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More "Whimsical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... easy to see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover. Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... naturalist will dispute. And this is what he says: "It might seem as if the ancient Egyptians had been inspired by nature, for the purpose of transmitting to after ages a monument of her natural history. That strange and whimsical people, by embalming with so much care the brutes which were the objects of their stupid adoration, have left us in their sacred grottoes cabinets of zoology almost complete. Climate has conspired with art to preserve the bodies from corruption, and we can ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... whimsical little Mistress Fiddy, "if only Lady Betty were here—great, good, kind, clever, funny, beautiful Lady Betty—who cured me that night at Bath, papa and mamma, I would be well again. She knows the complaint; she has had it herself; and her ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... suitably performed. And be it told to Sir Mungo's praise, that there were points about him in the highest respect suited to his official situation. He had even in youth a naturally irregular and grotesque set of features, which, when distorted by fear, pain, and anger, looked like one of the whimsical faces which present themselves in a Gothic cornice. His voice also was high-pitched and querulous, so that, when smarting under Master Peter Young's unsparing inflictions, the expression of his grotesque physiognomy, and the superhuman yells ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... though there were something about Mr. Twist magnetic to that language. Everybody knew this, and it was perfectly natural for a well-off Easterner to have a little place out West, even if the choice of the little place was whimsical. But what about the Miss Twinklers? Who and what were they? ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... stirring in the latter's heart. He had long been searching for a fitting rider for the erratic and sensitive Dixie—whimsical and uncertain of taste as any woman—and though he could not bring himself to believe in Crimmins' eulogy of Garrison's riding ability, he was anxious to ascertain how far ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... it comes out even in his very selections of books to be printed, but chiefly in little touches all through his prefaces. For example, in his preface to the Morte d'Arthur he answers with a certain whimsical gravity the allegations of those who maintain that there was no such person as King Arthur, and that "all such books as been made of him be but feigned and fables." He recounts with assumed sincerity the evidence of the chronicles, the existence of Arthur's ...
— Printing and the Renaissance - A paper read before the Fortnightly Club of Rochester, New York • John Rothwell Slater
... melancholy in its developed form, a habit, not a mere temperament, he often speaks. He more than once laughs at the passing and half-fictitious melancholy of youth and love; in Don John in Much Ado he had sketched the sour and surly melancholy of discontent; in Jaques a whimsical self-pleasing melancholy; in Antonio in the Merchant of Venice a quiet but deep melancholy, for which neither the victim nor his friends can assign any cause.[41] He gives to Hamlet a temperament which would not develop ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... so low, my lord," said I, "but he may be yet exalted. We are, the best of us, the instruments of a whimsical providence" ("What a rank doctrine," muttered the minister), "and Caesar himself was sometimes craven before his portents. You, my lord, have the one consolation left, that all's not bye yet with the cause you champion, and you may yet lead it ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... of nearly all that was known or written of Japan till the last twenty-five years. How such a statement as this came to be published I quite fail to comprehend. There was plenty of literature in reference to Japan far more reliable than Kaemfer's whimsical "yarns" at a much earlier period than twenty-five years back. Sir Rutherford Alcock's "The Capital of the Tycoon" was, I think, published in 1863. Sir Rutherford was the first resident British Minister in Japan, and his book remains a stirring and, making allowance for the author's ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... their plantations with intrenchments of walls and high hedges, one has the benefit of them even in passing by. The dispersed buildings, I mean temples, bridges, etc. are generally Gothic or Chinese, and give a whimsical air of novelty that is very pleasing. You would like a drawing-room in the latter style that I fancied and have been executing at Mr. Rigby's, in Essex. it has large and Very fine Indian landscapes, with a black fret round ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... give the seriousness, the earnestness to the literature of the Bible. Men who express great ideas in literary form are not dilettante about them. One of the English writers just now prominent as an essayist is often counted whimsical, trifling. One of his near friends keenly resents that opinion, insists instead that he is dead in earnest, serious to the last degree, purposeful in all his work. What makes that so difficult to believe ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... I expected to be, I assure you; but, for the love of the saints, be careful, or this whimsical fancy of your's may lead to ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... sight of by Norway. The chief impetus of the Revolution has been a reckless desire on the part of the Norwegians to be absolutly their own masters, that and nothing else. Norway has bragged about her prerogatives without any feeling of responsibility, like an unreasoning whimsical child. It must be declared, both on historical and psychological grounds, that it can never be politically defended. Norway must already have made the discovery that the great era of universal politics, is entitled, ...
— The Swedish-Norwegian Union Crisis - A History with Documents • Karl Nordlund
... at what seemed to me the singularly whimsical and unbusiness-like features of the enterprise I wrote him earnestly advising him either to abandon it or materially to modify his plan. I represented to him that such a journal, so conducted, could not in my judgment succeed; but he was obdurate ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... to go to Guvutu first." Joan looked at the men with a whimsical expression. "I've some shopping to do. I can't wear these Berande curtains into Sydney. I must buy cloth at Guvutu and make myself a dress during the voyage down. I'll start immediately—in an hour. Lalaperu, you ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... of great years, name, dignity, and learning boasted to me that he had been induced to a certain very important change in his faith by a strange and whimsical incitation, and one otherwise so inadequate, that I thought it much stronger, taken the contrary way: he called it a miracle, and so I look upon it, but in a different sense. The Turkish historians say, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... under the new dispensation, to indulge in exhortations to a keener chase, of this world, and "the things of this world." I found afterwards similar thoughts were passing through Harrington's mind, rendered more whimsical by the recollection that, during college life, his friend (though very far from vicious) had certainly never seemed to take any deficient interest in the affairs of this world, nor to exhibit any predilection for an ascetic life. Indeed, he acknowledged ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... the big voice collapsed like a rent balloon. For the office door had opened to let in Big Tim O'Brien. His shrewd eyes passed with whimsical disgust over Killen ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... Josie Larson," he said with a whimsical look on his face, that Josie now noticed was drawn and white. "It's that devilish lumbago that has got me. I hope I did not ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson
... honoured, especially by the common people, as was our said Master. And his fame so increased that his advice was asked on every subject, and he was so incessantly in demand that he did not know what to do. If a woman had a bad, or whimsical, or capricious husband, she went to this good master for a remedy. In short, if any could give good advice it was thought that our physician was at the top of the tree in that respect, and people came to him from all parts to enquire ...
— One Hundred Merrie And Delightsome Stories - Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles • Various
... or your brother, or some other deceased friend or relation, whose soul may inhabit the body of the animal you so wantonly destroy?" An officer in the service of the Eastindia Company, and a particular friend of mine, had like to have lost his life by not paying a proper deference to this whimsical notion; for being some time in that part of the country, and happening to shoot a heron, he was immediately arrested and prosecuted for it by one of the natives. The man insisted that the heron was inhabited by the soul of his father; and supported his point so much to the satisfaction of the court, ...
— Vice in its Proper Shape • Anonymous
... charge even Emerson, as he somewhere charges Wordsworth, with not being of a temperament quite liquid and musical enough to admit the full vibration of the great harmonics. The three human foster-children who have been taken nearest into Nature's bosom, perhaps,—an odd triad, surely, for the whimsical nursing mother to select,—are Wordsworth, Bettine Brentano, and Thoreau. Is it yielding to an individual preference too far, to say, that there seems almost a generic difference between these three ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... Corwin himself; for he was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion, so that he ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... she liked him. His voice was agreeable, and she noted his slight drawl. Phil's father, who was born in the Berkshires, said all Hoosiers drawled. As a matter of fact, Phil, who was indubitably a Hoosier, did not, save in a whimsical fashion of her own, to give a humorous turn to the large words with which she sometimes embellished her conversation. Her father said that her freedom from the drawl was no fault of the Montgomery High School, but attributable ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... habits and instincts, yet the birds sometimes seem as whimsical and capricious as superior beings. One is not safe, for instance, in making any absolute assertion as to their place or mode of building. Ground-builders often get up into a bush, and tree-builders sometimes get upon ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... god of this world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on creation's day; Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him. He calls it Reason—thence his power's increased To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... enjoyed herself. She absorbed much of their jargon and stored it up in her brain for future use. She unconsciously adapted herself to their mannerisms and whimsical enthusiasm, and when she went home everybody praised her and declared her one of them ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells
... much more difficult and important employment, and can expect their salaries but for the short space of five years; whereas a commissioner (unless he imprudently suffers himself to be carried away by a whimsical tenderness for his country) has an establishment ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... Argentina's ornate Palace precedes the pinkish-toned Netherlands building seen in the distance—the rather whimsical style of the latter adding a distinct note to that section of the grounds. The park to the south is distinguished by two Oriental buildings erected respectively by Siam and Turkey. The first is an exact copy of a ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... that if he had finished the novel it would have been a failure. "But I shall never finish it," he sighed, as if he felt irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in 'The Nooning' and 'FitzAdam's Story'. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... other hand, the zealous Roman Catholic had his arguments for the preservation and worship of images, some of which may strike us as sufficiently whimsical. "I confess," says one, "that God has forbidden idols and idolatry, but He has not forbidden the images (or pictures) which we hold for the veneration of the saints. For if that were so, He would not have left us the effigy ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... I entertain so much," she pleads in that vivid, whimsical way of hers that holds as much of ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... have something more.—Gone! Think of you? To think of a whirlwind, though 'twere in a whirlwind, were a case of more steady contemplation, a very tranquillity of mind and mansion. A fellow that lives in a windmill has not a more whimsical dwelling than the heart of a man that is lodged in a woman. There is no point of the compass to which they cannot turn, and by which they are not turned, and by one as well as another; for motion, not method, is their occupation. To know this, and yet ...
— The Way of the World • William Congreve
... baron, to a servant, and sat down again to her chrysanthemums, this time with a smile both malicious and gladsome. With his appearance in that house, though unseen by her, Baron Emil had lent form in her head to a certain whimsical idea. She knew that it was whimsical, but just for that reason it pleased her, and must also please the baron. She began quickly, almost with enthusiasm, to paint dark outlines of imps among the flowers. She disposed them so that they seemed to separate the flowers and keep them apart ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... of herself at this period was that she was "a wild lassie." She would often go back in thought to these days, and incidents would flash into memory that half amused and half shamed her. Some of her escapades she would describe with whimsical zest, and trivial as they were they served to show that, even then, her native wit and resource were always ready to hand. But very early the Change came. An old widow, living in a room in the back lands, used to watch the children running about the doors, and in her anxiety for ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... man. I am the last of the black Protestants." In this whimsical way Frank Nelson spoke of himself one day in conversation with a friend on some point of ritual. It is abundantly evident that he was in no way a bigoted churchman, and with all his fine, broad sympathies he stood forth as ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... the stranger leaned forward and tapped him lightly on the knee. "Say, I hate to interrupt yuh," he began in a whimsical drawl, evidently characteristic of the man, "but I'd like to know where it is I've seen ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... stood in a room so contradictory, so utterly unrelated to its supposed intention. Occupied it certainly was: towels and soap and sponge, and nightgown neatly folded on the patchwork quilt, showed that. But of all teasing suggestion of femininity, all the whimsical, rosy privacy of a girl's bedchamber, all the dainty nonsense and pretty purity, half artless, half artful, with which romance has invested this retreat and poetry and song have serenaded it, Margarita's apartment was entirely void. Even its spotlessness ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... of light is thrown upon the ways of nature as seen in the lives of our solitary wasps, so skillfully and charmingly depicted by George W. Peckham and his wife in their work on those insects. So whimsical, so fickle, so forgetful, so fussy, so wise, and yet so foolish, as these little people are! such victims of routine and yet so individual, such apparent foresight and yet such thoughtlessness, at such ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... prolonged study of the fifteenth century, we have of late paid tardy and perhaps exaggerated honours.[183] His fellow-workers seem to have admired him as an able draughtsman gifted with a rare if whimsical imagination; but no one recognised in him a leader of his age. For us he has an almost unique value as representing the interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a moment of transition, as embodying in some of his pictures the subtlest thought and feeling ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... France"). "I entrust to Baron de Lederheim, though with reluctance, a book for you which has just been published, the infamous memoirs of Rousseau entitled 'Confessions.' They seem to me those of a common scullion and even lower than that, being dull throughout, whimsical and vicious in the most offensive manner. I do not recur to my worship of him (for such it was) I shall never console myself for its having caused the death of that eminent man David Hume, who, to gratify me, undertook to entertain ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... those first weeks by finding that at the national capital in the houses he supposed to be the best, the head of the State was not a coveted guest; for this could be the only explanation of Mr. Bonnycastle's whimsical suggestion of their inviting him, as it were, in carnival. His successor went out a good deal for ...
— Pandora • Henry James
... Lovelace to Belford.— Pities Tomlinson. Finds that he is dead in prison. Happy that he lived not to be hanged. Why. No discomfort so great but some comfort may be drawn from it. Endeavours to defend himself by a whimsical case which he puts between A. a miser, and ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... plucky author knew little of Arabic, and least of what is most wanted, the dialect of Egypt and Syria. His prose is so conscientious as to offer up spirit at the shrine of letter; and his verse, always whimsical, has at times a manner of Hibernian whoop which is comical when it should be pathetic. Lastly he printed only one volume of a series which completed would have contained ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of whimsical mirth, Lined by the wind, burned by the sun; Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth, As whose children ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... to think now that the Clara was merely an iron box with an engine to push it about. Clara was somebody, a personality, a lovable, whimsical, powerful creature. She was "she" to everybody. And at last one morning she kicked up her heels and took a long white bone in her teeth and went ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... of dreams to myself is that they serve to show the essential texture of the mind. In waking hours I am conscious of many natural phenomena which make a strong impression on my mind; but my dreaming mind makes, it seems, a whimsical selection among these incidents, and discards some, while it makes a liberal use of others. For instance, in real life, the sight of a beautiful sunset is a common experience, and stirs in me the most profound emotion; ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... drawn a brilliant sketch of the influence which the Reformation exercised over biblical criticism. "It may be said that criticism of the Scripture text was unknown previous to the time of Luther; and if by this is meant that captious, whimsical, and shuffling criticism which DeWette has so justly condemned—certainly so. But that which relates to languages, antiquities, the knowledge of times, places, authors—in a word, hermeneutics—was known and practised in our schools before the Reformation, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... up at her with a sort of whimsical distress. And, suddenly, in that dainty voice of hers, which seemed to spurn each ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... word Cabal was popularly used as synonymous with Cabinet. But it happened by a whimsical coincidence that, in 1671, the Cabinet consisted of five persons the initial letters of whose names made up the word Cabal; Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale. These ministers were therefore emphatically called ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... office like a performing poodle; and there, in the growing dusk, under the cold glitter of Thirteen Star, two hundred strong, and beside the garish glories of the agricultural engine, Mamie and Jim were made one. The scene was incongruous, but the business pretty, whimsical, and affecting: the typewriters with such kindly faces and fine posies, Mamie so demure, and Jim—how shall I describe that poor, transfigured Jim? He began by taking the minister aside to the far end of the office. I knew not what he said, but I have reason to believe he was protesting his ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... lake, in the centre of which was an island with a pavilion. Fanciful barges and gondolas of various shapes and colors were waiting for Lothair and his party, to carry them over to the pavilion, where they found a repast which became the hour and the scene—coffee and ices and whimsical drinks, which sultanas would sip in Arabian tales. No sooner were they seated than the sound of music was heard—distant, but now nearer, till there came floating on the lake, until it rested before the pavilion, a gigantic shell, larger than the building ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... goes through the doorway into the hall. MRS BUILDER, following towards the door, meets RALPH BUILDER, a man rather older than BUILDER and of opposite build and manner. He has a pleasant, whimsical ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... cumbrous "atlas" folios of 1803-5, and they helped to ruin the worthy alderman. Even courtly Sir Joshua is clearly ill at ease among the pushing Hamiltons and Mortimers; and, were it not for the whimsical discovery that Westall's "Ghost of Caesar" strangely resembles Mr. Gladstone, there would be no resting-place for the modern student of these dismal masterpieces. The truth is, Reynolds excepted, there were no contemporary ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang
... the deck of the boat in everybody's way, with your hair immensely touzled, one brace on, your hands in your pockets, and the bottoms of your trousers tucked up. Yet you are inextricably connected with the plot, and are the man whom everybody is inquiring after. I think it is a very whimsical idea and extremely droll. It made me laugh heartily when I ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... had he looked more the vagabond enthroned. He was coatless, and the strong muscles sloped beautifully from the brown throat. A sardonic smile was on the devil-may-care face, and those who saw that smile labeled it impudent, debonair, or whimsical, as fancy pleased. ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... still indefinite and obscure and ill-comprehended, is made the content of artistic forms. As indefinite, it does not yet have that individuality which the artistic ideal demands; its abstractness and one-sidedness thus render its shape defective and whimsical. The first form of art is therefore rather a mere search after plasticity than a capacity of true representation. The spiritual idea has not yet found its adequate form, but is still engaged in striving and struggling after ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... HAYWOOD is a temperamental and whimsical old Negro of San Antonio, Texas, who still sees the sunny side of his 92 years, in spite of his total blindness. He was born and bred a slave in St. Hedwig, Bexar Co., Texas, the son of slave parents bought in ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... the pavements are harder and the girls are not so pretty as they used to be," he replied with a whimsical look of regret in his face and a twinkle in his still ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... this he set his hand, and the friars assigned to him a room to live in, which they gave to him, as he wished, empty and stripped of everything, save only a huge old chest, which appeared to them too awkward to remove. But Pinturicchio, like the strange and whimsical man that he was, made such an outcry at this, and repeated it so often, that finally in despair the friars set themselves to carry it away. Now their good fortune was such, that in removing it there was broken a plank which contained 500 Roman ducats of gold; at which Pinturicchio was ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... at that earnest little whisper and his eyes met hers unguarded a full minute, then a whimsical smile touched his ...
— The Innocent Adventuress • Mary Hastings Bradley
... field for little more. And now he, Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his daughter with three hundred thousand years of such toil. And she was but one daughter of a dozen. He was not elated at the thought. It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical world, and he chuckled aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which he knew lay deep in the hidden crypts of her being where he had ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... had set out to annihilate the aborigines of the West; but if such a fancy came to the man, it must have vanished when he noticed their intelligent appearance and the completeness of their outfit. Boys who start on such whimsical careers are never rightly prepared, and have no conception of the absurdity of their schemes until it is forced upon them by ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... mention of the less public episodes in Elgin's Canadian adventure; his whimsical capacity for getting on with men, French, British, and American; the sly humour of his correspondence with his official chief; the searching comments made by him on men and manners in America; the charm of such social and ...
— British Supremacy & Canadian Self-Government - 1839-1854 • J. L. Morison
... by means of the potent talisman which this learned Doctor exercised—for the latter, "at one lift," would now and then sweep a whole range of shelves in Scott's shop of every volume which it contained. And yet how whimsical, and, in my humble opinion, ill-founded, was Dr. North's taste in matters of typography! Would you believe it, Lisardo, he preferred the meagre classical volumes, printed by the Gryphii, in the italic letter, to the delicate and eye-soothing ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... children. Reckless expenditure is a common characteristic of young men. Antipathy to school is a common feeling with young people. Yet there are ways and means to bring him round. The worse with him is that his disposition is so crotchety and whimsical. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... his apartment in their night-gowns and slippers, and to exchange friendly greeting with them. At this Ayrton laughed outright, and conceived Lamb was jesting with him; but as no one followed his example he thought there might be something in it, and waited for an explanation in a state of whimsical suspense.... ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to a family which had enjoyed for several generations a considerable degree of distinction among the Roman nobility, though known by a somewhat whimsical name. The family name was Brazenbeard, or, to speak more exactly, it was Ahenobarbus, which is the Latin equivalent for that word. It is a question somewhat difficult to decide, whether in speaking of Nero's father at the present time, and in the English ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... King and his spirited but whimsical consort, Queen Charlotte, might have bent before the threats which accompanied this alluring offer; but at the head of the Neapolitan administration was an Englishman, General Acton, whose talents and force of will commanded their respect and confidence. To the threats ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... of the last age imagined the character of Morose to be wholly out of nature. But to vindicate our poet, Mr. Dryden tells us from tradition, and we may venture to take his word, that Jonson was really acquainted with a person of this whimsical turn of mind: and as humour is a personal quality, the poet is acquitted from the charge of exhibiting a monster, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... not if you knew Talano di Molese, a man right worthy to be had in honour; who, having married a young wife—Margarita by name—fair as e'er another, but without her match for whimsical, fractious, and perverse humours, insomuch that there was nought she would do at the instance of another, either for his or her own good, found her behaviour most grievous to bear, but was fain to endure what he might not cure. Now it so befell ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... found him charming. He is not above talking delightful nonsense even to a girl. I sat by him at dinner, and he talked to me—not nonsense, either, this time. He told me of his political contests and diplomatic battles; he was wise and witty and whimsical. I felt as if I were drinking some rare, stimulating mental wine. What a privilege it is to meet such men and take a peep through their wise eyes at ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lilies themselves, tulips, narcissi (which are of the amaryllis flock), and lilies-of-the-valley, a tribe by itself. You will wish to include all of them in your garden, but you must limit yourself to the least whimsical varieties on account of your purse, the labor entailed, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... about him and went out into the storm, leaving Salomon to meet his wife's reproachful eyes. "Yes, I know, heart's dearest, that I should not give silver cups to beggarly Frenchmen," he told her with a whimsical smile, "for who knows when we will have to pawn the little that remains of our silver. But until then—" he shrugged goodnaturedly, and a fit of coughing ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... been recently told over again in a little volume by Mr. C. J. Rowe, entitled Bonds of Disunion, or English Misrule in the Colonies (Longmans, 1883). The title is somewhat whimsical, but the book is a very forcible and suggestive contribution to the discussion raised ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... Knickerbocker was published in 1809. Nearly forty years later Washington Irving, the real author, says it was his purpose in the history to embody the traditions of New York in an amusing form, to illustrate its local humors, customs and peculiarities in a whimsical narrative, which should help to bind the heart of the native inhabitant to his home. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... her ridicule of his blond locks. He wore them half in defiance of conventionality and half in whimsical love for the picture of a beautiful mother from ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... the women, womanize the men, upset states, thrones, and churches; rear a race of chattering, conceited coxcombs who can always find books in plenty to excuse them from doing their duty; make the poor discontented, the rich crotchety and whimsical, refine away the stout old virtues into quibbles and sentiments! All imagination formerly was expended in noble action, adventure, enterprise, high deeds, and aspirations; now a man can but be imaginative by feeding on the false excitement of passions he never felt, dangers he never shared, and ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the churches, which is at twelve o'clock: prayers being over, they go to hunt the wren; and, after having found one of these poor birds, they kill her and lay her on a bier, with the utmost solemnity, bringing her to the parish church, and burying her with a whimsical kind of solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; ...
— A Righte Merrie Christmasse - The Story of Christ-Tide • John Ashton
... he said, with a whimsical smile in his twinkling eyes. "I've often noticed that folk who act queer, and are said to be crazy, and maybe get shut up in the foolish-house, generally have an elegant reason of their own for acting the way they do. Maybe other folks can't ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... the sleazy, clinging, white draperies wound around her slender form, then the wings of golden maline pinioned on either softly rounded shoulder. Sally was a perfect little beauty, and also possessed that whimsical manner so attractive in ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... the human race from a tree—however whimsical such a notion may seem—was a belief once received as sober fact, and even now-a-days can be traced amongst the traditions of many races.[1] This primitive idea of man's creation probably originated in the myth of Yggdrasil, ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... Roman literature has made us so accustomed to the idea of a Cupid awakening love by shooting arrows that we fail to realize how entirely fanciful, not to say whimsical, this conceit is. It would be odd, indeed, if the Hindoo poets had happened on the same fancy as the Greeks of their own accord; but there is no reason to suppose that they did. Kama is one of the later gods of the Indian Pantheon, and there is every reason to believe that the Hindoos borrowed ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... outfit. Sahwah looked like a floating cutlery store. Just why she should elect to impersonate a brave instead of an Indian maiden was not clear to Nyoda, but this was only another illustration of her whimsical temperament. Part of the time the stay-at-home duties appealed to her; the care of the hearthfire, the cooking and cleaning and hand-craft; and then again her imagination was kindled by tales of scouts and warriors and she longed for the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Maine Woods - Or, The Winnebagos Go Camping • Hildegard G. Frey
... he would but for that whimsical element of chance, which will for ever muddle up the affairs of this world and dumbfound the prophets. Whether it came from the want of his lights, or from his mind being full of the thoughts of his rival, he allowed too little by half a foot in taking the sharp turn upon the Basingstoke ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... up-to-date intrenchments you may find kitchens, dining-rooms, bedrooms, and even stables. One regiment has first class cow-sheds. One day a whimsical 'piou-piou,' finding a cow wandering about in the danger zone, had the bright idea of finding shelter for it in the trenches. The example was quickly followed, and at this moment the ——th Infantry possess an underground farm, in which fat kine, well cared for, give such quantities of milk that ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... queer combination," responded the doctor, smiling his slightly whimsical smile. He was rather short, with an almost imperceptible limp, and he had, as he put it, "never gone in for sports." "There's so much else when one comes to think of it," he added, pausing, with his hat in his hand, at the door; "there ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... lightly, minimized it and endeavoured to teach others to bear it lightly? His blithe humour ought surely to have been an example to Nellie! And as for the episode of the funeral march on the Pianisto, really, really, the tiresome little thing ought to have better appreciated his whimsical drollery! ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... committed his youthful offense of deer-stealing. The old mansion of Charlecot and its surrounding park still remain in the possession of the Lucy family, and are peculiarly interesting from being connected with this whimsical but eventful circumstance in the scanty history of the bard. As the house stood at little more than three miles' distance from Stratford, I resolved to pay it a pedestrian visit, that I might stroll leisurely through some of those scenes from which Shakespeare must have derived his earliest ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... with their fans, and ask him what he had been doing at St. Albans on such and such days; and when he replied as to his whereabouts with that easy grace of bearing which always characterized his dealings with men and women alike, they would shake their heads, flirt their fans, and call him by whimsical names incomprehensible to Tom, but which he knew implied that he was suspected of being concerned in ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... at Helen's whimsical comparison. "No," she said, "I've never been much interested in basket-ball. I'm afraid I've 'just sat' or ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... remarks were outrageous, but satisfactory to hear); but I waved him off. I couldn't give it up. It fascinated me. I toyed with it, I caressed it. I made it display its different tones of colour. I must see the two stones together. I must see it outshine its paltry rival. It was a whimsical frenzy that seized me—I can call it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... a rude railing rhymer, a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon; coarse as Rabelais, whimsical, obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of Diss, in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His Tunnyng of Elynoure Rummyng is a study ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... appeal which I make to you, Mr. Hamel," he said, with a whimsical smile. "Here we are in my study, with the door closed, secure against interruption, a bright fire in the grate, a bowling and ever-increasing wind outside. Let us go together over the ground of your last wonderful expedition ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... characters on the philosophy of history, on the character of Henry of Navarre and his followers, and on the worthies of Elizabethan England, in the literature of which we had immersed ourselves. Kipling had recently burst meteor-like on the world, and Barrie raised his head with a whimsical smile closely chasing a tear. Thomas Hardy was in the saddle writing "Tess," and in France Daudet was yet active though his prime was past. Guy de Maupassant continued the production of his marvellous ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the time, but his deep-set eyes did not lend themselves to the expression of whimsical politeness which he tried to achieve. He had another suggestion to offer. Why shouldn't we adjourn to his rooms? He had there materials for a dish of his own invention for which he was famous all along the line of the Royal Cavalry outposts, and he ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... bewildering tenor of it. She had an idea that she was seeing foreign manners as well as her petticoats would allow; but, in reality she was not seeing anything, least of all fortunately how much she was laughed at. She drove her whimsical pen at Dresden and at Florence, and produced in all places and at all times the same romantic and ridiculous fictions. She carried about her box of properties and fished out promptly the familiar, tarnished old puppets. She believed ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... thorough student of Shakespeare and Chaucer. To the elucidation of the text of Chaucer he made some admirable contributions. He was shy and diffident, full of kindness toward persons whom he knew and to children, and of sympathy with persons who were in sorrow, but whimsical, grotesque, and apt to take strong prejudices against persons whom he did not know. I suppose some of the best of our American men of letters of late years would have submitted their productions to the criticism of Child as to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... my guest. His whimsical gray eyes had become studious and detached from our surroundings. He had a generous mouth, which he seemed habitually to sew up in a close-drawn seam, but this would suddenly and pleasantly rip in moments of forgetfulness. Being the ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... The stories themselves only claim to be unvarnished matters of fact; and I may repeat here what I said in a previous volume, that my object has not been to strain after literary effect or style. My too early desertion of home-life to graduate in the harsh and whimsical discipline of sailing-vessels in the days when they had still some years to live and "carry on" ere steam took the wind out of their sails, precluded such studies as are natural to the embryo man of letters. But the circumstances ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... towers. He is as poor as a rat, but as proud as he is ragged, boasting of his descent from the illustrious house of Aguilar, from which sprang Gonsalvo of Cordova, the grand captain. Nay, he actually bears the name of Alonzo de Aguilar, so renowned in the history of the conquest. It is a whimsical caprice of fortune to present, in the grotesque person of this tatterdemalion, a namesake and descendant of the proud Alonzo de Aguilar, the mirror of Andalusian chivalry, leading an almost mendicant existence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... mists of sleep shredded away. A ragged youth with a crop of fiery red hair was standing in the doorway, regarding the occupants of the shelter with a grin, half-whimsical, half-defiant. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... the composition, it bears a striking and whimsical resemblance to a funeral sermon, not only in the pathetic prayer with which it concludes, but in the style and tenor of the whole performance. It is piteously doleful, nodding every now and then towards dulness; well stored ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of Christians, without a known exception, altered, interpolated, and without scruple garbled, their different copies of their various and discordant gospels, in order to adapt them to their jarring and whimsical philosophical notions, Celsus accuses them of this, and they accuse each other. And that they were continually tampering with their copies of the books of the New Testament, is evident from the immense number of various readings, and from some ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... his pets, and that later in life he gave it as his honest opinion that he would have been much more successful as a caricaturist than as a writer. But Eugene's drawings at all periods were never more than grotesque or fanciful illustrations of the whimsical ideas he harbored respecting everything that came ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... visitor with whimsical appraisement. "You'll wait till the agent returns, won't you?" And added, with a grimace: "You won't be in the way—I'm not anything official right now. I'm a neighbor, and this is my parlor—you see, I planted you on that rug, with ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... encased themselves in them, and were laughing at the whimsical appearance they made in the clumsy garments, when the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... shoulders, and there, with a hearty laugh at their folly, set them down to cool. All this was done so suddenly and so good-naturedly that they themselves could not refrain from joining in the merriment which so whimsical a conclusion to their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... suggestive of the poetry of William Blake than of anything to be elsewhere found,—flashes of wholly original and profound insight into nature and life; words and phrases exhibiting an extraordinary vividness of descriptive and imaginative power, yet often set in a seemingly whimsical or even rugged frame. They are here published as they were written, with very few and superficial changes; although it is fair to say that the titles have been assigned, almost invariably, by the editors. In many cases these verses will seem to the reader like poetry torn up by the roots, ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... slightly. "You want some one to love you. I understand. It's what we all want, I suppose. I'll try to be a real, true sister from now on, George. It—it will not be very hard for me to love you, I'm sure," she concluded, with a whimsical little smile that went straight to his sore, disfigured heart. A lump came into his throat and his eyes began to smart so suddenly that a mist came over them before he could blink his lids. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... Brushed into sleek submission; his trim beard Snug as the soft round body of a thrush Between the white wings of his fan-shaped ruff (His best, with the fine lace border) spoke of guests Expected; and his quick grey humorous eyes, His firm red whimsical pleasure-loving mouth, And all those elvish twinklings of his face, Were lit with eagerness. Only between his brows, Perplexed beneath that subtle load of dreams, Two delicate shadows brooded. "What does it mean? ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... implies certain Sounds, having certain Meanings."—Harris's Hermes, p. 315. "They returned to the city from whence they came out."—Alex. Murray's Gram., p. 135. "Respecting ellipses, some grammarians differ strangely in their ideas; and from thence has arisen a very whimsical diversity in their systems of grammar."—Author. "What am I and from whence? i.e. what am I, and from whence am ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... still bear children, and take their husband's name. But having become more individualized they demand more definite individual treatment and rebel more at what they consider an infringement of their rights as human beings. Also, and unfortunately, they still wish the right to be whimsical, they continue to reserve for themselves the weapons of tears, reproaches, and unreasonable demands. This has brought ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... reading lectures upon Oratory at Bath, where Derrick was Master of the Ceremonies; or, as the phrase is, KING. BOSWELL. Dr. Parr, who knew Sheridan well, describes him 'as a wrong-headed, whimsical man.' 'I remember,' he continues, 'hearing one of his daughters, in the house where I lodged, triumphantly repeat Dryden's Ode upon St. Cecilia's Day, according to the instruction given to her by her ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... It is whimsical that he, who was soon to bid adieu to rhyme, should fix upon a measure in which rhyme abounds even to satiety. Of this he said, in his Essay on Lyrick Poetry, prefixed to the poem: "For the more harmony likewise I chose the frequent return of rhyme, which ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children's play-fellowship. You felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... a genuine American with all the qualities which in fiction collect about that name but which are not so often seen in real life; an American with the measureless patience, the deep and gentle humor, the whimsical and tolerant philosophy and the dauntless courage, physical as well as moral, which we find most satisfyingly displayed in Lincoln, of all our heroes."—New ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... Lydia explained this whimsical reaction rather incoherently by saying that those nice old words were so much more fun than the others, and in spite of remonstrance she clung to her fancy with so lightly laughing an obstinacy that neither ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... whatever. Stannard, ever blunt and short of speech, had shoved his hairy hands deep in his trousers' pockets, a thing no sub would twice venture in his presence, looked Willett over from head to foot, then, with a sniff, had turned away, but Bentley and Turner had indulged in whimsical protest, "Gad, man, but you put us all to shame," said the surgeon. "I've seen no rig to match that since I came to this post. ...
— Tonio, Son of the Sierras - A Story of the Apache War • Charles King
... came a simple soldier's boy from Ireland To Prague—and with a master, whom I buried. 55 From lowest stable-duty I climbed up, Such was the fate of war, to this high rank, The plaything of a whimsical good fortune. And Wallenstein too is a child of luck, I love a fortune that is like my ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... editor ever took himself less seriously. Prominent citizens came with fair words and he listened to them and printed them; bribes were offered and accepted only for publication; while threats were received joyously and made the subject of half-whimsical comment. ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... not repeated. Dead silence reigned. And then quickly and decidedly the door opened, and Nick Ratcliffe stood upon the threshold. The light struck full upon his face as he halted—a clever, whimsical face that might mask almost ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... indeed a Surprize to him, for tho' Noah had preach'd of it for a hundred Year together, yet as he (Satan) daily prompted the People not to heed or believe what that old Fellow Noah said to them, and to ridicule his whimsical Building a monstrous Tub to swim or float in, when the said Deluge should come; so I am of the Opinion he did not believe it himself, and am positive he could not foresee it, by any insight into Futurity that ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... stroking his hand when she finished. The curious rumbling came softly in MacDonald's beard and his eyes were bright with a whimsical humour. ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... in most undertakings is the want of unanimity. This, however, we find is not wanting where actual danger, as well as possible advantage may accrue to the parties concerned. It is whimsical enough that thieves and other ruffians, while they bid open defiance to the laws, both of God and man, pay implicit obedience ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 543, Saturday, April 21, 1832. • Various
... desolate health [sic]—One on whose forehead the impress of grief was strongly marked, and whose words and motions betrayed that her thoughts did not follow them but were intent on far other ideas; bitter and overwhelming miseries. I was dressed also in a whimsical nunlike habit which denoted that I did not retire to solitude from necessity, but that I might indulge in a luxury of grief, and ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... thus throughout the whole day, quiet, kind, and attentive—at once a little matron and a tender, bashful girl. The three who had known her longest expected every moment to see some whimsical vagary of her capricious spirit burst forth. But they waited in vain for it. Undine remained as mild and gentle as an angel. The holy father could not take his eyes from her, and he said repeatedly to ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... sounded behind him, and his hand met that of Stephen Hollinger. The millionaire was dressed roughly in serge and yachting cap, for he was his own captain aboard the yacht. His strong, whimsical face lighted up in a smile ...
— The Pirate Shark • Elliott Whitney
... to have the use of one's legs again!" exclaimed his Lordship, stretching the members in question, "and that," said he, turning to Barnabas with his whimsical smile, "that is another value of the stocks—one never knows how pleasant and useful a pair of legs can be until one has sat with 'em stretched out helplessly at right angles for an hour or two." Here, the Bo'sun having stowed back the key and resumed his hat, ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... mistaken. He had dreaded this meeting, and now with joyful surprise was asking himself whether this could be the woman who had been described to him as a showy, extremely whimsical, perverse person, who used her son's renown to obtain access to aristocratic houses and as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... him with uplifted eyebrows—a look of whimsical incredulity. Sir John felt that after all forty-five ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... windy sun. And yet, behold, in a brief quarter of an hour, the change that took place. I had just returned from a trip below, and Miss West was venting her scorn on the River Plate and promising to go below to the sewing-machine, when we heard Mr. Pike groan. It was a whimsical groan of disgust, contrition, and acknowledgment ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... yet Hoffmann would have worshiped him for his daring experiments in the realms of art. When Bridau is wholly himself he is admirable, and as praise is sweet to him, his disgust is great when one praises the failures in which he alone discovers all that is lacking in the eyes of the public. He is whimsical to the last degree. His friends have seen him destroy a finished picture because, in his eyes, it looked too smooth. "It is overdone," he would ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... crossed the hall that separated her territory from his, her fine, full figure erect, her dark head high in the air, a whimsical regret came over him that they were not younger and ...
— A Philanthropist • Josephine Daskam
... for a briefened space cast up in a preliminary way the tally on behalf of the whimsical devils of circumstance and the part they are to play in the culminating and concluding periods of this narrative. On the noon train of the day following the night when that occurred which has been set forth in the ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... bottle of water, gun, powder, and lead. Whoever shall maltreat or assault another, while the articles subsist, shall receive the Law of Moses: this was the infliction of forty consecutive strokes upon the back, a whimsical memento of the dispensation in the Wilderness. There were articles relative to the treatment and disposition of women, which sometimes depended upon the tossing of a coin,—jeter a croix pile,—but they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... is hardly ever capable as a Reader of doing justice to his own imaginings. Dr. Johnson's whimsical anecdote of the author of The Seasons admits, in point of fact, of a very general application. According to the grimly humorous old Doctor, "He [Thomson] was once reading to Doddington, who, being himself a reader eminently elegant, was so much provoked by his odd utterance, that he snatched ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... character sketch and essay-philosophy, is not a novelist at all. His aim Is not to depict the traits or events of contemporary society, but to put forth the views of the Reverend Laurence Sterne, Yorkshire parson, with many a quaint turn and whimsical situation under a thin disguise of story-form. Of his two books, "Tristram Shandy" and "The Sentimental Journey," unquestionable classics, both, in their field, there is no thought of plot or growth or objective realization: the former is a delightful tour de force in which a born essayist ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... in his chair. A smile, half whimsical, half incredulous, lit his eyes. He thrust his elbows on the desk and supported his face ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... looking up at Henry with a whimsical smile. "Man, Quinny, I'm dying! Go away like a good chap and let me die in peace. Tell all my friends that my last ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Tom Slade where he sat near him by the fire, and noticed the torn shirt, the hand wrapped in a bandage, the bruised spot on that plain, dogged face, where a chunk of wood had flown up and all but blinded him. He noticed that big mouth. The whimsical thought occurred to him that this young fellow's face was, itself, something like a knot of wood; strong and stubborn, and very plain and homely. And yet he was so easily imposed upon—not exactly that, perhaps, but he was simple withal, ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... they might have been less literal. Despite his military training, his bearing and carriage had not the strong soldierly stamp which might redeem his infirmity, and even in the class-room a certain whimsical atmosphere seemed borne from the drill-ground. He, I believe, was the central figure of one of the most humorous scenes in Herman Melville's White Jacket, a book which, despite its prejudiced tone, has preserved many amusing and interesting ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... thought of Swan. There, indeed, he might hope for help. But Swan was out here, away from reinforcements. He was trailing Al Woodruff, and when he found him,—that might be the end of Swan. If not, Warfield could hurry Lorraine away before Swan could act in the matter. A whimsical thought of Swan's telepathic miracle crossed his mind and was dismissed as an unseemly bit of foolery in a matter so grave as Lorraine's safety. And yet—the doctor had received a message that he was wanted at ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... Corsican by birth, reserved and studious, neglectful of all pleasures for study; delights in important and judicious readings; extremely attentive to methodical sciences, moderately so as to others; well versed in mathematics and geography; silent, a lover of solitude, whimsical, haughty, excessively prone to egotism, speaking but little, pithy in his answers, quick and severe in repartee, possessed of much self-love, ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... different ancestors. But things, in themselves altogether arbitrary, are acknowledged to form the basis of a reasonable argument: And, if tribes are found to speak dialects of the same language, and to be attached throughout to the same whimsical customs, which are not deducible from the nature of things, but from pure caprice merely, such points of coincidence are commonly and rationally thought to furnish a moral demonstration of the common ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... griffins, and these coats were an incrusted mass of spangles and pieces of coloured glass. Underneath a skirt of tartan silk was fitfully visible. Their brown legs and feet were bare. The expression of their faces was solemn, not to say lugubrious—one performer had a most whimsical resemblance to Mr. Toole when he is sunk in an abyss of dramatic woe. They realised the responsibilities of their position, and there were moments when these seemed too many for them. The orchestra, taken as a whole, was rather noisy; but ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... points. Miss F——e, we are credibly informed, is Sub-, and Madame V——a Supra-Lapsarian. Mr. Pope is the last of the exploded sect of the Ranters. Mr. Sinclair has joined the Shakers. Mr. Grimaldi, Senior, after being long a Jumper, has lately fallen into some whimsical theories respecting the Fall of Man; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck; irresolution, the nerves ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... tears it was necessary to shed. As a poet of the time has said, "She wept with so much art that she was enabled to give to her tears the value of pearls." Those who had seen her in the morning, superb, imperious, a queen in all the splendor of power, would find her in the evening, gay, whimsical, capricious, presiding over one of these petits soupers with all the exuberant and madcap gayety of an actress after the theater. The Abbe Soulavie, who saw her often, has left us a well-studied ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... things are grown into my temper, which I should not have arrived at by better motives than the thought of being one day hers. I am pretty well satisfied such a passion as I have had is never well cured; and, between you and me, I am often apt to imagine it has had some whimsical effect upon my brain: For I frequently find, that in my most serious discourse I let fall some comical familiarity of speech, or odd phrase, that makes the company laugh; however, I cannot but allow she is a most excellent woman. When she is in the country I warrant she does not run into dairies, ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... was a statement, at once tense and whimsical, of the predicament of the writer. The latter, recognizing the confusion of thought among his captors, wrote because he must, but did not truly expect any aid from Senor Nobody. The writing would, however, prolong life for two days, perhaps for three. If at the end of that time ransom ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... flights and metaphors of the Jewish poets, and phrases and expressions now rendered obscure by our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies, and made to bend explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders, and commentators. Everything unintelligible ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... which was conceived as the Court of Occidental Fairy Tales, just as the Court of Flowers was to have been that of Oriental Fairy Tales. Mrs. Whitney's fountain of the Arabian Nights, a creation of whimsical beauty, was to have stood in the latter court. It was modeled, but was never enlarged; and its place was taken by Beauty and the Beast, the work of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Musick, Directed to a Friend'—a treatise that was published without the author's name, by Martin, the printer to the Royal Society, in the year 1677, at which time the future keeper was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. The merits of the tract are not great; but it displays the subtlety and whimsical quaintness of the musical lawyer, who performed on several instruments, was very vain of a feeble voice, and used to attribute much of his professional success to the constant study of music that marked every period of his life. "I have heard him say," Roger records, "that ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... ago, its tendency puzzled me considerably, remembering, as I did, with the greatest vividness, the fastidious and elegant personality of the author. I found it difficult to believe that he was in earnest. The book seemed to me to betray the whimsical sans-culottism of a man of pleasure who, when the ball is at an end, sits down with his gloves on and philosophizes on the artificiality of civilization and the wholesomeness of honest toil. An indigestion makes ...
— Tales of Two Countries • Alexander Kielland
... magnetism, and the different gases, be exhibited to their view, together with details of the results which have been produced by various mechanical contrivances. In fine, let their attention be directed to the foolish, whimsical, and extravagant notions attributed to apparitions, and to their inconsistency with the wise and benevolent arrangements of the Governor ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... could be handled by any particular gang. If the quantity fell short, there was usually trouble. However, he said nothing to the others that morning, but beckoned Weston aside, and stood a moment or two looking at him, with a grimly whimsical twinkle in his eyes. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... Lights.—1. Strange or whimsical. 2. Inapplicability. 3. Having differed or dissented. 4. An egg-shaped chemical vessel. 5. A recital of circumstances. ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... stage and support them under its difficulties, are generally associated with an eccentricity of character and a giddy disregard of prudential considerations, which generate adventure and chequer their lives with a greater variety of incidents and whimsical intercourse with the world than falls to the lot of men of other professions. Hence it follows that the stage presents the most ample field for the biographer; and that whether he writes for the instruction or the entertainment of ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... could not help ruling, especially because, in marrying, she was morally superior to me, as every young girl is incomparably superior to the man, since she is incomparably purer. Strange thing! The ordinary wife in our society is a very commonplace person or worse, selfish, gossiping, whimsical, whereas the ordinary young girl, until the age of twenty, is a charming being, ready for everything that is beautiful and lofty. Why is this so? Evidently because husbands pervert them, and lower ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... can be good or partake of "high-art" qualities that cannot be claimed as a true exponent of the family and social life of the period to which it owes its birth and development. A whimsical fashion in dress, in equipages, or in the etiquette of society may be tolerated without injury to the national advancement. Such fashions are transitory, springing suddenly into notice and as rapidly passing ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... series of misfortunes. The two chief officers then decided with one accord, that all should embark at six in the morning, and abandon the ship to the mercy of the waves. After this decision, followed a scene the most whimsical, and at the same time the most melancholy that can be well conceived. To have a more distinct idea of it, let the reader transport himself in imagination to the midst of the liquid plains of the ocean; then let him picture to himself a multitude ...
— Perils and Captivity • Charlotte-Adelaide [nee Picard] Dard
... the Mythist worshipped it reflected on the outer world and endowed with supernatural attributes, clothed with mist-caps and wishing-caps that gave it dominion over space and time. The restless, glittering, whimsical sprites of fairy mythology, that were believed of old to have so large a share in shaping the course of Nature and of human life, have vanished from the precincts of the schoolmaster at least. They could not endure the clear eyebeam of Science, which has searched their subterranean ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... else, and when Pelle went to prison, she collapsed entirely. She and the little girl suffered want, and when Johanna felt herself in the way, she ran away to a place where she could be comfortable. Her grandmother had also been in her way. She had her mother's whimsical, dreamy nature, and now she gave up everything and ran away to meet the wonderful. An older playfellow seduced her and took her out to the boys of the timber-yard. There she was left to take care of herself, often slept out ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Thorne, with a whimsical smile, held up his finger for silence. Through the thin screen of azalea bushes that fringed this open-air dining room Bob saw two men approaching down the forest. They were evidently unaware of observation. With considerable ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... realized that these things were barbarisms, but held his peace to escape a scolding or reminders of his stuttering. To increase the illusion of approaching maternity she became whimsical, dressed herself in colors with a profusion of flowers and ribbons, and appeared on the Escolta in a wrapper. But oh, the disenchantment! Three months went by and the dream faded, and now, having no reason for fearing ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... that misfortune lightly, minimized it and endeavoured to teach others to bear it lightly? His blithe humour ought surely to have been an example to Nellie! And as for the episode of the funeral march on the Pianisto, really, really, the tiresome little thing ought to have better appreciated his whimsical drollery! ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... coast, his only property, which he had purchased after much toil as a fisherman. His character was melancholic, and he conducted himself with propriety. He was appointed door-keeper, and filled his situation with such kindness and good humour that he was generally esteemed. He had the whimsical illusion of having been introduced into the world in the form of a salmon, and caught by some fisherman off Kinsale. He was found one morning hanging by a strip of his blanket to an old mop nail, which he had fixed between the partition boards of his cell, having taken the precaution of laying ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... former days. The lines of weariness and pain that never could be fully erased were all for her, she thought with a little catch of her breath. Then with a pitying, affectionate look at the sleeping man came a whimsical smile. Once she had thought no one could equal John in physical vigor. Now she pictured Kut-le's panther ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... had its old, whimsical inflection, but there was a deeper note in it, too. She parried him gently, yet not quite so ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... the ludicrous in being found in so plebeian a vehicle, as a New York lady would feel on passing through Broadway in a hand-cart or on a wheel-barrow. The fun-loving queen was so entertained with the whimsical adventure, that she could not refrain from exclaiming, as soon as she entered the opera-house, to the intimate friends she met there, "Only think! I came to the opera in a hackney-coach! Was it not droll? was it not droll?" The news of the indiscretion spread. All Paris was full of the ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... Footnotes: 1. This whimsical account of the Slave-market is probably taken from the following passage in the "Captivity and escape of Adam Elliot, M.A."—"By sun-rising next morning, we were all of us, who came last to Sallee, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... moment, an idea occurred to her. Her face, responsive as a wave to the wind, relaxed. Its sullenness disappeared in sudden brightness—in something like triumph. She raised her eyes. Their tremulous, half whimsical look set Winnington wondering what she could be ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... have a hundred lovers—but, ach, friends are the scarcest things in the world. I prefer friendship. It lasts. There! I see disapproval in your face! You Americans are so literal." She gazed into the fireplace for a moment, her lips parted in a whimsical smile. He waited for her to go on; the words were on her tongue's end, he could tell. "A divorce at twenty-five. I believe that is the accepted age, isn't it? If one gets beyond that, she—but, enough of this!" She sprang to her feet and stood before him, the flash dying in her eyes even ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... dissents the most perfectly is the most meritorious. In many points we hold strongly with that church. He that dissents throughout with that church will dissent with the church of England, and then it will be a part of his merit that he dissents with ourselves:—a whimsical species of merit for any set of men to establish. We quarrel to extremity with those who we know agree with us in many things, but we are to be so malicious even in the principle of our friendships, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... of the whimsical girl opened. A malicious smile distorted her pretty face. Slowly she arose, a dripping ghost in white, and pointing her long, thin fingers in the direction of the Ecouen road she ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... had his meed of personal amusement. For no editor ever took himself less seriously. Prominent citizens came with fair words and he listened to them and printed them; bribes were offered and accepted only for publication; while threats were received joyously and made the subject of half-whimsical comment. ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... I dare to say,' he answered, nor did he look at her yet, though there was a whimsical, tender little smile on the lovely mouth which might have won ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... shop,' said the minister reflecting, 'more or less, —two hours' work before shop,—three hours or so after shop; that's what you may call driving it hard. You couldn't do it, Richard Ancrum,' and he shook his head with a whimsical melancholy. 'But you were always a poor starveling. Youth that is youth's tough. Don't tell me, sir,' and he looked up sharply, 'that you don't amuse yourself. I wouldn't believe it. There never was a man built like you yet that ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... And then the picture of that other room, so exquisite, so impregnated with the Far-away Princess spirit of its creator, rose up before him, and he sighed and rubbed his fingers through his red stubbly hair, and made a whimsical grimace, and said, "Oh Damn!" And Elodie then bursting in, with a proud "Isn't it pretty, ton petit chez-toi!" What could he do but smile, and assure her that no soldier home from the wars could have a more beautifully ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... nine had youth, and many beauty too: Young friars round the place were oft in view, Who reckoned ev'ry step they took so well, That always in the proper road they fell. Th' aged gard'ner, of whom ere now we spoke, Was oft bewildered, they would so provoke; Capricious, whimsical, from day to day, Each would command and try to have her way; And as they ne'er agreed among themselves, He suffered more than if with fifty elves; When one was pleased, another soon complained: At length to quit the ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... gentleman here who is fond of accounting for everything in a philosophical way. He considers this, what I call a custom, as a real periodical disease peculiar to the climate. His train of reasoning is whimsical and ingenious, but I am not at leisure to give you the detail. The result was, that he found the distemper to be incurable; but after much study, he thought he had discovered a method to divert the evil he could not subdue. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... sail, and that there were large animals upon it with eight legs. The truth of this account he very strenuously insisted upon and wished me to go thither with him. I was at a loss to know whether or not Tinah himself gave credit to this whimsical and fabulous account; for though they have credulity sufficient to believe anything, however improbable, they are at the same time so much addicted to that species of wit which we call humbug that it is frequently difficult to discover whether they ...
— A Voyage to the South Sea • William Bligh
... his bony old Rosinante, not quite ignorant of the fact that he must forage on to other fields and look for better luck in newer ventures, yet not quite forgetful that life, after all, is rather a blithe adventure and that the man who refuses to surrender his courage, no matter what whimsical turns the adventure may take, is still to be reckoned the conqueror. But later on he was jolly enough and direct enough, when he got to showing Dinky-Dunk his books and curios. I suppose, at heart, he was about as interested in those things as an aquarium angel-fish ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... natural to young children. Reckless expenditure is a common characteristic of young men. Antipathy to school is a common feeling with young people. Yet there are ways and means to bring him round. The worse with him is that his disposition is so crotchety and whimsical. Can ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... are light and joyous, full of a child's warm impulses and ready zeal, and enlivened here and there by some roguish caprice. That was the time when, in my simplicity, I loved dandelions and buttercups, and could see beauty even in the common white-weed of the fields. Ah! here they are, arranged in whimsical positions,—Clover and Sorrel, Violets and Blue-eyed Grass, Peppergrass and Dock (O, how hard that was to press!), Mouse-Ear and Yarrow, Shepherd's Purse, Buttercups, and full-blown Dandelion, Succory, and Chickweed, ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... with a whimsical gesture. "Oh, he'll find me here. I shall work my time out slowly." He pointed to the scattered sheets on the kitchen table which ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... borders of the lake, in the centre of which was an island with a pavilion. Fanciful barges and gondolas of various shapes and colors were waiting for Lothair and his party, to carry them over to the pavilion, where they found a repast which became the hour and the scene—coffee and ices and whimsical drinks, which sultanas would sip in Arabian tales. No sooner were they seated than the sound of music was heard—distant, but now nearer, till there came floating on the lake, until it rested before the pavilion, a gigantic shell, larger than the building itself, but holding in its golden and ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... great fuss about what is no mystery at all,—a schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits. I mean to give up such nonsense and mind my own business.—Hark! What the deuse is that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of this world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on creation's day; Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him. He calls it Reason—thence his power's increased To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving thy gracious presence, he to me A long-legged ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... who was raking dry leaves, stood gazing at them with a shrewd, whimsical expression. He was the ...
— The Yates Pride • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... of this Nature may appear very unaccountable, and whimsical; when I assure you, my Design is fairly to lay before you all the Criticisms, as far as I can remember them, that I have heard on your History of Clarissa; from the Appearance of the two first Volumes, to the Close of the Work. I have not willingly omitted any ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... with whom she was promenading, and without a moment's hesitation, placed her left hand, fan-bearing, close to the shoulder knot on his stalwart right arm, her black-gloved right in his white-kidded left, and instantly they went gliding away together, he nodding half in whimsical apology, half in merriment, over the black spangled shoulder, and the roseate light died slowly from the sweet, smiling face—the smile itself seemed slowly freezing—as the still dilated eyes followed the graceful movements of the couple, slowly, harmoniously winding and reversing about ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... a whimsical good humour upon him all the time, looked over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of Marseilles; and taking up a determined position by putting his hands in his pockets and rattling his money at it, apostrophised it with ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... that St. Kitts boatmaster; never more impressive than when he successfully landed a bishop of the isles! Dolly and I recalled the "Admirable Crichton" in Barrie's whimsical play, who, as butler in a titled English family, was wrecked with the entire household on a desert island. It needed only the emergencies of twenty-four hours to establish him as the dominant intellectual force and the practical governor of the sadly inefficient earls, countesses, ladies, and ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... have washed the dishes beautifully; I know I have," she said, and she looked at him for praise, her head on one side, her look half-whimsical, half-childishly earnest. "I don't see why it is at all hard work to be a ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... I would—yes, my dear Coadjutor, I certainly would like to know before I go, what you are doing here. Mirepoix—Mirepoix is an honest man. I did not expect to find you in HIS house. And two ladies? Two! Fie, Coadjutor. Ha! Madame d'O, is it? My dear lady," he continued, addressing her in a whimsical tone, "do not start at the sound of your own name! It would take a hundred hoods to hide your eyes, or bleach your lips to the common colour; I should have known you at once, had I looked at ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... of Muhammad's whimsical despotism that shortly afterwards he ordered the inhabitants of different districts to go and repeople Delhi, which they attempted to do, but with little success. Batuta relates that during the interval of desolation the king mounted ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... of vast wealth had intoxicated this people, lifting them from the level of the commonplace into a saturnalia of extravagance. Poverty, the only restraint many of them had ever felt, was gone. Money had made them lawless, whimsical, bizarre. It had developed all-conquering personalities, potent individualities. They were still playing with it, wondering at it, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... watch sneeringly everything which happened at Lyndalberg got upon the lady's nerves. She could have screamed and shaken her fist at the dark mass of rock and stone across the water. But after the birthday ball and during the first days of Leopold's visit at her house, she often threw a whimsical glance at the grim silhouette against the ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... a rich capacity for misery, and there is no doubt that he exercised it to its fullest extent now. The events that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance. That his few minutes of hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his suffering now. The sun blazing into his face ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... but short answers, Lord L'Estrange continued to exhibit those whimsical peculiarities of character, which had obtained for him the repute of heartlessness in the world. Perhaps the reader may think the world was not in the right; but if ever the world does judge rightly of the character of a man who does not live for the world nor talk of the world ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... barber, but, instead of being vexed at it, she resolved to make it her diversion. She looked upon him with a smiling countenance, and my brother looked upon her in the same manner; but his looks were so very whimsical and singular, that the miller's wife was obliged to shut her window, lest her loud laughter should have made him sensible that she only ridiculed him. Poor Bacbouc interpreted her behaviour on this occasion to ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... My foolishly whimsical imagination translated that queer medley of sounds into the thought of a stable-pump. I heard the clank of the handle and then the musical rush of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... recruiting-officers used to unfurl their inviting banners, and neglect nothing that art and cunning could devise to insnare the ignorant, the idle, and the unwary. The means which they sometimes employed were no less whimsical than various: the lover of wine was invited to a public-house, where he might intoxicate himself; the glutton was tempted by the sight of ready-dressed turkies, fowls, sausages &c. suspended to a long pole; and the youth, inclined to libertinism, ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... his whimsical phase he was a very simple and direct man. He, too, was becoming adjusted to Priscilla's presence in his home and ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... her. Her whimsical smile, trembling to a piteously pretty hint of terror, overwhelmed him. He hesitated, then shoved back his chair and, rising, caught her to him so tightly that she gasped out, "Oo!" There it was again! He laughed like an overgrown cub as ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... together with several kind-hearted ladies from the adjoining purlieus of Tothill-street, who had been most willingly secured as models for water-nymphs. The most rabidly-engaged gentleman was Turner, who, despite the remonstrances of his colleagues upon the expense attendant upon his whimsical notions, would persist in making the grass more natural by emptying large buckets of treacle and mustard about the ground. Another old gentleman, whose name we cannot at this moment call to recollection, spent the whole of his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... permanent. And it was much more striking in situation, with the bay offering an immense, flat blue extension at one side and the city hills, pricked with lights, slanting up and away from the other. By day, the joyous, whimsical fantasy of the colossal Tower of Jewels, which caught the light in millions of rainbow sparkles, must, for children at least, have made of its entrance the door to fairyland. At night, there was the tragedy of old history about those faintly fiery facades... those ...
— The Native Son • Inez Haynes Irwin
... finished. There had been something slightly whimsical about his final words, about his manner and himself when he ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... any fund of three per cents in France, to furnish a test for the patriotism and public spirit of the lovers of French liberty. But there is another fund which may equally answer our purpose—the capital of three per cent stock which formerly existed in France has undergone a whimsical operation, similar to many other expedients of finance which we have seen in the course of the revolution—this was performed by a decree which, as they termed it, republicanized their debt; that is, in other words, struck off, ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... opinion; it is therefore not merely fantastical. Besides the prejudice which we have in favour of ancient dresses, there may be likewise other reasons, amongst which we may justly rank the simplicity of them, consisting of little more than one single piece of drapery, without those whimsical capricious forms by which all ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... guttural monosyllables to the chief, and the chief clucked back briefly, meanwhile eyeing me with a whimsical squint out of his puckered old eyes. ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... strange thing that of all the parsonage girls, Carol, light-hearted, whimsical, mischievous Carol, was the one most dear to the hearts of her father's people. Not the gentle Prudence, nor charming Fairy, not clever Lark nor conscientious Connie, could rival the "naughty twin" in Mount Mark's affections. And in spite of her odd curt speeches, and her openly-vaunted vanity, ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... Jack yearned, and he confided to Joe that his existence was blighted. This evoked no sympathy from the fickle Hawkridge, who was forgetting his black-eyed lass in the Azores and was already a slave to Dorothy Stuart. She laughed at them both and was their true friend, tender, and whimsical and anxious for their welfare. It was a ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... shop, and yet he sells everything saleable, and some other things, too, that the law scarcely considers merchandise. Anything to be useful or neighbourly. He often asserts that he is not very rich. It is possibly true. He is whimsical more than covetous, and fearfully bold. Free with his money when one pleases him, he would not lend five francs, even with a mortgage on the Chateau of Ferrieres as guarantee, to whosoever does not ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... the suggestion of contrast still farther one should read Hugo's "Notre Dame" on the spot. It will give a wonderful and whimsical conception of those weird gargoyles and devils, which have only to be seen to awaken a new interest in what this great writer has put forth. For another sensation, pleasant or otherwise, one might look up a copy of Meyron's wonderful etching of the same subject, or refer to a most excellent monograph, ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... the army, and their world did not extend beyond it. There were three of them—Laura, the eldest, beautiful, intelligent, and accomplished, with a strong leaning toward Ritualism; Juna, innocent, childish, and kitten-like; and Louie, the universal favorite, absurd, whimsical, fantastic, a desperate tease, and as pretty and graceful as it is possible for any girl to be. An aunt did the maternal for them, kept house, chaperoned, duennaed, and generally overlooked them. The colonel himself was a fine specimen of the ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... a variety of subjects"? Do you know what the general attitude of the savage and semi-civilized people is toward strange things? Note the rambling, conversational style in which this sketch is written. Compare it with Stevenson, Aldrich, and Edwards. Note the delightfully whimsical quality of the humor. Can you see any likeness in ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... slavery, upon a hill apart. These things are distinctive of this man; they suggest his temper, his spirit, his point of view; but they do not exhaust his interests. Similarly, the distinctive feature of Tuskegee—adequate provision for industrial training—sets it upon a hill apart, but by a whimsical perversity this major feature is in some quarters assumed to be the whole school. A moment's reflection shows such a view to ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... his earliest youth, was painted in exquisite designs. This he bore as a record of his deeds of prowess, and gained great increase of fame thereby. Here were to be seen depicted the slaying of Horwendil; the fratricide and incest of Feng; the infamous uncle, the whimsical nephew; the shapes of the hooked stakes; the stepfather suspecting, the stepson dissembling; the various temptations offered, and the woman brought to beguile him; the gaping wolf; the finding of the rudder; the passing of the sand; the entering of the wood; the putting of the straw through ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... lie down in my bed with a wish, and even a hope, that I may never awaken again. And in the morning, when I open my eyes, I behold the sun once more, and am wretched. If I were whimsical, I might blame the weather, or an acquaintance, or some personal disappointment, for my discontented mind; and then this insupportable load of trouble would not rest entirely upon myself. But, alas! I feel it too sadly. I am alone the cause of my own woe, am I not? Truly, my ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... Great Elector, of the house of Hohenzollern. He could not make Brandenburg a fertile province; so he turned it into a military state. He was wise, benignant, and universally beloved. But few of his amiable qualities were inherited by his great-grandson. Frederic II. resembled more his whimsical and tyrannical father, Frederic William, who beat his children without a cause, and sent his subjects to prison from mere caprice. When his ambassador, in London, was allowed only one thousand pounds a year, he gave a ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... and appraise him more highly, having read Mary Powell and its sequel, Deborah's Diary, than having read Paradise Lost. In The Household of Sir Thomas More she had for hero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men God ever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all that men may accomplish in their literature. In John Milton, whose first wife Mary Powell was, Miss Manning ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... when we pass from the vague sense of power or mana felt by the savage to the personal god, to Dionysos or Apollo, though it may seem a set back it is a real advance. It is the substitution of a human and tolerably humane power for an incalculable whimsical and often cruel force. The idol is a step towards, not a step from, the ideal. Ritual makes these idols, and it is the business of science to shatter them and set the spirit free for contemplation. Ritual must wane ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... critters will next sot down in 'em," and his eyes rested on the two barrel-rockers. "They seem tew be a lookin' at me right now, sort of forlorn an' reproachful-like," and a smile lighted his face at the whimsical thought. "Wal, that kind of philosophizin' won't dig no gold. Now, dew you reckon them skunks are on th' watch an' will try tew foller us?" and the smile left ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... get there in time. I am generally well received there, and in some sort may call myself the master of the house, so that those who go with me are generally made welcome by my lady, who, though she is sometimes a little whimsical, is the most charming person in the world when she smiles upon me. But you must keep on steadily with me; for if you stop or turn aside, a thousand to one ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... was not repeated. Dead silence reigned. And then quickly and decidedly the door opened, and Nick Ratcliffe stood upon the threshold. The light struck full upon his face as he halted—a clever, whimsical face that might mask almost any ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... see from the letters that Keats was a difficult lover. Hard to please at the best, his two sicknesses, one of body and one of heart, made him whimsical. Nothing less than a woman of genius could possibly have managed him. He was jealous, perhaps quite unreasonably so. Fanny Brawne was young, a bit coquettish, buoyant, and he misinterpreted her vivacity. She liked what is commonly called 'the world,' and so did he when he ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... sufficient number of quaint thoughts, whimsical fancies, bizarre notions, and ludicrous anecdotes, the difficulty which then, according to his own confession, occurred to Artemus Ward was, what should be the title of his lecture. The subject was no difficulty at all, for the simple reason that there was not to be any. The idea of instructing ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... extremely addicted to silence, and so great a lover of knowledge, that he made a voyage to Grand Cairo for no other reason but to take the measure of a pyramid. His chief friend was one Sir Roger De Coverley, a whimsical country knight, and a Templar, whose name he has not transmitted to us. He lived as a lodger at the house of a widow-woman, and was a great humorist in all parts of his life. This is all we can affirm with any certainty of his person and character. As for ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... death. To Ritzner, ever upon the lookout for the grotesque, his peculiarities had for a long time past afforded food for mystification. Of this, however, I was not aware; although, in the present instance, I saw clearly that something of a whimsical nature was upon the tapis with my friend, and that Hermann was its ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... put it that she passes the Commissioners of Lunacy, on the ground of her being a humorous damsel. Your predecessors had also argued it with her; and they, too, discovered their enemy in a whimsical feminine delicacy. Where is the difference between you? Evidently she cannot perceive it, and I have to seek: You will have had many ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the strange, helpless, whimsical being who now contemplated an emigration to Canada. How he succeeded in the ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... these daily murmurings and complainings that are in the world. For my part, I wanted but few things. Indeed, the terror which the savages had put me in, spoiled some inventions for my own conveniences. One of my projects was to brew me some beer; a very whimsical one indeed, when it is considered that I had neither casks sufficient; nor could I make any to preserve it in; neither had I hops to make it keep, yest to make it work, nor a copper or kettle to make it boil. Perhaps, indeed, after some years, I might ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... made at this time, when the young Emperor gave fullest flight to his dreams, was a Department of the Navy. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate how whimsical was the mind of the Austrian ex-admiral and how slight was his grasp of the situation. Long-postponed issues, involving vital questions of policy and of administration, were awaiting his decision, and he busied himself with ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... at her whimsical sally when one particular item in the crowd demanded attention, for it obtrusively barred our way. It was Maclachlan, once again hot and red with haste, waving a small package he had ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... Height-of-land Lake, tired and hungry, but happy over a day's work well done. It was a pretty little lake about two miles long, surrounded by low-lying land in the midst of a range of great rock-bound hills, and its waters had a whimsical fashion of running either east or west according to which way the wind struck it. Thus its waters became divided and, flowing either way, travel afar to their final destinations in oceans thousands of miles apart. But the western outlet, Moose Creek, being too ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... fanatic, enthusiastic, unrealistic, Utopian, Quixotic. ideal, unreal; in the clouds, in nubibus[Lat]; unsubsantial[obs3] &c. 4; illusory &c. (fallacious) 495. fabulous, legendary; mythical, mythic, mythological; chimerical; imaginary, visionary; notional; fancy, fanciful, fantastic, fantastical[obs3]; whimsical; fairy, fairy-like; gestic[obs3]. Phr. "a change came o'er the spirit of my dream" [Byron]; aegri somnia vana[Lat][obs3]; dolphinum appingit sylvis in fluctibus aprum [obs3][Latin][Horace]; "fancy light from fancy caught" [Tennyson]; "imagination rules the world" [Napoleon]; l'imagination gallope[Fr], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... twelve compositions, with no other internal connexion than that they are assigned respectively to the twelve months of the year. They are all different in subject, metre, character, and excellence. They are called AEglogues, according to the whimsical derivation adopted from the Italians of the word which the classical writers called Eclogues: "AEglogai, as it were aigon or aigonomon logoi, that is, Goatherd's Tales." The book is in its form an imitation of that highly artificial kind of poetry which the later Italians ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... its buildings embarrassed with ruins, we scarcely can believe we view that celebrated metropolis which formerly withstood the efforts of the most powerful empires, and for a time resisted the arms of Rome itself; though, by a whimsical change of fortune, its mouldering edifices now receive her homage and reverence. "In a word," says Volney, "we with difficulty recognize Jerusalem." Still more are we astonished at its ancient greatness, when we consider ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... was not much—taken by itself, entirely unworthy of notice; even taken in conjunction with the temple, of no real significance, that he could see. Still, it was a whimsical thing that, as had just struck him, Charlie's spectre should be named Agatha. But it came; to nothing: how could the name of Charlie's spectre have anything to do ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... leant forward in his chair. A smile, half whimsical, half incredulous, lit his eyes. He thrust his elbows on the desk and supported his ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... form of the African continent causes a whimsical family resemblance, allowing for the difference of northern and southern hemispheres, in its four arterial streams—the Nile and Niger, the Congo and Zambeze. I neglect the Limpopo, called in its lower bed Espirito Santo, Manica, Manhica ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... from sleep in the hurrying grip of steam, what on earth he wanted to get, and what was the substance of his gains: what! if other than a precipitous intimacy, a deep crumbling over deeper, with a little woman amusing him in remarks of a whimsical nudity; hardly more. Nay, not more! he said; and at the end of twenty paces, he saw much more; the campaign gathered a circling suggestive brilliancy, like the lamps about the winter park; the Society, lured ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, "Look here," he cried, "if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you're not ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... of the men here are decent. That's the only comfort I can give you." He smiled his whimsical smile. "I think you will find that you will be courted in the regular, old-fashioned way, and proposed to with as much solemnity and uncertainty as if you were back at home, and it will be left for you to choose your own husband. We have two ministers of the gospel here, you know. ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... One with a whimsical face spoke freely; "I?—I sought some stir, Some urge in living, Some sense in dying. I sought a mountain top With ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... realized that the substitution of sweeter sounds had made the life of that household more difficult. In spite of dismaying increases in wages, the Adamses still strove to keep a cook; and, as they were unable to pay the higher rates demanded by a good one, what they usually had was a whimsical coloured woman of nomadic impulses. In the hands of such a person the old-fashioned "dinner-bell" was satisfying; life could instantly be made intolerable for any one dawdling on his way to a meal; the bell was capable of every desirable profanity and left nothing bottled up in the breast ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... and gone to the cabinet; her father followed her. "This I would show thee," he said, calling her attention to a whimsical shape, blown and twisted almost into foam. "This Lorenzo Stino brought me only yesterday; he is full of genius; I think none hath a quicker hand, nor a more inventive faculty. I have watched him in his working." He scanned her eagerly ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... from the crest of which the Judge's place dominated the surrounding country. Little by little Denny Bolton's lean face lost its hint of hardness; the lines that ran from his thin nose to the corners of his lips disappeared as he smiled—smiled with whimsical gentleness—at the light that glimmered from a single window through the tangled bushes, twinkling back ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... his role was its chief attraction. He began to enjoy and give himself up to it, and make the most of his few gifts. Life was no longer without zest. His natural indolence increased with the size of his great body as the years passed, and his slow whimsical humour became his strongest characteristic. He felt it a fine point in the sarcasm of his destiny that he should at last have become a hero and be regarded with admiration for his conversational abilities, but he bore his ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a quantity of ready-made horse-shoes, and other articles proper to the profession of a farrier, there were also stoves, alembics, crucibles, retorts, and other instruments of alchemy. The grotesque figure of the smith, and the ugly but whimsical features of the boy, seen by the gloomy and imperfect light of the charcoal fire and the dying lamp, accorded very well with all this mystical apparatus, and in that age of superstition would have made some impression on the courage ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... on several occasions lately, and each time liked him better than the last; for his whimsical, facetious manner covered a nature (as it often does) that was serious and thoughtful; and I found him, not only a man of considerable learning, but one also of a lofty standard of conduct. His admiration for Thorndyke was unbounded, and I could see that the two men collaborated ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... Of course this is not a bona fide quotation, but a whimsical adaptation of various Homeric verses; the last is a coinage of his own, and means, that he is to have no part, either in the flesh of the victim or in the wine of ...
— Peace • Aristophanes
... his own Death, place him in the first rank of agreeable moralists in verse. There is not only a dry humour, an exquisite tone of irony, in these productions of his pen; but there is a touching, unpretending pathos, mixed up with the most whimsical and eccentric strokes of pleasantry and satire. His Description of the Morning in London, and of a City Shower, which were first published in the Tatler, are among the most delightful of the contents of that very delightful work. Swift shone as one of the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... two whimsical blunders made in the course of a performance of Macbeth, at a poor little country theatre. The Lady Macbeth—who, not unlikely, had been a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various
... and smiling to herself in half-satiric, half-whimsical fashion. "It says little for my intelligence that I was unprepared. You are a man, not a courtier. I should have known that you would not waste an hour. I wish that I might ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... after her farewell to Almo, on entering Vocco's house one afternoon, Brinnaria had a presentiment of something wrong. The children were as vociferous and as whimsical as usual, but there was a nameless difference in Flexinna's expression and bearing. As soon as they were alone in their bath, after she had had one good plunge in the pool, Brinnaria, treading water in the deepest part of the tank, shaking ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... beard, parted at the chin; it was almost white, and looked older than the rest of his face; his eyes were at once sad and whimsical. Lemuel tried to think where he ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... old man. I am the last of the black Protestants." In this whimsical way Frank Nelson spoke of himself one day in conversation with a friend on some point of ritual. It is abundantly evident that he was in no way a bigoted churchman, and with all his fine, broad sympathies he stood forth as a Protestant. He represented that aspect of the Catholic-Protestant ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... system of whirlpools (vortices) and particles, cubic, conic, striate, oblong, globular, hooked, crooked, spiral and angular: for who the devil but a mere tipsy, giddy brains, could have dished up such a confounded hotch-potch and gallimatias of whimsical rotations, or fancied that the whole earth whirled round like a town-top, had not Vinorum materia subtilis, the circling effluvia of Liber Pater, ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion, so that he might have been taken for a light mulatto; and he used ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... out," he said, with his whimsical smile. "But the rank and file will have to constitute the big end. We don't want a lot of busybodies, pussy-footing around with guns and looking for trouble. We had enough of that during the war. We would want some men who would answer a riot call ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... obliquely at her, his old face full of whimsical tenderness. She smiled bravely and he saw above the smile, her eyes, untouched by it. ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... then was, he would thus have possessed a needful mastery over the manuscripts, upon which, as it was, he wholly depended; and he would have been saved from some unguarded philological assertions and whimsical speculations. Wanting this guidance, the work, so well executed as it is, is a monument only the more to be wondered at of his indefatigable industry and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 57, No. 356, June, 1845 • Various
... superstitition, so humanism, in lesser souls, declines to egotism, license and sentimentality. Naturalism, either by a shallow and insincere use of the materialistic view of the universe, or by the exalting of wanton feeling and whimsical fancy as ends in themselves, attempts the identification of man with the natural order, permits him to conceive of each desire, instinct, impulse, as, being natural, thereby defensible and valuable. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... an Old Man of Apulia, Whose conduct was very peculiar; He fed twenty sons upon nothing but buns, That whimsical Man of Apulia. ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... was the first time in weeks. And he smiled, not so much at what she said, as at the way she said it—the whimsical expression of her face, the laughter in her eyes, and the several tiny lines of humour that drew in at the corners. He was curiously wondering as to what her age was, as he ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... dismissing some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of the creatures of his brain are going from him for ever." And contrast his superfluously solemn asseveration, "No one can ever believe this narrative in the reading more than I believed it in the writing," with the whimsical melancholy of the "Vanity Fair" preface, the references to the Becky doll and the Amelia puppet. One feels that Thackeray was the greater Master, in that he took himself less seriously, and had the finer sense of proportion. But that he lived with his characters ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... with life and beauty. Masked figures were flitting by, clad in every imaginable garb. Here was a sleek-faced friar, rotund and merry; there, a gypsy maid, or mild-eyed shepherdess with her stave. Lonely hermits and whimsical jesters, cackling witches, and members of a pilgrim band—all thronged together with laugh or grimace, adding their own peculiar lustre to the brilliant assembly. By and by a Turk came strolling down the floor; ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... idea too," thought Durtal, "and this coincidence in the views of the saint and the poet, on grounds at once analogous and different, is whimsical, to say ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... man who has a glance singularly sure to discern, when a ship is launched, what are the defects and qualities of that ship—that is valuable, please to observe! Nature is truly whimsical. Well, this Destouches appeared to me to be a man likely to be useful in a port, and he is superintending the construction of six vessels of 78, which the Provinces are building for his majesty. It results ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Ganymede, "I will feign myself to be Rosalind, and you shall feign to court me in the same manner as you would do if I was Rosalind, and then I will imitate the fantastic ways of whimsical ladies to their lovers, till I make you ashamed of your love; and this is the way ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... a slavery, and there is no freedom under Anarchy. Consider how much liberty we gain by the loss of the common liberty to kill. Thereby one may go to and fro in all the ordered parts of the earth, unencumbered by arms or armour, free of the fear of playful poison, whimsical barbers, or hotel trap-doors. Indeed, it means freedom from a thousand fears and precautions. Suppose there existed even the limited freedom to kill in vendetta, and think what would happen in our suburbs. Consider the inconvenience of two households ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... somebody was discharging the cook," he remarked with whimsical humor, "and that she was throwing the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... down at the meeting with a whimsical grin, her eyes screwed up and her crooked brows lifted, so that the room roared merely to look at her. The trim lady-secretary, however, bent forward with an air of annoyance. She had not, perhaps, realised that Mrs. Dickson was so much of ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in fine, by the obstacles it opposed to the usurpations of supreme power, and the innumerable guarantees it secured to the nation, established public and private liberty on foundations not to be shaken; yet, from the most whimsical of all inconsistencies, it was considered as the work of despotism, and occasioned Napoleon the ...
— Memoirs of the Private Life, Return, and Reign of Napoleon in 1815, Vol. II • Pierre Antoine Edouard Fleury de Chaboulon
... to learn. My friend and myself do not play for results of that antiquated kind. We seek in chess the wonderful, the whimsical, the weird. Did you ever see a ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... preparations. It attacked it by the three great openings of Italy, Switzerland, and Holland. A strong Austrian army debouched in the duchy of Mantua; it defeated Scherer twice on the Adige, and was soon joined by the whimsical and hitherto victorious Suvorov. Moreau replaced Scherer, and, like him, was beaten; he retreated towards Genoa, in order to keep the barrier of the Apennines and to join the army of Naples, commanded by Macdonald, which ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... course, it was a ridiculous sight, and that was why Rob winked his eye at Merritt when he thought he could detect a whimsical look on the other's face. Still, it was anything but a laughing matter to poor Tubby, who felt that he had a tremendous amount at stake. Every time he found himself compelled to let his horrified eyes turn downward ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... not poems. The feeling of the writer is excellent, but the expression is bad. The writer has seen, but she cannot tell what she has seen; she has felt, but she cannot express her experience so as to enkindle a like experience in others. These poetical utterances of inarticulate poets are sometimes whimsical but oftener pathetic; sometimes they are like the prattle of little children who exercise their vocal organs before they have anything to say; but oftener they seem to me like the beseeching eyes of a dumb animal, full of affection and entreaty ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... to Guvutu first." Joan looked at the men with a whimsical expression. "I've some shopping to do. I can't wear these Berande curtains into Sydney. I must buy cloth at Guvutu and make myself a dress during the voyage down. I'll start immediately—in an hour. Lalaperu, you bring 'm one fella Adamu Adam along me. Tell ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... The exception that might be drawn from Pickwick is rather in seeming than substance. A first book has its immunities, and the distinction of this from the rest of the writings appears in what has been said of its origin. The plan of it was simply to amuse. It was to string together whimsical sketches of the pencil by entertaining sketches of the pen; and, at its beginning, where or how it was to end was as little known to himself as to any of its readers. But genius is a master as well ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... recovered the dominance that it had possessed before the war, but it remained an important highway for the Western cotton States. The whimsical torrent, washing away its banks, cutting new channels at will, flooding millions of acres every spring, was too great to be controlled by States that had been impoverished by war and reconstruction. In 1879 Congress created a Mississippi River ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... surprised, because his backwoods philosophizing had long ago led him to the conclusion that when things get started happening, they have a way of keeping it up. Days, weeks, months, glide by without event enough to ripple the most sensitive memory. Then the whimsical Fates do something different, find it interesting, and proceed to do something else. So, though Timmins had been accustomed all his life to managing bulls, good-tempered and bad-tempered alike, and had never ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... way, mentions a whimsical sign-board which he saw somewhere in Holland, but which I regret to say I did not find. "It was a tree bearing fruit, and the branches filled with little, naked urchins, seemingly just ripened into life, and crying for succour: beneath, a woman holds up her apron, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... a brilliant mathematician and an ingenious inventor. Brailsford says that his inventions were "partly useful, partly whimsical." They would be, of course. They included a crane, a planing-machine, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor—besides his really big and notable invention of ...
— Greenwich Village • Anna Alice Chapin
... glanced up again with sudden keenness. "Don't harry the child, Wyndham!" he said, a half-whimsical note of pleading in his voice. "If you know you're going to win through, you can afford to let her have the honours of war. There's nothing softens a ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... headache, dimness or perversion of vision (i. e., seeing double) and confusion of thought. (N. B. What else does liquor do?) In larger doses (still like liquor,) you obtain these symptoms aggravated; and then a delirium, sometimes whimsical (snakes in your boots) and sometimes furious, a stupor, convulsions, and death. A fine drink this stramonium? Sugar of lead is what is called a cumulative poison; having the quality of remaining in the system when taken in small quantities, and piling itself up, as it were, until there ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... which Valentine left home. He was not, however, the only traveler of the reader's acquaintance, whose departure from London took place on the morning after the mysterious extinguishing of Madonna's light in the painting-room. By a whimsical coincidence, it so happened that, at the very same hour when Mr. Blyth was journeying in one direction, to paint portraits, Mr. Matthew Marksman (now, perhaps, also recognizable as Mr. Matthew Grice) was journeying in another, to pay a ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... down the steps of the castle and made her way towards them. She was a good-looking girl, with an air of quiet efficiency about her. Her eyes were grey and whimsical. Her head was uncovered, and the breeze stirred her dark hair. She made a graceful picture in the morning sunshine, and Reggie Byng, sighting her from the terrace, wobbled in his tracks, turned pink, and lost ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... prebendal commissary called for me, and I found in his father a most eccentric, whimsical sort of man. The curiosities of his collection consisted of his family tree, of books of magic, relics, coins which he believed to be antediluvian, a model of the ark taken from nature at the time when Noah arrived in that extraordinary harbour, Mount Ararat, in Armenia. He load several ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of the rough drafts of his famed discourses delivered at the Oratory are preserved in the library of the Guildhall, London. The advertisements he drew up for the papers, announcing their subject, are generally exceedingly whimsical, and calculated to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... lofty speech, though by them scorned and spurned: My pathos certainly would move Thy laughter, If Thou hadst not all merriment unlearned. Of suns and worlds I've nothing to be quoted; How men torment themselves, is all I've noted. The little god o' the world sticks to the same old way, And is as whimsical as on Creation's day. Life somewhat better might content him, But for the gleam of heavenly light which Thou hast lent him: He calls it Reason—thence his power's increased, To be far beastlier than any beast. Saving ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... entirely from their stalk-like bases and hung detached in the sky with daylight underneath. And then these mushroom tops stretched out laterally and threw up peaks of their own until there were distinct duplicate ranges, one on the earth and one in the sky. It was fascinating to watch these whimsical vagaries of nature that went on for hours. A change in one's own position, from erect to stooping, caused the most convulsive contortions, and when once I lay down on the trail that I might view ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... be dangerous, beat huge dogs into peace, climb trees, and even run races and jump gates. Once at least he went out foxhunting, and though he despised the amusement, was deeply touched by the complimentary assertion that he rode as well as the most illiterate fellow in England. Perhaps the most whimsical of his performances was when, in his fifty-fifth year, he went to the top of a high hill with his friend Langton. "I have not had a roll for a long time," said the great lexicographer suddenly, and, ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... man, had a whimsical, dark, fearless face. "But we be going to see strange things and serve ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... so very whimsical in both Sexes, that it is impossible to be lasting. —But my Heart is particular, and contradicts ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... sometimes has the feeling that a place one has never been to before is strangely familiar. That's how I seem to see you." He gave a whimsical smile. "Perhaps I knew you in some past existence. Perhaps, perhaps you were the master of a galley in ancient Rome and I was a slave at the oar. Thirty years have ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... impressions of life in Carlsbad by March's greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March's opinions were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March that he was matching them with Kenby's on some points, and suffering from their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together on ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
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