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More "Theme" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him with some whispered promise, and he took his seat, glancing covertly around him. Then the instruments struck up, and immediately fixed his attention. As the musical theme developed his eyes gradually lost their wild look, and a softened expression took its place. He sank lower in his seat, and rested his head upon his hand. His whole soul seemed, at last, to be absorbed in the music. When it was finished Blank was a ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... of its members, and on these points his advice is usually followed, and his decisions are very rarely questioned.... For many generations the deference habitually paid to the occupant of the chair has been the theme of admiring comment by foreign observers."[177] Finally, the fact should be noted that by the Parliament Act of 1911 the Speaker is given sole power, when question arises, to determine whether a given measure is or is not to be considered a money ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... theme of the gloomy orator was the display of his own virtues and his services as a patriot, distinguishing as enemies to their country all whose opinions were contrary to his own. He then reviewed successively the various departments of the government, and loaded them in turn with censure ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... is the sort of solemn relish which they have for talking of their own misfortunes. To be the objects of a calamity of any kind, seems to raise them in their own estimations. With a dreary enjoyment of his miserable theme, the servant expatiated on his position as a man deprived of the best of masters; turned adrift again in the world to seek another service; hopeless of ever again finding himself in such a situation as he had lost. He roused me at last into speaking to him, by sheer dint of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... constant aim of Cyrus whenever he and his soldiers messed together, that the talk should be lively and full of grace, and at the same time do the listeners good. Thus one day he brought the conversation round to the following theme:— ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... the man and the girl had departed, the trapper and Herbert sat by their campfire discussing the question which their guest had propounded. Their conversation was grave and deliberate, as became the theme; and they united in the opinion that if the deed had been done in anger elicited by a provocation, the man should give himself the favor which the law even ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... written and many errors ignorantly propagated. For months after the outbreak of the war against Turkey the development of this Alliance into a Confederation of the Balkan states, on the model of the American or the German constitution, was a theme of constant discussion in Europe and America. As a matter of fact there existed no juridical ground for this expectation, and the sentiments of the peoples of the four Christian nations, even while they fought together against the Moslem, were saturated with such an infusion of suspicion and ...
— The Balkan Wars: 1912-1913 - Third Edition • Jacob Gould Schurman
... This discourse of Isaiah takes the form of a theme (God's arraignment of his people as rebels) treated in four paragraphs: the prophet's remonstrance—repentance by oblations—repentance ...
— Select Masterpieces of Biblical Literature • Various
... works at Marly they perceived that the sky was brightening. The cocks began to crow in the poultry-yards. A bird twittered in a park at the left, ceaselessly reiterating a tender little theme. ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... very soon into a rolling succession of dreams. The actual scene, as looked down upon from the box of the mail, was transformed into a dream, as tumultuous and changing as a musical fugue. This troubled Dream is circumstantially reported in Section the Third, entitled, "Dream-Fugue upon the Theme of Sudden Death." What I had beheld from my seat upon the mail,—the scenical strife of action and passion, of anguish and fear, as I had there witnessed them moving in ghostly silence; this duel between life and death narrowing itself to a point of such exquisite evanescence ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... went into another key, and then resumed the theme. A lean little girl came in, who tapped on the counter with a coin. She called out "'A'p'orth o' dips!" taking a tress of her hair from between her teeth to say it, and putting it back to await the result. She had a little brother ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... skies; All Nature feels her renovating sway; The sheep-fed pasture, and the meadow gay; And trees, and shrubs, no longer budding seen, Display the new-grown branch of lighter green; On airy downs the shepherd idling lies, And sees to-morrow in the marbled skies. Here then, my soul, thy darling theme pursue, For every day was Giles ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... poem should be delivered with bold energy, with flashing eye, swelling breast, and free action—as though the speaker's heart was full of the nobility of the theme: ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... always ready at the proper hour. I know I dreamed of taking a draft of cool, sweet water from a full pitcher and then woke up with my mouth and throat as dry as dust. The good home I left behind was a favorite theme about the campfire, and many a one told of the dream pictures, natural as life, that came to him of the happy Eastern home with comfort and happiness surrounding it, even if wealth was lacking. The home of the poorest man on earth was preferable to this place. Wealth ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... bath. The second, a back view, full of the malformations of forty years, of children, of hard work, stands gripping her flanks with both hands. The naked woman has become impossible in modern art; it required Degas' genius to infuse new life into the worn-out theme. Cynicism was the great means of eloquence of the middle ages, and with cynicism Degas has rendered the nude again an artistic possibility. What Mr. Horsley or the British matron would say it is difficult to guess. Perhaps the hideousness depicted by M. Degas ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... him, thrusting his hand through his hair and biting the end of his penholder to a pulp. In his muttering, which was mixed with the curious, stingless profanity of which he was master, I caught the name of Cheyne, and I knew that he was facing the crisis of a fortnightly theme. The subject assigned was a narrative of some personal experience, and it was to be handed in on the morrow. My ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... sang, her whole soul thrilled with the joy of glorying in such a theme, and her last thought, as she closed her eyes for the night, was about a plan of work that she meant ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... Violinist sprang up and began pacing the room, pressing his hands to his eyes to drive away the notes, humming to himself to get rid of the sound, the theme, the one haunting, irrepressible motive. He walked up and down, lighting one cigarette after the other, puffing once, twice, and then hurling it ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... then, coming to our theme, when the conquistadors and settlers arrived at these islands and subdued that of Manila, they found three varieties or kinds of people in them. Those who held command of it [i.e., the island of Manila], and inhabited the seashore and river-banks and all the best parts round about, were ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... indifference, lavishing a vast deal more kindness and attention upon a noble wolf-hound that crouched close to her feet, his big clear eye bent ever upon his mistress's face with a degree of intelligence that would have formed a theme for a painter. It was a noble creature, and no wonder the lady evinced so much regard for the hound, who ever and anon walked close ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... artists,—great and small! From now until we go in June I shall hear nothing but this tune:— Whether I like Long's "Vashti," or Like Leslie's "Naughty Kitty" more; With all that critics, right or wrong, Have said of Leslie and of Long.... No. If you value my esteem, I beg you'll take another theme; Paint me some pictures, if you will, But spare me these, for good ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... To return to our theme. There was nothing in the whole range of moral offences against which the jurisprudence of William the Testy was more strenuously directed than the crying sin of poverty. He pronounced it the root of all evil, and determined to cut it up root and branch, and extirpate it from the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... to do at present:—other opportunities may hereafter arrive in which you may find the continuance of my friendship, and a grateful remembrance of the good office you did me; but to engage me to fulfil my obligations without any reluctance on my part, you must speak to me no more on a theme which I cannot hear without emotions, such as I would by no means ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... now time to examine the details of the parable in conformity with the main theme just stated and come to a definite interpretation. Henceforward we may keep ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... I see the spell of thoughtfulness is gone, Or going swiftly. I will not complain; But ere these lads are fastened to their games, And thoughts arise discordant with our theme, Let us with gratitude approach the throne And worship God. I wish once more to lead Your hearts in prayer, and follow with my own The leading of your song of thankfulness. Then will I lease and leave you for the night To such divertisement as suits ...
— Bitter-Sweet • J. G. Holland
... country; and a letter to the Bishop of Guadalaxara contained a confidential and detailed account of the good Father's spiritual temptation. But in some way the story leaked out; and long after Jose was gathered to his fathers, his mysterious encounter formed the theme of thrilling and whispered narrative. The mountain was generally shunned. It is true that Senor Joaquin Pedrillo afterward located a grant near the base of the mountain; but as the Senora Pedrillo ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... The favorite theme in the writings of Shelley is "Eros," love of the individual, of the race, of nature, and in this he follows Christ, in whose system of Philosophy, Love is ever the pre-dominating idea which permeates ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley as a Philosopher and Reformer • Charles Sotheran
... as she had made out on the rush to Folkestone; and if in Sir Claude's company on that occasion Mrs. Wix was the constant implication, so in Mrs. Wix's, during these hours, Sir Claude was—and most of all through long pauses—the perpetual, the insurmountable theme. It all took them back to the first flush of his marriage and to the place he held in the schoolroom at that crisis of love and pain; only he had himself blown to a much bigger balloon the large consciousness ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... people swarmed like ants, delighted with the calm perfection of the day, the magnetism of the crowds, the blare of martial music, the novelty of passing strangers, and, above all, by the prospect of the great race which, for weeks, had been the theme of conversation everywhere ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... whom he was very fond, should inherit everything. If we affronted him, for at the age of sixteen as a boy, and fourteen as a girl, worldly prospects were little regarded, he would then declare that we should not be a shilling the better for his money. With him money was everything: it was his daily theme of conversation, his only passion; and he valued and respected people in proportion to what they were supposed to possess. With these feelings he demanded for himself the greatest deference from Cecilia and me, ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... If on my theme I rightly think, There are five reasons why men drink,— Good wine, a friend, because I 'm dry, Or lest I should be by and by, Or any other ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... education, the multiplication of learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the most interesting chapters in the development of modern thought can be written, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on the theme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought, and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations might seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... obnoxious impost. Sometimes coarse invective and angry assertion take the place of convincing reason and calm philosophy. At others, there is a true vein of poetry and pathos running through the rather unpoetic theme, which touches us with its Wordsworthian feeling and gentleness. Then he would be found calling down thunders upon the devoted heads of the monopolists, with all a fanatic's hearty zeal, and in his fury he would even pursue them, not merely through the world, but beyond its dim frontiers ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... More, Glanvill, Pepys, Aubrey, and others, wrote eagerly to correspondents in the Highlands, while Sacheverell and Waldron discussed the topic as regarded the Isle of Man. Then came special writers on the theme, as Aubrey, Kirk, Frazer, Martin, De Foe (who compiled a catch-penny treatise on Duncan Campbell, a Highland fortune-teller in London), Theophilus Insulanus (who was urged to his task by Sir Richard Steele), Wodrow, a great ghost-hunter: and so we reach ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... in mind, and on other occasions, you may feel inclined to resort to artificial stimulus. Respecting this many-sided theme I have a few words to offer—of direct bearing on the collector's case. It should be clearly understood, in the first place, that a stimulant confers no strength whatever: it simply calls the powers that be into increased action, at their own expense. Seeking real ...
— How to Camp Out • John M. Gould
... Never had there been on the throne of England a sovereign more bent upon making England the champion-nation of the world. The deference, the sycophancy, of foreign princes and potentates to him, and the proofs of the same in letters and embassies, and in presents of hawks and horses, had become a theme for jests and caricatures among foreigners themselves. Parliaments might come and go in Westminster; but there sat Cromwell, immoveable through all, the impersonation of the British Islands. His dissolution of the late Parliament, and his easy suppression of the subsequent tumult, ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... unfeeling crew, frae yon burn side, Those fairy scenes are no for you, by yon burn side; There fancy smooths her theme, By the sweetly murmuring stream, And the rock-lodged echoes skim, down by ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... pitch become a sodden pulp, a Morass, a sponge, a lake, a running stream, What time a sad repentant Mea culpa Was all my musing's theme. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... was that Lucasta made its first appearance. When the fortunes of the gallant poet were at their lowest and never to revive, Marvell seizes the occasion to deplore the degeneracy of the times, a familiar theme with poets:— ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... the city have increased fifty thousand rupees, and furnished him with a net revenue of two lacs of rupees per annum. The merchant may travel without a guard or protection from one frontier to another, an unheard-of circumstance in the time of the kings. The justice of this chief affords a constant theme of praise to all classes. The peasant rejoices at the absence of tyranny, the citizen at the safety of his home, the merchant at the equity of his decisions and the protection of his property, and the ...
— Campaign of the Indus • T.W.E. Holdsworth
... freely copied by other papers, and for several weeks the topic was kept conspicuously before the little world of western Canada. Nowhere was the interest in the subject more keenly manifested than at the Royal Oak, where it furnished the theme of frequent and all-but-interminable discussion. Not a day passed but mine host Lapierre publicly congratulated himself upon his acumen in having all along believed and declared that Savareen was ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... street, in the stores, at the churches—wherever men met—this was the one unfailing theme of conversation. None but those who have seen a Southern community excited over one subject or one man can imagine how much can be said about a little matter. The newspapers of that and the adjoining counties were full of it. Colored men were ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of a dairy I purpose to sing, But all things in order, first, God save the King! {62} And the Queen, I may say, That every May-day, Has many fair dairy-maids all fine and gay. Assist me, fair damsels, to finish my theme, Inspiring ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... unmerited steak. The return of this asymmetrical Saturday was one of those petty occurrences, intra-mural, localised, almost civic, which, in uneventful lives and stable orders of society, create a kind of national unity, and become the favourite theme for conversation, for pleasantries, for anecdotes which can be embroidered as the narrator pleases; it would have provided a nucleus, ready-made, for a legendary cycle, if any of us had had the epic mind. At daybreak, before we were ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... of industrious affectionate women temporarily united to brutal and worthless men in a country where legal marriages are rare. Half of the creole songs which I was able to collect during a residence of nearly two years in the island touch upon the same sad theme. Of these, "Ch Manman Moin," a great favorite still with the older blanchisseuses, has a simple pathos unrivalled, I believe, in the oral literature of this people. Here is an attempt to translate its three rhymeless stanzas into prose; but the childish ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... breath and switching quickly to another theme, "have you heard about the Hairton scandal? It's simply rich! You ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... his listeners long in doubt as to his personal history. He enjoyed talking about himself. He was a Professor of archaeology, and had written various learned books on the subject. But his studies had by no means been confined to the one theme. History had also interested him profoundly. He had published a work on the old houses of England. The Priory figured among them. It was not difficult to discover from the conversation of this singular man, whose subtle and secretive instincts were contradicted, at times, by a strange inconsequent ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... hear of one convert to the gospel of mercy," said Mrs. Brown heartily. "The apathy of our women on this subject is heart-sickening. Men are denouncing us; the newspapers are full of our cruelty; the pulpit makes our heartlessness its theme; and yet we keep on with our barbarous work with an indifference that must ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... ofttimes artificial. It happens also that a story has no plot ("From the Diary of a Tutor in Pozman," "Bartek the Victor"), no action, almost no matter ("Yamyol"), but the reader is rewarded by simplicity, rural theme, humoristic pictures ("Comedy of Errors: A Sketch of American Life"), pity for the little and poor ("Yanko the Musician"), and those qualities make the reader remember his stories well. It is almost impossible to forget—under the general impressions—about ...
— So Runs the World • Henryk Sienkiewicz,
... and with more festivity. For when he came to Mitylene, he gave the city their freedom upon the intercession of Theophanes, and was present at the contest, there periodically held, of the poets, who took at that time no other theme or subject than the actions of Pompey. He was extremely pleased with the theater itself, and had a model of it taken, intending to erect one in Rome on the same design, but larger and more magnificent. When he came to Rhodes, he attended the lectures of all the philosophers there, and gave ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Flashy," continued the poor victim, unconsciously warming with his theme: "why then, I'd draw my chair up and call for Betty, the gal wot tends to customers. Betty, my dear, says I, you looks charmin' this mornin'; give me a nice rasher of bacon and h'eggs, Betty my love; and I wants a pint of h'ale, and three nice h'ot ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... done, as in the copious notes and explanations which he had gathered together for the purpose of annotating the book. He had made this subject a study of years, though his actual translation of it only took him eighteen months. The theme of The Scented Garden is one which is familiar to every student of Oriental literature. Burton, who was nothing if not thorough in all he undertook, did not ignore this. In fact, one may say that from his early manhood he ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... express the admiration and enthusiasm which your late despatches have excited in the breasts of all ranks of people. You are now the theme of every conversation, the toast of every table, the hero of every woman, and the boast of every Englishman. When Dumaresq waited on Lord St. Vincent, his lordship squeezed his hand in the greatest rapture, exclaiming, "I knew it,—I knew it,—I knew the man,—I knew what he could ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... put forward as the poet's theme. His theme is man, in the two contrasted moods of joyous emotion, or grave reflection. The shifting scenery ministers to the varying mood. Thomson, in the Seasons (1726), sets himself to render natural phenomena as they truly are. He has left us a vivid presentation in gorgeous ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... strangely enough, in both of his carefully prepared arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically" with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... suggested trinity as a substitute and started a titter, but the preacher had already got his dramatic momentum, and was sweeping along in a tumultuous tide of oratory. Right at his three victims did he aim his fiery eloquence, and ever and again he came back to his theme, "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity," even though Ann Pease had turned her back on William, whose head was low bowed, and Nancy was ostentatiously weeping into a ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... which they were destined to become more closely acquainted. "When I was a very young man," said George Brown, denouncing the Fugitive Slave Law before a Toronto audience, "I used to think that if I ever had to speak before such an audience as this, I would choose African Slavery as my theme in preference to any other topic. The subject seemed to afford the widest scope for rhetoric and for fervid appeals to the best of human sympathies. These thoughts arose far from here, while slavery was a thing ...
— George Brown • John Lewis
... from his lord withdrew; With head in lowly reverence bent, And filled with thoughts of joy, he went. The royal street he traversed, where Waved flag and pennon to the air, And, as with joy the car he drove, He let his eyes delighted rove. On every side, where'er he came, He heard glad words, their theme the same, As in their joy the gathered folk Of Rama and the throning spoke. Then saw he Rama's palace bright And vast as Mount Kailasa's height, That glorious in its beauty showed As Indra's own supreme abode: With folding doors both high and wide; With hundred porches beautified: Where golden ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... love, powerless for all her enchantments to resist, it is the subtle persuasion of Venus, seemingly invisible—in Titian's realisation of the legend—to the woman she tempts, that constitute the main theme upon which Titian has built his masterpiece. Moritz Thausing[22] had already got half-way towards the unravelling of the true subject when he described the Borghese picture as The Maiden with Venus and Amor at the Well. ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... his brother, the Major, who, on the return of his regiment from India and New South Wales, had sold out and gone upon half-pay, came to pay his biennial visit to Fairoaks. "My brother, Major Pendennis," was a constant theme of the retired Doctor's conversation. All the family delighted in my brother the Major. He was the link which bound them to the great world of London, and the fashion. He always brought down the last news of the nobility, and was in the constant ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "usually write eye in the middle of a line, but when they come to it at the end of one, they are fairly puzzled. In l. 10, the scribe of Hn ('Hengwrt') writes lye, and that of Ln ('Lansdowne') writes yhe; and the variations on this theme are curious. The spelling ye ( ye) is, however, common.... I print it 'ye' to distinguish it from ye, the pl. pronoun." The other differences are accounted for by the varying degrees in which the two editors depend on the Ellesmere MS. ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... on a new one. The readiness, with me, is nine tenths of the battle. I never, or almost never, write a sermon unless it be upon a. subject that I want to write upon. I never cast about for a subject; I do not find the theme, but the theme finds me. Last week I departed from my way, and did lot make good progress. The text, "What shall it profit t man?" struck upon my heart as I sat down on Monday Horning, and I wrote it at the head of my usual seven sheets of white paper, and went ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... pages alike with pleasure and profit. The writers, each on his own theme, seem steadfastly to keep in view scriptural teaching, sound doctrine, and the trials and temptations which beset the daily life and walk of the ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... and fifty-four of these Sonnets. The last two are different in theme and effect from those which go before, and may perhaps not improperly be considered as mere exercises in poetizing. They have no connection with the others, and I would have no contention with those who regard them as suggested ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... half-humorously upon the education of children at home, but out of this activity emerged the main theme of the days and the work at hand. The building of a house proved a natural setting for that; gardens and woods and shore rambles are a part; the new poetry and all the fine things of the time belong most intensely ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... it, we must first get an idea of Paul's theme. Briefly, he would oppose the vain boasting of false apostles and preachers concerning their possession of the spirit and their peculiar skill and gifts, by praising and glorifying the office of a preacher of the Gospel with ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... fact that one must begin a theme at a given moment and close at a similar arbitrary point affects the teacher's procedure somewhat. He will always have to attack the problem anew at ten o'clock and pull together the loose ends of discussion at ten-thirty, if these happen to be the limits of time assigned him. But who will ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... into the children's mouths. Rosencrantz declared that the children 'so berattle [i.e. assail] the common stages—so they call them—that many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills, and dare scarce come thither [i.e. to the public theaters].' Hamlet in pursuit of the theme pointed out that the writers who encouraged the vogue of the 'child actors' did them a poor service, because when the boys should reach men's estate they would run the risk, if they continued on the stage, of the same insults and neglect ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of these poems; they form a comedy of manners, shooting as it flies the folly rather than the wickedness of vice: not wounding with a red-hot iron, but "just flicking with uplifted lash," Horace stands to Juvenal as Chaucer stands to Langland, as Dante to Boccaccio. His theme is life and conduct, the true path to happiness and goodness. I write sermons in sport, he says; but sermons by a fellow-sinner, not by a dogmatic pulpiteer, not by a censor or a cynic. "Conversations" we may rather call them; the polished talk ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... casting about for other models. He soon found one, the greatest of all for his purpose. It was Weber—that same Weber for whose obsequies Wagner wrote some funeral music, not forgetting to use a theme from the Euryanthe overture. Weber was to Wagner a veritable Golconda. From this diamond mine he dug out tons of precious stones; and some of them he used for The Flying Dutchman. We all saw then what a parody ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the instrument and struck a few chords while she thought. Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... War is its theme but not its purpose. War breeds hatred, horror, pestilence and famine, yet from its tears and ashes eventually must rise the clean ...
— The Littlest Rebel • Edward Peple
... paragraphs when you expect and want news is tantalising, is it not? Pray agree with me, and then you will allow that I have acted very kindly in not writing till I had something to tell you. Something, of course, means Wilkes, for everything is nothing except the theme of the day. There has appeared a violent North Briton, addressed to, and written against Lord Mansfield, threatening a rebellion if he continued to persecute Mr. Wilkes. This paper, they say, Wilkes owned to the Chevalier ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume II • Horace Walpole
... not know in what order the chapters of The Parts Men Play were written, but it seems to me that as Mr. Baxter gets to grip with the realities of his theme, he begins to lose a certain looseness of touch which marks his opening pages. If so, he is showing the power of development, and to the artist this power is everything. The writer who is without it is a mere static consciousness weaving words round the creatures of his own imagination. The man ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... difficulties—this change that a few years have wrought. It has not been so very long since she was the universal butt of ridicule, lampooned and caricatured, with all that malice, in its coarsest and most brutal form, could suggest. Her age was the favorite theme of the callow witling, her cause a never-failing subject for reproach and abuse. It is all over and done with, thanks to the new race of men which women themselves are training and educating. There are no words for her nowadays but ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Early one morning, Mr. Barrett had been strolling along the road nearest the edge of the cliff when as if by chance, there had floated down upon his astonished ears, a high girlish voice singing the second theme of his Alan Breck Overture. For a moment, his lips had curled into a complacent little smile; the next minute, he had sucked in his breath sharply between his clenched teeth. In her excitement, Cicely had mistaken her distance; she had ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... the whole Continent was then governed by women who were by no means conspicuous for meekness. Maria Theresa herself had not escaped his scurrilous jests. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia knew that her gallantries afforded him a favorite theme for ribaldry and invective. Madame de Pompadour, who was really the head of the French government, had been even more keenly galled. She had attempted, by the most delicate flattery, to propitiate the King of Prussia; but her messages had drawn from him only dry and sarcastic ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Tom," continued Mrs. Castleton, still intent on the main theme, "that in all probability Miss ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... great stage of the first canoe, which was painted black, was seated Laea, surrounded by her women attendants, who joined in the wild singing whenever the name of their mistress formed the singers' theme. ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... the little allegro in 3/8, of which a whole bar represents one-third, or one beat of that of the minuetto, and the other allegro in 2/4, of which a whole bar represents two-thirds, or two beats, correspond with each other and with the principal theme; while the whole proceeds without the slightest confusion. All that is requisite is to make ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... least," was Reggie's answer, "it is like along Piccadilly after nightfall, looking in at the Empire, and returning via Regent Street; and in Paris, like a visit to the Rat Mort and the Bal Tabarin. It is the local version of an old theme." ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... were passed some glamour seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disenchanted eye all things were as they were on all other dullish days of summer, even to the accustomed bore leaning up against his favorite desk and transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. Yet to the gaze of this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and he shook hands right and left as he entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his effusion. He had merely come to get some newspapers to help pass away the long moments on the wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... taken aback by the introduction of so congenial a theme from so unexpected a quarter, "I've not played very much lately. Jill and I had a little punt about yesterday; but we did it quite slowly, you know, and I had my ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... recited, or at least put them into that jingling and quaint rhythm, acquired by habitual intercourse with the phraseology peculiar to these popular descants. On hearing a story he could readily shape it into verse, extempore, too, upon occasion; and many were the jokes that rebounded from his theme, whether in hall or kitchen. It was pleasant to watch his little grey eye, and the twinkling lashes, as they rose and fell, varying the expression of his lips. A slight lisp gave an air of simplicity to his ditties, which never failed to charm his auditors. He could throw the simplest expression ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... THEME no poet gladly sung, Fair to old and foul to young; Scorn not thou the love of parts, And the articles of arts. Grandeur of the perfect sphere Thanks the ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in silence. Her heart was like lead within her. The recurrence of the butter theme as a sort of leit motif in her companion's conversation was fraying her nerves till she felt she could endure little more. She cast her mind's eye back over the horrid months and had a horrid vision of Geoffrey ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... is ever written, I hazard the guess that its plot will be woven around the theme of American transportation, for that has been the vital factor in the national development of the United States. Every problem in the building of the Republic has been, in the last analysis, a problem in transportation. The ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... the war is over, the victory won! A cheering, exultant crowd beset the White House. Lincoln came out on the balcony, said a word of response, and invited them to come back two days later for a fuller word. When they came again, he talked to them and to the country. His whole theme was, What is our next duty? Here is the next step, the first of the "erring sisters" to return is to be welcomed back. Louisiana has adopted a constitution abolishing slavery, establishing public schools for black and white alike, and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the Giant-Killer" is a curious jumble. The second part, as in most chap-books, is a weak and late invention of the enemy, and is not volkstuemlich at all. The first part is compounded of a comic and a serious theme. The first is that of the Valiant Tailor (Grimm, No. 20); to this belong the incidents of the fleabite blows (for variants of which see Koehler in Jahrb. rom. eng. Phil., viii. 252), and that of the slit paunch ...
— English Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... That imagination should sometimes run riot and the pen be carried beyond the boundary line of the strictly literal is perhaps nothing much to be marvelled at in the case of the supernatural minded Celt with religion for his theme. Did the scribe believe what he wrote when he recounted the multiplied marvels of his holy patron's life? Doubtless he did—and why not! To the unsophisticated monastic and mediaeval mind, as to the mind of primitive man, ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous
... whom Cleopatra practised speaking the Roman language, had often seen him, and had heard of him still more frequently—for his mode of life was the theme of gossip among all classes of Roman men and women. His house was said to have descended in a direct line from Hercules, and his figure and magnificent black beard recalled his ancestor. You know him, and know that the things reported of him are those ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... said, clear his head. A great deal that he said was above Hugh's comprehension; and much of his repetitions mere words: but there were other matters which fixed Hugh's attention, and proved to him that study might be interesting out of school. When Dale had a theme to write, the two boys often walked up and down the playground for half an hour together, talking the subject over, and telling of anything they had heard or read upon it. Hugh presently learned the names and the meanings of ...
— The Crofton Boys • Harriet Martineau
... the purchase of an evening paper had made the great over-seas strife the general theme, "can you egsplain me why they don' stop that war, when 'tis calculate' to projuce so ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable
... cause of all things,—the first creative power by which or whom the world was formed. Thus "God is love" is a sublime doctrine which philosophy revealed to the Greeks, and the emphatic and continuous and assured declaration of which was the central theme of the revelation made by Jesus, the Christ, who resolved all the Law and the Gospel into the element of Love,—fatherly on the part of God, filial and fraternal on the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... CRACK. The fashionable theme, the go. The Crack Lay, of late is used, in the cant language, to signify the art and ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... said, half laughing. "In England, at least, people do not know what is meant by IMPROVISING. They think it is to take a little theme and compose variations on it—the mere ABC of the art. But to sit down to the piano and plan a whole sonata or symphony in your head, and play it while planning it, is a thing they do not and will not understand. They come to ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... very glad of such a companion, and such a theme," said the old gentleman, with a smile. "Well, Laurence, if our oaken chair, like the wooden Palladium of Troy, was connected with the country's fate, yet there appears to have been no supernatural obstacle to its removal from the Province House. In 1760, Sir Francis ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a thorn At evening chime. Its sweet refrain fell like the rain Of summer-time. Of summer-time when roses bloomed, And bright above A rainbow spanned my fairy-land Of hope and love! Of hope and love! O linnet, cease Thy mocking theme! I ne'er picked up the golden cup In all my dream! In all my dream I missed the prize Should have been mine; And dreams won't die! though fain would I, And make ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... legends of the olden time are revived as the tourist passes them in review. England, too, has other charms than these. British scenery, though not always equal in sublimity and grandeur to that displayed in many parts of our own country, is exceedingly beautiful, and has always been a fruitful theme of song ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... not to see them; and the whole book was the spiritual story of a young Roman's soul, a priestlike artistic temperament, born in the haunted twilight between the setting sun of pagan religion and philosophy and the dawn of the Christian idea. The theme presented many fascinating analogies to the present time; and in the hero's "sensations and ideas" Henry found many correspondences with his own nature. In him, too, was united that same joy in the sensuous form, that same ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... forms would be resolved into the mist. But it was hard to say if he consoled himself effectually with such reflections, for the return to common sense meant also the return to the sharp pangs of defeat. It recalled him to the bitter theme of his own inefficiency, to the thought that he only desired one thing of life, and that this was denied him. He was willing to endure the austerities of a monk in a severe cloister, to suffer cold, to be hungry, to be lonely and friendless, to forbear all ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... went with tongues of flame In one blest theme delighting, The love of Jesus and His Name God's children all uniting! That love our theme and watchword still; That law of love may we fulfill, And love as we ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... you say, that I've forgotten what it's like? Not quite. Last winter I had to attend an execution: couldn't get out of it, you know. My cousin married a Washington belle, and I had to be there a week, and take it all in. Ah well, this is a threadbare theme; but I could understand how men fifteen hundred years ago fled from Alexandrian ball-rooms to Nitrian deserts. The emptiness of it—the eternal simper, the godless and harrowing routine! If a man has brains or a soul about him, what can he do with them in such a crowd? ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... an irritated monologue upon the theme of certain persons whose ignorance is not blissful, but trouble-inviting. Applehead, it would seem from his speech upon the subject, would be a much surprised ex-sheriff—now a deputy—if they were not all captured ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... little sister of the angels never lived, except in the imagination of the poet. It seems a pure allegory, or, rather, an exercise in arithmetic or a theme of astrology. Dante, who was a good doctor of Bologna and had many moons in his head, under his pointed cap—Dante believed in the virtue of numbers. That inflamed mathematician dreamed of figures, and his Beatrice is the flower ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... cease my lay; and especially was the fat land of Burgundy my theme, for I knew it well. Max would listen in enraptured silence. When he was eighteen, I wrote, with deep-seated purpose, several letters to my friend Lord d'Hymbercourt, who was at the time one of the councillors ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... mine. That's my theme," she says. "I've had a piece of music to myself because every one in this has a piece of music. ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... Memorial came before the House of Commons, Disraeli, as leader of the Opposition, eloquently supported the project. He was rewarded by a copy of the Prince's speeches, bound in white morocco, with an inscription in the royal hand. In his letter of thanks he "ventured to touch upon a sacred theme," and, in a strain which re-echoed with masterly fidelity the sentiments of his correspondent, dwelt at length upon the absolute perfection of Albert. "The Prince," he said, "is the only person whom Mr. Disraeli has ever known who realised the Ideal. None with whom he is acquainted ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of affectionate warning on this one theme, but (alas!) I am not permitted to improve—I am condemned to narrate. My wealthy relative's cheque—henceforth, the incubus of my existence—warns me that I have not done with this record of violence yet. We must leave Mr. Godfrey to recover in Northumberland Street, and must follow ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... skirts and the constraints of corsets are still properly made the theme of indignant declamation. Yet let us be just. It is impossible to make costume the prime culprit, when we recall what robust generations have been reared beneath the same formidable panoply. For instance, it seems as if no woman ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... philosophic spirit, Livy was honest and candid, and possessed a wonderful command of his native language. His work enjoyed an unbounded popularity, not entirely to be accounted for by the fascinations of his theme, He realized his desire to present a clear and probable narrative, and no history of Rome can now be written without constant ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... organ were rolling out into the summer day, a wonderful theme from an old master, grandly played. Yes, she could play. She had been well taught. And the looks of her! She was wonderful at this distance. Were these then wealthy people perhaps summering in this quiet resort? He glanced about at the simple ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... where the King and Queen were proclaimed. The professional pride both of the clergy and of the army had been deeply wounded. The doctrine of nonresistance had been dear to the Anglican divines. It was their distinguishing badge. It was their favourite theme. If we are to judge by that portion of their oratory which has come down to us, they had preached about the duty of passive obedience at least as often and as zealously as about the Trinity or the Atonement. [4] Their attachment to their political creed had indeed been severely tried, and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... less than thee Would I have broke this happy dream; It was a theme For reason, much too strong for fantasy. Therefore thou waked'st me wisely; yet My dream thou brok'st not, but continued'st it. Thou art so true that thoughts of thee suffice To make dreams truths and fables histories; Enter these arms, for since thou ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... the fields and woods, the two young people soon exhausted the topic of Hellebergene. He took up another theme. His inventions became the topic of conversation. He had acquired, from his studies with his mother, an unusual facility in explaining his meaning, and in Helene he found a listener such as he had rarely before met with. She was sufficiently ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... amused on this theme,' said Mortimer, restlessly. 'You can make almost any theme amusing to me, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... bright Shiraz, of Persian bards the theme; The vine with bunches laden hangs o'er the crystal stream; The nightingale all day her notes in rosy thicket trills, And the brooding heat-mist faintly lies along the ...
— Life of Henry Martyn, Missionary to India and Persia, 1781 to 1812 • Sarah J. Rhea
... uneasy, lest by any possibility some knowledge of Percy's escapades should have come to Miss Trevor and might by her be incautiously betrayed to Colonel and Mrs. Rush. She turned rather an anxious eye upon the old lady, wishing that she would not pursue the theme of Percy and his valorous deeds, but not seeing very well how she could change the subject. Words did not come ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... faction, prepared for the event, and regardless of the priority of age, exalted Chosroes to the throne of Persia. He filled that throne during a prosperous period of forty-eight years; [42] and the Justice of Nushirvan is celebrated as the theme of immortal praise by the nations ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of my three years' slumber on the banks of Ocean, unless he has seen them in the spirit, or unless he should read my long Poem descriptive of those acts; for I have in these years composed an immense number of verses on one grand theme, similar to Homer's Iliad or Milton's Paradise Lost; the persons and machinery entirely new to the inhabitants of earth (some of the persons excepted). I have written this Poem from immediate ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... the bold, the rash, adventure cost, In wide eternity I dare be lost. The muse is wont in narrow bounds to sing, To teach the swain, or celebrate the king. I grasp the whole, no more to parts confin'd, I lift my voice, and sing to humankind: I sing to men and angels; angels join, While such the theme, their sacred songs with mine. Again the trumpet's intermitted sound Rolls the wide circuit of creation round, A universal concourse to prepare Of all that ever breath'd the vital air: In some wide field, which active whirlwinds sweep, Drive cities, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... conflict in the field with veterans whose whole life had been a preparation for the day of battle. The instances which it was the fashion to cite of the great achievements of soldiers taken from the threshing floor and the shopboard were fit only for a schoolboy's theme. Somers, who had studied ancient literature like a man,—a rare thing in his time,—said that those instances refuted the doctrine which they were meant to prove. He disposed of much idle declamation about the Lacedaemonians by saying, most concisely, correctly and happily, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the few true novels of the day.... It is powerful, and touched with a delicate insight and strong impressions of life and character.... The author's theme is original, her treatment artistic, and the book is remarkable ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... those who best knew him, that he was of such an icy and death-like constitution, that he neither loved his friends nor hated his enemies. But, be this as it may, I see no reason that a difference between Mr. Washington and me should be made a theme of discord with other people. There are those who may see merit in both, without making themselves partisans of either, and with this reflection ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... and Rustum, the first in order, the largest in bulk, and the most ambitious in scheme of the poems which appeared for the first time in the new volume, was written in direct exemplification of the theories of the Preface. The theme is old, and though not "classical" in place, is thoroughly so in its nature, being the story of a combat between a father and a son, who know not each other till too late, of the generosity of the son, of the final triumph of the father, of the anagnorisis, with the resignation of the vanquished ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... Leffingwell, M.D., is by far the most judicial and unimpassioned contribution to the study of the question that it has been our privilege to read. Dr. Leffingwell has long been known both in this country and Europe, as a writer upon this theme. No one, so far as we know, has brought to it at once so calm and balanced a judgment as he, or a more exact knowledge of the whole field in which biological investigation plays so large a part. This latest publication from his pen is the result of years of study, ...
— An Ethical Problem - Or, Sidelights upon Scientific Experimentation on Man and Animals • Albert Leffingwell
... common in early spring to this latitude. Its form was unique and exaggerated, with flaming eyes, and mouth of huge proportions, with long, pointed teeth, white and sharp. For weeks, this gorgon of my imagination constituted the theme of neighborhood gossip. Several negroes had seen it, and fled its fierce pursuit, barely escaping its voracious mouth and attenuated claws, through the fleetness of fear. The old hardshell Baptist preacher, of the ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... disappointments obliged him to "coin his mind for bread", for a long period, of exclusive attention to portrait painting, although, at rare intervals, he accomplished something more satisfactory. More than thirty years since, on a voyage from Europe, in a conversation with his fellow passengers, the theme of discourse happened to be the electromagnet; and one gentleman present related some experiments he had lately witnessed at Paris, which proved the almost incalculable rapidity of movement with which electricity was disseminated. The idea suggested itself to the active ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various
... the distinguished Secretary of State [Rutherford B. Hayes and William M. Evarts], are between us. [Laughter.] For here is a special occasion for the application of the policy of peace. [Laughter.] I therefore reserve what few remarks I shall make upon this special theme ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... course been made long before war was contemplated. The completion of Mr. BOURCHIER'S beard in itself points to a comparatively remote date for the play's inception. Certainly there is nothing very apposite in its theme at the present juncture; for HARRY OF ENGLAND, suffering from the gout, blustering into a sixth marriage, and haunted by the ghosts of four dead wives and the wraith of the sole survivor, is not a figure precisely ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 16, 1914 • Various
... kind is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is exactly the same as in most of my problems in morphology—that you have the theme in one of the old master's works followed out in all its endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of unity in variety. So in painting; what is called "truth to nature" is the intellectual element ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... draws near, the activity of intrigue and the agitation of the populace increase; the citizens are divided into hostile camps, each of which assumes the name of its favorite candidate; the whole nation glows with feverish excitement; the election is the daily theme of the public papers, the subject of private conversation, the end of every thought and every action, the sole interest of the present. As soon as the choice is determined, this ardor is dispelled; and as ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... limited range of their civil and domestic life, and out of the simple theme of the characters above mentioned, the invention of the Greek comic writers contrived to extract an inexhaustible multitude of variations, and yet, what is deserving of high praise, even in that on which they grounded ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... knew best.) It seemed this exquisite nature only needed the sunshine of his unspoken assurance to respond with delighted tenderness to his refined, his cultured advances. He was already beginning to write imaginary letters to his friends, on the theme of his engagement: semi-humourous academic effusions as to how he, who had so long remained immune, had succumbed at last to feminine charm; how he, the determined celibate—Wentworth always called himself a ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... two comrades, Gabriel and Roche, were hunting in the rolling prairies of the South, on the eastern shores of the Buona Ventura. One evening we were in high spirits, having had good sport. My two friends had entered upon a theme which they could never exhaust; one pleasantly narrating the wonders and sights of Paris, the other describing with his true native eloquence the beauties of his country, and repeating the old local Irish legends, which appeared to ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... the tramp printer, who was being seated in the pew behind him. Miss Goodrich was with her father and Dick heard nothing of the opening part of the service, only coming to himself when Cameron was well started in his discourse. The preacher's theme was, "The Sermon on the Mount," and the first words that caught the young man's ear were, "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." He glanced around at the congregation. Mrs. Gadsby was inspecting the diamonds in the ears of the lady by her ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... quite unlike Mr. McCutcheon's previous works in the field of romantic fiction and yet possessing the charm inseparable from anything he writes. The scene is laid in Indiana and the theme is best described in the words, "Whom God hath joined, let no man ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... and fight it he would. Also the townsmen and captains within, they had their hopes and their expectations heightened, believing at last the day would be theirs; so they feared them the less. Their subordinate preacher, too, made a sermon about it; and he took that theme for his text, 'Gad, a troop shall overcome him: but he shall overcome at the last.' Whence he showed, that though Mansoul should be sorely put to it at the first, yet the victory should most certainly ...
— The Holy War • John Bunyan
... not only of the right of Americans to go and come about their proper business by way of the sea, but also of something much deeper, much more fundamental than that. I am thinking of those rights of humanity without which there is no civilization. My theme is of those great principles of compassion and of protection which mankind has sought to throw about human lives, the lives of noncombatants, the lives of men who are peacefully at work keeping the industrial processes of the world quick and vital, ...
— World's War Events, Vol. II • Various
... repulsive to write, can hardly be excluded from a theme dramatising Celtic views, and treating of a blood, to which the idea of country must shine resplendently if we would have it running at full tide through the arteries. Preserve your worship, if the object fills your optics. Better worship that than nothing, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... allegorical? How, upon a pure invention, upon a simple allegory, could a poem have been composed of about fifty thousand verses, relating with such force and power the events, and giving details with such exactness? On a theme purely allegorical there may easily be composed a short mythical poem, as for example a poem on Proserpine or Psyche: but never an epic so full of traditions and historical memories, so intimately connected with the life of the people, as the Ramayan.(1183) ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... mind for the impressions that are to follow. Several of the leading motives appear in this Vorspiel and must be appreciated to be understood. First we have the "Blaubartmotiv" (Bluebeard Motive). This is a theme whose giant march gives us in rhythmic thunders the terrible ...
— Bluebeard • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... 'here,' I must needs own; because this is 'a letter' and 'not a letter,' as I may say; but a kind of 'short' and 'pithy discourse,' touching upon 'various' and 'sundry topics,' every one of which might be a 'fit theme' to enlarge upon of volumes; if this 'epistolary discourse' (then let me call it) should be pleasing to you, (as I am inclined to think it will, because of the 'sentiments' and 'aphorisms' of the 'wisest of the antients,' which 'glitter through it' like so many dazzling 'sunbeams,') ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... from the darkness and enjoying the sunshine of Divine favour, he loved social intercourse and communion of saints. It is one of the slanders heaped upon Christianity to call it a gloomy, melancholy theme: though 'it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting,' yet the wisely pious man will endeavour, even at an elegant entertainment or a Lord Mayor's dinner, to drop useful hints. Whenever Bunyan describes a ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... usually hug the shore so closely, kept well to seaward, and but few fishing boats were in sight. The only sail noticeable was a foreign schooner with all sails set, which was seemingly going westwards. The foolhardiness or ignorance of her officers was a prolific theme for comment whilst she remained in sight, and efforts were made to signal her to reduce sail in the face of her danger. Before the night shut down she was seen with sails idly flapping as she gently rolled on the undulating swell of ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic Isle, For the negro ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red gills ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... languid, because unsupported by faith, the manual skill and science of the artist were continually on the increase. When these had reached a certain point, they began to be the principal things considered in the picture, and its story or scene to be thought of only as a theme for their manifestation. Observe the difference. In old times, men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times, they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting. ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the Talmud per se, that great work of 2,947 folio leaves. Were we to continue the tradition further, we might show how often this vast legal compilation was the subject of further commentary, discussion and deduction by yet later scholars. But that takes us beyond our theme and is ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... he heard that fine sylvan symphony of the sound of the falling water—the tinkling bell-like tremors of its lighter tones mingling with the sonorous, continuous, deeper theme rising from its weight and volume and movement; with the surging of the wind in the pines; with the occasional cry of a wild bird deep in the new verdure of the forests striking through the whole ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... culminating in an overwhelming necessity of confession—is so powerfully presented to us that we forget all question of originality until our memory of the fascinating pages has cooled down. Then we may recall the resemblance of theme in the recent novel entitled "The Silence of Dean Maitland," while we find the prototype of both these books in "The Scarlet Letter" of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who has handled the problem with a subtlety and haunting weirdness to which neither of the English works can lay any claim. As our first interest ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... presented himself there one morning towards the end of October. D'Ache arrived there the same evening while they were at dinner. They talked rather vaguely of the great project, but much of their old Chouan comrades. In spite of his decided German accent Flierle was inexhaustible on this theme. He and d'Ache slept in the same room, and this intimacy lasted two whole days, at the end of which it was decided that Flierle should be employed as a messenger at a salary of fifty crowns a month. That same night, Lanoe conducted d'Ache ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... Italians have liberty or even food to-day, is one of a few months', or, at most, a few years', concern, while the soul's experience of that one Italian who died more than five hundred years ago will be a fruitful theme forever? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... school reader, if it is to do effective work, must be purposefully organized. Sound organization groups into related units the various selections that center about a common theme. This arrangement enables the pupil to see the larger dominant ideas of the book as a whole, instead of looking upon it as a confused scrapbook of miscellaneous selections. Such arrangement also fosters literary comparison by bringing ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... appearances of rank. All this is credible enough, but, if there existed a society as dull and base as that which we meet in the pages of "Mr. Soapy Sponge," and Surtees's other novels, assuredly it was no theme for the great and generous spirit of Sir Walter. The worst kind of manners always prevail among people whom moderns call "the second-rate smart," and these are drawn in "St. Ronan's Well." But we may believe that, even ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... shoul! you'll shell this pretty garter?" Here let me pause;—the Muse, in sad affright, Turns from the dire disasters of that night; Quite panic-struck she drops her trembling plumes, And thus a moralizing theme assumes:— Know, gentle Ladies, once these shapeless walls, O'er whose grey wreck the shading ivy crawls, Compos'd a graceful mansion, whose fair mould Led from the road the trav'ller, to behold. Oft, when the morning ting'd ...
— Poems • Sir John Carr
... and kissed her. He was in a wonderfully good humor. On his walk he had found a beautiful musical theme, and he felt it frolicking in him like a fish in water. He refused to go to the Palace until he had had something to eat. He was as hungry as an ape. Louisa then supervised his dressing, for he was beginning to tease her again, pretending that he was quite all right as he was with ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... that he was of such an icy and death-like constitution, that he neither loved his friends nor hated his enemies. But, be this as it may, I see no reason that a difference between Mr. Washington and me should be made a theme of discord with other people. There are those who may see merit in both, without making themselves partisans of either, and with this reflection I close ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... open air, on the highways, among the fields, seasoned by all the incidents that happen to occur; and in it everybody takes a part, wedding-guests and outsiders, occupants of the houses and passers-by, for three or four hours in the day, as we shall see. The theme is always the same, but it is treated in an infinite variety of ways, and therein we see the instinct of mimicry, the abundance of grotesque ideas, the fluency, the quickness at repartee, and even the ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... has ever electrified an audience while he was thinking of his style or was conscious of his rhetoric, or trying to apply the conventional rules of oratory. It is when the orator's soul is on fire with his theme, and he forgets his audience, forgets everything but his subject, that he ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... princely criticism—that is to say, criticism of princes—it is refreshing to meet a really good bit of aristocratic literary work, albeit the author is only a prince-in-law.... The theme chosen by the Marquis makes his story attractive ...
— A Little Norsk; Or, Ol' Pap's Flaxen • Hamlin Garland
... address of Father Marquette. Such was ever, in substance, his teaching. Jesus the Christ, and Him crucified, was his constant theme. Two or three days were spent in similar exercises. The Indians crowded around the father constantly. They listened to his teachings with respectful and apparently with even joyful attention. He was pale and emaciate. Even the Indian could perceive, from ...
— The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and Their Interviews with the Savage Tribes, Two Hu • John S. C. Abbott
... as soon as we reached the school we put his photograph up on the wall; for our moral lesson we learned by heart his last mention in the despatches; for our writing lesson we wrote his name, and he was the subject for our theme; and finally, we had to draw an airplane. We did not begin to think of him only after he was dead; before he died, in our school, every time he brought down an airplane we were proud and happy. But when we heard that he was ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... by some mysterious influence never experienced by me before in any church. The sermon was ended at last; the Judgment Day was the theme; all the old horror that used haunt me in childhood, when I thought upon this awful period in my soul's future, came back to me as the preacher with a power scarce short of inspiration pictured that day. I could hear Mrs. ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... mortal here, Oh, if Eliza's steps employ thy hand, Blot the sad legend with a mortal tear. Nor when she errs, through passion's wild extreme, Mark then her course, nor heed each trifling wrong; Nor, when her sad attachment is her theme, Note down the transports of her erring tongue. But, when she sighs for sorrows not her own, Let that dear sigh to Mercy's cause be given; And bear that tear to her Creator's throne, Which glistens in the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... superficial aspects of recent English history. Mr. Parnell and Mr. Davitt, and the whole line of witnesses before the Special Commission, tell a different tale. The very name of the Land League is significant. Home Rule was a mere theme for academic discussion in the mouth of Mr. Butt. Repeal itself never touched the strongest passions of Irish nature, though advocated by the most eloquent and popular of Irish orators. Not an independent Parliament, but independent ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... one hundred and fifty-four of these Sonnets. The last two are different in theme and effect from those which go before, and may perhaps not improperly be considered as mere exercises in poetizing. They have no connection with the others, and I would have no contention with those who regard them as suggested by Petrarch, ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... assented Eugene, settling himself in his arm-chair. 'I would rather have approached my respected father by candlelight, as a theme requiring a little artificial brilliancy; but we will take him by twilight, enlivened with a ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... invisible to mortal eye. Then first he recognized the ethereal guest; Wonder and joy alternate fire his breast; Heroic thoughts, infused, his heart dilate; Revolving much his father's doubtful fate. At length, composed, he join'd the suitor-throng; Hush'd in attention to the warbled song. His tender theme the charming lyrist chose. Minerva's anger, and the dreadful woes Which voyaging from Troy the victors bore, While storms vindictive intercept the store. The shrilling airs the vaulted roof rebounds, Reflecting to the queen the silver sounds. With grief renew'd the weeping fair descends; Their ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... these brief records of military affairs, the more pleasing theme for the historian of the Netherlands in comparison with domestic events, which claim attention but to create sensations of regret and censure. Prince Maurice had enjoyed without restraint the fruits of his ambitious daring. His power was uncontrolled and unopposed, but it was publicly odious; ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... The main theme of the story has occupied a great deal of attention. Its analogy to the Biblical narrative of Joseph and Potiphar's wife comes at once into the reader's mind. But there is just as close a similarity in the Greek tales, where the hero is killed or his life endangered for ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... though fitful in the first instance, soon developed into a steady appetite for work. Much of his former freshness and elasticity returned; ideas and forms of expression recurred to him without trouble. He had seized on a dramatic theme suggested in one of the books which Lettice had been reading, and a few days later admitted to her that he was at work on a poetic drama. She clapped her hands in almost childlike glee at the news, and Alan, without much need for pressing, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... and good "you" are thought to be; the joy at "your" coming; what "we" now want to learn of "you;" what "we" wish "you" to do; how "we" desire a longer stay or regret the need of an early departure—all is a variation of the one theme—"we" ...
— Toasts - and Forms of Public Address for Those Who Wish to Say - the Right Thing in the Right Way • William Pittenger
... appointed room of one of America's great hotels that night, he might have wondered at the manner in which five of Chicago's great men hung upon the words of one little Japanese, who, now and then as he spoke, as if to indicate the vastness and grandeur of his theme, spread his hands ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... is, the great civilizations that have been created by the spirit of man—may all reveal the same plot, if we analyse them rightly. Each civilization—for instance, the civilization of Mediaeval and Modern Europe and again that of Ancient Greece—is probably a variant of a single theme. And to study the plot of civilization in a great exposition of it—like the Hellenic exposition or our own Western exposition—is surely the right goal ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the unemployed had been most satisfactorily met and overcome. No one starved in the public ways, and no rags, no costume less sanitary and sufficient than the Labour Company's hygienic but inelegant blue canvas, pained the eye throughout the whole world. It was the constant theme of the phonographic newspapers how much the world had progressed since nineteenth-century days, when the bodies of those killed by the vehicular traffic or dead of starvation, were, they alleged, a common feature ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... London attorneys, Upham and Blackwell, with Graham, the well-known chirographical expert, had seized every opportunity for rendering himself and them as conspicuous as possible, while his boasts of their well-laid plans, the strong points in their case, and their ultimate triumph, formed his theme on all occasions. Mr. Whitney's position at this time was not an enviable one, for Ralph Mainwaring, having of late become dimly conscious of a lack of harmony between himself and his New York attorney, took special delight in frequently flouting his opinions and advice ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... gold, say I, I who must win it, or die. Here goes, I'll sell my Muse. You may buy her for twenty sous. No, I'll write by the ream, Only give me your theme, And a sou more for a light To put in my garret at night. Garret!—ah, I was forgetting, My present's a very cheap letting Under the prison wall, Just where it grows so tall. Why don't I steal, you say? Oh, I wasn't brought up that way. ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... spreading settlement, and this launched Mr. Pennypacker upon a favorite theme of his. He liked to predict how the colony would grow, sowing new seed, and already he saw great cities to be. He found a ready listener in Lucy. This too appealed to her imagination at times, and if at other times interest was lacking, she was too fond of the old man ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... over, she remembered that her father had spoken to her of the second "Agnus Dei" as an especially beautiful number. It was for five voices; exquisitely prayerful it seemed to her. With devout insistence the theme is reiterated by the two soprani, then the voices are woven together, and the simile that rose up in her mind was the pious image of fingers ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... The revolutionary party had seized upon the Texas question to effect or hasten its overthrow. Its determination to restore friendly relations with the United States, and to receive our minister to negotiate for the settlement of this question, was violently assailed, and was made the great theme of denunciation against it. The Government of General Herrera, there is good reason to believe, was sincerely desirous to receive our minister; but it yielded to the storm raised by its enemies, and on the ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Polk - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 4: James Knox Polk • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... unschool'd: For what we know must be, and is as common As any the most vulgar thing to sense, Why should we, in our peevish opposition, Take it to heart? Fie! 't is a fault to heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd; whose common theme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse, till he that died to-day, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... listening while they talked, and the theme which occupied them was the joint effort that must be made on either side the old feud line for the firm enforcement of the new treaty. They discussed plans for catching in time and throttling by joint action any sporadic insurgencies by which the experimentally minded ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... whom, perhaps, when under the patronage of Major Carbonnell, and the universal rapture from my supposed wealth, I had treated with hauteur, glad to receive the intelligence, and spread it far and wide. My imposition, as they pleased to term it, was the theme of every party, and many were the indignant remarks of the dowagers who had so often indirectly proposed to me their daughters; and if there was anyone more virulent than the rest, I hardly need say that it was Lady Maelstrom, ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... depicted as sexually insatiable, as in a piece written by a man who takes a month's vacation from sex to recoup his strength (pt. 2, p. 12). And the related image of the female with a sexual organ capable of absorbing a man plays a variation on the vagina dentata theme (e.g., pt. 2, pp. 19, 24). A drawing of a man hanging himself for love raises a considerable debate on whether such a thing can indeed occur (pt. 2, pp. 17-18). In a more realistic vein, though equally cynical, is the poem on the woman who complained ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym)
... stanza which, translating your first line—'Where the great green combers break,' etc.—strictly according to East Polynesian ballad-metres, ushers in your great theme. ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... day more fittingly than by a discussion of its highest general problems. It must be regarded, therefore, with satisfaction that the speaker on such an august occasion as this—the seventy-fifth anniversary of your Society—has selected as the subject of his address a theme of the highest general importance. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more the custom on such occasions, and even at the general meetings of the great "Association of German Naturalists and Physicians," to take the subject of address from a narrow and specialised territory ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... of morning, somewhat like a salt-marsh. It certainly would have at times the purple-distance haze, that atmosphere of the sea which hangs across the marsh. The two might resemble each other as two pictures of the same theme, upon the same scale, one framed and hung, the other not. It is the framing, the setting of the marsh that gives it character, variety, tone, ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... cut off from the body of his troops, and only escaped destruction by the dashing exploit which his admiring subjects seem to have been never weary of commemorating, and which furnished Penta-our, the court poet, with a brilliant theme. A few extracts from the recital shall be given, based upon M. de Rouge's version, from which I venture in a few respects to deviate. The papyrus begins in the middle of a sentence, at the moment when the King had discovered ...
— Egyptian Literature
... that the multifarious scenes are linked together; it is by another idea, a more general, as we may still dare to hope, than the idea of war. Youth and age, the flow and the ebb of the recurrent tide—this is the theme of Tolstoy's book. ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... of formal balance. In the first a lack of sequence impairs the picture's unity. In the second, though the objects are contiguous there is no subjective union, and in David's composition the formality of the decorative structure is inapplicable to the theme. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... I'll sing my lay, With humble Kelvin for my theme; My song shall be of life to-day, And not ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... himself glad to outline his general policy, and spoke of finding in the Colonies an undeveloped estate, which he was determined to develop. His phrases caught the popular imagination then as always. Colonial enterprise was the theme of all pens and tongues. Then on New Year's Day of 1896 had come the Jameson Raid. But in the stormy chapters of Parliamentary life which followed Sir Charles took little part, beyond commending Mr. Chamberlain's promptitude in condemning the Raid. The speech which he made in the vote of censure ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Vol. 2 • Stephen Gwynn
... world such a delightful place, but that to unity belongs the relating of this variety to the underlying bed-rock principles that support it in nature and in all good art. It will depend on the nature of the artist and on the nature of his theme how far this underlying unity will dominate the expression in his work; and how far it will be overlaid and hidden behind ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... Time: And the last words that he uttered will forgotten be by few: "I have bravely fought them, mother—I have bravely fought for you!" Let his memory be green in the hearts who love the South, And his noble deeds the theme that shall dwell ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... doubtful. There is nothing in the style or diction of Alphonsus which resembles Chapman's undisputed work, and it is hard to believe that he had a hand in it. The Revenge for Honour is on an Oriental theme, entirely different from those handled by Chapman in his other tragedies, and the versification is marked by a greater frequency of feminine endings than is usual with him; but phrases and thoughts ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... wrote for him, and in many ways was his hands and eyes. He in turn talked to her of the things that filled his mind. The betterment of man was an ever-present theme with them. It pleased him to trace for her the world's history from its early beginning when all was misty tradition, down through the uncertain centuries of early civilization to the ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... modify what we have just written. In justice to our own sex, and in all truthfulness, we cannot allow the blame to be removed altogether from women themselves. They alone are responsible for one of the most fruitful causes of their wretchedness. The theme is a threadbare one. We approach it without hardly any hope that we shall do good by repeated warnings utterly monotonous and tiresome. But still less can we feel comfortable in mind to pass it over in silence. We refer to the foolish ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... preceding statement it has been assumed that there can be recognized, in these combinations of inflection, a theme or root, as it is sometimes called, and a formative element. The formative element is used with a great many different words to define or qualify them; that is, to indicate mode, tense, number, person, gender, etc., of verbs, nouns, and other parts ...
— On the Evolution of Language • John Wesley Powell
... fitly speak on such a theme? He is a treasure by the world neglected, Because he hath not, with a prescience dim, Like those whose every aim is self-reflected, Pil'd up some fastuous trophy, that of him Might tell, what mighty powers the age rejected, But taught his lips the office ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... began to discuss it, and for better consideration of the theme it became necessary for Cora to "cut" the next dance, promised to another, and to give it to Mr. Wattling. They danced several times together, and Mr. Wattling's expression was serious. The weavers of the tapestry smiled and whispered things the men would ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... performances. He has worked without any secondary political purpose, and has, therefore, produced more harmonious results. The aim is ambitious, but consistent. 'Contarini Fleming' is the record of the development of a poetic nature—a theme, as we are told, 'virgin in the imaginative literature of every country.' The praises of Goethe, of Beckford, and of Heine gave a legitimate satisfaction to its author. 'Henrietta Temple' professes to be a love-story pure and simple. Love and poetry are certainly themes worthy of the ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... scandalous scenes. Every means were taken to keep these disputes a profound secret—the revilings which accompanied their private conferences were turned into smooth panegyrics of each other when they ascended the tribune, and their unanimity was a favourite theme in all their ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... of their existence. As for the deacon, he really thought it would be unseemly, and of evil example, for Daggett to converse with Dr. Sage, touching these doubloons, of the Lord's day: while he had felt no scruples himself, a short hour before, to make them the theme of a long and interesting discussion, in his own person. It might not repay us for the trouble, to look for the salve that the worthy man applied to his own conscience, by way of reconciling the apparent contradiction; though it probably was connected with some fancied and especial duty ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... that I was myself the subject; but, after a time, I began to fancy I was mistaken. Judging from the earnest manner of both—but more especially from Holt's gestures and frequent ejaculations—something of still greater interest appeared to be the theme of their dialogue. I saw the squatter's face suddenly brighten up—as if some new and joyous revelation had been made to him; while the features of his visitor bore the satisfied look of one, who was urging an argument ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... them. With this should be compared Augustine, Contra litteras Petiliani Donatistae, II, 38-91, and the treatise De Baptismo contra Donatistas libri septem, which is little more than a working out in a thousand variations of this theme. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... lad nineteen years old, the son of a wealthy Barbadoes planter, wrote in three weeks a tragedy entitled Victorious Love (4to, 1698), which is confessedly a close imitation of Southerne's theme. It was produced at Drury Lane in June, 1698, with the author himself as Dafila, a youth, and young Mrs. Cross as the heroine Zaraida, 'an European Shipwrack'd an Infant at Gualata'. Possibly Verbruggen acted Barnagasso, the captive king ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then life tenure a la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha Bullock, the nephew ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... a most decided poetic predisposition,—writing, when but ten years old, with surprising facility on every possible subject. No metre had any difficulties for her, and no theme seemed dull to her vivid intelligence,—her fancy being roused to action in a moment, by the barest hint given either by Nature or Art. Her first drama was written at this early age; it was called "Boadicea," and was composed immediately ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... with many compartments sat on a stool beside him, and this held bits of wood that looked like pegs, but were in reality whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes, rests, flats, sharps, and the like. These were cleft in such a way that he could fit them on the wires almost as rapidly as his musical theme came to him, and Lyddy had learned to transcribe with pen and ink the music she found in wood and wire. He could write only simple airs in this way, but when he played them on the violin they were transported into a loftier region, such ...
— A Village Stradivarius • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prettiest fancies of Marvell; that in the second, of Flora scattering her tresses over the spring meadow, and Pomona playing under the orchard boughs, is at least a vivid pictorial presentment of a sufficiently well-worn theme. A more normal specimen of Calpurnius's manner may be instanced in the lines (v. 52-62) where one of the most beautiful passages in the third Georgic, the description of a long summer day among the Italian hill-pastures, is ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... surrendering, and his victorious battles [lit. noble days] advancing his proud destinies beyond the seas, laving his laurels with the blood of Africans! In fine, all that is told of the most distinguished warriors I expect from Rodrigo after this victory, and I make my love for him the theme of my glory. ...
— The Cid • Pierre Corneille
... Thought yet further, I shall submit it to your Consideration, whether instead of a Theme or Copy of Verses, which are the usual Exercises, as they are called in the School-phrase, it would not be more proper that a Boy should be tasked once or twice a Week to write down his Opinion of such Persons and Things as ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... is Wright's translation of La Fontaine's famous fable on the day-dreaming theme. Notice how much more complicated its application becomes in contrast with the obvious truth of the proverb in the preceding version. La Fontaine is responsible for the story's popularity in modern times. The most fascinating study on ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... Andreyev, he pursues it a long time, presenting it under various aspects, until at last it assumes its final form, rounded and completed, as it were, in some figure or symbol. As such it appears either as the leading theme of an entire story or drama, or as an important subordinate theme. Thus we have seen that the idea of death finds concrete expression in the character of Lazarus. The idea of loneliness, of the isolation of the individual from all other human beings, even though he be physically ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... have been brought to this point without the violent pressure of her sister's supposed interests? This is one of those questions which wise men will not ask, because it is one which the wisest man or woman cannot answer. Upon this theme, an army of ingenious authors have exhausted their ingenuity in entertaining the public, and their works are to be found at every book-stall. They have decided that any woman will, under the right conditions, marry any man at any time, provided her "higher nature" is properly appealed to. Only ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... upon this theme, a bold proposal was made by Basil. It was, that they should "strike camp," and continue their journey. This proposal took the others by surprise, but they were all just in the frame of mind to entertain and discuss it; and a long consultation was held upon the point. Francois chimed ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... forms of his limitless advancement. We have our lessons in all providence, in all beings and things, God teaching us in and through all. No mean vocation, then, is that of the earthly educator; no unimportant theme that now in hand. Yet even of the school in the more technical sense of the term, we cannot speak at large, except as in touching on any one department we more or less affect every other. Our thought may be fitly ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... precipitous allegro a capella, driven headlong to its end by the impetuous semiquaver triplets of the famous finales to the first act of Don Giovanni or the coda to the Leonore overture, with a specifically contrapuntal theme, points d'orgue, and a high C ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... very large, very ancient type of funny story: the tale in which the jest depends wholly on an abnormal degree of stupidity on the part of the hero. Every race which produces stories seems to have found this theme a natural outlet for its childlike laughter. The stupidity of Lazy Jack, of Big Claus, of the Good Man, of Clever Alice, all have their counterparts in the ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... IS E BRATHAIR, If it be not Bran, it is Bran's brother,' was the proverbial reply of Maccombich. [Bran, the well-known dog of Fingal, is often the theme of Highland ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... it the South Sea, a name which it habitually bore till far into the eighteenth century. From this time the exploration and settlement of the western coast, both up and down, went on with little interruption, but this history, somewhat foreign to our theme, ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... Emperour takes against the encroaching Turk, And whether his Moony-standards are design'd For Persia or Polonia: and all this The wiser sort of State-Worms seem to know Better than their own affairs: this is discourse Fit for the Council it concerns; we are young, And if that I might give the Theme, 'twere better To talk of ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... shall now become the theme of my book; for I feel that I cannot serve the cause of education better than by trying to describe and interpret the work that is being done in it. The school belongs to a village which I will call Utopia. It is not an imaginary village—a village ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... our poets left untried; Nor small their merit, when with conscious pride They scorn'd to take from Greece the storied theme, But dar'd to sing their ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... chapter abundant reason for rectifying their ideas. Among the number of such persons we may rank Mr. Macaulay, the eloquent historian, whose opinion, however, has no weight, as regards Lord Byron's character. For it is evident that he made use of this great name by way of choosing a good theme for his eloquence, a sort of mould for fine phrases. Besides, Macaulay did not know Lord Byron personally, nor did he study him impartially; facts which are his fault and ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... had finished copying my share of the story, From the Apennines to the Andes, and was seeking for a theme for the independent composition which the teacher had assigned us to write, when I heard an unusual talking on the stairs, and shortly after two firemen entered the house, and asked permission of my ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... with the becoming indignation of an ill-used man; and as Mr. Bumble felt that it rather tended to convey a reflection on the honour of the parish; the latter gentleman thought it advisable to change the subject. Oliver Twist being uppermost in his mind, he made him his theme. ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... intentionally mingles the comic and the terrible in his poem, The Witch of Fife, but his prose-stories reveal his power of creating an atmosphere of diablerie, undisturbed by intrusive mockery. In the poem Kilmeny, he handles an uncanny theme with dreamy beauty. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the roads constructed by Mr. Telford through the formerly inaccessible counties of North Wales was the theme of general praise; and their superiority, compared with those of the richer and more level districts in the midland and western English counties, becoming the subject of public comment, he was called upon to execute like improvements upon that part of the post-road which extended between Shrewsbury ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... the once far-famed ATTICUS: the once illustrious RICHARD HEBER, Esq., the self-ejected member of the University of Oxford. Even yet I scarcely know how to handle this subject, or to expatiate upon a theme so extraordinary, and so provocative of the most contradictory feelings. But it were better to be brief; as, in fact, a very long account of Mr. Heber's later life will be found in my Reminiscences, and there is little to add ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Though some Americans talked as if the United States could close its doors and windows against all mankind, the victor in the election, Senator Harding, of Ohio, knew better. The election returns were hardly announced before he began to ask the advice of his countrymen on the pressing theme that would not be downed: "What part shall America—first among the nations of the earth in wealth and power—assume at the ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the early Conventions the resolutions were interminable. It was not thought that full justice was done to the subject, if every point of interest or dissatisfaction in this prolific theme was not condensed into a resolution. Accordingly the Akron Convention presented, discussed, and adopted fifteen resolutions. At Salem, the previous ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Lodges, education always began afresh. Forty years had left little of the Palermo that Garibaldi had shown to the boy of 1860, but Sicily in all ages seems to have taught only catastrophe and violence, running riot on that theme ever since Ulysses began its study on the eye of Cyclops. For a lesson in anarchy, without a shade of sequence, Sicily stands alone and defies evolution. Syracuse teaches more than Rome. Yet even Rome was not mute, and the church of Ara Coeli seemed more and more to draw all the threads of thought ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... rights under the English Constitution by an argument of great power, showing how often and causelessly they had been assailed; and he justified the resolutions by the "cool deliberation" of Parliament in fastening the chains of slavery upon them. Warming with his theme, he advanced to matchless eloquence, and closed his philippic with such a daring burst of patriotism ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... were slain while trying in vain to batter down the gates with heavy timbers, the baffled Indians were obliged to retire discomfited. The siege was chiefly memorable because of an incident which is to this day a staple theme for story-telling in the cabins of the mountaineers. One of the leading men of the neighborhood was Major Samuel McColloch, renowned along the border as the chief in a family famous for its Indian fighters, the dread and terror of the savages, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... his song we deem a little while That Song itself with his great voice hath fled, So grand the toga-sweep of his great style, So vast the theme on which ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson, an Elegy; And Other Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... forming that magnificent chord a theme was developed; and some near, others far away, these brilliant, those muffled, one would have said that the waters and the birds, the breezes and the forests, men and angels, earth and heaven, were singing, ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... stanza that once ended the poem, finds man at war with himself and with reason; but the cool sequestered path—its goal identical with that of the paths of Glory—finds man at peace with himself and with reason. The theme was not new before Gray made it peculiarly his own, and it has become somewhat hackneyed in the last two hundred years; but the fact that it is seldom unheard in any decade testifies to its permanency of appeal, and the fact that it was "ne'er so well express'd" as ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... "The water-works, Mr. Bruce, is, I hardly need say, a source of pride to us all. To you especially it has had a large significance. You have made it a theme for a continuous agitation in your paper. You have argued and urged that, since the city's new water-works promised to be such a great success, Westville should not halt with this one municipal enterprise, but should refuse the new franchise the street ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... with the Duke, she tried another theme, while still, like a pertinacious cracker, the Great Mel kept banging up and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... he is waked early in the morning by the clarion voice of some neighboring cock, he will not repine, provided he went to bed at a reasonably early hour, for he will hear some music that is not wholly to be despised. The rooster in the neighboring barn-yard gives out the theme. His voice is a deep, but broken, bass. It is suggestive of his having roosted during the night in a draft, which has inflamed his vocal chords so that his tones have lost their sweetness. It is as if a coffee-mill had essayed to crow. The theme is taken up by a thin-voiced ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... have made a stirring theme for Sir Walter Scott, is found in the chronicles of Tewkesbury, in the Anglo-Norman chronicles, and in Wace, the old rhyming historian of the twelfth century. Here are a few lines ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... speaking just now of the Libyan grotto, I think I probably suggested the theme of my visit to you this afternoon. I confess, I am a passionate man. Things of the senses appeal to me more than to most; it is, of course, the artist within me. I am like a mountain torrent or the beetling ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... Natural foliage, leaving Artificial foliage to be dealt with at another opportunity. It is not Historical. The History of the Decorative treatment of Natural foliage, showing its evolution in the past, is a large and interesting theme; but, unless this were accompanied by critical remarks based on given principles, the method might be barren of results. Tradition is not to be undervalued; but the student should be ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... without an audience. The musician was seated in a garden chair, and around sat, and lay, ten of the twelve old men who dwelt with him beneath John Hiram's roof. Bold sat down on the soft turf to listen, or rather to think how, after such harmony, he might best introduce a theme of so much discord. He felt that he had a somewhat difficult task, and he almost regretted the final leave-taking of the last of the old men, slow as they were in going ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... of Nottingham, hearing continually of this pother, fell a-chattering between themselves, and ere a week was out Monceux's reward of a hundred golden pieces for the head of Robin Hood was the one theme of conversation ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... coloured plates of varying merit which enrich the original edition has not been considered desirable. The map shows clearly the route taken by the Author in the journey the description of which is the leading theme ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... written by anyone, and had no beginning in time nor end and were eternal. Their authority was not derived from the authority of any trustworthy person or God. Their words are valid in themselves. Evidently a discussion on these matters has but little value with us, though it was a very favourite theme of debate in the old days of India. It was in fact the most important subject for Mima@msa, for the Mima@msa sutras were written for the purpose of laying down canons for a right interpretation of the Vedas. The slight extent to which it has dealt with its own epistemological ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... to get alongside the next wharf without blocking up more than three parts of the river. He watched it as though the entire operation depended upon his attention, and, the steamer fast, he turned his eyes back again and resumed his theme. ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... knew not that the music was silenced. A softer, sweeter, dearer melody sounded in her ears; she heard the echo of that voice which had spoken scornfully, despairingly, and yet love had been the sweet theme. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... father and his country, or whether he imagined that his own personal courage and superiority of knowledge would be sufficient to dispossess the conquerors of Ulietea, is uncertain; but, from the beginning of the voyage, this was his constant theme. He would not listen to our remonstrances on so wild a determination, but flew into a passion if more moderate and reasonable counsels were proposed for his advantage. Nay, so infatuated and attached to his favourite scheme was he, that he affected ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... probably no lady in the town that would have received this information with as great composure as did Anastasia Joliffe. Since the death of his grandfather, the new Lord Blandamer had been a constant theme of local gossip and surmise. He was a territorial magnate, he owned the whole of the town, and the whole of the surrounding country. His stately house of Fording could be seen on a clear day from the minster tower. He was reputed to be a ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... enforced during the first month they would have had their hands full far longer than they dreamed. Week after week sped by, summer ripened into fall, and fall faded into winter, but Philemon came not. Little by little Janice's misconduct ceased to be a general theme of village talk, and the life at Greenwood settled back into its accustomed groove. Even the mutter of cannon before Boston was but a matter of newspaper news, and the war, though now fairly inaugurated, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... of Paradise Lost, Milton proposes as theme for a new epic "Paradise Regained." In it he purports to sing of "deeds heroic although in secret done" and to describe how Christ was led into the wilderness to be tempted ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... of each other, but afterwards the most intimate confidence arose between us. General Driesen looked forward with certainty to the return of the Bourbons to France, and in the course of our frequent conversations on his favourite theme he gradually threw off all reserve, and at length disclosed to me that he was maintaining a correspondence ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... good-naturedly, wishing to relieve this embarrassment. "You're getting all fussed up. I guess you'd better cut out this story. I don't believe it's much good anyway. If you think there are any sentimental variations on a Fall River steamboat theme that we are not fully conversant with, why you've got ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... shorter poems accumulated up to this period, various as they are in theme and metrical form, are uniform in the fashioning of their contour and color. As soon as this underlying uniformity of make is recognized it may be seen to be the coloring and relief belonging to any ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... March 1883. After his death appeared The Conquest of England. The Short History may be said to have begun a new epoch in the writing of history, making the social, industrial, and moral progress of the people its main theme. To infinite care in the gathering and sifting of his material G. added a style of wonderful charm, and an historical imagination which has hardly ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... [Subject of thought, ] Topic. — N. subject of thought, material for thought; food for the mind, mental pabulum. subject, subject matter; matter, theme, [Grk], topic, what it is about, thesis, text, business, affair, matter in hand, argument; motion, resolution; head, chapter; case, point; proposition, theorem; field of inquiry; moot point, problem &c. (question) 461. V. float in the mind , pass in the mind &c. 451. Adj. thought ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... Lap-dog, I purloin: While you Rob Ladies Bosoms every day, } And filch their pretious Maiden-heads away; } I'll plead good nature for this Brat the Play: } A Play that plagues no more the thread-bare Theme Of powder'd Beaux, or tricks o'th' Godly Dame, But in your humours let's ye all alone, And not so much as Fools themselves runs down. Our Author try'd his best, and Wisemen tell, 'Tis half well doing to endeavour well: What tho' his poor Allay runs not so fine; Yet, let it ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... d'archet announced the overture, and roused her energy, as if Ithuriel's spear had pricked her. She came down dressed, to listen at one of the upper entrances, to fill herself with the musical theme, before taking her part in it, and also to gauge the ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... picture wherein that result is depicted with artistic completeness, it is only an imperfect narrative imperfectly rounded off. We feel sure, however, that the healthy-minded reader will be grateful for our reticence and total disregard of proportion. In spite of the disadvantage which such a theme imposes on any writer with a deep sense of responsibility, we have resolved to let in some light on these obscure figures; for we can imagine no more effective way of throwing into high relief the low morals and deep corruption into which all classes of society ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... he said. "The critics would say I had forgotten it, and put in instead what I could remember of a variation out of the Handel theme. That next one's, oh, great fun. But I wish you would remember that we all haven't got great orang-outang ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... coldness. But when you gave me your warm hand and claimed something like kindred, I was grateful for that which does not always accompany kindred,—genuine kindness. This feeling was greatly increased when instead of making my diffidence and awkwardness a theme of ridicule, you evinced a delicate sympathy, and with graceful tact suggested a better courtesy to others. Do you think then, that, after this glimpse down such a beautiful vista in your nature, I can associate you with 'total depravity'? It was plain to you, Miss Marsden, that I had seen little ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... was a sympathetic attack, concurrent with Allenby's great Gaza offensive. This campaign is the theme of the second ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson
... no wonder that the sight should cause surprise to the most indifferent observer, nor that it should have been long a theme of speculation with the curious, and an interesting subject of ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... to themselves, discussed the theme that the captain's words had suggested, and were rather ashamed to see how vague their knowledge of the famous battle was. So, at Alec's suggestion, Norton agreed to read the account of the fight ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... the Land. Nor is it all the Nation has these Spots, There is a Church as well as Kirk of Scots, As in a Picture where the Squinting Paint Shews Fiend on this Side and on that Side Saint; He that Saw Hell in's Melancholy Dream, And in the Twilight of his Fancy's Theme, Scar'd from his Sins, repented in a Fright, Had he view'd Scotland had turn'd Proselyte. A Land where one may pray with curst Intent; Oh, may they never suffer Banishment! Had Cain been Scot, God would have chant'd his ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... is necessary," introducing the burning tincture of iodine several times. Carre feels the sting; and when, passing by his corner an hour later, I listen for a moment, I hear him slowly chanting in a trembling but melodious voice the theme: "He gave me tincture ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... to speculate on this theme, however, for the next instant a piteous cry broke from the girl's lips—a cry in a voice strangely familiar; a cry that sent the blood bounding through his heart like an electric shock—and before he could take ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... human touch other than the pitiful and thwarted affection of two personalities at hopeless odds. "Least said soonest mended" was a favorite aphorism of the experienced quack. But in this tangle it failed him. It was he who first touched on the poisoned theme. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... independently of the sentiment of her being there as a guarantee of Aminta's return. Still he knew his English earth, and the counties and soil for particular wild-flowers, grasses, mosses; and he could instruct her and inspire a receptive pupil on the theme of birds, beasts, fishes, insects, in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... same volume appeared Sardanapalus, written in the previous May, and dedicated to Goethe. In this play, which marks the author's last reversion to the East, we are more arrested by the majesty of the theme— ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... few true novels of the day.... It is powerful, and touched with a delicate insight and strong impressions of life and character.... The author's theme is original, her treatment artistic, and the book is remarkable for its unflagging ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... which can reconcile us to it. I remember having heard an incident of war, myself, which affected me much," said Murphy, who caught the infection of military anecdote which circled the table; and indeed there is no more catching theme can be started among men, for it may be remarked that whenever it is broached it flows on until it is rather more than time ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... be difficult to explain why, except on that principle of decimation by which Macaulay accounted for the outcry against Lord Byron, Gibbon's solitary and innocent love passage has been made the theme of a good deal of malicious comment. The parties most interested, and who, we may presume, knew the circumstances better than any one else, seem to have been quite satisfied with each other's conduct. Gibbon and Mdlle. Curchod, afterwards Madame Necker, remained on terms of the most ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... chat about my old friend a good while longer. But perhaps I had better stop, for fear you may get tired of the theme. I must tell you a little about his old age, ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... with enthusiasm of his hero; and he could see that, although Mistress Bradfute said but little, she fully shared his views. It was but natural that Wallace's name should come so often forward, for his deeds, his hairbreadth escapes, his marvellous personal strength and courage, were the theme of talk in every Scotch home; but at Lanark at present it was specially prominent, for with his band he had taken up his abode in a wild and broken country known as Cart Lane Craigs, and more than once ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... was abundance of wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free. Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field; he himself and ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... footsteps falling'). I now returned with renewed ardour to the theatre, with which, even at this time, my family was in close touch. Den Freischutz in particular appealed very strongly to my imagination, mainly on account of its ghostly theme. The emotions of terror and the dread of ghosts formed quite an important factor in the development of my mind. From my earliest childhood certain mysterious and uncanny things exercised an enormous influence over me. If I were left alone in a room for ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... from this event, and various other causes, the spirit of disturbance, towards the close of the year, began to decline. Perhaps the most effectual cause of this decline was a prospect of the redress of those hardships which had formed the theme of so much complaint. In October government sent down a commission, which was to examine into the operation of the turnpike-laws, and other alleged grievances of the country. From the report of this commission, poverty and the hardness of the times had more to do with ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... glowering into Ida's tear-stained face, and noting with polite deprecation the convulsive sobs which the sensitive girl vainly tried to repress before the young fellows. Beauty in distress is a favorite theme of your shallow romancists; but, to the philosophic mind, its pathos is nothing to that of ugliness in distress. At the best of times, poor Ida was heart-breaking; her sunniest smile wrung my soul with commiseration; and when the sympathy naturally accorded to helpless anguish was superimposed ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... came indoors. It came back to the city. And it gave us the new crop of heroes and heroines and the scenes and settings with which the fiction of to-day has replaced the Heroes and Heroines of Yesterday. The Lure of the City is its theme. It pursues its course to the music of the ukalele, in the strident racket of the midnight cabaret. Here move the Harvard graduate in his dinner jacket, drunk at one in the morning. Here is the hard ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... general exhortation to that practical wisdom which walks in the path of righteousness. The principles laid down here are true in regard to drunkenness and abstinence, but they are intended to receive a wider application, and to that wider application we must first look. The theme is the old, familiar one of the two paths, and the aim is to recommend the better way by setting forth the contrasted effects of walking in ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... often denote it by some mark only, as those other titles Andria Eunuchus, or these, Sylla, Cicero, Torquatus. I love a poetic march, by leaps and skips, 'tis an art, as Plato says, light, nimble; and a little demoniacal. There are places in Plutarch where he forgets his theme, where the proposition of his argument is only found incidentally, and stuffed throughout with foreign matter. Do but observe his meanders in the Demon of Socrates. How beautiful are his variations and digressions; and then most of all, when ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... one seizes on such a theme he is sure to be carried to extremities with it. It was one of Price's favourite theories, that the time when interest was highest was the best time for borrowing money, because the borrowed sinking-fund would then bring the highest interest. One is astonished in times like these, ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... Mr. Lindsay's arm was around her shoulders, and she was left in quiet to listen. The conversation was very lively, and on a subject very interesting to her; for America had been always a darling theme; Scottish struggles for freedom were fresh in her mind; her attention had long ago been called to Switzerland and its history by Alice and Mrs. Vawse, and French history had formed a good part of her last winter's reading. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... according to the laws of etiquette to rap officious gentlemen over the knuckles, when they introduce their fingers into private pies without permission from the chief cook. How the dance went Debby hardly knew, for the conversation fell upon books, and in the interest of her favorite theme she found even the "grand square" an impertinent interruption, while her own deficiences became almost as great as her partner's; yet, when the music ended with a flourish, and her last curtsy was successfully achieved, she longed to begin all over again, ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... that impossible in such very dissimilar actresses as we must have been. The quantity of effect produced, of course I cannot judge of; but it seems to me, from what I have seen and known of her off the stage, that the quality must have been essentially different. This theme, however, should not be begun in the corner of a letter already ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... talked for a while. Garstin had said most. He had been more agreeable than usual, and had explained to Arabian, rather as one explains to a child, that a worker in an art is sometimes baffled for a time, a writer by his theme, a musician by his floating and perhaps half-nebulous conception, a painter by his subject. Then he must wait, cursing perhaps, damning his own impotence, dreading its continuance. But there is nothing else to be done. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... compositions of this kind is essentially of the same nature as that which is derived from pursuits which are commonly regarded as purely intellectual. I mean, that the source of pleasure is exactly the same as in most of my problems in morphology—that you have the theme in one of the old masters' works followed out in all its endless variations, always appearing and always reminding you of ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... pleasures[306]. His son, Rahula, is mentioned several times in the Pitakas but his wife only once and then not by name but as "the princess who was the mother of Rahula[307]." His separation from her becomes in the later legend the theme of an affecting tale but the scanty allusions to his family found in the Pitakas are devoid of sentimental touches. A remarkable passage is preserved in the Anguttara Nikaya[308] describing his ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in which the characters of scholars and beauties is delineated their allusions are again repeatedly of Wen Chuen, their theme in every page of Tzu Chien; a thousand volumes present no diversity; and a thousand characters are but a counterpart of each other. What is more, these works, throughout all their pages, cannot help bordering on extreme licence. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Peloponnesian cities which the Dorians invaded and possessed, Homer makes as broad an allusion to the conquests of the Heraclidae, not only as would be consistent with the pride of an Ionic Greek in attesting the triumphs of the national Dorian foe, but as the nature of a theme cast in a distant period, and remarkably removed, in its general conduct, from the historical detail of subsequent events, would warrant to the poet [165]. And here I may observe, that if the date thus assigned to Homer be correct, the very subject of the Iliad might have been suggested ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... great theme, however, was Christ, and I think that most men in that little market town, and a great many of those who used to come to the fair, both heard and understood the great gospel ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... town of Ternate, they were conducted to a large cabin, built of palmetto leaves and bamboo, and requested not to leave it until their arrival had been announced to the king. The peculiar courtesy and good breeding of these islanders was the constant theme of remark of Philip and Krantz; their religion, as well as their dress, appeared to be a compound of the Mahometan ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Henry mean by his resolve "to preach Christ crucified in a crucified style"? More perhaps than he thought or knew. "He shall testify of me," is Jesus' saying concerning the promised Paraclete. The Comforter bears witness to the Crucified. No other theme in the pulpit can be sure of commanding his co-operation. {144} Philosophy, poetry, art, literature, sociology, ethics, and history are attractive subjects to many minds, and they who handle such themes in the pulpit may set them forth ...
— The Ministry of the Spirit • A. J. Gordon
... poet, was suddenly transferred from his plough in Ayrshire to the polished circles of Edinburg, his ease of manner, and nice observance of the rules of good-breeding, excited much surprise, and became the theme of frequent conversation. The same thing has been remarked of Tecumseh: whether seated at the tables of generals McArthur and Worthington, as he was during the council at Chillicothe in 1807, or brought in contact with British officers of the highest rank, ...
— Life of Tecumseh, and of His Brother the Prophet - With a Historical Sketch of the Shawanoe Indians • Benjamin Drake
... Glenorchy. The poem, or lay, is descriptive, less of the forest, or its mountain fastnesses, than of the habits of the creatures that tenant the locality—the dun-deer, and the roe. So minutely enthusiastic is the hunter's treatment of his theme, that the attempt to win any favour for his performance from the Saxon reader, is attended with no small risk,—although it is possible that a little practice with the rifle in any similar wilderness may propitiate even the holiday sportsman somewhat in favour of the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... time also he began to translate the simpler odes of Horace. One of these (viii. Bk. II.) long afterwards suggested to him the theme of his "Instans Tyrannus." It has been put on record that his sister remembers him, as a very little boy, walking round and round the dining-room table, and spanning out the scansion of his verses with his hand on the smooth mahogany. He was scarce ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... especially formed, "he felt the need of more intimate affection." Thus, after many years of lonely wandering, another period of Longfellow's life opened with his marriage in 1843. Had he himself been writing of another, he might have divided his story into cantos, each one with a separate theme. One of aspiration, one of endeavor, one with the despair of young sorrow, and one of triumphant love. Advancing thus through the gamut of human experience he might have closed the scene with the immortal ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... soft'ning accents move, Soft as the strain of constant Emma's love: Or let his fancy choose some jovial theme. As when he told Hans Carvel's jealous dream; Prior th' admiring reader entertains, With Chaucer's humour, ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... frolics of the sun-bird is revealed. Time cannot lag with such gay, saucy creatures, so while they wait half a dozen or more congregate in a circle and with uplifted heads directed towards a common centre sing their song in unison. Whether the theme of the song is of protest against the tardiness of the tree, or of thanks in anticipation, or of exultation in race, or of rivalry, matters not; but one is inclined to the last theory, for none but males take part in it. The sun glints on their burnished breasts, ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... there, to which I have already referred. The next process was to arrange the many separate pages and seeming fragments into heaps, by subjects; and finally to examine these carefully and, with a view to 'connections,' to place them together. In not a few cases where the theme was attractive and the prospect promising, utter failure to complete the article or sketch was the result, the opening or ending passages, or a page in the middle, having ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sentimental purr, and Margaret was fairly boiling with rage at him; but she would not let her temper give way, especially when she was talking on the sacred theme of the Christ. She felt as if she must scream or jump out over the wheel and run away from this obnoxious man, but she knew she would do neither. She knew she would sit calmly through the expedition and somehow control that conversation. There was one relief, anyway. ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... thus occasioned to my observations made me destroy my journal, and I have now to write to you only about London—only about London! What an expression for this human universe, as my brother calls it, as if my weak feminine pen were equal to the stupendous theme! ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... nevertheless an indubitable fact that the custom is widely prevalent, and that Hong Kong is a market for the buying and selling of women which the Government is powerless to touch. Exeter Hall in possession of these facts would indeed have a theme for pious lucubrations." ...
— Heathen Slaves and Christian Rulers • Elizabeth Wheeler Andrew and Katharine Caroline Bushnell
... of discussion, my friend quoted some passages from a writer on landscape-gardening who has been supposed to have well treated his theme: ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a narrative of railway life at home, not of Imperial matters abroad, and it is therefore clearly my duty not to wander too far from my theme; nevertheless my readers will perhaps forgive me if in my next chapter I give some account of the Commission and its doings. The fact that I was placed on the Commission chiefly because I was a railway man is, after all, some ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... The theme of the Treatise on the Sensations, 1754, is: Memory, comparison, judgment, abstraction, and reflection (in a word, cognition) are nothing but different forms of attention; similarly the emotions, the appetites, and the will, nothing but modifications of desire; while both alike take their ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... against all mankind, the victor in the election, Senator Harding, of Ohio, knew better. The election returns were hardly announced before he began to ask the advice of his countrymen on the pressing theme that would not be downed: "What part shall America—first among the nations of the earth in wealth and power—assume at the council ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... which announced forthcoming publications. Amongst them was a notice of a satirical journal, very low priced, and already advanced to its third or fourth number. My heart palpitated a little on seeing myself announced as the principal theme for the malice of the current number. The reader must not suppose that I was left in any doubt as to the quality of the notice with which I had been honoured; and that, by possibility, I was solacing my vanity with some anticipation of honeyed compliments. That, I can assure him, was made altogether ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... cases I could have recited showing the ill recompense that so often overtakes the virtuous action; but, as I explained to Bute, it would have saddened me to dwell upon the theme. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... be pointed out—and yet almost without a place in our literature. Other rivers, historically lesser rivers, have had their stories told again and again, their beauties lauded, and their praises sung. But this great pioneer waterway, fit theme for an ode, is to-day our ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... lost, in his sense of conscious dignity, the keen northern prudence which recommended a good understanding with the butler. Our mendicant envoy drank ale, and talked over old stories with his comrade, until, no other topic of conversation occurring, he resolved to take up the theme of his embassy, which had for some time ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... great natural powers of pleasing, his warm social temperament, and his capability of forming ardent attachments for friends, many of them women, he should never have formed an attachment of the heart. Even in his youthful and poetical days, the subject of love, so frequently the theme of boyish song, is never alluded to; while his school friendships are often recalled to mind and, indeed, made the special subject of his verse. It seems odd to find him, when at Shrewsbury—a handsome fellow, with a ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... really could not tell. I'm not sufficiently in his confidence. . . . Honour thy father and thy mother," he proceeded, reverting to his former theme. "What think you, Heard, of this old injunction? Is it not altogether obsolete? Was it not written for quite other conditions? Honour thy father and mother. Why? The State educates children, feeds them, investigates and cures their complaints, washes and weighs them, reports on their ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... Monckton, who returned in about a fortnight to the Grove, observed the encreasing influence of Albany with the most serious concern. The bounties of Cecilia, extensive, magnificent, unlimited, were the theme of every tongue, and though sometimes censured and sometimes admired, they were wondered at universally. He suffered her for a while to go on without remonstrance, hoping her enthusiasm would abate, as its novelty wore out: but finding that ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... same theme in metre and rhyme will be a much more difficult matter. The great thing will be to avoid getting mud at the end of a line, for the reasons already given. We had better have long ten-syllable lines, and we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... Nottingham, hearing continually of this pother, fell a-chattering between themselves, and ere a week was out Monceux's reward of a hundred golden pieces for the head of Robin Hood was the one theme of conversation in ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... from Househill (a seat in the vicinity) to Cruikston Castle, the country is rich, and the scenery delightful. The castle itself might be the subject of volumes, as it has been the theme of many a poet, and the subject of many a painter's pencil. Its name is known all over the world, or may be so, from the circumstance of its once having been the residence of Mary Queen of Scots and Henry Lord Darnly; and ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... demi-god. The opening orchestra of shot and shell braces up the mind of the soldier and attunes it up to receive new sensitiveness. The bullets play strange dirges on the strings of life before they break them, and each dirge has its theme, some song of spiritual things. His gaze is towards the sky line and he sees strange things, a whole battery of lights each of which is in its way a revelation. The battle chorus crying to the night of long silence becomes a prayer, and the ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... during this lecture to find my theme in changes which are now going forward in English, but I cannot finish it without drawing one illustration from its remoter periods, and bidding you to note a force not now waning and failing from it, but extinct long ago. I cannot well pass it by; being as it is by far ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... inanity of sublunary things has afforded a theme to philosophers, moralists, and divines, from the earliest records of antiquity; "Vanity of vanities!" says the preacher, "all is vanity!" Nor is there any one, I suppose, who has passed the meridian of life, who has not at some moments ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... paternally delighted with his virtues, you will always be an excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable biographer. Indeed, we can only be sorry and surprised that Principal Shairp should have chosen a theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing on Burns, who likes neither "Holy Willie," nor the "Beggars," nor the "Ordination," nothing is adequate to the situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galere?" And every merit we find in the book, which is sober ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides "Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age) in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and later thoughts, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... cut it out and let me finish this theme. Every time I've started to write you've broken in and driven every blooming idea out of my head. Now quit it. You better pitch into your own work for to-morrow. Dig out all the Cicero you can, and later I'll help you with ...
— The Story of Sugar • Sara Ware Bassett
... had loved. It was probable also that light would come to him from the talk of the rest of the company: the Colonel's queer habit, both as it affected his own situation and as it affected his wife, would be a familiar theme in any house in which he was in the habit of staying. Lyon had not observed in the circles in which he visited any marked abstention from comment on the singularities of their members. It interfered with his progress that the Colonel hunted all day, while he plied his brushes ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... shark and dog-fish wait Under an Atlantic Isle, For the negro ship, whose freight Is the theme of their debate, Wrinkling their red ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... problem for our inquiry, but the fact is indisputable. Whereas there is scarcely a single modern poet who has not lingered with undisguised feelings of happiness over the gentle memories of his childhood, not one of the ancient poets has systematically touched upon the theme at all. From Lydgate down to Tennyson, it would be easy to quote from our English poets a continuous line of lyric songs on the subject of boyish years. How to the young child the fir-trees seemed to touch the sky, how his heart leaped ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... sing my lay, With humble Kelvin for my theme; My song shall be of life to-day, And not ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... down from heaven with wonderful endowments. If he sang of a mountain, the eyes of all mankind beheld a mightier grandeur reposing on its breast, or soaring to its summit, than had before been seen there. If his theme were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown over it, to gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea, even the deep immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher, as if moved by the emotions of the ...
— The Snow Image • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... satisfaction on the other, was not the struggle which Byron experienced in himself or desired to depict in his mysterious hierarch of the powers of nature. "It was the Staubach and the Jungfrau, and something else," not the influence of Faust on a receptive listener, which called up a new theme, and struck out a fresh well-spring of the imagination. The motif of Manfred is remorse—eternal suffering for inexpiable crime. The sufferer is for ever buoyed up with the hope that there is relief somewhere in nature, beyond nature, above nature, and experience replies with an everlasting ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... mixed motives urge them to oppose the executive. They are embodying the purposes of others if they aid; they are advancing their own opinions if they defeat: they are first if they vanquish; they are auxiliaries if they support. The weakness of the American executive used to be the great theme of all critics before the Confederate rebellion. Congress and committees of Congress of course impeded the executive when there was no coercive public sentiment to check and ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Occidental methods, I now find it difficult to write with absolute accuracy upon things in general. But I have found this to be the case in all my travels. What is, or seems to be, accurate to-day of any given thing in a given place is wrong tomorrow under seemingly the same conditions; and although no theme could be more tempting, and no subject offer wider scope for ingenious hypothesis and profound generalization, one has to forego much temptation to "color" if he would be accurate of anything he writes of the Chinese. Eminent ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... about twenty years of age,—in the full splendor of loveliness, and endowed with charms which presented to the gaze of those around a very incarnation of the ideal beauty which forms the theme of raptured poets. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... powerful story of a woman's desperate struggle to save her reputation and her happiness. How she tries to sink the memory of a foolish entanglement with another woman's husband in her own marriage with the man she really loved and how she paid the subsequent bitter price of her folly forms a dramatic theme of deep human interest. 12mo. Cloth. Illustrated with scenes from ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... he showed that his democratic proclivities were something more than a mood. He showed that he took himself seriously, and he compelled the public to take him seriously. The tendency which had only flashed forth here and there in the "novelettes" now revealed its whole countenance. The author's theme was the life of the prosperous bourgeoisie in the western coast-towns; he drew their types with a hand that gave evidence of intimate knowledge. He had himself sprung from one of these rich ship-owning, ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel, does he content himself with stating 'that some apologetic writers' are 'satisfied by the analogies which could scarcely fail to exist between two works dealing with a similar (!) theme,' [15:3] without mentioning for the benefit of the reader some of these analogies, as for instance, that our Lord is styled the Word of God in these two writings, and these alone, of the New Testament? He recurs more than once to the doctrine of the Logos, as exhibited ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... for a moment to drop the graver thread of our theme to relate an anecdote in illustration of our present point. It happened a few years ago that we had as a household guest for two or three weeks an English gentleman, well-informed, courteous, and excellent, who had been for several years the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... little, the talk about this theme died out, and things settled down, not without some of the reaction Mr. Dillwyn had predicted; but they settled down, and all was as before in Shampuashuh. Mr. Dillwyn did not come again to make a visit, or Mrs. Marx's aroused vigilance would have found some ground for suspicion. ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the Scythians. He says—"The Irish have from the Scythians mantles and long glibs, which is a thick curled bush of hair, hanging down over their eyes, and monstrously disguising theme." ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... and impassioned speaker, and he, too, made his impression. The principal point of his theme, that the French alone fraternized with the Indians, was good and all were familiar with the fact. He returned to it continually, and when he sat down the applause was louder than it had been for either Willet or the priest. It was evident that he ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... and struck a few chords while she thought. Then she began to work with all her soul at the theme in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony which is like the sound of the opening of the ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... meaning of his material, and after going on brilliantly up to the point where Dermot plunges into the magic well, he becomes incoherent, and the rest of the tale is merely a string of episodes having no particular connexion with each other or with the central theme. The latter I have here endeavoured to restore to view. The Gilla Dacar is given from another Gaelic version by Dr P.W. Joyce in his ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... the city herself than in the deities who guarded her. Rome was the one name that roused enthusiasm; from first to last she was the true Supreme Deity, and her material aggrandisement was the never-exhausted theme of literary, as it had been the consistent goal of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... insurrection, which, as they stated, was already far advanced toward maturity. Presently a man named Martin, Gabriel's brother, proposed religious services, caused the company to be duly seated, and began an impassioned exposition of Scripture, bearing upon the perilous theme. The Israelites were glowingly portrayed as a type of successful resistance to tyranny; and it was argued, that now, as then, God would stretch forth His arm to save, and would strengthen a hundred to overthrow a thousand. Thus passed, the witness stated, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... to the consummation of all things. And just as Christ in His Ascension was taken from them whilst His hands were lifted up in the act of blessing, so it is fitting that the revelation of which He is the centre and the theme should part from us as He did, shedding with its final words the dew of benediction ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the girl had departed, the trapper and Herbert sat by their campfire discussing the question which their guest had propounded. Their conversation was grave and deliberate, as became the theme; and they united in the opinion that if the deed had been done in anger elicited by a provocation, the man should give himself the favor which the law even would ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... tender moment, sang a sweet hymn to a "Name Unknown," and many an ardent youth in and since his time, has borrowed inspiration from the dulcet numbers of the familiar bard, and allowed his imagination to run riot in "castle-building" upon this simple theme. Had we the poet's gift, our enthusiasm might, doubtless, prompt us to extol in more lofty strain the praises of the "great unknown"—the donor of the handsome instalment of one thousand pounds towards the organization of an expedition to ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... said, that "good health is physical religion;" and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters. But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious; but, in point of fact, the greater part of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... founded England's maritime glory? Will a Dibdin ever arise to sing a Devastation or a Glatton? Can a Devastation or a Glatton ever inspire poetic thoughts and images? One would say that the singer must be endowed in no ordinary degree with the sacred fire whom such a theme as a modern ironclad turret-ship should move to lyric utterance. It has been said that all the romance of the road died out with the old coaching days; and certainly a locomotive engine, with its long black train of practical-looking cars, ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... is interesting, for it fits in (so far as its main theme is concerned) with the authentic account given above of Jane's romance in the west, although the setting is completely different. It is quite possible that the fiction originated in an incorrect account—mis-heard or mis-repeated—of the ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... squatting system which checks the spread of families. If pastoralisation were not one thing, and colonisation another, the occupation of tending sheep should be as fit and proper for women as for men. The pastoral life, so favourable to love and the enjoyment of nature, has ever been a favourite theme of the poet. Here it appears to be the antidote of all poetry and propriety, only because man's better half is wanting. Under this unfavourable aspect the white man first comes before the aboriginal ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... did not wish to appear vanquished, was at a loss how to change the conversation to such a theme as would afford him a suitable opportunity to take his leave in a dignified manner. But good Magde, who had now entirely recovered her usual equanimity, soon assisted him—by means of that instinct which ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... that which they hoped. In this fine strain of eloquent commonplace the falling minister had already begun to moralize upon the vanity of human wishes. When he was established at his charming retreat in Burgundy, he had full leisure to pursue the theme. He remained in retirement till his beard grew to his waist, having vowed, according to report, that he would not shave till recalled to the Netherlands. If the report were true, said some of the gentlemen in the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... this world. Every soul that has received the blessed experience John here describes will be able to appreciate the unbounded rapture the beloved apostle felt in the contemplation of this wonderful theme of redemption that caused him to ascribe to God, its author, "glory and ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... a whirl of variegated ecstasies. 'Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,' he remarked to the street. What he meant was that, after more than a month's excogitation, he had absolutely failed to get any single shred of a theme for the successor to Love in Babylon—that successor out of which a mere couple of thousand pounds was to be made; ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... Clodion whose popularity rivalled that of his master Pajou, and whose prodigious output of marble and terra-cotta sculpture failed to keep pace with the demands of his clients. 777 is Pajou's, The Forsaken Psyche. By the seductive and sentimental Canova are 523 and 524, variants of a favourite theme, Love and Psyche.[202] With some sense of relief we enter the more invigorating atmosphere of Room VI., named after the sturdy Francois Rude (1784-1855), who flung off the yoke of the Roman classicists, and from whose simple, austere atelier issued works instinct ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... it, but he took great interest in all the news the "boys" brought back from their annual deer hunts "up North." They were all enthusiastic over West Superior and Duluth, and their wonderful development was the never-ending theme of discussion in ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... figurative du theme de la deuxieme conjugaison du verbe actif, XXXI. —Prononciation de l'i, meme quand il n'est pas ecrit dans le mot, 7. —Distinction de i voyelle et de i consonne, 10, 31. —Difference de prononciation ...
— An Introductorie for to Lerne to Read, To Pronounce, and to Speke French Trewly • Anonymous
... of a young musician, ambitious to seize his opportunity. After stating its theme largely, simply, in sixteen strong chords, it broke into variations in which the audience for a few moments might read nothing but cacophonous noise, until a gateway opened in the old wall, and through it a band of white-robed Druids came streaming towards the stone altar which stood—the ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Through every Period of my Life Thy Goodness I'll pursue; And after Death in distant Worlds The Glorious Theme renew. ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... for his story, and promised to profit by the moral, when discovered. Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have anything ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... This theme, that of what was going on at Monksmead, and that of what to do when Dam was recaptured, formed the bulk of her conversation with her ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... supremely unimportant, of whom there happen to be quite a number in the world. With the symbolism of The Master-Builder no fault can be found. It is a legitimate and effective means of expressing a sense of reality. The theme is never lost. The artist who sacrifices his human relations, but dare not give all, dare not give his vanity or his life to the ideal, moves steadily to his inevitable doom. Whether he move in the form of Halvard Solness, the cowardly ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... little eccentricities, into which we need not now enter. We apologize to him for publishing the following extract, which is, however, not our own, but comes (of course) from an American source: 'Bernard Quaritch's antiquated hat is a favourite theme with London and other bookmen. A committee of the Grolier Club once made a marvellous collection of newspaper clippings about it, and a member of the Societe des Bibliophiles Contemporains wrote a tragedy which was a parody of ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... cultivation of man. Nevertheless, the origin of the plant must have been analogous to that of other plants. Wheat-growers must necessarily have been people who stayed long in one place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... reforms advocated by him, with one exception, unachieved; critical mourners over Milton's political writings; the mourners comforted; Milton's classification of his prose tracts; the occasional nature of these tracts; allusions in the early prose works to the story of Samson, and to the theme of Paradise Lost; Milton's personal and public motives; his persuasive vein; his political idealism; Johnson's account of his political opinions; the citizen of an antique city; Milton's attitude towards mediaeval romance, and towards the mediaeval Church; his worship of liberty; ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... never been more uncertainty and disagreement about the production, composition, and source of any opera than about the opera of "Martha." Among the reasonable guesses as to its source is one that Flotow found the theme for the story in a French ballet named "Lady Henriette, ou la Foire de Richmond," also, "Lady Harriette, ou la Servante de Greenwich." Among the German titles we find "Martha, oder der Markt zu Richmond," and "Martha, oder der Maegdemarkt zu Richmond." ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... comprising nearly half the ship's company, were lost. It was one the most terrible of the many similar disasters recorded in the history of steamboating on the Mississippi; and to this day the burning of the Lytle is a favorite theme of conversation among ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... class, from town, and eight minutes' walk from the station) was a grotesque, little red-faced abode, situated among a tangle of villas and roads. It stood detached in a garden, with—O! theme of pride—a full-sized tennis court. There were also several flower beds, and six unhappy gooseberry bushes, but the feature was the lawn; here also were seats and a small striped awning. The grounds of "Monte ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... wondered why the Captain had touched on such a theme, and said that he couldn't exactly say what he might or might not ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... among the officers, which led them after a certain time to simply quit, without being particularly whipped, but because they had fought enough. Their authorities of the present day grow enthusiastic over their theme when telling of these victories, and speak with pride of the large sum of money they forced us to pay in the end. With us, now twenty years after the close of the most stupendous war ever known, we have writers —who profess devotion to the nation—engaged in trying to prove that the Union ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... FIRST LORD OF THE ADMIRALTY, who was hotly rebuked for his lack of imagination by Captain ELLIOT. The fact that two young Coalitionists should have advocated such revolutionary ideas inspired another of Sir EDWARD CARSON'S gloomy variations on the theme that any form of Home Rule must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... community applauds their combination with music. But when a subject is in itself solemn, let it be solemnly treated. Opinions may be divided as to whether the story of the Prodigal Son can with propriety be represented in the form of serious opera or spectacle, but that it is an improper theme for burlesque there cannot be the shadow of a doubt. Our dramatic authors have too long been in the habit of trying to raise a laugh about every thing, and we have too long been inundated with a species ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... which the old woman looked like a withered stalk standing amid a riotous growth of gaily-hued flowers. But she threw the grain deftly amid the wilderness of beaks, and her quavering voice carried as far as the two people who were watching her. She was still harping on the theme of death coming to ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... parliamentary battle between Webster and Hayne, the broad nationalism of the former stands out in splendid contrast with the narrow provincialism of the latter. Hayne's theme was small and sectional—it wanted bulk; hence, he continually intrudes himself in his subject: the subject is half, and Hayne and Webster the other and more important half. Webster, on the contrary, is completely absorbed in the magnitude of his subject; he forgets the very existence ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental. Stalky & Co., as I said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing cleverness of insight, is not typical. Gilkes' books are excellent studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; Tim is an interesting book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; A Day of My Life at Eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... On this theme, Sir Wilfrid—who was a man of singularly strong private opinions, of all kinds and on all subjects—spoke for a whole day; from the rising almost to the going down of ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Mr. LOWELL'S capabilities for a more extended theme that the second part of this poem is superior to the first. It is not merely that the interest of the story increases, but the verse is more compressed, the expressions are more graphic, and the flow of the stanza is finer and more natural. The opening lines ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Burns' conversational gifts, Mr. Carlyle wrote: "They were the theme of all that ever heard him. All kinds of gifts, from the gracefullest allusions of courtesy to the highest fire of passionate speech, loud floods of mirth, soft wailings of affection, laconic emphasis, clear piercing ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... sat upon a thorn At evening chime. Its sweet refrain fell like the rain Of summer-time. Of summer-time when roses bloomed, And bright above A rainbow spanned my fairy-land Of hope and love! Of hope and love! O linnet, cease Thy mocking theme! I ne'er picked up the golden cup In all my dream! In all my dream I missed the prize Should have been mine; And dreams won't die! though fain would I, And ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... expression. Puritan poetry was somber, but it was almost devoid of sentiment. Poe loved sad beauty and meditated on the sad things in life. Many of his poems lament the loss of some fair one. "To Helen," "Annabel Lee" "Lenore," and "To One In Paradise" have the theme, while in "The Raven" the poet is seeking solace for the loss of Lenore. "Eulalie—A Song" rises, on the other hand to intense happiness. With Poe the sound by which his idea was expressed was as important as the thought itself. He knew how to make ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... sexual inversion, not only in the minds of inverts themselves, but in the popular mind. To wear a red necktie on the street is to invite remarks from newsboys and others—remarks that have the practices of inverts for their theme. A friend told me once that when a group of street-boys caught sight of the red necktie he was wearing they sucked their fingers in imitation of fellatio. Male prostitutes who walk the streets of Philadelphia and New York almost invariably wear red neckties. It is the badge of all ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... on an entirely different theme. "Miss Morrison ain't what you'd call a real pretty girl, not like Mary Barner or ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... the time irregular?" continued Hawkins, blushing under Wingate's eye, and yet clinging despairingly to his theme, like a shipwrecked mariner to ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... wall-placards and sarcastic verses full of bitter and telling popular satire against the new monarchy. When a comedian ventured on a republican allusion, he was saluted with the loudest applause. The praise of Cato formed the fashionable theme of oppositional pamphleteers, and their writings found a public all the more grateful because even literature was no longer free. Caesar indeed combated the republicans even now on their own field; he himself and his abler confidants replied ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... his clime— Now his name belongs to Freedom, to the very end of Time: And the last words that he uttered will forgotten be by few: "I have bravely fought them, mother—I have bravely fought for you!" Let his memory be green in the hearts who love the South, And his noble deeds the theme that shall ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... Russian author, who suffered a nervous breakdown, found—after trying many other aids to health without success—that a retired life for several months in the mountains in which simple deep-breathing exercises practised systematically every day formed the central theme, effected a permanent cure. Deep breathing is a great resource for people who are shut in most of the day. If they will seize the chance, whenever it offers, to step out-of-doors and take a dozen deep breaths, they can partly compensate for ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... information far more upon the writings by men than upon those by women. Yet, here and there, in the diaries and letters of wives and mothers we catch glimpses of what the institution meant to women—glimpses of that deep, abiding love and faith that have made the home a favorite theme of song and story. In the correspondence between husband and wife we have conclusive evidence that woman was held in high respect, her advice often asked, and her influence marked. The letters of Governor Winthrop to his ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... contemplation We sweetly then pursue The theme of God's salvation, And find it ever new. Set free from present sorrow, We cheerfully can say, Let the unknown to-morrow Bring ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... distributed widely and profusely throughout Europe," and that my chapter on Aladdin is proof sufficient that they have not done so. The reviewer goes on to say that I cite "numerous variants, but, save one from Rome, variants of the theme, not of the version; some again, such as the Mecklenburg and Danish forms, are more primitive in tone; and all lack those effective and picturesque details which are the charm of the Arabian story, and which a borrower only interested in the story as a story might just be ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... his works? He was talking of St. Arnaud, their first commander. "Cunning dog," said he, "he went and died." Death was easier than life. But nobody ever said he was a coward or effeminate because he said this. Why, if Mr. Fields would permit an excursus in twelve numbers here, on this theme, we would defer Sybaris to the 1st of April, 1868, while we illustrated the Sybarite's manly epigram, which these stupid Spartans could only gape at, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... Our favourite theme was Margaret, whom he outspokenly worshipped. He rhapsodized over her in great stretches, calling me to testify with him to her divineness, and rating me soundly if, in the bitterness of my heart, I was a little laggard in my devotions. And, at irregular intervals, like Selah ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... that this little text may lead a few to pursue further this most fascinating theme and that the pursuit may bring much of pleasure ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... for the theme of my song? Or must my poor pipe on the willow be hung? No more to commend that good nature and sense, Which always cou'd please, but ne'er once gave offence. What honour directed he firmly pursu'd, Yet would not his judgment on others intrude; Still ready ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... presenting such information, with variations to suit the nature of the topics handled, is to begin with historical excerpts, chronologically arranged. These are usually followed by sometimes lengthy essays dealing with the subject as a theme, taken from the writings of qualified authors, and like all the other entries, also chronologically arranged. Then come elegant extracts in prose and verse, in all of which the subject may be simply mentioned and not treated as in the essays. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... garden could not divert me from the main theme, and when we were seated again on the front porch I returned to ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... will speak! The time has come for it. Besides, I'm quite ready to discuss this new theme; ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... books to be kept only a fortnight, and that, according to the librarian, it was out "literally all the time." Moreover, it would not be difficult to cite various poems that have been more or less modeled upon Lanier's; it is sufficient, perhaps, to point out that the marsh, a theme almost unknown to poetry before Lanier immortalized it, is not infrequently the subject of poetic treatment now, as in the works of Charles G. D. Roberts,*6* Clinton Scollard,*7* and Maurice Thompson.*8* It is noteworthy, too, that many of the younger poets of the day, both in Canada and ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... various scientific assertions, which are proposed as facts without being such, but these parts do not immediately pertain to our theme. Suffice it to say that, after reading Haeckel's "Weltraetsel," one would be led to think that there is no question of a "deathbed of Darwinism," but that on the contrary Darwinism, as remodeled by Haeckel, is more in the ascendant to-day than ever. Let us judge ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... My own theme is Courage, as you should use it in the great fight that seems to me to be coming between youth and their betters; by youth, meaning, of course, you, and by your betters us. I want you to take up this position: That youth have for too long left exclusively ...
— Courage • J. M. Barrie
... certainly, the author's capital. Here are then, to these moralities, a smiling train of mirths supplied by George Cruikshank. See yonder little fellows butterfly-hunting across a common! Such a light, brisk, airy, gentleman-like drawing was never made upon such a theme. Who, cries the author— ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... myself, on October 21st left England in the same boat as General Baden-Powell's brother, the most frequent theme of conversation was the then unknown fate of Mafeking. Its relief was the news most eagerly enquired for at St Vincent's, and we were all hugely disappointed when on reaching the Cape we learned that the interesting event had not yet come off. Some toilsome and adventurous months brought us to ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... of Jane did, in certain directions, romantically hold. Fortified by thought of the Miss Minetts' agitated interest in all which might befall her, she indulged in imaginary conversations with that great proconsul, her employer—the theme of which, purged of lyrical redundancies, reduced itself to the somewhat crude announcement that "your daughter, yes, may, alas, not impossibly be taken from you; ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... shall not hurry myself; I intend that the execution shall be equal to my ideal—and that ideal entirely worthy of the theme. I want to lay my 'Modern Macaria,' as the first offering of Southern art, upon my country's altar, as a nucleus around which nobler and grander pictures, from the hands of my countrymen and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... him, base in every sense the word can be used. Then agin he had painful and prolonged spells of wantin' to be genteel and fashionable, then anon political ambition had rousted up his rusty old faculties and for months and months Coney Island had been his theme, and wuz now, and so on through a long roll of characters he had desired to play in ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... and when the news of Waterloo arrived, the editor's comment upon the great epoch-making victory was expressed in a dozen lines. One sighs at the thought of the miles of "long primer" that would be expended if we had the opportunity of commenting upon such a theme to-day. Yet the twelve-line article in the Leeds Mercury of June, 1815, really said everything that was to the point on the subject with ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.
... and more than common gracefulness were instantly the theme of general admiration, and the laugh which his gallantry raised against Marianne received particular spirit from his exterior attractions. Marianne herself had seen less of his person than the rest, for the confusion which crimsoned over her face, on his lifting her up, had robbed ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... to corpulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease; and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. At first his tones were conversational: he seemed to dally with the shallows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it: but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought; the stream gathering strength, seemed to bear along ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... enthusiasts, who ascribed to him verses that he had not written; he kept no copies of his compositions, seldom troubled to write them himself, and was content for the most part to dictate them to others. He has no great intellectual force, no philosophic doctrine, is limited in theme as in outlook, is curiously uncertain in his touch, often marring a fine poem with a slovenly rhyme or with a misplaced accent; and, on the only occasion when he was induced to revise a set of proofs, his alterations were nearly ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... frequently the theme of conversation between Luigi and Teresa. The young girl trembled very much at hearing the stories; but Vampa reassured her with a smile, tapping the butt of his good fowling-piece, which threw its ball so well; and if that did not restore ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... that I had no theme save the wreck of our house, if they read this. But I take it all out in here. I believe I must be made of wood, or some other tough material, not to feel it more. I sometimes ask myself if it is because I did not ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... on the program. An important feature of this, as of several preceding conferences, was the reports of what women had been able to accomplish in the many States where they were now enfranchised. Organization and political action in order to carry State amendments formed the principal theme of discussion. Mrs. John R. Leighty of Kansas was elected president with Mrs. Ueland and Mrs. Grace Julian Clarke of Indianapolis on her committee to arrange for the next conference. The shadow of war rested over the meeting, yet in all the speeches ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... such as might his soul proclaim; One eye was blinking, and one leg was lame: His mountain shoulders half his breast o'erspread, Thin hairs bestrew'd his long misshapen head. Spleen to mankind his envious heart possess'd, And much he hated all, but most the best: Ulysses or Achilles still his theme; But royal scandal his delight supreme, Long had he lived the scorn of every Greek, Vex'd when he spoke, yet still they heard him speak. Sharp was his voice; which in the shrillest tone, Thus with injurious taunts ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... sojourn had been among these primitive people, it furnished us with many pleasant reminiscences. Their genial hospitality and simple good-nature, together with their utter ignorance of the outer world, formed the theme of various amusing anecdotes during the remainder of the passage. Favored by a southerly wind and a stock of good coal, we made the southeastern point of Iceland in a little ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... impropriety of Miss Reynolds's appearing to stab herself in the hand with a pin, is far too obvious, and too glaringly unladylike, to be pointed out), we descended from our maiden elevation to discuss this uncongenial and this unfit theme. Responsible inquiries having assured us that it was but one of those 'airy nothings' pointed at by the Poet (whose name and date of birth Miss Giggles will supply within half an hour), we would now discard the subject, and concentrate ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... letters to me that she had writ whilst she wuz away South on this visit to her friend. One young man's name run through 'em like the theme to a great melody, and then all to once stopped, and though Maggie and I hadn't passed a word on the subject I mistrusted more than Maggie mistrusted I did about the cause of ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley
... that it might often have borne comparison with the homilies of John Chrysostom in the Palaea of Antioch. Any incident in the inner life of the college, any occurrence directly concerning himself or one of the pupils furnished the theme for a brief and lively soliloquy. The reading of the reports on Friday was still more dramatic and personal, and we all anticipated that day with a mixture of hope and apprehension. The observations with which he interlarded the ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... of his inspiration to Carlyle's tremendous prose epic. But the genius that depicted a moving and tragic story upon the red background of the Terror was Dickens's own, and the "Tale of Two Cities" was final proof that its author could handle a great theme in a manner that was worthy of its greatness. The work was one of the novelist's later writings—it was published in 1859—and is in many respects distinct from all his others. It stands by itself among Dickens's masterpieces, in sombre ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a mountain-pass, in which a valiant band of mountaineers overwhelmed and destroyed the flower of the French army, has been exalted by poetic legend into one of the most stupendous and romantic of events. Ponderous epic poems have made Roland their theme, numbers of ballads and romances tell of his exploits, and the far-off echoes of his ivory horn still sound through the centuries. One account tells that he blew his horn so loud and long that the veins of his neck ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... They were on the eve of their summer flight to the ranch, where she would have other things to think about than young men. That was his half-expressed theme when ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... instructed and wise. But he had devoted his attention to the question of the coming Presidential election, and was not unwilling to exchange with all whom he might the ideas to which he had arrived. He then began to show the fallacy of some of the arguments against General Taylor, making his chief theme the fashionable statement of all those who oppose him (the old Locofocos as well as the new), that he has no principles, and that the Whig party have abandoned their principles by adopting him as their candidate. He maintained that General Taylor occupied a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... enabling her to create a great native industry, sufficient to supply all her own wants, was the aim of his policy and the constant object of his untiring efforts. Those who have had the good fortune to know him personally must have often heard him discourse eloquently on this theme, supporting his views by quotations from the economists of his own school, and by illustrations drawn from the history of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of sequence impairs the picture's unity. In the second, though the objects are contiguous there is no subjective union, and in David's composition the formality of the decorative structure is inapplicable to the theme. ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... is evident that this must have been a collection of lyrics celebrating some of the great events of Hebrew history. The title seems to mean "The Book of the Just." The exploits of the worthies of Israel probably furnished its principal theme. ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... their conversation with most provoking indifference, lavishing a vast deal more kindness and attention upon a noble wolf-hound that crouched close to her feet, his big clear eye bent ever upon his mistress's face with a degree of intelligence that would have formed a theme for a painter. It was a noble creature, and no wonder the lady evinced so much regard for the hound, who ever and anon ...
— The Heart's Secret - The Fortunes of a Soldier, A Story of Love and the Low Latitudes • Maturin Murray
... thin. To be sure, no doctor will tell you to do the same things any other doctor prescribes, but it all simmers down to the same thing: Cut out the starchy foods and sweets, and take exercise. Also: Don't drink alcohol. The variations that can be played on this simple theme by a skillful doctor are endless. When a real specialist in fat reduction gets hold of you—a real, earnest reducer—he can contrive a diet that would make a living skeleton thin—and likewise put him in his little grave. I have had diets handed to me that ...
— The Fun of Getting Thin • Samuel G. Blythe
... imputations, a browner glow; and it was all in the right key that, a few years later, he should, after "showing some talent for sculpture," have gone the hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad vague headshakes (kind and very pitying in his case) and died prematurely and pointlessly, or in other words, by my conception, picturesquely. The headshakes were heavier and the sighs sharper for another slim shade, one of the younger and I believe quite the most hapless ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... this book. Notwithstanding the length of time which his task occupied, and his constant interruptions, it has turned out a work of one mould and casting, and shows from the first page to the last how completely the translator was absorbed in his theme, and yet how closely his life and thoughts were interwoven with those of his fellow countrymen, for whom he wrote and whose language he spoke. In 1534 the whole of his German Bible was at length in print, and the next year a new edition was called for. Of the ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... present personality, of which the battle-ground is a bereaved human heart and the prize its complete possession; between earthly duty and spiritual desire also; was one that had long attracted him. Finding at length a few months of leisure, he treated the difficult theme, not indeed as he would have wished to do, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... to be on his pet theme, and he continued his talk as he and Reynolds again resumed their journey. Several times the latter endeavored to find out something about the old man's past history, but all in vain. The prospector gave him not the slightest information concerning himself, but discoursed ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
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