, now braided in maidenly style, reached him; the liveliness of her relaxed young figure communicated itself to him without his touch; all the invitation of her helplessness ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... that he was by nature a marvelously clever, cunning man, though without education; and understood human nature to a kink, and well knew whom he had to deal with; and then, one glance of his squinting eye, was as good as a knock-down, for it was the most deep, subtle, infernal looking eye, that I ever saw lodged in a human head. I believe, that by good rights it must have belonged to a wolf, or starved tiger; at any rate, I would defy any oculist, to turn out a glass eye, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... peculiar temptations.' And in boldly prophetic words, which time has partly justified, he added, 'I venture to think that the greatest scientific problems of the future will find their solution in this Borderland, and even beyond; here, it seems to me, lie Ultimate Realities, subtle, far-reaching, wonderful.' ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... eyes would have detected any change in him. But, as the minutes of the new morning wore away, the swiftly-subtle progress of the influence began to show itself more plainly. The sublime intoxication of opium gleamed in his eyes; the dew of a stealthy perspiration began to glisten on his face. In five minutes more, the talk which ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... rag-tags and bob-tails of the world who presumed to snub him—these restaurant-haunting outsiders, among whom he condescended to sit, feeling always the subtle flattery they ought to accord him by virtue of a social position hopeless of attainment by any ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... of attendance or enthusiasm, I am sure; for it is a very different thing to speak under the bushel of a private club on the one hand, and, on the other, in a public place, where a happy period or a subtle argument may do the speaker permanent service in after life. Such a club might end, perhaps, by rivalling the 'Union' at Cambridge or the 'Union' ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have been! The elder woman's eyes would have crackled brightly among her wrinkles and she would have looked at her daughter with the air of genial treachery which old women wear when they contrive a young girl's marriage, and she would have dropped some subtle hint at the next convenient assignation; and the girl herself would have stood by like a dark living scythe in the Latin attitude of modesty, very straight from the waist to the feet, but the shoulders bent as if to hide the bosom and the head bowed, mysteriously intimating ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... is a fiend for subtle craftiness, evolved a plan whereby we might worm the information from him. And so I caused Hor Vastus to be harnessed in the metal of a Zodangan soldier and chained in Parthak's cell beside him. For fifteen days the noble Hor Vastus has languished in the darkness of the pits, but not ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her father's care. Competent teachers of high character were employed for so important work. The mental culture, social training, and refined accomplishments of Esther Randolph to such a father were matters of import. Nor were the subtle interwoven relations of the intellectual and ethical with bodily conditions, disregarded. She learned much by study wisely directed; became proficient in the languages, vocal and instrumental music; absorbed valuable general information from frequent talks with her father; ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... motion." A tall woman, with the magisterial sweep of shawl and wave of the arm of a cheap boarding-house keeper, rose. "I detect a subtle purpose in that offer. There is a rat behind that arras. There is a prejudice against us in the legislature, and the car company wish no mention of Woman Suffrage to be made in Berrytown until their ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... to demand general ideas from Balzac himself, because he is so liberal of general imagery, and what is more, general prosopopoeia. Be the Balzacian world real, as some would have it to be, or be it removed from our mundane reality by the subtle "other-planetary" influence which is apparent to others, its complexity, its fullness, its variety, its busy and by no means unsystematic life and motion, cannot be denied. Why on earth cannot people be content with asking Platonism from Plato and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... not let him read it to the end." Fielding attacked Cibber's style and language more than once in Joseph Andrews and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Cibber possessed wit, unusual good sense and tact; and in the Apology he showed himself the most delicate and subtle critic of acting of his time. He was frequently accused of plagiarism, and did not scruple to make use of old plays, but he is said to have been ashamed of his Shakespearian adaptations, one of which, however, Richard ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... it, "and Tom twigg'd it, and Dick twigg'd it, and Harry twigg'd it, and so they all twigg'd it." In the mean time the chat went round very briskly, and dram after dram, the brandy, until the tickler was drained to the bottom. And then the subtle spirit of the brandy, ascending into their noddles, worked such wonders, that they all began to feel themselves as big as field officers. Macdonald, for his part, with a face as red as a comet, reined up Selim, and drawing his claymore, began to pitch and prance about, cutting and slashing ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... love, my love," he said, "it is in the subtle poison of such abuses to breed such diseases. His blood is infected, and objects lose their natural aspects in his sight. It is not ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... the Graevenitz, seeing she herself refused to deny her magic practices, and there is little doubt that she possessed that magnetic or hypnotic power, the use whereof our ancestors called witchcraft. It is curious to speculate how much of this power, in wonderfully subtle and varied forms, exists in every human being of whom we say: 'They have ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... was deep in the tumult of Chicago," runs the entry, "to-day, I am hoeing in my sun-lit garden, hearing the mourning-dove coo and the cat-birds cry. Last night as the sun went down the hill-tops to the west became vividly purple with a subtle illusive deep-crimson glow beneath, while the sky above their tops, a saffron dome rose almost to the zenith. These mystical things are here joined: The trill of black-birds near at hand, the cackle of barn-yard fowls, the sound ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... with the other circumstances, they knew that I was no other than Julian West. Even had there been no thought, as at first there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete said she believed that this event would have affected her daughter in a critical and life-long manner. The presumption of some subtle ordering of destiny, involving her fate with mine, would under all circumstances have possessed an irresistible fascination ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... mysterious power Who speaketh not? Who hath not felt Its subtle influence? Yet, when one is by feeling deep impelled Its secret joys and sorrows to unfold, The theme seems ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... of the procession that once more issued from the Lone Star cabin did not fail to show itself in each individual partner according to his temperament. The subtle tact of Union Mills, however, in expressing an awakened respect for their fortunate partner by addressing him, as if unconsciously, as "Mr. Ford" was at first discomposing, but even this was forgotten in their ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... of a storm—my dinner is not a very cheerful one. Not that I am necessarily unhappy when I take a solitary meal. In this matter all depends upon the mood, and the mood frequently depends upon influences too subtle to be analyzed. The dinner was as good as I had a right to expect it to be. A dish on which the hostess had evidently striven to use her best art was of orange mushrooms in a sauce of verjuice; but the substantial one was a roast fowl—an unfortunate bird that was just going to ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... travel to watch the surprising judgment which is about to overtake the wicked city of Edinburgh. An angel hath revealed it to me in a dream. Fire and brimstone will descend upon it as on Sodom and Gomorrah, and it will be consumed and wither away, with its cruel Ahabs and its painted Jezebels, its subtle Doegs and its lying Balaams, its priests and its judges, and its proud men of blood, its Bible-idolaters and its false prophets, its purple and damask, its gold and its fine linen, and it shall be as Tyre and Sidon, so that none shall know the site thereof. But ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... researches of the sages are not confined to such subtle or elegant studies. They comprise various others more important, and especially the properties of vril, to the perception of which their finer nervous organisation renders the female Professors eminently ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... evening, a dreamy vapor exhaled from the garden and enveloped it; a shroud of mist, a calm and celestial sadness covered it; the intoxicating perfume of the honeysuckles and convolvulus poured out from every part of it, like an exquisite and subtle poison; the last appeals of the woodpeckers and the wagtails were audible as they dozed among the branches; one felt the sacred intimacy of the birds and the trees; by day the wings rejoice the leaves, by night the leaves ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... he understood that a flood of fortune had carried him for the time being away from them, and that his desire must be to help but not to regret them. Indeed, he could not resist, nor did he wish to resist a great content in this well-being, which overtook him in so subtle a manner. The sermons of the old days, preached by many a mad fanatic of Union Street, declared that any alliance between the rich and the poor must be false and impossible. Alban believed it to ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... ondertuck fer ter run de hull shebang an' Miss Peggy inter de bargain, what is never been run by nobody," had circulated throughout the whole community, and met with a resolute, though carefully concealed opposition—subtle, intangible, but sure to prove overwhelming in the end—the undertow, so hidden but so irresistible. All this had stolen from one pair of lips to another and, of course, been related with indignant emphasis to Jim Bolivar, ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... mortal wisdom teaches men presumption, and presumption doubt.' 'Pardon me,' I answered; 'it is not Wisdom, but Ignorance, which teaches men presumption: Genius may be sometimes arrogant, but nothing is so diffident as Knowledge.' 'But,' resumed the Zealot, 'those accustomed to subtle inquiries may dwell only on the minutiae of faith,—inexplicable, because useless to explain, and argue from those minutiae against the grand and universal truth.' Pardon me again: it is the petty not the enlarged mind which prefers casuistry to conviction; it is the confined ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... own. She need not act for only Madame Imogen and Pere Anselme. But when she thought of this latter a sensation of discomfort came. How could she read in peace with the dear old man, who was so keen and so subtle he would certainly divine that all was not well? And ever his sentence recurred to her: "Remember always, my daughter, that le Bon Dieu settles things for us mortals if we leave it all to Him, but if we take the helm in the direction of our own affairs, it may ...
— The Man and the Moment • Elinor Glyn
... I found myself shut into a narrow box, like one of those which considerate pawnbrokers provide for their more diffident clients, and in a similar, but more intense, degree, pervaded by a subtle odour of uncleanness. The woodwork was polished to an unctuous smoothness by the friction of numberless dirty hands and soiled garments, and the general appearance—taken in at a glance as I entered—was such as to cause me to thrust my hands into my pockets and studiously ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... so absolutely undeviating and uncompromising that it admits of no complexity, no turning, no qualification. Self is ingenious, crooked, and, governed by subtle and snaky desire, admits of endless turnings and qualifications, and the deluded worshipers of self vainly imagine that they can gratify every worldly desire, and at the same time possess the Truth. But the lovers of Truth worship Truth with the sacrifice of self, ...
— The Way of Peace • James Allen
... virtue of the supernatural power acquired in that mighty meditation, it was given the holy missionary to know the secret of that newly created plant,—the subtle virtue of its leaves. And he named it, in the language of the nation to whom he brought the Lotos of the Good Law, "TE"; and ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... besides sundry of the chief of the Moors of Cochin, who had endeavoured to impress on his mind that the Portuguese were willing to assume the command in his dominions[8]. Henceforwards Pacheco had such good intelligence, that all the subtle devices of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... her singing was done at night. One of her songs was the Nightingale's Trill or Queen of the Night. The memory of her singing ever lingers with me like the sweet perfume wafted from the distant isle, its subtle influence sinking upon the senses, calming the tired child as upon the mother's breast it rests in perfect peace and confidence. Its message accomplished, it floated away into space to travel on, and, forever until it reached the Giver of every perfect gift and ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... shrugged his shoulders. "Destiny!" he said. "Besides, the best people do not run away easily from the homes they love. Perhaps they have the feeling that, in a home which has always meant peace, nothing terrible can happen. Yet there's more in it than that—something more subtle which keeps them in the place where they have always lived: something, I think, that binds the spirits of us Frenchmen and women to the spirit of their own hearths—their own soil. Haven't you found that already, in other places you have visited ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Spring had bustled into town from the prairies, insinuating itself into the dirty, cavernous streets, sailing in boisterously over the gleaming lake, eddying in steam wreaths about the lofty buildings. The subtle monitions of the air permeated the atmosphere of antiseptics in the office, and whipped the turbulent spirits of Sommers until, at the lunch hour, he deserted the Athenian Building and telephoned for ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the changes in human life, went changes even more subtle and enduring in the Cumbria county itself. Those were times of crisis for English agriculture. Wheat-lands went back to pasture; and a surplus population, that has found its way for generations to the factory towns, began now to turn toward the great Canadian spaces ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Time, the subtle thief of youth, Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year: My hasting days fly on with full career, But my late Spring no bud or blossom show'th. Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth, That I to manhood am arriv'd so near, And inward ripeness ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... having lost the corporeal form given to Him by religion, and as divulged in the history of the creation, lost at once all His attributes, and being magnified to fill the infinite and being absorbed into it, became so impalpable and subtle to the intellect as ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... when Ferdinand And Isabella ruled the Spanish land, And Torquemada, with his subtle brain, Ruled them, as Grand Inquisitor of Spain, In a great castle near Valladolid, Moated and high and by fair woodlands hid, There dwelt, as from the chronicles we learn, An old Hidalgo proud and taciturn, Whose name has perished, with his towers ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... over Mademoiselle Mariposa. She was no longer the Dreaming Gipsy, but a grande dame, a lady with some subtle, exotic touch of foreign distinction, who greeted the older woman with a charming and ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... this sudden emotion. His own heart was just in the vein to sympathize with it; so, in a moment the subtle freemasonry of kindred spirits was established ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... would seem that contemplation or meditation is not the cause of devotion. No cause hinders its effect. But subtle considerations about abstract matters are often a hindrance to devotion. Therefore contemplation or meditation is not the cause ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... fellow countrymen, to speak a solemn word of warning to you against that deepest, most subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking sides. The United States must be neutral in fact as well as in name during these days that are to try men's souls. We must be impartial in thought ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... I reach my feeble hands to join In sweet embraces—ah! no longer thine! She said, and from his eyes the fleeting fair Retired, like subtle ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of the position, and be so far responsible for what he might do, that she would not dare to let her heart be rebellious toward him subsequently. If he himself went to her it would look too much like pleading for her intercession. The subtle directness of the woman's spirit had to be ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... said, 'There is an insoluble difficulty.' Such a course is far less dangerous to the moral sense than that pernicious ingenuity which, assuming that there can be no literal errors in Scripture, resorts to subtle arts of criticism, improbabilities of statement, and violence of construction, such as, if made use of in the intercourse of men in daily life, would break up society and destroy all faith of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... commenced. All these Indian associations have a tutelary spirit. That of the Strong Hearts is embodied in the fox, an animal which a white man would hardly have selected for a similar purpose, though his subtle and cautious character agrees well enough with an Indian's notions of what is honorable in warfare. The dancers were circling round and round the fire, each figure brightly illumined at one moment by the yellow light, and at the next drawn in blackest shadow as it passed between the flame and ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... passed as a treasure from one member of the aristocracy to another, and received high stipends, and presents of at least equal value. Being a German, she put by money, and let her husband know it. But in the seventh year of her enforced widowhood her letters began to undergo subtle ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... fond of making proselytes, and Juliet was not aware that she was treading upon dangerous ground, with a very subtle companion. Untouched by the sacred truths she sought to impress upon his mind, and which indeed were very distasteful to him, Godfrey, in order to insinuate himself into the good graces of his fair instructress, seemingly ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... much that would be interesting about the proceedings and the evidence given against and for the Companies; how reckless were many of the charges brought against them, how easily they were disproved; how subtle and disingenuous other charges were and what skill was required to refute them; how some of the witnesses were up in the clouds and had to be brought down to common earth; how conclusively the Companies proved that the railways had done their best to encourage and help every industry and that ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... that the Doctor pressed him forward unduly; indeed, there was no need of it; for the boy manifested a remarkable docility for instruction, and a singular quickness in mastering the preliminary steps which lead to science: a subtle instinct, indeed, which it seemed wonderful a child should possess for anything as artificial as systems of grammar and arithmetic. A remarkable boy, in truth, he was, to have been found by chance in an almshouse; except that, such being his origin, we are at liberty to suppose for ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the same abruptness she had shown at their last parting, she caught Lucy by the arm and darted away in a romping race to her dwelling. Jarman started after her. He had not wanted to go to her father's house particularly, but why was SHE evidently as averse to it? With the subtle pleasure that this admission gave him there was a ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... will have its hour of empire; the most torpid heiress will easily get herself married; but the wife whose sweet nature can kindle worthy delights is she that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, ardent spirit, and that subtle power whose sources we can hardly trace, but which yet so irradiates a home that all who come near are filled and inspired by a deep sense of womanly presence. We best learn the unsuspected might of a being like this when we ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... the fields of corn, the craggy mountain, the blossomy lane, or the rush of water through the greenwood. But for your good Cockney the shoals of gloom, the dusky tracery of chimney-stack and gaswork, the torn waste of tiles, and the subtle tones of dawn and dark in lurking court and alley. Was there ever a lovelier piece of colour than Cannon Street Station at night? Entering by train, you see it as a huge vault of lilac shadow, pierced by innumerable pallid arclights. The roof flings itself against the sky, a mountain ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... hour of uncertainty his imagination traveled far, but again and again it was captured by the remembrance of his days with the bishop. This had nothing to do with works, and yet in a way they were intimately connected. The bishop had demonstrated the operation of high and subtle forces to which he himself had not given much thought. The bishop had saved his life, just as Belding had saved it, and he still seemed to feel the working of big muscles under his twitching palms. There flashed back what the prelate had said ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... grows, the more one thinks of it! I believe it grew under his hands in just the same way. I don't doubt that it would have come, at last, to Miss Holladay's death by some subtle means; to the substitution of her sister for her—after a year or two abroad, who could have detected it? And then—oh, then, she would have married Fajolle again, and they would have settled down to the enjoyment ...
— The Holladay Case - A Tale • Burton E. Stevenson
... with these remarkable figures before her, no longer wondered at the slight esteem in which the Marquise held Lucien's good looks. And when conversation began, when intellects so keen, so subtle, were revealed in two-edged words with more meaning and depth in them than Anais de Bargeton heard in a month of talk at Angouleme; and, most of all, when Canalis uttered a sonorous phrase, summing up a materialistic epoch, and gilding it with ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... in all others they are exact duplicates of them. They differ from them and from each other, in every particular: in form, in size, in colour; in the structure of internal as well as of external organs; in those subtle peculiarities which produce differences of constitution, as well as in those still more subtle ones which lead to modifications of mind and character. In other words, in every possible way, in every organ and in every function, individuals ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... exactly what I am unable to do," she answered, and I could see she was speaking truly. "This fear has grown up in some degree, I think, from a subtle sort of consciousness that the person in question has it in his power to exert a curious influence over me. I seem to be drawn against my will into an attitude towards him which is not only against my judgment, but also against ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... shown by suspending the cube on a string, by which it may be twisted rapidly and caused to revolve; in this motion a cylinder being readily seen. When the cylinder is spun in like manner a sphere suddenly appears, and so the wonderful and subtle bond of union ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... person: "Duns Scotus," a subtle philosopher of the 13th century. His method of reasoning was very popular in the schools during the Middle Ages, and a very skillful hair-splitter was called a Dunse; but at last, through the influence of the ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... others to serve as background for our joys—just as sin is essential as the background for any appreciation of virtue, even any knowledge of its existence.... So now, on the day of Mary Turner's trial, there was a subtle gaiety of gossipings to and fro through the store. The girl's plight was like a shuttlecock driven hither and yon by the battledores of many tongues. It was the first time in many years that one of the employees had been thus accused of theft. Shoplifters were so common ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... With subtle flattery he recognized in me a powerful arm of a corrupt Empire, which Empire he likened to the old man who rode Sindbad the Sailor. He admitted my noble loyalty to France, pointing out, however, that ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... good and bad, and that they are under the power of the D—l, he being prince of the air." "The less perfectly good" hang out, if we may say so, "in the space between earth and the clouds," all which is subtle, and creditable to Mr. Dodwell's invention, but not susceptible of exact demonstration. The whole controversy is an interesting specimen of Queen Anne philosophy, which, with all respect for the taste of the period, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... an opposite window. As if touched by a gleam from the lamp, or as if by some subtle interior illumination, the spectre became faintly luminous, and a thin smile seemed to quiver over its features. At the same moment, a strong, energetic figure—Dr. Renton, himself—came in sight, striding down the slope of the pavement to his own door, his over-coat thrown back, as if the ...
— The Ghost • William. D. O'Connor
... to try his hand once more at his long-neglected art, and, armed with brushes and palette, passed many of his leisure hours in his friend's society. We cannot accredit M. Linders with any profound penetration, or with any subtle perception of what was working in his little daughter's mind, but with the most far-reaching wisdom he could hardly have devised better means, at this crisis in her life, for maintaining his old hold upon her, and keeping up the sense of sympathy between them, which had in one ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... but it admits of a brilliancy and finish in the matter of style that are impossible on the old-fashioned wicket. Whilst the modern bowler has learnt extraordinary accuracy of pitch, the batsman has perfected the art of "timing" the ball. And what a subtle, delicate art is correct "timing"!—the skilful embodiment of thought in action, depending for success on that absolute sympathy of hand and eye which only assiduous practice, confidence, and a good digestion can give. And on uncertain, treacherous ground confident play is never ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... in London. I had often heard of the beauty of the youngest daughter of the Duke of Belminster, but no description of it, and no contemplation of colourless photographs, had prepared me for the subtle, delicate charm and the beautiful colouring of that exquisite head. And yet as we saw it that autumn morning, it was not its beauty which would be the first thing to impress the observer. The cheek was lovely, ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... She felt love's subtle, potent charm Binding her on that strong right arm; 'T was softer than the cold gray stone, 'T was sweeter thus than ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey
... grew up and became the wonder of the world. She was married to a powerful King, and they lived in peace and plenty until the Goddess of Envy once more troubled the child's life. For owing to her subtle planning a Prince was promised for wife the fairest woman in the world, and he took the wife of the powerful King and carried her away to Asia to the six-gated city. The King prepared a host of ships ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... extreme point. After exerting himself for a long time, he will suddenly find himself possessed of a wide and far-reaching penetration. Then, the qualities of all things, whether external or internal, the subtle or the coarse, will be apprehended, and the mind, in its entire substance and its relations to things, will be perfectly intelligent. This is called the investigation of things. This is called the perfection of knowledge [3].' And knowledge must be thus perfected ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) Unicode Version • James Legge
... character to the Lord of Misrule in England. "This pageant potentate," as Stowe calls him, "was annually elected, and his rule extended through the greater part of the holydays conected with the festival days of Christmas." But these "fine and subtle disguisings, masks, and mummeries," too often degenerated into abuse, as indeed was to be expected, when such pastimes had for their object to turn all lawful authority into ridicule, and more particularly to burlesque the services of the Church. On such occasions, "the rude vulgar occupied the ...
— The Works of John Knox, Vol. 1 (of 6) • John Knox
... "What is more subtle than arithmetical conclusions; what more agreeable than musical harmonies; what more divine than astronomical, what more certain than ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... proceed all the methods of inflexion, derivation, and composition that give being to the most subtle kind of Sophistry; all the species and forms of Nouns, Verbs, and particles that make up the oeconomy of a Language, together withall diversity of Numbers, Genders, Cases, tenses, Modes, and Persons which ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... exclaimed explosively. This 'Ha!' was entirely different from his 'Ah!' Something shot across his eyes, something incredibly rapid—too rapid for a wink; yet it could only be called a wink. It was the most subtle transmission of the beyond-speech that I have ever known any man accomplish, and it endeared Mr Brindley to me. But ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... enclosure, which was almost a rude teepee, and, tucked away in the further-most corner, lay something with a trout-like, speckled, tawny coat. She bent over it. The fawn was apparently sleeping. Presently its eyes moved a bit, and a shiver passed through its subtle body. ...
— Indian Child Life • Charles A. Eastman
... pervert everything, do under-value and find fault with other men's opinions, although they be good and sound; I like not such brains which can dispute on both sides, and yet conclude nothing certain. Such sophistications, said Luther, are nothing but crafty and subtle inventions and contrivances to ...
— Selections from the Table Talk of Martin Luther • Martin Luther
... works as Antony and Cleopatra and Lysistrata that makes it so easy to undervalue them, to see only a phallic play and political pamphlet in one, only a chronicle play in a grandiose method in the other. For we have to be in a highly sensitized condition before we can get to that subtle point where life and the image mix, and so really perceive the work at all; whereas we can command the response to a lesser work which does not call so finely on the full breadth and depth ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... conform to it. Science should be the handmaid of the church, philosophy its helpful brother; but its ecumenical council, its court of last resort, should be the religious instinct inherent in man—that perception so fine, so subtle, that all attempts to weave it into words to clothe it so that the eye may perceive and the reason handle it, have signally failed; which logic has hammered at with all her ballistae and battering-rams for thirty ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... how she controlled her feelings, how she remained and made no sign, she never knew. But that the instinct of self-esteem was one of her strongest passions, the dread of detection in proportion to it, she never had remained. There she was, and she could not get away again. The subtle dexterity which had served her in coming might desert her in returning. Had their senses been on the alert they might have heard her ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... may, perhaps, be thought more subtle than the grossness of real life will easily admit. Let it, however, be remembered, that the efficacy of ignorance has been long tried, and has not produced the consequence expected. Let knowledge, therefore, take its turn; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... Hassim and the Pangeran Budrudeen, with numbers of their families and retainers, have been basely murdered by their treacherous kinsman, because of their attachment to the English and their unswerving determination to put down piracy; and what is worst of all, Mr. Brooke's arch-enemy, the subtle and indefatigable villain Macota, the man whose accursed head was thrice saved by my too-generous friend, has now returned triumphantly to the scene of his former crimes, and is commissioned by the sultan to take ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... as far as our means of knowing what they receive are concerned. The wind of the spirit that is not of this earth, nor limited by time and space, breathes through their words, and thoughts, and deeds. They are not mere combinations, however deft and subtle, of known atoms. They must continually delight, and continually surprise; custom cannot stale them; like the heaven-born Laws in Sophocles, age can never lull them to sleep. Their works, when they are authors, never lose hold on ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... instinct in man that forces him to climb the hills of science, unlock the mysteries of ages, and wrest from the natural forces of earth and air, their well-guarded secrets. Is it the subtle workings of this desire for the mastery over mechanical agencies, this prying into Nature's secrets, that leads us out into the forest primeval and gives zest to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 5 • Various
... of all help; concealed in a corner of a wood, or squatting at the foot of a tree, he requires all his courage, all his experience; for he then finds himself engaged in a deadly conflict with the most subtle and ferocious beasts, possibly a mouthful for the largest and most powerful jaws, and at the mercy of the quickest ears of the forest. Motionless in his hut, like a spider in its web, nothing can put him off his guard—neither the view ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... book has a subtle intention. It indicates, and is true to the verities in doing so, the strange dreamlike quality of life to the man who has not yet fought his own battles, or come into conscious possession of his will—only such battles bite into the ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... this morning was a bit of real literature. It produced the effect you desired without making a bid for it. It was as subtle and full of suggestion as Jusserand's book on France and the United States. You gave an atmosphere to the old building as an institution, which made every one of us feel something more of ennobling standards and traditions. You touched emotion. Many an old chap there felt called upon ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... to a somewhat subtle distinction, the attention of the reader is drawn to the following line, slightly altered, ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham
... claims that its educational work in economics is dedicated to progress of free enterprise; and many of its programs in schools and colleges are educational; but its subtle and relentless emphasis is on the governmental interventionism that is the essence of New-Dealism, Fair-Dealism, Modern-Republicanism, and New-Frontierism—the governmental interventionism prescribed long ago as the way to socialize the economy of America in preparation for integrating this nation ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... your dog, then a man for your horse; that is the usual order of trouble. Of course the horse itself precedes the horse-keeper, but then I do not reckon the buying of a horse among life's troubles, rather among its luxuries. It combines all the subtle pleasures of shopping with a turbid excitement which is its own. From the moment when you first start from the breakfast- table at the sound of hoofs, and find the noble animal at the door, arching his neck and champing ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... ordinary waking consciousness, that you and I are using at the present time. If our consciousness works in the subtle, or astral, body, and is able to impress its experiences upon the brain, it is called Svapna, or in English, dream consciousness; it is more vivid and real than the Jagrat state. When working in the subtler form—the mental body—it is not able to impress its experiences on the brain, it ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... are in this humour individuality after individuality disappears, and ere long, if we are consistent, nothing will remain but one universal whole, one true and only atom from which alone nothing can be cut off and thrown away on to something else; if, on the other hand, we are in a subtle philosophically accurate humour for straining at gnats and emphasizing differences rather than resemblances, we can draw distinctions, and give reasons for subdividing and subdividing, till, unless we violate what we choose to call our consistency ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... and not a word of this to me! Margery, Margery! when shall a straightforward one of your sex be found! Subtle even in your simplicity! What mischief have you caused me to do, through not telling me this? I wouldn't have so endangered anybody's happiness for a thousand pounds. Wicked girl that you were; why didn't ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... leading. With the inner eye I have seen lines of light like subtle shining cords running between persons. Such a thread stretched now between me and Enrique de Cerda. I determined to make my way, as Juan Lepe, through the mountains and over the plain of Granada ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... of this message discloses with what subtle ingenuity words, phrases, definitions, ideas, and theories were being invented and plied to broaden and secure every conquest of the pro-slavery reaction. An elaborate argument was made to defend the enormities ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... most subtle of these men of punctilio, and the most troublesome, was the Venetian ambassador; for it was his particular aptitude to find fault, and pick out jealousies among all the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... who cannot bend the knee of humble adoration before nature's altar, where sacrifices are offered to the Jehovah, pavilioned in invisibility. There is an ardent love of nature as far removed from gross materialism or subtle pantheism on the one hand as from stupid inappreciation on the other. There is such a thing as looking "through nature up to nature's God," notwithstanding the frightened denials of those who, shocked at the growing materialism of the age, would ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... from that of Athanasius. Besides this, very many trifles show themselves here unworthy of any sensible man whatever, not to say Athanasius ... and a great number of expressions unknown to Athanasius ... so that it savours of inferior Greek. And truly his subtle disputation {183} on the hypostasis of Christ, and on the two natures in Christ, persuades us, that he lived after the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon; of which councils moreover he uses the identical words, whereas his dissertation on the two wills in Christ ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... waits. Quorum came for ROLLIT. Numbers increased as he proceeded with singularly lucid address, investing even Bankruptcy with subtle charms. Gave the tone to thoroughly business Debate; and, even in less than the maimed period of time allotted, had carried ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... become convinced that even in matters of science, although every added mechanical power has its proper use and sphere, yet the things which are vital to our happiness and prosperity can only be known by the rational use and subtle skill of our natural powers. We may trust the instrument with the prophecy of storm, or registry of rainfall; but the conditions of atmospheric change, on which depend the health of animals and fruitfulness of seeds, can only be discerned by the eye ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... yellow in spring with Anemone Ranunculoides, or starred with green Herb Paris. This is the kind of glen scenery that is found along the courses of the Semois, Lesse, and Ourthe, recalling, with obvious differences, that of Monsal Dale or Dovedale, but always, perhaps, without that subtle note of wildness that robes even the mild splendours of Derbyshire with a suggestion of mountain dignity. The Ardennes, in short—and this is their scenic weakness—never attain to the proper mountain spirit. There is a further point, however, in which they also ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... on all possible occasions for courtesy, but at times, it would seem, upon impossible ones; for in some instances the most subtle diagnosis fails to reveal in them a relevancy to anybody. That the commonest objects should bear titles because of their connection with some particular person is comprehensible, but what excuse can be made for a phrase like the following, "It respectfully does ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... great painter can make splendid use of the human probabilities of Religion and Science; but it is none of these things that one finally thinks, as one comes to follow him, but of things more subtle, more remote, more translunar, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... mediation, but they were stubborn when Ned asked them to agree that no more churches were necessary. They were not moved by the argument that the population was declining and would not admit that there were too many churches or even that there were churches enough. The ecclesiastical mind is a subtle one and it knows that when men cease to build churches they cease to be religious. The instinct of the clergy was against Ned, but they had to make concessions, for the country was awakening to its danger, and Ned began to think that all its remaining energies ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... hatred and disgust. Ah! that villain too, who is leading her headlong to her own ruin! I hate him also. His affection towards me as a friend and companion has only served as a mantle to cover his deceitful heart. He is a serpent more subtle and venomous than that which entered the Garden of Eden. Ah! the vile wretch that he is! The deed is too base to forgive. I spurn the debased villain. I shall humble his proud heart. I shall crush him ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... most penetrative spirit, apparently dry and yet unctuous, and easily capable of tingeing a plate of metal.... If we say that its nature is spiritual, it would be no more than the truth; if we described it as corporeal the expression would be equally correct; for it is subtle, penetrative, glorified, spiritual gold. It is the noblest of all created things after the rational soul, and has virtue to repair all defects both in animal and metallic bodies, by restoring them to the most exact and ...
— Bygone Beliefs • H. Stanley Redgrove
... of Matter (A) comprises the forms of Matter in its form of solids, liquids, and gases, as generally recognized by the text-books on physics. The Plane of Matter (B) comprises certain higher and more subtle forms of Matter of the existence of which modern science is but now recognizing, the phenomena of Radiant Matter, in its phases of radium, etc., belonging to the lower sub-division of this Minor Plane. The Plane of Matter (C) comprises forms of the most subtle ...
— The Kybalion - A Study of The Hermetic Philosophy of Ancient Egypt and Greece • Three Initiates
... loveless was doomed to be Juana humiliated, degraded, hopeless. She could not honor the man who took her thus. She felt, in all the conscientious purity of her youth, that distinction, subtle in appearance but sacredly true, legal with the heart's legality, which women apply instinctively to all their feelings, even the least reflective. Juana became profoundly sad as she saw the nature and the extent ...
— Juana • Honore de Balzac
... beyond my province, even if it were within my power, to discuss these airy speculations, and thereby to descend into the arena where for ages subtle dialecticians have battled with each other over the reality or unreality of an external world. For my purpose it suffices to adopt the popular and convenient distinction of mind and matter and hence to divide experience into two sorts, an ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... not appear to entertain a vastly deeper grade of contempt for the simple townsfolk than did the officers of the Chasseurs who had drunk in the same cafes the year before. Nevertheless there was a something in the air; something subtle and indefinable, an intolerably unfamiliar atmosphere like a widely diffused odor—the odor of invasion. It filled the private dwellings and the public places, it affected the taste of food, and gave one the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... on the steps of the throne groaning). Oh see how well her Irish tongue can twist Her words to suit her will! Her words are smooth; So smooth that when one grasps them they escape The hand like shining, slippery, squirming snakes! And she has subtle words, caressing words, And words that set the mind on fire; hot words That burn, and haughty ones that swell and puff Like stallions' nostrils, and toss high their heads! Oh she has words, and words, and many words With which ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... talons; but man has to depend on his superior sagacity. In all his encounters with these, his proper enemies, he resorts to stratagem; and when he perversely turns his hostility against his fellow-man, he at first continues the same subtle mode ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... of an impression that in some subtle way John had changed since their last meeting. For a moment he could not have said what had given him this impression. Then it flashed upon him. Before, John had always been, like Mrs. Fezziwig in "The Christmas Carol," one vast substantial smile. He had beamed cheerfully on what ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... more, put over me. I trust they won't think of pickling and bringing me home to Clod, or Blunderbuss Hall. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." Hunt's view is, in this as in other subtle respects, nearer the truth than Moore's; for with all Byron's insight into Italian vice, he hated more the master vice of England—hypocrisy; and much of his greatest, and in a sense latest, because unfinished work, is the severest, ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... tempestuous arm, And saw my scatter'd squadrons fly before him. Nor will I trust th' uncertain chance of combat; The rights of princes let the sword decide, The petty claims of empire and of honour: Revenge and subtle jealousy shall teach A surer passage to his ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... career in horrible suffering. In the drama, it is true, we prefer that no use be made of such mad calamities and that what befalls a man shall at least seem to grow out of his character. But then a man's character is the effect of a hundred subtle causes which began their operation in part before he was born; so that there is an element of essential truth in the saying that character is fate. We have become aware that there is a sense in which it is exactly true that the sins of the father ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... watch over us, till I scarcely have the opportunity now of speaking to Juliet alone. If I go to her house, there he is sitting like a black statue at the fireplace, and when I would protest, and lead her into another room or into the garden, he rises and overwhelms me with such courtesies and subtle disquisitions that I am tripped up in my endeavors, and do not know how to leave or how to stay. I wish he would fall sick, or his house ...
— The Old Stone House and Other Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... favorites, proudly first In zeal and charms, too well the Impostor nurst Her soul's delirium in whose active flame, Thus lighting up a young, luxuriant frame, He saw more potent sorceries to bind To his dark yoke the spirits of mankind, More subtle chains than hell itself e'er twined. No art was spared, no witchery;—all the skill His demons taught him was employed to fill Her mind with gloom and ecstasy by turns— That gloom, thro' which Frenzy but fiercer burns, That ecstasy which from the depth of sadness Glares like the maniac's ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... determined to put into operation his long-thought-of scheme for the paying off of the score against Phil. It was subtle, and founded on a perfect knowledge of Bourne's character, and a perfect disregard of the consequences to any one—even including himself. Acton would have willingly martyred himself, if he could have inflicted a little of the torments on ...
— Acton's Feud - A Public School Story • Frederick Swainson
... others. We read the reviews of books in the old Spectators and Athenaeums, and put in the words they say there about other people's books. We said we thought that chapter about Geraldine and the garters was "subtle" and "masterly" and "inevitable"—that it had an "old-world charm," and was "redolent of the soil." We said, too, that we had "read it with breathless interest from cover to cover," and that it had "poignant pathos and a convincing realism," and the "fine flower of delicate sentiment," ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... 'golden-haired girl-graduates,' with 'Dowagers for Dons,' Shall tyrannize in Trinity, and domineer in 'John's.' Then, instead of May Term races in the science grand of rowing, There'll be constant competition in the subtle art of sewing. Soon the modern undergraduate, with a feather in her hat, Shall parade the streets of Cambridge, followed by her faithful cat. From Parker's Piece and Former's shall be banished bat and wicket, For crotchet work and knitting shall supplant the game of cricket, Save ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... to Ilion's city came by stealth A spirit as of windless seas and skies, A gentle phantom-form of joy and wealth, With love's soft arrows speeding from its eyes— Love's rose, whose thorn doth pierce the soul in subtle wise. ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... my going to Carmona's house and trying to see Monica, such a plan appeared useless, as I should certainly not be allowed to come near her. Therefore I must wait with such patience as I could, and let my friends help me in the subtle ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... things human, but in things Divine it is the subtle English form of rationalism. This is no time to explain, Phoebe; but human sense and intellect are made the test, and what surpasses them is only admired as long as its stringent rules ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got to the pass that I began to be afraid to bring books into the house. At first Alice used to reproach me indirectly by eying the new book jealously, and hinting in a subtle, womanly way that Grolier needed new shoes, or that Richard was sadly in need of a new cap. Presently, encouraged by my lamb-like reticence, Alice began to complain gently of what she termed my ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... that she was at that very moment following other beckonings? That she had responded to a call that was not the call of selfish need, but of a subtle understanding of her rare charm. Bruce McKenzie had, perhaps, subconsciously felt that Emily would be fortunate to have a place by his fireside, to bask in his presence—Ulrich Stoelle leading Emily through the moist fragrance of his hot-houses counted himself ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... reason of man has not yet learned to value those subtle instincts which guide a woman. De Catinat argued and exhorted until he had silenced if he had ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of St. Chad's had its effect upon Honor, she owed more than even Miss Maitland guessed to the influence of Janie Henderson. Janie seemed to have the power of drawing out all that was best in her friend's disposition. In some subtle fashion she appeared to demand the good, and, by presupposing it was there, to bring it actually into existence. Many new ideas of duty, consideration for others, and self-restraint, that had never before occurred to Honor, now began to take root and grow—feebly at first, but the seed was ...
— The New Girl at St. Chad's - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... way, our second coming to the country was like the landing of the Swiss Family Robinson upon that little world of theirs in the midst of the sea. Town life had become a subtle persecution. We hadn't been wrecked exactly, but there had been times in which we were torn and weary, understanding only vaguely that it was the manner of our days in the midst of the crowd that was dulling the edge of health and taking the bloom from life. I had long been troubled about the little ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... shelves well lined with volumes. Their contents too on closer inspection were very remarkable. They indicated a student of a high order. Egremont read the titles of works which he only knew by fame, but which treated of the loftiest and most subtle questions of social and political philosophy. As he was throwing his eye over them, his companion said, "Ah! I see you think me as great a scholar as I am a gardener: but with as little justice; ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... of a more subtle way in all things, had proceeded to the issue with delicate caution, creeping toward it by inches, as a man stalks a caribou. He too had been aware of rivalry; and, having surmised Tommy Lark's ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... of Thrace. Denis was a Greek of the first century B. C., who made or carried out the remarkable discovery that there was such a thing as a science of grammar, i. e. that men in their daily speech were unconsciously obeying an extraordinarily subtle and intricate body of laws, which were capable of being studied and reduced to order. Denis did not make the whole discovery himself; he was led to it by his master Aristarchus and others. And his book had been re-edited several times in the nineteen-hundred odd ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... It would seem that contemplation or meditation is not the cause of devotion. No cause hinders its effect. But subtle considerations about abstract matters are often a hindrance to devotion. Therefore contemplation or meditation is not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... trail curved so much that he made many short cuts across the winding line he had left. His weariness was now so intense that all feeling had departed. His feet, his limbs, his arms, and hands were numbed. The subtle poison of the emanations from the earth had begun to deaden his nerves. It seemed a full hour or more to him till he reached the spot where the skeletons were drawn in ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... flesh, nor bones, nor the other natural parts of a human body, belongs to the error of Eutyches, Bishop of Constantinople, who maintained that "our body in that glory of the resurrection will be impalpable, and more subtle than wind and air: and that our Lord, after the hearts of the disciples who handled Him were confirmed, brought back to subtlety whatever could be handled in Him" [*St. Gregory, Moral. in Job 14:56]. Now Gregory condemns this in the same book, because Christ's body was not changed ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... gave up the attempt to explain the magic of San Francisco—that city-personality which transcends the opal hills and rare amber sunlight, festivals, and the transplanted Italian hill-town of Telegraph Hill, liners sailing out for Japan, and memories of the Forty-niners. It was too subtle a spirit, too much of it lay in human life with the passion of the Riviera linked to the strength of the North, for them to be able to comprehend its spell.... But regarding their own ambitions to ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... distributed all over Penrod, both upon his body and upon his spirit. Driven by subtle forces, he had dipped his hands in catastrophe and disaster: it was not for a Georgie Bassett to beard him. Penrod was about ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... that all God does is reasonable and cannot be better done, strikes at the outset every man of good sense, and extorts, so to speak, his approbation. And yet the most subtle of philosophers have a fatal propensity for offending sometimes without observing it, during the course and in the heat of disputes, against the first principles of good sense, when these are shrouded in terms that disguise them. We have here [329] ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... telegraphed an invitation with such a subtle suggestion of a private understanding that Mac ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... subtle; and it is a fact that three days before the date of the unveiling the fishermen went, all in their black Sunday clothes, and claimed audience of the mayor. He laid aside the MS. of his speech, and received them affably. Old Agostino, their spokesman, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... He does not understand that he should sit down at his desk at a certain hour. He imagines that publishers and booksellers should keep all their engagements with him to the letter;—but that he, as a brain-worker, and conscious of the subtle nature of the brain, should be able to exempt himself from bonds when it suits him. He has his own theory about inspiration which will not always come,—especially will not come if wine-cups overnight have been too ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... enhance; And supple charms the third spring flowers ornate; Softly is wafted one streak of fragrance! A light mist doth becloud the tortuous way! With moist the clothes bedews, that verdure cold! The pond who ever sinuous could hold? Dreams long and subtle, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... they have had recourse to infernal agents, after they have thus purified their circle of an offender. Doctors confess to the same of their physic. The expelling agency has next to be expelled, and it is a subtle poison, affecting our spirits. Duchess Susan had now the incense of a victim to heighten her charms; like the treasure-laden Spanish galleon for whom, on her voyage home from South American waters, our enterprising ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... despatches represented the policy and conduct of England in the darkest colours. In the hope of softening these asperities Pitt and Grenville decided to send the Earl of Bute to Madrid in place of Jackson, who desired to escape from the insolences of that capital. Thus by one of the subtle ironies of history, the son of Chatham despatched to the Court of Madrid the son of the man who thwarted Chatham's aims respecting that same Power. Bute's instructions (dated 5th April) bade him humour that Court, but none ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... canine jaw, and singularly noble forehead; but his most obvious distinction was his full head of snowy hair. The only hair upon his face, a pair of bushy eyebrows, was so much darker as to suggest a dye; but the eyes themselves were black as midnight, with a glint of midnight stars, and of such a subtle inscrutability that a certain sweetness of expression came only as the last surprise in a face full of contrast ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... the two men were radically different, and never could have been sympathetic. Washington was strong, direct, masculine, and at times fierce in anger. Jefferson was adroit, subtle, and feminine in his sensitiveness. Washington was essentially a fighting man, tamed by a stern self-control from the recklessness of his early days, but always a fighter. Jefferson was a lover of peace, given to quiet, hating quarrels and bloodshed, and at times timid in dealing with public questions. ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... into the counting-house," laughed Fink. "Did one ever see such a subtle Hamlet in jack-boots? If I could only find out whether you secretly desire or fear such a logical conclusion!" Then drawing a piece of money from his pocket, he said, "Heads or tails, Anton? Blonde or ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... nothing else. Her education has been shamefully neglected. She has had the best masters, who have taught her nothing. Like all other American girls, she plays on the piano, but does not play the piano—you will please notice this subtle but suggestive distinction. She has picked up a smattering of French, partly because it is a fashionable accomplishment, and partly because she intends to marry; but I will not yet break your heart by announcing ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... you will like them," said Truxton, wondering whether she were divinely secreted in one of the great, heavily draped window recesses. She had been in this room but recently. A subtle, delicate, enchanting perfume that he had noticed earlier in the evening—ah, he would never ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... casting about for some new kind of church, machinery, or new style of preaching, or anything else, by which he hopes to accomplish what the Holy Spirit only can accomplish, he will not receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. As long as one tries to find some subtle system of exegesis to read out of the New Testament what God has put into it, namely, the absolute necessity that each believer receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit as a definite experience, he is not going to receive the baptism with the Holy Spirit. As long as a man tries ...
— The Person and Work of The Holy Spirit • R. A. Torrey
... intercourse, and the evacuation connected with it, are no less inherent in human nature than other bodily functions. Yet, as the semen is the most subtle and spirituous part of the human frame, and as it contributes to the support of the nerves, this evacuation is by no means absolutely necessary; and it is besides attended with circumstances not common to any other. The emission of semen ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... paragraph of comment is taken as a whole, the picture is full of dignity and pathos; we have before us a blameless and noble spirit stricken to the earth by malign powers, but not conquered; tempted, but grandly putting the temptation away; enmeshed by subtle coils, but sternly resolved to rend them and march forth victorious, at any peril of life ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Parliament acknowledging with humble thankfulnesse to Almighty God, the disposer of hearts, the Christian zeal and love which the Generall Assembly of the Churches of Scotland, have manifested in their pious endeavours for the preservation of the true reformed Protestant Religion, from the subtle practices and attempts of the Popish and Prelaticall party, to the necessary Reformation of Church discipline and Government in this Kingdome, and the more near union of both Churches, do earnestly desire that reverend Assembly to take notice, that the two Houses of Parliament fully ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... Irish. He was born in America, educated there and elsewhere, a little while in Paris, a little while at Bonn, and, like all Irishmen, he was baned with the wandering foot; for the man who is homeless by choice has a subtle poison in his blood. He was at Bonn when the Civil War came. He went back to America and threw himself into the fight with all the ardor that had made his forebears famous in the service of the worthless Stuarts. It wasn't a question with him of the mere love ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... her dinners, it courts her smiles, it fawns upon her, it showers its good things upon her, all because she has mastered it. Becky Sharp is not a model. Her aims are unworthy, and her means unscrupulous; but she reads us a lesson in fact, in foresight, in energy, in the subtle art of making the most of limited resources. So long as life is a game, it is worth studying. The difference between playing it well and playing it ill is the difference between light and darkness, between joy and ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... too well I see, The tempter's voice has caught thy willing ear, And poured its subtle poison ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... with another gentleman," cried one of them, in a subtle misinterpretation of the cause ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... of prosperity: When apparent adversity comes, be not cast down by it, but make the best of it, and always look forward for better things, for conditions more prosperous. To hold yourself in this attitude of mind is to set into operation subtle, silent, and irresistible forces that sooner or later will actualize in material form that which is today merely an idea. But ideas have occult power, and ideas, when rightly planted and rightly tended, are the seeds that ...
— Thoughts I Met on the Highway • Ralph Waldo Trine
... it over, just as solemnly as he had said it. I think I was satisfied. For when my Dinky-Dunk was away off on the prairie, working like a nailer, and I was alone in the shack, I went to his old coat hanging there—the old coat that had some subtle aroma of Dinky-Dunkiness itself about every inch of it—and ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... before they will credit anything that purports to be of a spiritual tendency;—something startling—some miracle of a stupendous nature, such as according to prophecy they are all unfit to receive. Few will admit the subtle influence and incontestable, though mysterious, authority exercised upon their lives by higher intelligences than their own—intelligences unseen, unknown, but felt. Yes! felt by the most careless, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... that the Lady Barbara knew more of London life than its gossip. Also it might prove that there were other ingredients in the Lady Barbara's character than dutiful submission to her father's commands. Undoubtedly, it shows that the devil's children are as subtle as ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... But inasmuch as one was haughty, audacious, and intemperate, the other was cunning, cool, and treacherous. Charles was the proudest, most daring, and most unmanageable prince that ever made the sword the type and the guarantee of greatness; Louis the most subtle, dissimulating, and treacherous king that ever wove in his closet a tissue of hollow diplomacy and bad faith in government. The struggle between these sovereigns was unequal only in respect to this difference of character; for France, subdivided as it still was, and exhausted by the wars with ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... But when the serpent began to speak, and taught the most sublime truths—those which cannot be demonstrated—he found that Adam being made of red earth, was of too dull a nature to understand these subtle distinctions, but that Eve, on the contrary, being more tender and more sensitive, was easily impressed. Therefore he conversed with her alone, in the absence of her husband, in order to ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... my theories, I like to handle, if not to read, certain books which were read by me under curious and perhaps abnormal circumstances. If I do not open them it is due to a certain bashfulness, a subtle dislike of seeing myself as I was. Yet the books I read while tramping in America, such as Sartor Resartus, have the same attraction for me that a man may feel for a place. I carried the lucubrations of Teufelsdrockh with me as I ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... Pulido, a wealthy proprietor, whom he served so well that he was very quickly advanced to a position of confidence and command. In a few months the slayer of the churrion had learned to smile at his recent apprehensions; but the wild life of the hato had already thrown around him its subtle fascination, and the sprightly youth of Araure had become a naturalized son of the Plains. Soon few were able like young Jose to break an untried steed; few wielded more dexterously the lasso, or could drive with more unerring force the jagged lance into the side of a galloping bull. Clad ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... difference between them, but it sounded better to say that one of these rationalizing free-and-equal religionists had been made a convert than any of those half-way Protestants who were the slaves of catechisms instead of councils and of commentators instead of popes. The subtle priest played his disciple with his finest tackle. It was hardly necessary: when anything or anybody wishes to be caught, a bare hook and a coarse line are all that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... turn up? I am simple myself, and never tire of the blessed liberty from all restraints. Even such apparently indifferent details as being able to walk straight out of doors without first getting into a hat and gloves and veil are full of a subtle charm that is ever fresh, and of which I can never have too much. It is clear that I was born for a placid country life, and placid it certainly is; so much so that the days are sometimes far more like a dream than anything real, the quiet days of ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... takes from us. That faint resemblance composed Gladys, and gave her yet more loving thoughts of the old man. He had been kind when, in his own rugged way, the first harshness of his bearing towards her had swiftly been mellowed by her own sweet, subtle influence. We must not too harshly blame Abel Graham; his environment had been of a kind to foster the least ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... of a walnut. Whilst the girl, with her cloud of copper-dusted brown hair trapped within an Oriental head-dress, her piquant beauty enhanced, if that were possible, by the softly shaded lights, and the bewitching curves revealed by her evening gown borrowing a more subtle witchery from their sombre environment of black-coated plutocrats, justified the most inspired panegyric that ever had poured from the fountain-pen of a New York reporter. Mr. ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... when you have contrived to extricate self or some pal from some little difficulty, you have frequently shown a disposition to take advantage of my gratitude to gain some private end. Those purple socks, for instance. Also the plus fours and the Old Etonian spats. Choosing your moment with subtle cunning, you came to me when I was weakened by relief and got me to get rid of them. And what I am saying now is that if you are successful on the present occasion there must be no rot of that description about that mess-jacket ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... matter. Really, you're come out of it very well. Now, look here, which would you rather be owed for? A clockwork man—which is broken, and you can have it back—or a tandem bicycle, an enlarging camera, a kodak, and a magic-lantern? What?" His reasoning was too subtle for the uneducated mind. The man retired, puzzled, and unpaid, and Ukridge kept ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... the corners of shadow, the splashes of firelight on the curves of old full-bodied wardrobes and cabinets, gave it an air of intimacy increased by its faded hangings, its slightly frayed and threadbare rugs. Everything in it was harmoniously shabby, with a subtle sought-for shabbiness in which Darrow fancied he discerned the touch of Fraser Leath. But Fraser Leath had grown so unimportant a factor in the scheme of things that these marks of his presence caused the young man no emotion beyond that of a faint ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... There is a subtle charm in the taste of tea which makes it irresistible and capable of idealisation. Western humourists were not slow to mingle the fragrance of their thought with its aroma. It has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... his face hidden from her, at the window. By some subtle process of association which he was unable to trace, the image of Simple Sally rose in his mind. An irresistible influence forced him to think of her—not as the poor, starved, degraded, half-witted creature of the streets, ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... axle, see in what showers they come floating down! The ground is all party-colored with them. But they still live in the soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years, by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees, and the sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after-years, it has become the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... would scorn a humble individual like myself. The 'Beautiful Yankee' looks far higher. She will be escorted to-night by the brilliant, the accomplished, the powerful and subtle gentleman, the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... answered. And Faith's words, few or many, for she was sometimes drawn on, were said in the humble yearning desire to let him know what she rejoiced in and save him from an abyss of false fathomless depth. It was more than she could do. Dr. Harrison's subtle difficulties and propositions had been contrived in a school of which she knew nothing; and were far too subtle and complicate in their false wit for Faith's true wit to answer. Not at all for lack of wit, but for lack of skill in fencing and of experience ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... woke not, neither uttered cry nor plaint, nor did its subtle air vibrate with the slightest tinkle—so soft was the fall of the retreating steps. They sounded for a time, and then were silent. And the evening stillness became pensive, stretched itself out in long shadows, and then grew dark;—and suddenly night, coming to meet ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... two or three undulatory movements of his glistening body finished the work. Then, with marvellous ease, he cautiously raised himself up, his tongue flaming from his mouth the while, curved over the nest, and, with wavy, subtle motions, explored the interior. I can conceive of nothing more overpoweringly terrible to an unsuspecting family of birds than the sudden appearance above their domicile of the head and neck of this arch-enemy. It is enough to petrify the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... example? We are alive now. To refuse to take advantage of increased light and improved conditions may look like filial piety in the eyes of some: to us such conduct appears nothing better than a distrust of the Divine Providence, a subtle form of atheism. What are chimneys for, pray? And as for soot and smoke, we were made to live in them. Otherwise, let some of our opponents be kind enough to explain why we were created with ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... that open window, garnished with flowers, that room hung with rose, and at the back those white curtains which the morning sun is gilding? Oh, that he might melt into those subtle rays, and penetrate, like a ray of love, into that ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... that elder school of comedy, which remains not only unsurpassed, but unapproachable, save by Rabelais alone, as the ideal cloudland of masquerading wisdom, in which the whole universe goes mad—but with a subtle ...
— Lectures Delivered in America in 1874 • Charles Kingsley
... coming. I had hardly settled in my chair before I was conscious of a thick, musky odour, subtle and nauseous. At the very first whiff of it my brain and my imagination were beyond all control. A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about ...
— The Adventure of the Devil's Foot • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Hillebrandt may indeed be referable to the latter end of the series rather than to the former; but that the author, despite the learning and ingenuity of his work, has proved his point definitively, we are far from believing. It is just like the later Hindu speculation to think out a subtle connection between moon and soma-plant because each was yellow, and swelled, and went through a sieve (cloud), etc. But there is a further connecting link in that the divinity ascribed to the intoxicant led to a supposition that it was brought from the sky, the home of the gods; above all, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... The subtle implication in those words brought him to his senses. Was he not her protector? And was he not abusing the confidence ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... regions, and he knoweth no more than the rest of us. But while his foot is on the earth he steps like a king among writers. His Christian is no fool. He is cunning of fence, suspicious, sagacious, witty, satirical, abounding in invective, and broad, bold, delicious insolence. Bye-Ends is a subtle, evasive knave ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... eaten or drunk at the imperial table till it had been tasted by the praegustator. To avoid this difficulty a very hot draught was given to Britannicus, and when he wished for something cooler a swift and subtle poison was dropped into the cold water with which it was tempered. The boy drank, and instantly sank from his seat, gasping and speechless. The guests started up in consternation, and fixed their eyes on Nero. ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... for that, his father would not have let him go), dressed him like a doll, gave him teachers of every kind, and placed him under the care of a French tutor—an ex-abbe, a pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau—a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles an adroit and subtle intriguer—"the very fine fleur of the emigration," as she expressed herself; and she ended by marrying this fine fleur when she was almost seventy years old. She transferred all her property ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... color between many species of chipmunks are subtle, and refined techniques are required to discover them. When "measuring" chipmunks taxonomically, it is necessary to use a "chipmunk scale" and not, for example, a "pocket-gopher scale." In explanation, some species of pocket gophers closely allied to each other, and even ...
— Taxonomy of the Chipmunks, Eutamias quadrivittatus and Eutamias umbrinus • John A. White
... to a height, the lights burned with a fuller power, the odour of the flowers spread, subtle and intense. The dancers moved more and more quickly. "There are only three horses," said Cousin William, "two in front and one behind. Two gentlemen and a servant. Now they are crossing the little bridge. Shall I go ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... thrown by the trees upon the snow are blue and soft, sharply defined, and so contrasted with the gleaming white as to appear narrower than the boughs which cast them. There is something subtle and fantastic about these shadows. Here is a leafless larch-sapling, eight feet high. The image of the lower boughs is traced upon the snow, distinct and firm as cordage, while the higher ones grow dimmer by fine gradations, until the slender ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... atmosphere of purity and serenity. To study about God the whole nature must be prepared, so unitedly and with loving hearts teacher and disciples prayed to the Supreme Being for His grace and protection. It is not possible to comprehend the subtle problems of life unless the thought is tranquil and the energy concentrated. Until our mind is withdrawn from the varied distractions and agitations of worldly affairs, we cannot enter into the spirit of higher religious study. No ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... drew from St. Augustine a subtle distinction which for ages eased the difficulties in the case: he taught in effect that God created the substance of things in a moment, but gave to the work of separating, shaping, and adorning this creation, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... contemplation; the forehead broad, the nose long and formidable, the lips clean-shaven and at once dogged and sensitive, the cheeks lean, with a deeply running tide of red blood in them. His eyes, expressive now of the usual masculine impersonality and authority, might reveal more subtle emotions under favorable circumstances, for they were large, and of a clear, brown color; they seemed unexpectedly to hesitate and speculate; but Katharine only looked at him to wonder whether his face would not have come nearer the standard ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and searchingly. She had not neglected the art of the toilette. Blinds tempered the sunlight which flooded her room; but that, failing the service of rouge, Madame had been pale this morning, I perceived immediately. In some subtle way the night had changed her. Something was gone out of her face, and something come into it. I thought, and lived to remember the thought, that it was thus Marie Antoinette might have looked when they told her how the drums had rolled in the Place de la Revolution on that morning of ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... something more subtle, on that miasmatic metropolitan night, something farther back than the new determination to break away from Mern and all his works of mischief. It was not merely a call of family loyalty, a resolve to stand by the grandfather who had disowned his kin. She ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... of the Sphinx, he solved it not—only delighted with pure pleasure of poetry and of subtle thought as he led one along the pathways of his Enchanted Garden, where I shall ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
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