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More "Voluptuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... since the days of the celebrated Felix Babylon, the founder of the hotel, post-lunch coffee was merging into afternoon tea. The number of idle persons in the world, and the number of busy persons who ministered to them, and the number of artistic persons who played voluptuous music to their idleness, struck Mr. Prohack as merely prodigious. He had not dreamed that idleness on so grandiose a scale flourished in the city which to him had always been a city of hard work and limited meal-hours. He saw that he had a great deal to learn before he could ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... got rid of two-thirds of his burning poison by the help of man's chief nurse, sleep; and now he must work off the rest, grumbling at this the kind severity of his lot. Warm men, respectable men, among whom justices of the peace and other voluptuous disciplinarians, were tempted out of delicious beds by the fragrant berry, the balmy leaf, snowy damask, fire glowing behind polished bars—in short, by multifarious comfort set in a frame of gold. They ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... crouch to the giver, and thou who desirest to surpass others in honour shalt become vile by thy baseness in begging. Wishest thou for power? Thou shalt be in danger of thy subjects' treacheries. Seekest thou for glory? But, drawn into many dangers, thou shalt lose thy safety. Wilt thou live a voluptuous life? But who would not despise and neglect the service of so vile and frail a thing as his body? Now they who boast of the habilities of their body, upon how unsteadfast a possession do they ground themselves! For can you be bigger than elephants, or stronger than bulls? Or swifter than tigers? ...
— The Theological Tractates and The Consolation of Philosophy • Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
... them at home. Their dreadful caliph was himself a sword of death. At his will they hurled themselves from towers or from precipices; to satisfy his policy they sacrificed their wives and children. And their reward—in life, the drugged cup and voluptuous dreams; after it, as they believed, ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... that screened me from people below. "A handsome girl," he would murmur, upstaring, (and so I am). "But—too much sex in her build; fine eyes, but eyelids too heavy; A bosom too full for her age; in her lips too voluptuous a look." (It may be. But who put it there? Assuredly it ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... affable and communicative. He could talk of nothing but the beautiful coast of Leghorn; the superb bay of Naples; pleasant trips to Rome; visits to Tripoli; and other interesting parts on the African coast; and, on the voluptuous city of Palermo, with its amiable ladies and incessant festivities—he was quite as eloquent as could reasonably be expected from a smart ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... and wide celebrity, assisted no doubt by the outcry against its immorality. Lewis tried to defend himself by pleading that the outline and moral of his story were borrowed from "The History of Santon Barsisa" in the Guardian (No. 148). But the voluptuous nature of some of the descriptions induced the Attorney General to enjoin the sale of the book, and Lewis bowed to public opinion so far as to suppress the objectionable passages in later editions. Lewis' melodrama ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the mountain bee hummed his tune of gladness around the holy man, save when buried in the foxglove bell, or revelling upon a fragrant bunch of thyme; and even then the little voice murmured out happiness in low and broken tones of voluptuous delight. Father Cuddy derived no small comfort from the sound, for it presaged a good metheglin season; and metheglin he considered, if well manufactured, to be no bad liquor, particularly when there was no stint or ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... damp linen, revealed the delicate outlines of her shape; over this she wore a red drapery, numerous folds of which, gradually lengthening as they fell by her side, took the graceful curves of a Greek peplum. This voluptuous garment of the pagan priestesses lessened the indecency of the rest of the attire which the fashions of the time suffered women to wear. To soften its immodesty still further, Marie threw a gauze scarf ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... woof of the tale. The package contains a clipping, a dozen closely written pages, and a photograph—a small photograph of a girl. The photograph is printed on the picture of a scroll, and the likeness of the girl does not throb with life as it did thirty years ago when it was taken. Then the plump, voluptuous arm and shoulders in the front of the picture seemed to exude life and to bristle with the temptation that lurked under the brown lashes shading her big, innocent, brown eyes. And her hair, her wonderful brown hair that fell in a great ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... construction. Not only is the slow assimilation of the mass of heterogeneous elements thrown together in these dramas not astonishing, but to the thoughtful student it must appear to be inevitable. On the one hand was the insatiable desire for voluptuous spectacle, for the lascivious pseudo-classicism of the pictorial dance, for the bewildering richness of movement which had originated in the earlier triumphal processions, and for the stupendous scenic apparatus made possible in the open air sacred plays. On the other was ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature, beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don't you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or surveying ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a man who commits himself to theories about such an untheoretical subject as Central Africa is deterred from bestirring himself to prove them by the test of exploration. His opinion of such a man is, that he unfits himself for his duty, that he is very likely to become a slave to theory—a voluptuous fancy, which ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... in a Catholic country. In vain did he write to his friends that "Don Juan" will be known by-and-by for what it is intended,—a satire on the abuses of the present state of society, and not a eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous: I can't help it. Ariosto is worse; Smollett ten times worse; Fielding no better. No girl will ever be seduced by reading "Don ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... him with his nephew! How different a figure did the same prince make in a reign of dissimilar complexion! The philosophic warrior, who could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits. Let me transcribe a picture of Prince Rupert, drawn by a man who was far from having the least portion of wit in that age, who was superior to its indelicacy, and who yet was so overborne by its prejudices, ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... once have put forth in defending himself. He was the Voltaire of Germany, and very much more than the Voltaire; for his romantic and legendary poems are above the level of Voltaire. But, on the other hand, he was a Voltaire in sensual impurity. To work, to carry on a plot, to affect his readers by voluptuous impressions,—these were the unworthy aims of Wieland; and though a good-natured critic would not refuse to make some allowance for a youthful poet's aberrations in this respect, yet the indulgence cannot extend itself to mature years. An old man corrupting his readers, attempting to corrupt them, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... room, the voices sounded more suppressed but not less fiery, amongst the scattered sketches, the outlines, the glowing, voluptuous paintings; amongst the drawings on the floor there was many a sketch of vigorous beauty, like unto the daughters of the Campagna, yet they themselves were much more beautiful. The six-armed lamp glowed brightly, and the human forms warmed ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... fallacy that the purity of the family is best maintained by feminine seclusion. It is true there were exceptions to this reign of illiteracy. With the natural disposition to glorify the past, the writers of the next generation liked to refer to the golden era of the Valois and the brilliancy of its voluptuous court. Very likely they exaggerated a little the learning of Marguerite de Navarre, who was said to understand Latin, Italian, Spanish, even Greek and Hebrew. But she had rare gifts, wrote religious poems, besides the very secular ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... for the rest of my very unnatural life, but I'll be shot if I'll regulate mine or my wife'& behaviour by the twaddle they talk! I'll have that dagger." Slipping it slowly into its sheath he watched it travel home, the supple female curve gliding and yielding as a woman yields to a man's caress. "Voluptuous, I call it. Under the left breast, eh?" He drew it again and held it poised and pointing at his cousin. "Come, even I could cut your heart out with a gem of a blade like that." Lawrence held himself lightly ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of the 'sunny isle' and its 'smiling women' had really tempted the men to mutiny, Bligh would himself not be free from blame, for having allowed them to indulge for six whole months among this voluptuous and fascinating people; for though he was one of the most active and anxious commanders of his time, 'the service,' as is observed by a naval officer, 'was carried on in those days in a very different spirit from that which regulates its movements now, otherwise the Bounty would ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... court sword, loose silk stockings, white shoes, and unbuckled knee-bands; his shoulders are adorned with white bows, and curtain rings for a chain, hung by a blue ribbon from his neck. Next to him, adorned with a blanket, is a character of voluptuous gaiety, helmeted by a saucepan, holding up the cover for a shield, and a bottle for a weapon. Then comes the Fool, making grimaces with his painted cheeks, and bending his fists at the military; while the Lord Mayor with his white wand, is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... even voluptuous—nothing could be more melodious. The poem has always affected me in a remarkable manner. The intense melancholy which seems to well up, perforce, to the surface of all the poet's cheerful sayings about his grave, we find thrilling us to the soul—while there is ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... satiety; and after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well that they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, not the quality; and therefore we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy. But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... just comfortably settled to stocking-mending in the back parlour, when Martin—laying down a book which, stretched on the sofa (he was still indisposed, according to his own account), he had been perusing in all the voluptuous ease of a yet callow pacha—lazily introduced some discourse about Sarah, the maid at the Hollow. In the course of much verbal meandering he insinuated information that this damsel was said to have ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... mass of stories published in the great weeklies and the cheap novels are mischievous. When the devil determines to take charge of a young soul, he often employs a very ingenious method. He slyly hands a little novel filled with "voluptuous forms," "reclining ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... to be Tuned to each season's harmony. The holy sky bent near to her; She saw a spirit in the stir Of solemn woods. The rills that beat Their mosses with voluptuous feet, Went dripping music through her thought. Sweet impulse came to her unsought From graceful things, and beauty took A ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... the music of Tannhaeuser is characterized by intense energy, the greatest definiteness, and richness and gorgeousness of colouring. Inviting as must have been the opportunities offered in the opening scene of indulging in a riot of voluptuous colour, the definiteness is never lost. Through the whirling, dancing-mad accompaniment runs a fibre of strong, clean-cut, sinewy melody. The picture is drawn with firm strokes as well as painted with a full brush. Or perhaps the better analogy ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... obscure and neglected young soldier's departure to spread the blessings of Fraternity in Italy, the voluptuous Barras was commissioned by him to announce to the Directory his marriage with Citizeness Tascher Beauharnais. Then began a period of devouring love and war such as the world has never beheld. In the midst of ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... disproportionate or inappropriate. The arresting overture describing the swift and sudden approach of the Red Death, the gay, thoughtless security of Prince Prospero and his guests within the barricaded abbey, the voluptuous masquerade held in a suite of seven rooms of seven hues, the disconcerting chime of the ebony clock that momentarily stills the grotesque figures of the dancers, prepare us for the dramatic climax, the entry of the audacious guest, ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... father retired, leaving his daughter to the care of the many handsome gallants who danced attendance upon her. The reception did not close until the small hours of the morning. Each waltz became more voluptuous; intoxicated by sensuality, the dancers became more bold, and lust was aroused in every breast. How many sins that reception occasioned, I do not know; this, at least, is sure, that this girl who entered that dancing-hall three months ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... sudden should ask thee, what it is that thou art now thinking, thou mayest answer This, and That, freely and boldly, that so by thy thoughts it may presently appear that in all thee is sincere, and peaceable; as becometh one that is made for society, and regards not pleasures, nor gives way to any voluptuous imaginations at all: free from all contentiousness, envy, and suspicion, and from whatsoever else thou wouldest blush to confess thy thoughts were set upon. He that is such, is he surely that doth not put off to lay hold on that which ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... exclude spiritual thought and fill their minds with the fascinations of worldly affairs, pleasure and business, dream with less frequency than those who regard objective matters with lighter concern. The former depend alone upon the voluptuous warmth of the world for contentment; they look to money, the presence of some one, or to other external sources for happiness, and are often disappointed; while the latter, with a just appreciation of temporal wants, depend alone upon the inner consciousness ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... was a ballet master of some repute. Born at Stockholm, where her father was employed at the Royal Opera, she made her debut at Vienna, where she created an immediate sensation. Hitherto ballet dancing had been somewhat realistic and voluptuous, as illustrated by the performances of the celebrated Madame Vestris, but La Taglioni put poetry and imagination into her work, which was more ideal in character, and her supremacy was soon unquestioned. Among her ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... that as lascivious old men seek by being whipped to excite new power of enjoyment, so old Rome endured monkish chastisement to find more exquisite delight in torture and voluptuous rapture in pain? Evil excess of stimulant! it took from the body of the state of Rome its last strength. It was not by division into two realms that Rome perished. On the Bosphorus, as by the Tiber, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... dance, grave, moderate, flowing, and by no means stereotyped. Liszt tells of the capricious life infused into its courtly measures by the Polish aristocracy. It is at once the symbol of war and love, a vivid pageant of martial splendor, a weaving, cadenced, voluptuous dance, the pursuit of shy, coquettish woman by the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... golden penumbra with tawny eyeballs, on a moist and blue crystalline lens like that of a child, send out a glance of astonishing acuteness; the nose, divided into abrupt polished flat places, breathes strongly and passionately, through large red nostrils; the mouth, large and voluptuous, particularly in the lower lip, smiles with a rabelaisian smile under the shade of a moustache much lighter in colour than the hair; and the chin, slightly raised, is attached to the throat by a fold of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... hand, as we enter, is the tomb of the Doge Marco Cornaro, who died in 1367. It is rich and fully developed Gothic, with crockets and finials, but not yet attaining any extravagant developement. Opposite to it is that of the Doge Andrea Morosini, who died in 1382. Its Gothic is voluptuous, and over-wrought; the crockets are bold and florid, and the enormous finial represents a statue of St. Michael. There is no excuse for the antiquaries who, having this tomb before them, could have attributed ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the learned stiffness and affectation of the Alexandrian school. They are strongly national, despite the author's ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... General Hoar or Charles Sumner. When spring came, he took to the woods, which were best of all, for after the first of April, what Maurice de Guerin called "the vast maternity" of nature showed charms more voluptuous than the vast paternity of the United States Senate. Senators were less ornamental than the dogwood or even the judas-tree. They were, as a rule, less good company. Adams astonished himself by remarking what a purified charm was lent ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... lost to a certain extent. The first act opens with a gay party in Violetta's house. Among the crowd about her is Alfred Germont, a young man from Provence, who is passionately in love with her. The sincerity of his passion finally influences her to turn aside from her life of voluptuous pleasure and to cherish a similar sentiment for him. In the next act we find her living in seclusion with her lover in a country-house in the environs of Paris, to support which she has sold her property in the city. When Alfred discovers this he refuses to be the recipient ...
— The Standard Operas (12th edition) • George P. Upton
... and lord of all the Frankish hosts, was a prisoner within the walls of Constantinople. With Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, with Stephen of Chartres and some lesser chiefs, Hugh had chosen to make his way through Italy; and the charms of that voluptuous land had a greater effect, it seems, in breaking up and corrupting their forces than the delights of Capua had in weakening ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... sound of revelry by night— "Columbia's" capital had gathered then Her beauty and her chivalry: and bright The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men. A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes that spoke again, And all went merry ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and even bright. His forehead was broad and high, light as if built of ivory, with large projecting eyebrows, and his eyes rolling beneath them like a sea with darkened lustre.... His mouth was gross, voluptuous, open, eloquent; his chin good-humored and round, but his nose, the rudder of the face, the index of the will, was small, feeble, nothing—like what he has done." And Dorothy Wordsworth (to close ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... semi-gloom of twilight, for the silver lamp burning on the bracket by Sir Allan's side was covered with a rose-colored shade, and threw all its light downward. The art treasures with which the room was crowded, and the almost voluptuous grace of its adornment and coloring, were more suggested than seen. Mr. Brown, who had advanced only a few steps from the closed door, covered his eyes with his hand, and looked a ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Jean-Christophe's prison of care and banal tasks were drawn about him, the more his heart in its revolt felt its independence. In a life without obstacles he would doubtless have abandoned himself to chance and to the voluptuous sauntering of adolescence. As he could be free only for an hour or two a day, his strength flowed into that space of time like a river between walls of rock. It is a good discipline for art for a man to confine his efforts ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... mortal man impassion'd far At these voluptuous accents, he arose, Ethereal, flush'd, and like a throbbing star Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose Into her dream he melted, as the rose 320 Blendeth its odour with the violet,— Solution sweet: meantime the frost-wind blows Like Love's alarum pattering the sharp sleet Against ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... swells into a mighty outpour and passes, finally, away. Evenfall; last echo of the chant. As night breaks, magic sights and sounds appear, the whirlings of a fearsomely voluptuous dance ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... French ambassador in Vienna." exclaimed the empress. "If the cardinal is so shocked at a slight breach of etiquette, he should be careful to conceal his own deformities under its sheltering veil. Innocence may sin against ceremony; but he, who leads a dissolute and voluptuous life, should make decorum a shield wherewith to cover ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... forward at night, when the hammocks were in place; but even for that occasional compensations offered. I remember once, when making this awkward journey, hearing a colloquy between two young seamen just about to swing themselves into bed at nine o'clock. "I say, Bill," said one, with voluptuous satisfaction, "too watches in,[9] and beans to-morrow." Can any philosophy soar higher than that, in contentment with small things? Plain living and high thinking! Diogenes wasn't ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... this time the image of that terrible night is graven on my memory with a scorching pen of fire. After this it changes, and with the exception of a few real incidents that aroused me from my trance, it floats before me in more than the voluptuous splendor of an opium-dream. The cause of this change is a curious chapter in mental philosophy. It was no doubt purely physical, resulting from want of sleep, fatigue, dampness, lack of food, and intense mental exertion. But ...
— Daring and Suffering: - A History of the Great Railroad Adventure • William Pittenger
... a winning smile, and you have secured your passport to the satin and brocade of her mansion. A spring is heard to tick, a whisper of caution to some one within follows, and a block broad enough to admit your hat swings open, disclosing the voluptuous splendor of a great hall, the blaze of which flashes upon your senses, and fills you instinctively with curious emotions. Simultaneously a broad, cheerful face, somewhat matronly in its aspect, and enlivened with an urbane smile, darkens the space. After a few moments' pause we see two sharp ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... was very eulogistic. "We have the pleasure," he said, "of seeing united in one collection the sweet Romanic tongue which the South of France has adopted, like the privileged children of her lovely sky and voluptuous climate; and her lyrical songs, whose masculine vigour and energetic sentiments have more than once excited patriotic transports and awakened popular enthusiasm. For Jasmin is above all a poet ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... The people addressed were in Ephesus, and they were likewise in Christ. What did it mean to be in Ephesus? Ephesus was one of the great centers of paganism. It was adorned with costly and magnificent temples. It was rich and voluptuous. Both private and public life were utterly corrupt. Even the religious practises of the Ephesians were unspeakably vile. This city was a moral bog, a sink of pollution, filled with all corruption, and reeking with vileness. It was a second Sodom. Vice stalked ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... war-drum rumbles from afar, the brazen trumpet brays its thrilling note, and the rude clash of hostile arms speaks fearful prophecies of coming troubles. The gallant warrior starts from soft repose—from golden visions and voluptuous ease; where, in the dulcet "piping time of peace," he sought sweet solace after all his toils. No more in Beauty's siren lap reclined he weaves fair garlands for his lady's brows; no more entwines with flowers his shining sword nor through the livelong lazy ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... calm noonday scenes which impress upon us their own bright and voluptuous tranquillity. There stood the old herdsman leaning on his staff, and the quiet cattle knee-deep in the gliding waters. Never did stream more smooth and sheen than was at that hour the surface of the Moselle mirror ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... references, and sometimes very brutal ones, to the generative organs; and stories of lust, adultery, sodomy and incest, that might raise blushes in a brothel; while in the Song of Solomon they will find the most passionate eroticism, decked out with the most voluptuous imagery. The "Zolaism" of the Bible is far more pernicious than the "Zolaism" of French fiction. The one comes seductively, with an air of piety, and authoritatively, with an air of divinity; while the other shows that selfishness and excess ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... two courtesans). Oh! my gods! what bosoms! Hard as a quince! Come, my treasures, give me voluptuous kisses! Glue your lips to mine. Haha! I was the first ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al
... you should call me romantic, hear a man of pleasure on the subject, the Petronius of the last age, the elegant, but voluptuous St. Evremond, who speaks in the following manner of the friendship ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... up in all sections of society an ever-increasing lateness of retiring at night, coupled with a growth of indolence caused by every kind of sensual indulgence, not the least of which was gluttony. Music of a sensuous, voluptuous character formed a chief part of the brief Sunday services, and every item was loudly applauded as though the whole affair had been a performance rather than a ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... make things run in the right channel; but, if it should, our court will require a new modelling." In this note of alarm he forebodes danger to come. A man of his majesty's character, witty and careless, weak and voluptuous, was not likely to reconstruct his court, or reclaim it from ways he loved. Nor was his union calculated to exercise a lasting impression on him. The affection he bore his wife in the first weeks of ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... Star reeled, and shuddered, and turned, and began to drag all her anchors. But she now dragged away from the great building and its lights,—away from the voluptuous thunder of the grand piano, even at that moment outpouring the great joy of Weber's melody orchestrated by Berlioz: l'Invitation a la Valse,—with its ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... of Robin. It's such an awful illness, Hatty. I can't move when I'm in bed. Robin has to get up and turn me a dozen times in one night.... Robin's a perfect saint. He does everything for me." Prissie's voice and her face softened and thickened with voluptuous content. ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... woman he coveted—and still his excited fancy at once gave shape to what Rosa's dreamy babbling had stirred up within him. The child was enraptured with the dear Virgin who smiles at the innocent, but he adorned her with all the voluptuous charms which she—his eyes glittered as they hung on the ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... was so much feeling, dignity, terror, or contempt in her way of raising or dropping those veils of the soul. She could freeze or give life by a look. Her light-brown hair, carelessly knotted on her head, outlined a poet's brow, high, powerful, and dreamy. The mouth was wholly voluptuous. And to crown all by a grace, rare in France, though common in Italy, all the lines and forms of the head had a stamp of nobleness which would defy the ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... between two trees, you would see a thing like a bird come to ruin. Orchids grew here as in a hothouse. All the trees—the few there were—had a spectral and miserable appearance. They were half starved by the voluptuous growth ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Beat out thy last voluptuous beat Of hope and fear, my heart! I thought the clock I' the chapel struck as I was pushing through The ferns. And so I shall no more see rise My love-star! Oh, no matter for the past! So much the more delicious task to ...
— A Blot In The 'Scutcheon • Robert Browning
... Revolution" paints a wonderfully vivid picture of the idle, voluptuous noblesse of the eighteenth century: compare the views ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... sharp Greek profile, his long, lank, unpowdered locks, his simple uniform, and awkward seat in the saddle, he looked like a new human type, neither angel nor devil but an inscrutable apparition from another sphere. To officers and men the voluptuous city extended wide its arms, and the shabby soldiery were incongruous figures where their entertainers were elegant and fastidious beyond what the guests had dreamed. With stern impartiality the liberator repressed all excess ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... understood? It is breathed in the air; but does it penetrate the heart? Your poetry, in which love performs so principal a part, possesses considerable grace, and much imagination; it is ornamented with brilliant pictures, whose colours are lively and voluptuous. But where will you find that tender, melancholy sentiment, which animates our poetry? What have you that can be put in comparison with the scene between Belvidera and her husband, in OTWAY; or with that in SHAKESPEARE, between Romeo and Juliet? But above ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... even for a moment courage or resignation; perhaps to suggest a sense of infinity and eternity in a way which mere language is incapable of attaining. True, the same power which in the purer age of art embodies gods and heroes only, may be made to express the voluptuous image of a Corinthian courtezan. But this only shows that art, like other outward things, may be turned to good and also to evil, and is not more closely connected with the higher than with the lower part of the soul. All ...
— The Republic • Plato
... Marianne's kiss on his lips, burning like ice. To-morrow,—in a few hours,—his first thought, his only thought would be to find that woman again, to experience that voluptuous impression, that dream that had penetrated his heart. A danger, Lissac had said. The feline eyes of Marianne had a dangerous ardor; but it was their charm, their strength and their adorable seductiveness, that filtered like a flame through her ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... Quincey's imagination ran voluptuous riot. But upon such things as history or poetry she had a somewhat blighting influence. The flowers in the school Anthology withered under her fingers, and the flesh and blood of heroes crumbled into ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... going down, and its long, golden rays streamed over hill and dale, palace and cot, clothing all in a voluptuous flow of ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... Holy Land, or scouring the Mediterranean, and scourging the Barbary coasts with their galleys, or feeding the poor, and attending upon the sick at their hospitals, they led a life of luxury and libertinism, and were to be found in the most voluptuous courts of Europe. The order, in fact, had become a mode of providing for the needy branches of the Catholic aristocracy of Europe. "A commandery," we are told, was a splendid provision for a younger ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Every limb of her body and every feature of her face followed, with a sort of effortless grace, the movements of her feet. Yet the general effect of the whole was suggestive of a sweet and dainty repose, voluptuous yet refined, glowing with life, yet dreamily restful. In a certain sense her physical movements, even her body itself, seemed merged and lost in the artistic ideal created and born of her performance. And so it was that he carried away that day ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... God, he listens ... he collects all their voluptuous nothings and out of them creates worlds. Do you see him give ear? His face has kept its sanctimonious expression, but the fire gleams forth beneath his drooping eye-lid. He is leaning near, as near as possible to those stammering lips.... The penitent is silent. What! already? everything ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... the corner, overhung by a great Louis XV mirror with a gilt frame of rich, voluptuous curves. On the mantel lay a scarf of old-rose velvet smelling decidedly musty. Alone, apart, upon this mantel, as an altar, stood a colored plaster bust of Jeanne d'Arc, showing her in the beauty of her winsome youth. The pale, girlish face ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... universal jollity had reached its height, two Bayaderes, who belonged to the suite of the Maharajah of Sabathu, made their appearance, Indian beauties, whose voluptuous feminine charms were calculated to make the blood even of the spoilt European run warm. Dressed in gold-glittering petticoats and jackets, which left a hand's breadth of light brown skin visible round the waist, ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... peculiar flowers. The boudoir was hung with blue satin; over the doors were pictures by Claude Audran, representing the history of Venus in four tableaux, while the panels formed other episodes of the same history, all most graceful in outline and voluptuous in expression. This was the house which Noce, in the innocence of his heart, had designated as fit for ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... have ascribed to Blumenbach (heretofore the great Goettingen naturalist) an opinion as to the English which we have good reason to think that he never uttered—viz. that the people of this island are the most voluptuous of nations, and that we bear it written in our national countenance. But suppose him to have said this, and secondly, (which is a trifle more important,) suppose it to be true, not the less we assert the impassioned predominance of a moral interest in this nation. The intensity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... deeper and holier ones might be, by any splendor of external adornment that could be bestowed on it. It is deplorable and disheartening to see it in faded and shabby plight,—this joyous, exuberant, warm, voluptuous work. There is the head of a cow, thrust into the picture, and staring with wild, ludicrous wonder at the godlike bull, so as to introduce quite a ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... vanquished,—then shrugged her shoulders and leaned back in her chair. The little room was plainly furnished. Shelves covered three sides, and the window-seat and the table were littered with books. There were no curtains, no ornaments; but Chonita's hair, billowing to the floor, her slender voluptuous form, her white skin and green irradiating eyes, the candlelight half revealing, half concealing, made a picture requiring no background. I caught the expression of Estenega's face, and determined to ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... displays an almost classical intensity of voluptuous passion, and belongs in all probability to a period later than the Carmina Burana. I have ventured, in translating it, to borrow the structure of a song which occurs in Fletcher's Rollo (act v. scene 2), the first stanza of which is also ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... cigarette. Her tall, slim figure looked even taller and slimmer in the tight-fitting black satin evening dress. Her features faintly suggested her relationship to Norman. She was a handsome woman, with a voluptuous ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... sword. St. Cecilia refused to lend the divine touch to lips steeped in pleasure. He who sings for love of gold finds his voice becoming metallic. In art, also, Hitchcock has said: "When the brush grows voluptuous it falls like an angel from heaven." Fra Angelico refuses an invitation to the Pitti palace, choosing rather his crust and pallet in the cell of the monastery. The artist gave his mornings to the poor, his evenings to his canvas. But when the painter had worn his life away in kindly ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... again to make choice of one of them for my companion In short, madam, not to weary you with repetitions, I must tell you that I continued a whole year among those forty ladies, and received them into my bed one after another: and during all the time of this voluptuous life, we met not with the least kind of trouble. When the year was expired, I was greatly surprised that these forty ladies, instead of appearing with their usual cheerfulness to ask me how I did, entered my chamber one morning all in tears. They embraced me with great ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... warm, fragrant, and delicious, and the larboard watch of the tired crew of the Gentile, after a boisterous passage of forty days from Gibralter, yielded to its somnolent influence, and lay stretched about the forecastle and waists, enjoying the voluptuous languor which overcomes men suddenly emerging from a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... she still would have been that spectator. Too well she knew that she would have analyzed what she thought and felt. She would have rated even the second before eternity in its degree as a frisson; and, no doubt, would have been aware of a voluptuous satiety, while anticipating the second after. She hated herself, and she hated too the smart, ultra-refined life that had brought her to it. How many of those past years, or of the years to come would she not give to shed a few ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... Christian inspiration. But Art has its dangers here as well as its uses: especially it is apt to degenerate from a discipline of religious virtue into a mere relaxation, losing the severity that elevates and purifies, in what is merely pretty or voluptuous or pleasing. It is therefore of the utmost consequence what style of beauty we cultivate, and how the tastes of people are ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... its music was pure; and no less pure were the notes which breathed from Nero's lute, whilst the blaze of ten thousand homes glutted his Imperial lust for spectacle. Divorce the unworthy song, stay the voluptuous dance, and the music suffers no clinging defilement; the redeemed melodies, stainless as fresh-fallen snow, may be wedded to songs of gallant aspiration or angelic sympathy, which shall raise the soul awhile ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... archway of Highgate Hill. There were a few fishermen loitering by the cliffs, on which their nets were hung up to dry; and, at a distance, the sound of some rustic pipe (more common at that day than in this), mingled now and then with the bells of the lazy mules, broke the voluptuous silence,—the silence of declining noon on the shores of Naples. Never till you have enjoyed it, never till you have felt its enervating but delicious charm, believe that you can comprehend all the meaning of the dolce far niente; and when that luxury has ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... realised that the volume was upside down, and even when he had righted it, the words he saw had no meaning for him. All the time a queer procession of women's faces was passing before his eyes—Caroline, with her half-flirtatious, wholly sentimental bon camaraderie; Stephanie, with her voluptuous figure and passion-lit eyes; and then, blotting the others utterly out of his thoughts and memory, Rosamund, with all the sweetness of life shining out of her eager face. He saw her as she had come to him ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... arm, by Odin's honour, Haste, hide thy tears and thee in shades of alder! Haste to the still, the peace-accustom'd valley, Where lazy herdsmen dance amid the clover. There wet each leaf which soft the west wind kisses, Each plant which breathes around voluptuous odours, With tears! There sigh and moan, and the tired peasant Shall hear thee, and, behind his ploughshare resting, Shall wonder at thy ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... folk as are full of young warm lusty blood and other humours exciting the flesh to filthy voluptuous living, the devil useth to make those things his instruments in tempting them and provoking them to it; and as, where he findeth some folk full of hot blood and choler, he maketh those humours his instruments to set their hearts on fire ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... been favourably received, and surely the age of their author will preclude severe criticism. The adventures of my life from sixteen to nineteen, and the dissipation into which I have been thrown in London, have given a voluptuous tint to my ideas; but the occasions which called forth my muse could hardly admit any other colouring. This volume is vastly correct and miraculously chaste. Apropos, talking ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... Taylors', whence in May 1569 he matriculated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar. At or before this time he must have contributed (though there are puzzles in the matter) certain translations of sonnets from Petrarch and Du Bellay to a book called The Theatre of Voluptuous Worldlings, published by a Brabanter, John van der Noodt. These, slightly changed from blank verse to rhyme, appeared long afterwards with his minor poems of 1590. But the original pieces had been claimed by the Dutchman; and ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Theseus. The white hand of Circe may have closed around this stem when she stood to greet Ulysses, and knew not that he had the saving herb in his palm. Goneril may have sent this green and gilded shape to Regan. Fair Rosamond may have drunk from it while the Queen watched her. At some voluptuous feast, Caesar Borgia and his sister, sitting crowned with roses, side by side, may have pressed it upon a reluctant guest, who had, perhaps, a treasure of his own. I dare swear Rene, the Florentine, hath fingered many such ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... this hope they have remained, and now remain, where they are. Take away this hope, by making slavery the distinctive bond of union of a new government, and you drive them to the North. These persons are not among the rich, the voluptuous, the effeminate; nor are they the despised, the indigent, the thriftless—they are men of moderate property, of intelligence, of conscience—in every way the "bone and sinew" of ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... misery to have been born, and to be awake and work; and for the duller a felicity, if, like hibernating animals, safe-lodged in some Salamanca University, or Sybaris City, or other superstitious or voluptuous Castle of Indolence, they can slumber-through, in stupid dreams, and only awaken when the loud-roaring hailstorms have all done their work, and to our prayers and martyrdoms the new ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... who cooeperated with him and helped him in all his undertakings with the utmost zeal was Lucius Aelius Sejanus, a son of Strabo, and formerly a favorite of Marcus Gabius Apicius,—that Apicius who so surpassed all mankind in voluptuous living that when he had once desired to learn how much he had already spent and how much he still had, on finding that two hundred and fifty myriads were left him became grief-stricken, feeling that he was destined to die of ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... frogs, barking, and sounds of a harmonium, of a woman screeching.... I stopped in Kulikov's hotel, where I took a room for seventy-five kopecks. After sleeping on wooden sofas and washtubs it was a voluptuous sight to see a bed with a mattress, a washstand.... Fragrant breezes came in at the wide-open window and green branches thrust themselves in. It was a glorious morning. It was a holiday (May 6th) and the bells were ringing in the cathedral. People were coming out from mass. I saw police ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... time Edith left him, he married Abby Wilson. She had grown into a voluptuous though coarse maturity, and was dashing in dress and manner. Her father had recently died, leaving her a fine property. She had always coveted Ben, and did not delay the nuptials from any sense of delicacy, but rather hastened the hour which should ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... non-resistant quasi-ascetic, is the exception that proves the rule; he may be persecuted, but he persecutes not again. He is the best authenticated type living of primitive Christian. That the religion of Jesus was a purely reactionary movement, suggested by the smug complacency and voluptuous condition of the times, most thinking men agree. Where rich Pharisees adopt a standard of life that can only be maintained by devouring widows' houses and oppressing the orphan, the needs of the hour bring to the front a man who will swing the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... similar in Mrs. ——'s mind, and to me it taints more or less everything it touches. She showed me the other day an etching of Eve, from one of Raphael's compositions. The figure, of course, was naked, and being of the full, round, voluptuous, Italian order, I did not admire it,—the antique Diana, drawing an arrow from her quiver, her short drapery blown back from her straight limbs by her rapid motion, being my ideal of beauty in a womanly shape. "Ah, but," said Mrs. ——, "look at the inimitable coquetry ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... term with men who might have been called cranks. Bernard Shaw declined to dine with them ... he preferred to eat at home.... "Voluptuous vegetarian!" said Gilbert ... but he talked to them for an hour on "Equality" and tried to persuade them to advocate equal incomes for all, asserting that this was desirable from every point of view, biological, social ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... practice that salutary rigor by which M. de Metternich prolongs his statu quo; but we would advise you to do so with more tact and with still more tenderness; for your wife is more crafty than all the Germans put together, and as voluptuous as the Italians. ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... Petrani: the small head indicates a person below the middle height; the attributes are those of a Roman matron in her pride; her high complexion, graceful contour, straight nose, black eyebrows, and expression at the same time imperious and voluptuous indicate this character to the life; a smile still seems to linger on the charming dimpled cheeks and perfect mouth mentioned by the chronicler, and her face is exquisitely framed by luxuriant curls falling from her forehead in ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Malati, a love-glance is said to be "anointed with nectar and poison;" when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard, though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin; voluptuous, though piercing—when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is love only in the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Flowers, and the title would fit well with the substance of the ceremonies if at that season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to creep from the narrow house with the opening flowers. There may therefore be a measure of truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis worship a dreamy voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the King of Terrors, but as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to himself and lulls them into an eternal sleep. The infinite charm of nature in the Lebanon, he thought, lends itself to religious emotions of this sensuous, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... temperament, fed with the infinite varieties of Europe, had seldom given way to the pleasures of indolence. Even satiety had not meant rest. But California—as distinct from San Francisco—with her traditions of luxurious idleness, the low languid murmur of her woods, her soft voluptuous air, her remoteness from the shrieking nerve centres of the United States, the sublime indifference of her people to the racing hours, drew so many quiet fingers across his tired brain, half obliterating deep and ugly impressions, giving him back something of the sense of youth and future. Perhaps ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... which we ate a-bed in most voluptuous disorder, Charles got up, and taking a passionate leave of me for a few hours, went to town, where concerting matters with a young sharp lawyer, they went together to my late venerable mistress's, from whence I had, but the day before, made my elopement, and with whom he was determined to settle ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... desire me to take your life. No, my aim and my soul refuse the request." This said, she required the magician to go before, and guide her to the castle. The prisoners were set at liberty, though some, in their secret hearts, regretted the voluptuous life which was thus brought to an end. Bradamante and Rogero met one ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Volatilise vaporigi. Vol-au-vent pastecxo. Volcano vulkano. Volcanic vulkana. Volley (gun firing) pafilado. Voluble babilema, fluantparola. Volume (book) volumo. Volume (size) dikeco. Voluminous multdika. Voluntary memvola, propramova. Volunteer memvolulo. Voluptuous voluptema. Voluptuousness volupteco. Vomit vomi. Vomiting vomado. Vomitory vomilo. Voracious englutema. Voracity engluteco. Vortex turnakvo, turnigxado. Vote vocxdoni, baloti. Vouch garantii, atesti. Voucher garantio, garantianto, atesto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... say at first, second, or third sight of Angelique des Meloises. She was indeed a fair girl to look upon,—tall, and fashioned in nature's most voluptuous mould, perfect in the symmetry of every part, with an ease and beauty of movement not suggestive of spiritual graces, like Amelie's, but of terrestrial witcheries, like those great women of old who drew down the very gods from Olympus, and who in all ages have incited men to ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... revenge, are the motives of those who are really energetic . . . It is very difficult for me to know my friends; this also preys heavily on my spirits. The gold of the royalists is as plentiful as when the wretched woman, who is now about to die, was revelling in her voluptuous pride at Versailles. I know that the hands of many, who call themselves patriots, are even now grasping at the wages for which they are to betray the people. A day of reckoning shall come for all ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... daughter of Robert Brudenel, Earl of Cardigan, and the wife of Francis, Earl of Shrewsbury: amongst many shameless women she was the most shameless, and her face seems to have well expressed her mind. In the round, fair visage, with its languishing eyes, and full, pouting mouth, there is something voluptuous and bold. The forehead is broad, but low; and the wavy hair, with its tendril curls, comes down almost to the fine arched eyebrows, and then, falling into masses, sets off white shoulders which seem to designate an inelegant amount of embonpoint. There is nothing elevated in the whole countenance, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... blushing oleander in full bloom, twenty, thirty, forty feet above the street—the painted halls, moldering and blotting, and rotting in the damp corners, and still shining out in beautiful colors and voluptuous designs, where the walls are dry—the faded figures on the outsides of the houses, holding wreaths, and crowns, and flying upward, and downward, and standing in niches, and here and there looking fainter and more feeble than elsewhere, by contrast ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... soon became transformed into some sombre allegory, of I know not what aspect of human life. She opposed to the vigorous and ardent expression of her commanding acquaintance a revelation of heartless corruption and voluptuous cruelty. Heedless enough to perpetrate a crime, hardy enough to feel no misgivings; a pitiless demon that wrings larger and kinder natures with torments that it is incapable of knowing, that simpers over a traffic in love, sheds tears over a victim's ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... all are polygamists. Their religion appeals to the luxury of animal propensities, and the voluptuous character of the Orientals has penetrated ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... noble Branches. Charles Beauclerk, Duke of St. Albans, born 8 May, 1670; James Beauclerk, born 25 December, 1671, ob, Septemher, 1680, the two sons of Nell Gwynne by Charles II. There is an exquisitely voluptuous painting by Gascar, engraved by Masson, of Nell Gwynne on a bed of roses whilst the two boys as winged amorini support flowing curtains and draperies. Her royal lover appears in the distance. There is also a well-known ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... of all those underground benefactions in which he himself had acted as almoner—the bank-notes to poverty, the Sandeman's port and the evaporated turtle-soup to sickness. And the pity of it that such a man should so misjudge his Claudia! 'Voluptuous ice-woman.' He could fathom the meaning of the phrase, but the wave it would fain have spouted over his Claudia left her angel raiment dry. Neither one nor the other of the far-parted spumings of the wave touched her. Was that ice when her lips were so tenderly laid ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... existence is almost a gratuitous gift of nature; his wants are supplied without laborious exertion, his desires are gratified without restraint, his soul remains in peaceful indolence and tranquillity, and his life glides on in voluptuous apathy and tranquil calm: he has few solicitudes or apprehensions, and he meets the stroke of fate with ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... Life of Fenton Johnson describes Ford as 'a clergyman at that time too well known, whose abilities, instead of furnishing convivial merriment to the voluptuous and dissolute, might have enabled him to excel among the virtuous and the wise.' Johnson's Works, viii. 57. Writing to Mrs. Thrale on July 8, 1771, he says, 'I would have been glad to go to Hagley [close to Stourbridge] for I should have had the opportunity of recollecting past times, and ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... "if I were only that butterfly!" At that moment the luxurious vagrant, in the midst of its careless sports, and voluptuous banquet, became entangled in a web woven by a great black spider, which sat with eager impatience waiting until it had wound itself into the toils by its fruitless exertions, that he might seize and devour his prey. The heart of Adakar melted with pity; starting up from the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... now that September is deep and that we are cool as people hoped to be when at hottest.... Do tell me your full thought of the commonwealth of women.[168] I begin by agreeing with you as to his implied under-estimate of women; his women are too voluptuous; however, of the most refined voluptuousness. His gardener's daughter, for instance, is just a rose: and 'a Rose,' one might beg all poets to observe, is as precisely sensual as fricasseed chicken, or even boiled beef and carrots. ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... yielding anew to the sense of indolent luxury and voluptuous ease his surroundings engendered,—and presently the aroma of rising incense mingled itself with the scent of the strewn rose-petals,—the pages had replenished the incense-burner, and now, these duties ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... with the talkative Annette, that this young man was making a change for the worse, and could not forbear silently lamenting, that he should be drawn from the innocence and beauty of these scenes, to the corrupt ones of that voluptuous city. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... joke this book-faking. Wouldn't Thackeray have lambasted the best sellers? A fancy picture of a girl on the cover, something doing all the time, and a happy ending—that's the recipe. Or else be as voluptuous as velvet. Wait till my novel, 'Three Minutes,' comes out. Order ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... which is in the act of whetting a sickle. All these were in Paris, and are now restored to this Gallery. In this chamber two pictures struck me in particular: the one the Venus of Titian, a most voluptuous figure; the other a portrait of the mistress of Rafaello, called "La Fornarina," from her ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... sin of impurity was the reigning vice in India amongst the Portuguese, he applied himself, in a particular manner, to withdraw them from their voluptuous living. The first rule of his proceeding was to insinuate himself into the favour, not only of the concubinarians, but of their mistresses; and he compassed this by the mildness of his aspect, by the obligingness of his words, and sometimes by good offices. Yet we cannot think that the ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... so skeptical and voluptuous, so much of a philosophe and pyrrhoneste, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society—to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes; and not all the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... till now; for first, he succeeded even to triumph upon Eve, he did the like upon Cain, and in short upon the whole World, one Man (Noah) excepted; when he blended the Sons of God, and the Daughters of Hell, for so the Word is understood, together, in promiscuous voluptuous ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... Megabazus seemed to feel a savage joy, a ferocious pleasure, in employing only the same means chosen by the Lydian king, and turning to account for the murder those very precautions which had been adopted for voluptuous fantasy. ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... an Oriental gem in an American setting; or such a strange Southern beauty in an exotic frame. For one would think her from the South, or further down from Mexico. Nay, of Andalusian, and consequently of Arabian, origin she must be. Her hair and her eyes are of the richest jet; her glance, voluptuous, mysterious; her complexion, neither white nor olive, but partakes of both,—a gauze-like shade of heliotrope, as it were, over a pink and straw surface, if you can imagine that; and her expression, a play between devotion and diabolism—now a question mark to love, now an exclamation ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour, Voluptuous transport ripens with the corn Beneath a warm moon like a ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... cercus—that uncanny white witch of a creature, with its petals moulded in wax or ivory, its golden-brown leaf-sheathings, and its unequalled emerald (is it a tint, or is it but a shadow?) far down within the lovely cup, with that overpowering voluptuous odor, burdening the atmosphere, permeating the innermost fibres of sensation, steeping the soul in lethargy! What more fit exponent can there be for this weird plant's expression than the song of the serpent-charmer, the singing which can root the feet unto ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... things fared similarly. These men who, in the days of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu, had directed the policies of their fiefs and led their armies in the field, were gradually transformed, during the lone peace of the Tokugawa era, into voluptuous faineants or, at best, thoughtless dilettanti, willing to abandon the direction of their affairs to seneschals and mayors, who, while on the whole their administration was able and loyal, found their account in contriving and perpetuating the effacement of their chiefs. Thus, in effect, the government ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... though not deaf, nor obstinate to find 340 Error without excuse upon the side Of them who strove against us, more delight We took, and let this freely be confessed, In painting to ourselves the miseries Of royal courts, and that voluptuous life 345 Unfeeling, where the man who is of soul The meanest thrives the most; where dignity, True personal dignity, abideth not; A light, a cruel, and vain world cut off From the natural inlets of just sentiment, 350 From lowly sympathy and chastening truth; Where good and evil interchange their ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... voluptuous-looking brunette—left her escort and went directly to the space by the piano. Here she was soon dancing with one of the coloured ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... was sacred with him; he had no sort of worthy intimacy with any one; had a declared contempt for faith, promises, honour, probity, truth; took pleasure at laughing at all these things; was equally voluptuous and ambitious, wishing to be all in all in everything; counting himself alone as everything, and whatever was not connected with him as nothing; and regarding it as the height of madness to think or act otherwise. With all this he was soft, cringing, supple, a flatterer, and false admirer, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... shuttle and the daylong dance to it are not altogether of the kind which Milton speaks of when he invokes the "soft Lydian airs" of voluptuous leisure. From this time henceforward for half a weary year, from the bell-call of morning twilight to half-past seven in the evening, with brief intermissions for two hasty meals, the operatives will ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Splendour still is lingering there. And yonder towers the Prince's palace fair: There thou too, Vathek! England's wealthiest son,[bb][50] Once formed thy Paradise, as not aware When wanton Wealth her mightiest deeds hath done,[bc] Meek Peace voluptuous lures was ever wont ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the Feast of Venus in the island of Cythera: about eleven feet by seven. There is also another, of himself, in the Garden of Love—with his two wives—in the peculiarly powerful and voluptuous style of his pencil. The picture is about four feet long. His portrait of one of his wives, of the size of life, habited only in an ermine cloak at the back (of which the print is well known) is an extraordinary production ... ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... before it had sunk into the eclipse which barbaric spoliations and papal usurpations, and general ignorance, madness, and violence produced,—there was one at Antioch (the seat of the old Greco-Asiatic civilization, alike refined, voluptuous, and intellectual) who was making a mighty stir and creating a mighty fame. This was Chrysostom, whose name has been a synonym of eloquence for more than fifteen hundred years. His father, named Secundus, was a man of high military rank; his mother, Anthusa, was a woman of rare Christian graces,—as ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... closing To grief—the woman-shame no art can heal— To that small life beneath my heart reposing! Man, man, the wild beast for its young can feel! Proud flew the sails—receding from the land, I watch'd them waning from the wistful eye, Round the gay maids on Seine's voluptuous strand, Breathes the false incense ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... in luxuriant bloom, and a thousand other evergreens, on shore, vie with voluptuous aquatic flowers to bewilder and delight the astonished traveller, accustomed hitherto only to the more unassuming productions of the sober north. Everything here was new, strange, and solemn. The gigantic ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... beautiful of their palaces. Here, when wearied with the dust and toil of the city, they loved to retreat, and solace themselves with the society of their favorite concubines, wandering amidst groves and airy gardens, that shed around their soft, intoxicating odors, and lulled the senses to voluptuous repose. Here, too, they loved to indulge in the luxury of their baths, replenished by streams of crystal water which were conducted through subterraneous silver channels into basins of gold. The spacious gardens were stocked with numerous varieties ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... away, and in your sweet society I shall grow joyous again. We will sing the ditties of my fatherland; and, provided no one is within hearing, I will teach you our German dances, which, because of the corruption that dwells within their hearts, these French people stigmatize as voluptuous. With such a birdling as you to carol around me, the lark that once dwelt in my heart, will find its voice again, and awake to sing a hymn of thankfulness to God, who has enriched me with the blessing of ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... brilliant flowerbeds and the white walls of the villa. Under the green arch of the trees, where luminous insects, white and flame-colored butterflies, aimlessly chased one another, Marsa half slumbered in a sort of voluptuous oblivion, a happy calm, in that species of nirvana which the open air of summer brings. She felt herself far away from the entire world in that corner of verdure, and abandoned herself to childish hopes and dreams, in profound enjoyment ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I propose," said the third demon who came forward, "is involved in the general cultivation of music, which I contend would render men effeminate, indolent, voluptuous, and finally vicious and corrupt, so that whole nations might eventually be kept out of heaven and secured for hell through its ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... is something diabolic in such pleasure, especially when it is felt by a man intoxicated with love, and full of religious respect for the virgin of his election. This feeling is, from a rational point of view, absurd, and in its tendencies, immoral; but it is delicious in its sacredly voluptuous subtlety. Defloration thus has its powerful fascination in the respect consciously or unconsciously felt for woman's chastity. In marriage, the feeling is yet more complicated: in deflowering his bride, the Christian (that is, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... City class; he carried an air of sleekness. Clearly he was a worthy citizen, a man who had Got On, and had now abandoned himself to this most odious of vices. And there he stood, in a lilac light, splashed with voluptuous crimsons and purples, dispensing Charity to the little ones before him whose souls were of hills and the sea. He began to address them. It appeared that the Orphanage had received, that very morning, forty more children; and he wished to observe how unnecessary ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... those of Debussy. Emerson is definite in that his art is based on something stronger than the amusing or at its best the beguiling of a few mortals. If he uses a sensuous chord, it is not for sensual ears. His harmonies may float, if the wind blows in that direction, through a voluptuous atmosphere, but he has not Debussy's fondness for trying to blow a sensuous atmosphere from his own voluptuous cheeks. And so he is an ascetic! There is a distance between jowl and soul—and it is not measured by the fraction of an inch between Concord and Paris. On the ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... idols of this world are fame, pleasure and wealth, and the love of these is the strong passion of the heart. But it is the most prolific source of individual, social and public misfortune, the most mischievous, contentious and demoralizing passion. The ambitious, the voluptuous, the rich and the great are not necessarily happy. Alexander wept upon the throne of the world because there was not another world ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... blaze of orient sky, 310 "Sweet MAY! thy radiant form unfold; "Unclose thy blue voluptuous eye, "And wave thy shadowy locks ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... time when New England groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous, had annulled the charters of all the colonies and sent a harsh and unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger our religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a single characteristic ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Missionario. Antonio de Moraes, in this story, is not so strong in will as Taunay's vicar of sorrows. Antonio is a missionary "with the vocation of a martyr and the soul of an apostle," on duty in the tropics. The voluptuous magnetism of the Amazon seizes his body. Slowly, agonizingly, but surely he succumbs to the enchantment, overpowered ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... perspective of the whole is kept steadily in view. No part is disproportionate or inappropriate. The arresting overture describing the swift and sudden approach of the Red Death, the gay, thoughtless security of Prince Prospero and his guests within the barricaded abbey, the voluptuous masquerade held in a suite of seven rooms of seven hues, the disconcerting chime of the ebony clock that momentarily stills the grotesque figures of the dancers, prepare us for the dramatic climax, the entry of the audacious guest, the Red Death, and his struggle with Prince Prospero. ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... and it was like the music of a hundred chiming bells. There was a tremor of the bow, and I heard a flute play, and a harp, and a golden-mouthed cornet; I heard the mirthful babble of happy voices, and peals of laughter ringing in the swelling tide of pleasure. Then I saw a vision of snowy arms, voluptuous forms, and light fantastic slippered feet, all whirling and floating in the mazes of the misty dance. The flying fingers now tripped upon the trembling strings like fairy-feet dancing on the nodding ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... in their slow progress with their helpless burden to the lace-canopied and snowy couch of the young gambler, it seemed almost a profanation of some feminine seclusion. Gideon, to whom such luxury was unknown, was profoundly troubled. The voluptuous ease and sensuousness, the refinements of a life of irresponsible indulgence, affected him with a physical terror to which in his late moment of real peril he had been a stranger; the gilding and mirrors blinded his eyes; even the faint perfume seemed to him an unhallowed incense, and turned him ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, voluptuous poem of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance; glowing with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure with the burning chastity of passion, which completes and exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what ...
— Walt Whitman Yesterday and Today • Henry Eduard Legler
... superior position for which he was designed, than by the interpretation of Bacon upon the legends of the Syren coast "When the wise Ulysses passed," says he, "he caused his mariners to stop their ears, with wax, knowing there was in them no power to resist the lure of that voluptuous song. But he, the much experienced man, who wished to be experienced in all, and use all to the service of wisdom, desired to hear the song that he might understand its meaning. Yet, distrusting his own power to be firm in his better purpose, he caused himself ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... peace, but more care, more trouble, than a man had in the first place when he was without them. And therefore Tullius says, in that book on Paradoxes, when execrating riches: "I at no time firmly believed the money of those men, or magnificent mansions, or riches, or lordships, or voluptuous joys, with which especially they are shackled, to be amongst things good or desirable, since I saw certain men in the abundance of them especially desire those wherein they abounded; because at no time is the thirst of cupidity quenched; not only are ...
— The Banquet (Il Convito) • Dante Alighieri
... an expression of anger. He rose from the table, and he looked round the room. Its appearance was singularly jarring, shattering as it did his dream of the cloister, and up-building in fancy the horrid fabric of marriage and domesticity. The room seemed to him a symbol—with the great bed, voluptuous, the corpulent arm-chair, the toilet-table shapeless with muslin—of the hideous laws of the world and the flesh, ever at variance and at war, and ever defeating the indomitable aspirations of the soul. ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... from the mouth to the heart, and thence lower down, with such delicate industry has nature prepared everything! The little glands of the lips, their spongy tissue, their velvety paps, the fine skin, ticklish, gives them an exquisite and voluptuous sensation, which is not without analogy with a still more hidden and still more sensitive part. Modesty may suffer from a lengthily savoured kiss ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... not, and you find this more in music than in any other phase of Spanish life. The Germans dance the gay and voluptuous waltz with a 'bock' in their hand, singing the Gaudeamus igitur, that students' hymn glorifying the material life free from care. The French sing amid rippling laughter, and dance with their free and elastic limbs, greeting with rapturous applause their fantastic and monkey-like movements. ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... have chosen better foils for her own voluptuous style than the three women, all angles—looking as she always did, as though she had been visiting Vulcan, and feeding on the red-hot coals beneath his hammer, while quenching her thirst from a cantharus given her by ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... poison by the help of man's chief nurse, sleep; and now he must work off the rest, grumbling at this the kind severity of his lot. Warm men, respectable men, among whom justices of the peace and other voluptuous disciplinarians, were tempted out of delicious beds by the fragrant berry, the balmy leaf, snowy damask, fire glowing behind polished bars—in short, by multifarious comfort set in a frame of gold. ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... lean face and sharp Greek profile, his long, lank, unpowdered locks, his simple uniform, and awkward seat in the saddle, he looked like a new human type, neither angel nor devil but an inscrutable apparition from another sphere. To officers and men the voluptuous city extended wide its arms, and the shabby soldiery were incongruous figures where their entertainers were elegant and fastidious beyond what the guests had dreamed. With stern impartiality the liberator repressed all excess in his army, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... too was fantastically ornate, surely the most extraordinary hotel on earth, with a high roof of a gray severity which ironically frowned down upon gilded balconies and nude plaster women who supported them, robustly voluptuous creatures who faded into foliage below the waist, like plump nymphs escaping the rude pursuit of gods. Their bareness and boldness startled the convent-bred girl, even horrified her. She was the last to leave the omnibus, ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... philosophical schools. On the other hand, the homely, domestic joys of the average Jew and his intense devotion to the service of the temple and to the faith of his fathers seemed contemptible to those familiar with the brilliant, voluptuous life of the Hellenic cities. Hellenism protested against the narrowness, barrenness, and intolerance of Judaism; Judaism protested against the godlessness and immorality of Hellenism. Both were right in their protests, and yet each in a sense ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... a moment of the voluptuous joy of suddenly finding myself in the hyperborean regions with the cold thirty degrees ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... the afternoon Lucien was still sleeping, cradled in this voluptuous paradise. He had caught glimpses of Coralie's chamber, an exquisite creation of luxury, a world of rose-color and white. He had admired Florine's apartments, but this surpassed ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... glove, and a delicate hand, and a winning smile, and you have secured your passport to the satin and brocade of her mansion. A spring is heard to tick, a whisper of caution to some one within follows, and a block broad enough to admit your hat swings open, disclosing the voluptuous splendor of a great hall, the blaze of which flashes upon your senses, and fills you instinctively with curious emotions. Simultaneously a broad, cheerful face, somewhat matronly in its aspect, and enlivened with an urbane smile, darkens the space. After a few moments' ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... had encounters with the fierce Figian; the savage New Caledonian; both addicted to the horrid habit of anthropophagy. He has been a spectator to the voluptuous dances of Samoa, and looked upon the daughters of Otaheite, Owyhee, whose ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... ran the sensuous surface fires of her dream-wrought limbs. Upon my face the weird magnetic lure of ever-nearing, never-kissing lips made soundless music. Like a sister, like a mother she caressed me, lazy with the huge feast; and yet, a drowsy, half-voluptuous joy shimmered and rippled ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... investigated that question, the great object of moral philosophy, how men might be rendered happy in the present world. In the first place, he refutes the opinion of the voluptuous, who make happiness to consist in corporal pleasures. "Not only," said he, "are these pleasures fleeting, they are also succeeded by disgust; and while they enfeeble the body they debase ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... Here, when wearied with the dust and toil of the city, they loved to retreat, and solace themselves with the society of their favorite concubines, wandering amidst groves and airy gardens, that shed around their soft, intoxicating odors, and lulled the senses to voluptuous repose. Here, too, they loved to indulge in the luxury of their baths, replenished by streams of crystal water which were conducted through subterraneous silver channels into basins of gold. The spacious gardens were stocked with numerous ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... trowe ye the peple eek al aboute Wolde of it seye? It is ful light to arede. 1570 They wolden seye, and swere it, out of doute, That love ne droof yow nought to doon this dede, But lust voluptuous and coward drede. Thus were al lost, y-wis, myn herte dere, Your honour, which that ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... you wretch! And yet we poor women," she went on, "are forbidden pleasures far less voluptuous than this. There is no flesh in the world as soft as these. None. When M. Verdurin did me the honour of being madly jealous... come, you might at least be polite. Don't say that you never ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the great Herod, a voluptuous, murderous tyrant; and, from some source or other, he had inherited a very weak nature. Perhaps, if he had come under strong, wholesome influences, he would have lived a passably good life; but it was his misfortune to fall under the influence of a beautiful fiend, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... was one of those lovely days so peculiar to the sunny regions of favoured Australia. The sky was without a cloud to vary its unbroken and immaculate azure, and the sun shone with a voluptuous lustre, which rendered the atmosphere warm, though not oppressive, and the face of the country smiling and cheerful. The people around the place—men, women, and children, clean and neatly clad—assembled in an orderly manner; while the sombre stillness of the bush tended to impress ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... this book-faking. Wouldn't Thackeray have lambasted the best sellers? A fancy picture of a girl on the cover, something doing all the time, and a happy ending—that's the recipe. Or else be as voluptuous as velvet. Wait till my novel, 'Three Minutes,' comes out. Order ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... were beat with great exactness and uniformity. The dances, however, consisted more in wanton gestures than in muscular exertion or graceful attitudes. The ladies vied with each other in displaying the most voluptuous movements imaginable. ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... were only that butterfly!" At that moment the luxurious vagrant, in the midst of its careless sports, and voluptuous banquet, became entangled in a web woven by a great black spider, which sat with eager impatience waiting until it had wound itself into the toils by its fruitless exertions, that he might seize and devour his prey. The heart of Adakar melted with pity; starting up from the spot where ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... amalgamation with a rival company in 1787. Thus was created the famous "Northwest Company," which for a time held a lordly sway over the wintry lakes and boundless forests of the Canadas, almost equal to that of the East India Company over the voluptuous climes and magnificent ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... has generally reached that state when the greatest natural pleasure is found inside rather than outside of a sleeping-bag. But in spite of the general detestation in which De Aar is held, the neighbouring hills furnish, in the quickening light of dawn, studies in changing colour so voluptuous, varied, and fantastic that the wonder is that all the artists in the world have not fore-gathered at the place. But familiarity with all this beauty reduces it to a commonplace. It just becomes part of the monotony of your daily life, especially if you have, as we had that morning, ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... a sound of revelry by night, And Belgium's capital had gather'd then Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a marriage bell; But hush! hark! a deep sound strikes a ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... fascinating woman," continued the major. "That Juno-like beauty which so distinguishes her on the stage scarcely shows itself in the drawing-room. On the stage she is queenly—in private, soft, voluptuous and winning as a houri. I don't wonder that she has crowds ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... rare adorned and strange jewels, Reposed on a billowy nest, A prey to voluptuous longing, Tamara awaited ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... sitting-room had been arranged by the artist who had done the house, as a perfect bower of Italian Sixteenth Century art. Mr. Jephson, the artist, had assured her that this period would make a perfect background for her fresh and rather voluptuous coloring; it had not become so banal as any of the French Louis'. And so Arabella had been instructed to drum into her head the names of the geniuses of that time, and their works, and she could now babble sweetly all about Giorgione, ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... sex to use them. "Sellae" was the name of seats common to both sexes. The use of the "speculum," or mirror, was also confined to the female sex; indeed, even Pallas or Minerva was represented as shunning its use, as only befitting her more voluptuous fellow-goddess, Venus.] ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... distant corner a Turco, wearing his red fez upon his head, sat with his chin on his knees amid an improvised bivouac of bed-clothes and looked on uncomprehendingly. The rest smoked cigarettes and toyed with the voluptuous pages ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... resembled her mother, the beautiful Catharine, but was voluptuous and weak. She abandoned herself to puerile amusements and degrading follies. And she was as superstitious as she was debauched. She would continue whole hours on her knees before an image, to which she spoke, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 1787: the poet, accompanied by his future biographer, Professor Walker, went, when close on twilight, to this romantic scene: "he threw himself," said the Professor, "on a heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous enthusiasm of imagination. In a few days I received a letter from Inverness, for the poet had gone on his way, with the Petition enclosed." His Grace of Athole obeyed the injunction: the picturesque points are ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... palace must have been inimitable. The display of counter-fascinations between these two tigers; their voluptuous natures mutually attracted; their hatred giving to each that deep interest in the other which so often turns to mutual passion while it incites to conquest; the grace and finish of their manners, concealing a ruthless ferocity; the splendor ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... of the table sat the Chief. His features were swarthy but elegant. He was splendidly dressed in new clothes, and had that voluptuous, dreamy air of grandeur about him which would at once rivet the gaze of folks generally. In answer to a highly enthusiastic call he arose and delivered an able and eloquent speech. We regret that our space does not permit us to give this truly great speech in full—we can merely ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... too far," he retorted. "To appear half nude on the stage and in some voluptuous scene exhibit one's personal charms to those who in an hour or so take their leave as they would of some courtesan after paying the usual fee! A ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... this man in the white coat had removed one tortoise-shell comb and then another; that his fingers were fumbling clumsily with unfamiliar hairpins; that this hair, this wonderful hair of hers, was going—she would never again feel its long voluptuous pull as it hung in a dark-brown glory down her back. For a second she was near breaking down, and then the picture before her swam mechanically into her vision—Marjorie's mouth curling in a faint ironic smile ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... artist, she would have presented him with his nephew! How different a figure did the same prince make in a reign of dissimilar complexion! The philosophic warrior, who could relax himself into the ornament of a refined court, was thought a savage mechanic, when courtiers were only voluptuous wits. Let me transcribe a picture of Prince Rupert, drawn by a man who was far from having the least portion of wit in that age, who was superior to its indelicacy, and who yet was so overborne ...
— The Memoirs of Count Grammont, Complete • Anthony Hamilton
... soldier and the indifference of the patrician. In France the wealth was the accumulation of an immense commerce and the varied labors of the most industrious nation on the earth diverted by a brilliant and corrupt court, a profligate and chivalrous nobility, and a rich and voluptuous capital. ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... heal— To that small life beneath my heart reposing! Man, man, the wild beast for its young can feel! Proud flew the sails—receding from the land, I watch'd them waning from the wistful eye, Round the gay maids on Seine's voluptuous strand, Breathes the false incense of his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... twitch, as if dazed. Then she looked up at her husband with a queer smile, puckering the corners of her eyes. He looked at the cigarettes, not at her. His face had the blunt voluptuous gravity of a young lion, a great cat. She kept him standing for some moments impassively. Then suddenly she hung her long, delicate fingers over the box, in doubt, and spasmodically jabbed at the cigarettes, clumsily raking ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... panting tow'rds the sky, A foil'd ascent, while adverse fortune flings Her strong link'd meshes o'er his flutt'ring wings, Sinks, while exalted Ignorance supine, Unheeded slumbers like the pamper'd swine; Obsequious slaves in his voluptuous bowers Young pleasures warble, while the dancing Hours In sickly sweetness languishingly move, Like new-waked virgins flush'd with dreams of love— Him, when by Death's dark angel swept away From sloth's embrace, in premature decay, Surviving friends, donation'd into grief, Shall mourn with ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... day: Voluptuous July held her lover, Earth, With her warm arms, upon her glowing breast, And twined herself about him, as he lay Smiling and panting in his dream-stirred rest. She bound him with her limbs of perfect grace, And hid him with her trailing robe ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... at the bed; it stood in an alcove on the side of the room furthest from where she was. It was long, low, and gilded; plum-coloured curtains rose in voluptuous folds till they were joined near the ceiling by a pair ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... o'er fair women and brave men; A thousand hearts beat happily; and when Music arose, with its voluptuous swell, Soft eyes looked love to eyes which spake again, And all went merry as a ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... have stated what were the characteristics which enabled her to hold the pleasure-loving cardinal so surely and to secure her recognition as the mother of several of his acknowledged children. We may imagine her to have been a strong and voluptuous woman like those still seen about the streets of Rome. They possess none of the grace of the ideal woman of the Umbrian school, but they have something of the magnificence of the Imperial City—Juno and ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... performing an extremely disagreeable task. Shudderingly she looked into the unpleasant bedroom, and comprehending all of the sordidness of the tragedy, spent half an hour with her teeth set hard together while she dragged out dingy blankets and hung them over the fence under a voluptuous plum-tree. The next hour was so disagreeably employed that she wondered afterward how even her sympathy could have driven her to the things she did. She carried more water, after she had scrubbed that bedroom, and opened the window with the aid of the hammer, and set the tea-kettle on to heat ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... her tiny ears, and clustered low at the back of her slender, well-shaped neck. Where the rays of light caught the coiled tresses they had the sheen of burnished gold. In the shadow they commingled those voluptuous tints by which the magic of Rubens has immortalized one fair woman, Isabella Brant, in every gallery of note ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... with an evident tendency to curl, if he had not worn it so short on account of the heat of the season, that a curl was rendered impossible; a heavy dark brown moustache, worn without other beard; a sunny hazel eye that seemed made for laughter, and a full, red, voluptuous lip that might have belonged to a sensualist; while the eye could really do other things than laughing, and the lip was quite as often compressed or curled in the bitterness of disdain or the earnestness of close thought, as employed to express any ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... Tacitus, parts of the tragedians, at school, but now he had it in his power to study a great author entire, and as a whole. Never before did he fully appreciate the "thunderous lilt" of Greek epic, the touching and voluptuous tenderness of Latin elegy, the regal pomp of history, the gorgeous and philosophic mystery of the old dramatic fables. Never before had he learnt to gaze on "the bright countenance of truth, in the mild and dewy air of delightful studies." Those who decry ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... the same heart whose wild pulse is thrilled by the adventurous interests of the huntsman and the wanderer, can beat in unison with the gentlest truth of deep devotion, is shown in "When other Friends are round Thee." "I love the Night" has the voluptuous elegance of the Spanish models. Were we to meet the lines "Oh, think of me!" in an anthology, we should suppose they were Suckling's—so admirably is the tone of feeling kept down to the limit of probable sincerity—which is a characteristic that the cavalier style of ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... into a higher life. An average slave-character, not difficult to govern, but without instinct to improve, filled the colony. A colonist would hardly suspect the fiery Africa whose sun ripened the ancestors of his slaves, unless he caught them by accident in the midst of their voluptuous Calenda, or watched behind some tree the midnight orgy of magic and Fetichism. A slave-climate gnawed at the bold edges of their characters and wore them down, as the weather rusted out more rapidly than anywhere else all the iron tools and implements ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... full-lipped. Here was none of smiling prettiness, for these eyes were grave and thoughtful, these lips, despite their soft, voluptuous curves, were firmly modelled like the rounded chin below, and, in all the face, despite its vivid youth, was a vague and ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... sang and smiled, and at the same time her face wore an expression of gravity, almost of sternness ... a token of perfect rapture! She smiled ... and Praxiteles' Faun, indolent, youthful as she, effeminate, and voluptuous, seemed to smile back at her from a corner, under the branches of an oleander, across the delicate smoke that curled upwards from a bronze censer on an antique tripod. The beautiful singer was alone. Spell-bound by the music, her beauty, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... boy's family was at that time very hard pressed for money, he travelled with thirty-five horses and sumpter mules. The princesses of the blood, each surrounded by a group of highborn and graceful ladies, accompanied the King; and the smiles of so many charming women inspired the throng of vain and voluptuous but highspirited gentlemen with more than common courage. In the brilliant crowd which surrounded the French Augustus appeared the French Virgil, the graceful, the tender, the melodious Racine. He had, in conformity with the prevailing fashion, become devout, had given up writing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Listen whilst I try And say. I joy to see the sunset slope Beyond the weak hours' hopeless horoscope, Leaving the heavens a melancholy calm, Of quiet colour chaunted like a psalm, In mildly modulated phrases; thus Your life shall fade like a voluptuous Vision beyond the sight, and you shall die Like some soft evening's sad serenity ... I would possess your dying hours; indeed My love is worthy of the gift, I ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... the inner side of the world; he wakens and strikes the strings for a dance, such as the world has never heard (Allegro Finale). It is the World's own dance; wild delight, cries of anguish, love's ecstacy, highest rapture, misery, rage; voluptuous now, and sorrowful; lightnings quiver, storm's roll; and high above the gigantic musician! banning and compelling all things, proudly and firmly wielding them from whirl to whirlpool, to the abyss.— He laughs at himself; for the incantation was, after all, but play ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... of a more intellectual and less voluptuous cast than that of the Queen; but impatience and anxiety had given her countenance a glow which it sometimes wanted, and her mien had a character of energetic dignity that imposed silence for a moment even on ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... vases on the mantel-tree; the figures on the hangings, and the print of Apollo and the Sibyl, taken from Salvator, and hung over the chimney. I eyed my own shape and garb in the mirror, and asked how my rustic appearance would be regarded by that supercilious and voluptuous being to whom I was ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall! Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with dreams? Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the soul aloft to the world of fancies, a world full of voluptuous imaginings, where the artist forgets the real world, yesterday and the morrow, the future—everything down to its miseries, the good and the ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac
... native energy upon these shores and realized in the history of their colonies the myth of Ulysses' comrades in the gardens of Circe. Hannibal was tamed by Capua. The Romans in their turn dreamed away their vigor at Baiae, at Pompeii at Capreae, until the whole region became a byword for voluptuous living. Here the Saracens were subdued to mildness, and became physicians instead of pirates. Lombards and Normans alike were softened down, and lost their barbarous fierceness amid the enchantments ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... general, I have observed throughout Germany that the women in the lower ranks degenerate far less from the ideal of a woman, than the men from that of man. The dances were reels and waltzes; but chiefly the latter. This dance is, in the higher circles, sufficiently voluptuous; but here the emotions of it were far more faithful interpreters of the passion, which, doubtless, the dance was intended to shadow; yet, ever after the giddy round and round is over, they walked to music, the woman laying her arm, with confident affection, ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... rather long wait. A distinctly long wait. Bell lighted a cigarette and seemed to become mildly bored. He regarded a voluptuous small statuette with every appearance of pleased interest. A subtly decadent painting seemed to amuse him considerably. He did not seem to notice that no windows at all were visible, and that shaded lamps lit this room, even ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... the talkative Annette, that this young man was making a change for the worse, and could not forbear silently lamenting, that he should be drawn from the innocence and beauty of these scenes, to the corrupt ones of that voluptuous city. ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... long uninterrupted leisure; I read my manuscript, and filled in some occurrences which I had forgotten, but which my diary enabled me to place in their proper order. This will account for the difference in style in places, which I now observe; and a very needless repetition, of voluptuous descriptions, which I had forgotten, had been before described; that however is inevitable, for human copulation, vary the incidents leading up to it as you may, is, and must be, at all times, much ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... all sections of society an ever-increasing lateness of retiring at night, coupled with a growth of indolence caused by every kind of sensual indulgence, not the least of which was gluttony. Music of a sensuous, voluptuous character formed a chief part of the brief Sunday services, and every item was loudly applauded as though the whole affair had been a performance rather than ...
— The Mark of the Beast • Sidney Watson
... the Spaniard, if not by nature indolent, is prone to luxury. The earth producing by handfuls, the colonists saw little necessity of laborious exertion. They accordingly degenerated from the spirit and enterprise of their ancestors, and fell into habits of voluptuous idleness. Agriculture was neglected, and the mines deserted. Contenting themselves with a bare supply of the wants of nature, they sank into such a state of indolence, that many of their slaves had no other employment than to swing them in their hammocks the livelong day. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... authority of the Press of England. Occasionally, when a publisher or author makes too free with the good name of an English citizen, the restraint of a prison cell is imposed upon the audacious libeller. Sometimes when a book offends against the public morals, and contains the outpourings of a voluptuous imagination, its author is condemned to lament in confinement over his indecorous pages. The world knows that Vizetelly, the publisher, was imprisoned for translating and publishing some of Zola's novels. Nana and L'Assommoir ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... Jerome, commenting on Matt. 11:8, "Behold they that are clothed in soft garments are in the houses of kings," says: "Hence we gather that an austere life and severe preaching should avoid the palaces of kings and the mansions of the voluptuous." But the needs of secular business induce men to frequent the palaces of kings. Therefore it is unlawful for religious to occupy themselves ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... earthly joy, the chants d'amour, or hymns to pleasure, sung by Armida's ministers (xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13). Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty, and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights. It remained for Tasso to give that magic of the senses vocal utterance. From the myrtle groves of Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... short in stature and inclined to corpulency; his head was large and round, with an ample forehead; his eyes were gray and very pleasant in their expression; his mouth was voluptuous, and upon his lips there usually lurked a smile, humorous in its threatening, provoking a pleasing dimple upon his cheek. In society, in his extreme old age, for I only knew him then, he was less gay than the general ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... manners of the day in gay society. His style was remarkably felicitous, and it is said that he adorned all that he touched. Most of his poems are quite short, and their subjects range from a touching outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the learned stiffness and affectation ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... a man would say at first, second, or third sight of Angelique des Meloises. She was indeed a fair girl to look upon,—tall, and fashioned in nature's most voluptuous mould, perfect in the symmetry of every part, with an ease and beauty of movement not suggestive of spiritual graces, like Amelie's, but of terrestrial witcheries, like those great women of old who drew down the very gods from Olympus, and who in ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... glorious essence as a God, Unmeasured space our chainless footsteps trode— All Nature our abode! Round us, in waters of delight, for ever Voluptuous flow'd the heavenly Nectar river; We were the master of the seal of things, And where the sunshine bathed Truth's mountain-springs Quiver'd our glancing wings. Weep for the godlike life we lost afar— Weep!—thou and I its scatter'd fragments are; ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... torment; but now the place was bare and empty and the door stood ajar. So came Beltane thither, bearing the torch, and stepped softly into the room beyond, a wide room, arras-hung and richly furnished, and looking around upon the voluptuous luxury of gilded couch and wide, soft bed, Beltane frowned suddenly upon a woman's dainty, ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... theatre excellently well, but in a style quite different to ours, and the women very fat and plain. And though Moll, being but a slight slip of a lass, in whom the warmer passions were unbegotten, could not give the bolero the voluptuous fervour of the Spanish dancers, yet in agility and in pretty innocent grace she did surpass them all to nought, which was abundantly proved when she danced it in our posada before a court full of Spaniards, for there they were like mad over her, casting their silk handkerchiefs at her feet in ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... at the rich table, and at the glittering chandelier overhead (albeit the lamps thereof were inferior to his own), and at the expanses of soft carpet, and at the silken-textured walls, and at the voluptuous curtains, and at the couple of impeccable gentlemen in-waiting, and at Joseph, who knew his place behind his master's chair—he came to the justifiable conclusion that money was a marvellous thing, and the workings of commerce mysterious and beautiful. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... such as Rossini can give us. If he was ever justified in giving vent to that flowery, voluptuous grace for which Italian music is blamed, is it not in this charming movement in which each person expresses joy? The enslaved people are delivered, and yet a passion in peril is fain to moan. Pharaoh's son loves a Hebrew woman, and she must leave him. What ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... and dephlogisticated music of the future, to be sure, will never appeal to the mob, which will keep on demanding its chance to gloat over gaudy, voluptuous women, and fat, scandalous tenors. The mob, even disregarding its insatiable appetite for the improper, is a natural hero worshiper. It loves, not the beautiful, but the strange, the unprecedented, the astounding; ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... it must be understood that Caesar, in his early youth, was not wasting his gifts in what seemed to be a half-voluptuous, half-adventurous, wholly careless life, but was accumulating strength by absorbing into himself the forces with which he came in contact, exhausting the intelligence of his companions in order to stock his own, learning everything simultaneously, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... Liszt tells of the capricious life infused into its courtly measures by the Polish aristocracy. It is at once the symbol of war and love, a vivid pageant of martial splendor, a weaving, cadenced, voluptuous dance, the pursuit of shy, coquettish woman ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... burning tropical sun, shooting above the eastern horizon as suddenly as the volcanic cone had been lifted above the fog. This hot sun burned away the mists in a few minutes and there, stretching below us, in all its oriental beauty was the sinewy, voluptuous form of the silver sand ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... eyes, as though gazing in fancy upon the glossy draperies and rosy flesh of those voluptuous ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... This, and That, freely and boldly, that so by thy thoughts it may presently appear that in all thee is sincere, and peaceable; as becometh one that is made for society, and regards not pleasures, nor gives way to any voluptuous imaginations at all: free from all contentiousness, envy, and suspicion, and from whatsoever else thou wouldest blush to confess thy thoughts were set upon. He that is such, is he surely that doth not put off to lay hold on that which is best indeed, a very priest and ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... around this stem when she stood to greet Ulysses, and knew not that he had the saving herb in his palm. Goneril may have sent this green and gilded shape to Regan. Fair Rosamond may have drunk from it while the Queen watched her. At some voluptuous feast, Caesar Borgia and his sister, sitting crowned with roses, side by side, may have pressed it upon a reluctant guest, who had, perhaps, a treasure of his own. I dare swear Rene, the Florentine, hath fingered many ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... time; he would effect a moral eclipse of its influence. He loved Henrietta Temple. She should be his. Who could prevent him? Was he not an Armine? Was he not the near descendant of that bold man who passed his whole life in the voluptuous indulgence of his unrestrained volition! Bravo! he willed it, and it should be done. Everything yields to determination. What a fool! what a miserable craven fool had he been to have frightened himself with the flimsy shadows of petty worldly ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the future life as that here set forth, it is plain, was strikingly adapted to win and work fervidly on the minds of the imaginative, voluptuous, indolent, passionate races of the Orient. It possesses a nucleus of just and natural moral conviction and sentiment, around which is grouped a composite of a score of superstitions afloat before the rise of Islam, set off with the arbitrary drapery of a poetic ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... one of the noblest of the nobility of France, alike in birth and in spirit. In his youth a voluptuous liver, he had afterwards undergone a genuine and solemn conversion. While in Switzerland, the news of the guillotining of his brother gave him such a shock, that it revolutionized his motives and his life. The gay, impassioned, fascinating man of the world became an austere and fervent Christian. ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... may say 'summer' now that September is deep and that we are cool as people hoped to be when at hottest.... Do tell me your full thought of the commonwealth of women.[168] I begin by agreeing with you as to his implied under-estimate of women; his women are too voluptuous; however, of the most refined voluptuousness. His gardener's daughter, for instance, is just a rose: and 'a Rose,' one might beg all poets to observe, is as precisely sensual as fricasseed chicken, or even boiled beef and carrots. Did you read Mrs. Butler's 'Year of Consolation,' and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... of this world are fame, pleasure and wealth, and the love of these is the strong passion of the heart. But it is the most prolific source of individual, social and public misfortune, the most mischievous, contentious and demoralizing passion. The ambitious, the voluptuous, the rich and the great are not necessarily happy. Alexander wept upon the throne of the world because there was not another world for ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... greenish-grey eyes fringed by long black lashes under curved dark brows contrasting with the warm auburn tint of the hair that showed under her sunhat. Her complexion was dazzlingly fair. Her mouth was rather large and voluptuous with full red lips and even white teeth. Bewitching dimples played in the pink cheeks. Even from a man like Wargrave, fresh from England and consequently more inclined to be critical of female beauty than were his comrades, who for many months had seen so ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. There were seven—an imperial suite. In many palaces, however, such suites form a long and straight vista, while the folding doors slide back nearly to the walls on either hand, so that the view of the whole ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... had arrived at the fulfilment of his wishes. In the retirement of his fairy-like palace by the lake he could enjoy voluptuous pleasures to the full. But already seventy-eight years had passed over his head, and old age had laid the burden of infirmity upon him. His dreams were dreams of blood, and vainly he sought refuge in chambers glittering with gold, adorned with arabesques, decorated with costly armour ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - ALI PACHA • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... sect have not two properties, fear it not; for it will not spread. The one is the supplanting, or the opposing, of authority established; for nothing is more popular than that. The other is the giving license to pleasures, and a voluptuous life. For as for speculative heresies (such as were in ancient times the Arians, and now the Armenians), though they work mightily upon men's wits, yet they do not produce any great alterations in states; except it be by the help of civil occasions. There be three manner of plantations of new sects. ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... after they be used, their verdure departeth, which showeth well that they be but deceits of pleasure, and not pleasures; and that it was the novelty which pleased, not the quality; and therefore we see that voluptuous men turn friars, and ambitious princes turn melancholy. But of knowledge there is no satiety, but satisfaction and appetite are ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... intellective; So by reason of thine understanding, Thou hast dominion of other beasts all, And naturally thou shouldst desire cunning To know strange effects and causes natural; For he that studieth for the life bestial,[12] As voluptuous pleasure and bodily rest, I account him never better than ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley
... nothing along with them but an impudent front, some vulgar trifles and foolish scholastic technicalities, unworthy of respect even at the crossing of the highways. This is the unworthy, vagrant, voluptuous race, fitter for the hog sty (haram) than the altar (aram), that basely prostitute divine literature; these are they who fill the pulpits, creep into the palaces of our nobility after all other prospects of existence fail them, owing to their imbecility of body and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
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