"Devotional" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... but necessary for young girls, those that the needle, embroidery cushion, and spinning wheel usually afford, and if to refresh my mind I quitted them for a while, I found recreation in reading some devotional book or playing the harp, for experience taught me that music soothes the troubled mind and relieves weariness of spirit. Such was the life I led in my parents' house and if I have depicted it thus minutely, it is not out of ostentation, ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... flame. The household has been described to me by one who saw it in 1847: the father, titular professor of Italian literature, but with no professional duties, seated the livelong day, with a shade over his eyes, writing devotional or patriotic poetry in his native tongue; the girls reading Dante aloud with their rich maiden voices; Gabriel buried here in his writing, or darting round the corner of the street to the studio where he painted. From this seclusion he wrote to the friend who has kindly ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... viewed the Church merely as an establishment—human, not divine. I had learnt faith from Holy Scripture, from my boy, from the infants who passed away so quickly, and I better understood how to direct the devotional tendencies that I had never been without, but the sacramental system had never dawned on my comprehension, nor the real meaning of Christian ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to the Church, my venerable mother; I recite the Psalms with heartfelt accents; I should, if I followed the bent of my inclination, pass hours at a time in church; gentle, plain, and pure piety touches me to the very heart; and I even have sharp relapses of devotional feeling. All this cannot coexist without contradiction with my general condition. But I have once for all made up my mind on the subject; I have cast off the inconvenient yoke of consistency, at all events for the time. Will God condemn me for having simultaneously admitted that which my ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... portion of London was in consequence commonly the gayest of all its districts, with something of the meretricious gaiety of a seaport or city of hotels. And for those who took a more serious view of aeronautics, the religious quarters had flung out an attractive colony of devotional chapels, while a host of brilliant medical establishments competed to supply physical preparatives for the journey. At various levels through the mass of chambers and passages beneath these, ran, in ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... commanding a fine prospect to the Firth and Fifeshire, and in themselves well proportioned and comfortably furnished, with pictures on the wall, shells on the mantelpiece, and several books upon the table, which I found afterwards to be all of a devotional character, and all presentation copies, "to my Christian friend," or "to my devout acquaintance in the Lord, Bethiah McRankine." Beyond this my "Christian friend" could not be made to advance: no, not even to do that which seemed the most natural and pleasing thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... earth can satisfy or fill. Old and young, ignorant and learned, heathen and christian feel the same dissatisfaction with the objects of momentary duration. The heathen, in the midst of all his self-denials and self-tortures to appease his gods, and in the conscientious discharge of all his devotional duties, is still a dissatisfied and miserable being. God has so constituted the human mind that it cannot repose in error, however sincere may be the faith it exercises. There is still a growing vacuum within that nothing but the powers of truth can ...
— Twenty-Four Short Sermons On The Doctrine Of Universal Salvation • John Bovee Dods
... imparted to his own head and hands, the old man began to ascend the stairs. As he toiled on before, with his palm upon the stair-rail, and his long black skirt, a very gaberdine, overhanging each successive step, he might have been the leader in some pilgrimage of devotional ascent to a prophet's tomb. Not troubled by any such weak imagining, Fascination Fledgeby merely speculated on the time of life at which his beard had begun, and thought once more what a good 'un he was ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... of England when a great religious revival began, 1738. Its leader was John Wesley. A number of years earlier, while a tutor at Oxford, he and his brother Charles, with a few others, were accustomed to meet at certain hours for devotional exercises. The regularity of their meetings, and of their habits generally, got for them the name of "Methodists," which, like "Quaker" and many another nickname of the kind, was destined to become a ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... no deeper feeling than a determination to adhere to the conventions of the time. These conventions ensure an effect of more or less devotional character, and this, coupled with our reverence for the name of Raffaelle, the sentiments arising from antiquity and foreignness, and the inability of most people to judge of the work on technical grounds, ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... Baltimore, where it was said there were a good many. I remember she used to defend them, and say she knew a great many very devout ones. And she admitted that she sometimes went to the Catholic church, and found it devotional; the choral service, she said, satisfied something in her soul. It happened to be in the evening that she was talking about this. She sat down at the piano, and played some of the Gregorian chants she had heard, and it had a soothing ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of the inheritance of this gifted man; but if called to define him, I should say artist, not saint, was the ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... earliest writer. In the latter half of the twelfth century, when Iceland was in the flush of literary production, Denmark lingered behind. No literature in her vernacular, save a few Runic inscriptions, has survived. Monkish annals, devotional works, and lives were written in Latin; but the chronicle of Roskild, the necrology of Lund, the register of gifts to the cloister of Sora, are not literature. Neither are the half-mythological genealogies of kings; and besides, the mass of these, though doubtless based on older ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... she 'had not seen' had become her rest and her reliance, and in her year of loneliness and darkness, a trust, a support, a confiding joy had sprung up, such as she had before believed in, but never experienced. 'Her Best, her All;' those had been words of devotional aspiration before, they were realities at last. And it was that peace that breathed into her fresh energy to work and love on, unwearied by disappointment, but with renewed willingness to spend and be spent, to rejoice with ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the dread of annihilation—the longing for continual life. If death ends all then here is a violation of "natural law"—a miracle! And you, my dear Colonel, do not believe in miracles. If we discard Revelation and take Reason for our supreme guide, we must infallibly conclude that the devotional instinct implanted in the heart of the entire human race has its correlative that the longing for immortal life which burns in the breast of man was not a brutal mistake, else concede Nature a poor blunderer and all this prattle anent her ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... breakfast with one of the colonists, and found him a sweet-spirited man, and his family pious. His name is David Voote. He appreciated the object of our mission, and spoke of the awakening that had taken place of late; telling us that devotional meetings had been established, but that some of their preachers did not approve of them. We sent for one of the ministers, with whom I was pleased; he invited us to hold a meeting with them on a future occasion if we could make it accord with our journey, which ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... those objects in Nature the contemplation of which had inspired the Poet with a devotional love of Liberty. Second Stanza. The exultation of the Poet at the commencement of the French Revolution, and his unqualified abhorrence of the Alliance against the Republic. Third Stanza. The blasphemies and horrors during the domination of the Terrorists regarded ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... children, squat and chubby, with bulging cheeks starting from the close-fitting French bonnet; and the peasant-farmers, mostly of the older varieties, whose stiffened or rheumatic knees and knotty hands made their kneeling real acts of devotional zeal. There were a dozen such altars and groups scattered over the perpendicular slant of the hill. The singing of the choir-boys, rising like skylark notes into the clear space of heaven, would be floating from one rocky-nested chapel, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... under the gallows; and, after a short interval spent in devotional exercise, three of the culprits ascended the platform, who, after recommending themselves to God, and avowing their innocence, although the clearest possible evidence of guilt had been brought against them, were ...
— The Hedge School; The Midnight Mass; The Donagh • William Carleton
... introduced in other hymn-books. Occasional verses are marked with a *, and it is recommended to the reader that these be taught to the children as little prayers. In practice, I found that in their evening meetings the grown persons as well as the children recited these simple and devotional little verses as their prayers: surely a more satisfactory delivery to them and the congregation than rude and halting attempts at ...
— The Communistic Societies of the United States • Charles Nordhoff
... would walk round his room. She was happy and proud the day when, to give the countess a surprise, she led him thus into the little salon, where the countess, thinking he was asleep, was reading a devotional book. The agitated joy of the mother and the nervous gayety of the son brought tears to the eyes of the young peasant girl; but stoical, like all her race, ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... indifferent ritual and devotional observances. But there was to Mrs. Ginx's faith a corollary or secondary creed, only ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... had shrunken to a handful. He officiated at one end of the church, and his plump, black-eyed daughter led the singing at the other, but it was observed that she looked discontented rather than devotional. She was keenly alive to the fact that there was not an eligible man left in the parish. Uncle Lusthah patiently drove the mules every clear Sunday morning and Mr. and Mrs. Baron sat in the carriage whose springs Aun' Suke had sorely ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... poetry of Christianity in general. What indeed shews the frivolousness of the whole inference is that Deckar, who is asserted by our critic to have contributed some of the most passionate and fantastic of these devotional scenes, is not even suspected of a leaning to Popery. In like manner, he excuses Massinger for the grossness of one of his plots (that of the Unnatural Combat) by saying that it was supposed to take place before the Christian era; by this shallow common-place persuading himself, or ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... sure that she would meet sympathy and kindred spirits in Benham, but her experience in New York had so far depressed her that she had not allowed herself to expect such a thorough-going champion. What a contrast his solid, devotional, yet business-like aspect was to the quizzical lightness of the men in New York she had been told were clever, like Dr. Page and Mr. Dennison! He possessed Wilbur's ardor and reverence, with a robustness of physique and a practical air which Wilbur had lacked—lacked to his and her detriment. If ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... Ghirlandajo. And thus Pietro Perugino combines within himself already the two most important currents of the art of the Italian Renaissance—that art of Florence, with its intellectualism, its masterly drawing, its sense of form, and that lovely devotional spirit of Umbrian art, developed and inherited from the earlier Sienese. He is at least for us here the precursor—the "forerunner"; and what his divinely gifted pupil, the young Raphael of Urbino, was to complete he ...
— Perugino • Selwyn Brinton
... thin brown book, which poor Giles had kept at hand mainly for the convenience of whetting his pen-knife upon its leather covers. She began to read in that rich, devotional voice peculiar to women only on such occasions. When it was over, Marty said, "I should like ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... its developed state, was as distinct, as unequally distributed, as mysterious in its origin and in its distribution, as was the faculty for pure mathematics, for music, for metaphysics, or for research. They might call it the devotional or religious faculty. Just as there were men whose faculties of insight amounted to genius in other regions of mental activity, so there were spiritual geniuses, geniuses in the region in which man holds communion with God, and from this region these who had never developed ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... a special meeting appointed for this purpose, at the week-night prayer-meeting, or at the young people's devotional meeting Sunday evening, let the studies for the week be reviewed and the memory verses recited. Short talks may also be given on each topic ...
— The Art of Soul-Winning • J.W. Mahood
... arriere of such storms, such wrecks, such mysteries, fires, love, wrong, greed for wealth, religious problems, crosses—mirror'd from those crazed faces (yet now temporarily so calm, like still waters,) all the woes and sad happenings of life and death—now from every one the devotional element radiating—was it not, indeed, the peace of God that passeth all understanding, strange as it may sound? I can only say that I took long and searching eyesweeps as I sat there, and it seem'd so, rousing unprecedented thoughts, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... certainly was an omission of one passage about the Blessed Virgin. This omission, in the case of a book intended for Catholics, at least showed that such passages as are found in the works of Italian authors were not acceptable to every part of the Catholic world. Such devotional manifestations in honour of our Lady had been my great crux as regards Catholicism; I say frankly, I do not fully enter into them now; I trust I do not love her the less, because I cannot enter into them. ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... a few plain reflections to aid the understanding of my reader. What I have written was designed for those who reverence the Bible as their counsellor—who take it for rules of conduct, and devotional sentiments. ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... always a little devotional. She went to the nearest chapel or church, and, satisfied that she heard the word of God, without troubling herself with the niceties of any peculiar dogma, which she could not have understood if she had, and finding herself on the threshold of Divine grace, she knelt ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... be, his mother came round, was drawn over to his point of view. Oh, she was so little sure of herself yet; the world had not quite lost its hold on her. Last winter she had gone so far as to read occasionally a certain excellent devotional work which she had brought from Trondhjem, from the Institute; but now, Eleseus might be a ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... were not an improvement on those who had gone before them. They were undoubtedly the smartest and most important congregation within the limits of the Nedahma Conference, and this new church edifice of theirs represented alike a scale of outlay and a standard of progressive taste in devotional architecture unique in the Methodism of that whole section of the State. They had a right to be proud of themselves, too. They belonged to the substantial order of the community, with perhaps not so many very ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... peculiar significance in tracing the gradual preparation for the work of Redemption; and though one great object has been the illustration of Prophecy, the course of types has been passed over, lest the plain narrative should be confused, since types are rather subjects of devotional contemplation than of history, and they should be perfectly comprehended as facts, before ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... mere interjections, or by connected words, but always by some articulate utterance. To ejaculate is to throw out brief, disconnected, but coherent utterances of joy, regret, and especially of appeal, petition, prayer; the use of such devotional utterances has received the special name of "ejaculatory prayer." To cry out is to give forth a louder and more excited utterance than in exclaiming or calling; one often exclaims with sudden joy as well as sorrow; if he cries out, it ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... all gone now—gone as if it had never been; and it was as foolish as, if the attempt had succeeded, it would have been mischievous, to revive a devotional interest in the Lives of the Saints. It would have produced but one more unreality in an age already too full of such. No one supposes we should have set to work to live as they lived; that any man, however earnest in his religion, would have gone looking for earth floors and wet ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... books are saturated with a devotional spirit rising into words like these: "Let my love rest in nothing short of thee, O God!" "Kindle and enflame and enlarge my love. Enlarge the arteries and conduit pipes by which Thou the head and fountaine of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the prophets to the poets of Israel—and especially to the book of Psalms—the devotional manual of the people, reflecting the moral and religious life of the nation at the various stages of its development—we find the same exalted character of God as a God of Righteousness, hating evil and jealous for devotion, the same profound ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... behind with no little consternation. Their guileful souls seem to turn naturally to Allah in their perplexity; and they all prostrate themselves toward Mecca, and pray with the apparent earnestness of deep sincerity. Having duly strengthened and fortified themselves with these devotional exercises, they bravely prepare to resign themselves to kismet and follow my instructions ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... marked by a tone of severe contemptuous misanthropy. He seldom stirred abroad except during morning, or in the evening twilight, when he might be seen gliding amidst the coming darkness, like a dissatisfied spirit. His life was an austere one, and his devotional practices were said to be of the most remorseful character. Such a man, in fact, was calculated to hold a powerful sway over the prejudices and superstitions of the people. This was true. His power was considered almost unlimited, and his life one that would not disgrace the highest ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... monuments of learning and devotion. His sermons form, however, his most brilliant and most voluminous productions, and fully establish his claims to the first place among the learned, witty, fanciful, ornate and devotional prose ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... Berenson goes so far as to say that this art of "space composition," as he terms it, can "directly communicate religious emotion," and explains on this ground the devotional influence of Perugino's works, which show so remarkable a feeling for space.[1] If he is right, it is on this principle, rather than because of its subject, that the Angelus is, as it has sometimes been called, "one of the greatest religious ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... was all of a temporary nature, with Go and Sugorok playing boards, as well as one for the game of Dagi. He noticed some articles for the services of religion, showing that Genji was wont to indulge in devotional exercises. The visitor told Genji many things on the subject of affairs in the capital, which he had been longing to impart to him for many months past; telling him also how the grandfather of his boy always ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... the emperor himself appeared. Nothing in the bead-roll, or devotional offering of the morning, had he overlooked; the divers dishes that followed had been scrupulously partaken of, and then only—as a man not to be hurried from the altar or the table—had he emerged from his tent. His glance mechanically swept the camp, noting the bustle and stir, the ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... again in its devotional black cover. She read for a long while, but I paid no heed to her voice, nor fell under its sleepy spell. Presently she closed the pages with a ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... spiritual thought which we occasionally, and the deep spiritual yearning which we frequently, are permitted to witness in their books. In evidence of this we need only to refer to the powerful hold which the yoga system of philosophy and life has upon them. An intense meditativeness, a devotional ecstasy and an insight of true heavenly wisdom is the ideal of life to which the Hindu has been called from time ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... nor lacking in a really religious tone. It has a directness and a simplicity, without affectation, which would incline one to believe that it was not made mechanically, but composed with a devotional spirit that ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... are others—English Christians—who confidently anticipate good to the Church from any reciprocation of the diversely-developed expressions of One Spirit, this introductory effort at presenting, in their language, a specimen of Welsh Devotional Song (in which a few English Originals are included), as illustrating its characteristic genius, is, to them also, respectfully offered, with the view of realising, in however humble a ...
— Favourite Welsh Hymns - Translated into English • Joseph Morris
... spiritual wants of 150 poor lepers are freely administered to, and have already opened another such establishment, in Betsilio land. Prison visitation, dispensing rice, clothing, and spiritual instruction to half-starved and naked prisoners under the Madagascar rule; their catalogue of books devotional, literary and scientific; a dictionary, all of which have been edited and published in the Madagascan language, are among the golden contributions for civilization by the Catholics in this far-off island continent in ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... a peak named Munjaban on the summits of the Himalaya mountains, where the adorable Lord of Uma (Mahadeva) is constantly engaged in austere devotional exercises. There the mighty and worshipful god of great puissance, accompanied by his consort Uma, and armed with his trident, surrounded by wild goblins of many sorts, pursuing his random wish or fancy, constantly resides in the shade of giant forest trees, or in the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... of their arrival was naturally Sunday; and after a while Hewson fancied symptoms of going to church in Mrs. Rock. She could not have become more vague than she ordinarily was, but her wanderings were of a kind of devotional character. She spoke of the American church in Rome, and asked Hewson if he knew the rector. Then, when he said he was afraid he was keeping her from going to church, she said she did not know whether Rosalie ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... to order by Vice-President Noble. "Saviour, visit thy plantation," was sung, after which Dr. Noble conducted the devotional exercises ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... sights and sounds, its effect of isolating an individual in the midst of an almost impenetrable throng—perhaps these things are chiefly responsible. But it is certain that, in common with the desert and the sea, a city like London or Paris or New York carries in its very atmosphere a sense of almost devotional reality, of almost the pure essence of life. In the very shrine of the unreal and the artificial, reality grips with a power elsewhere unknown. Beyond all the curious striving for the immaterial, the sense of the utter futility of that very effort becomes wholly clear. ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... I realised these things about her (which, besides her rigid, unprayerful pose, were all there were to see) I must admit to myself that she bore no resemblance to my lady. That one matter of devotion, and the devotional attitude were enough to condemn her. For Aurelia was no bargainer in church, but lent herself unreservedly to the holy commerce—her generous body, her ardent soul—and asked no interest for the usufruct. Have I not seen her rain kisses upon the tomb of ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... table, they are taught to wait in patience until the white man is satiated; and then to be content with the fragments and crumbs. If they enter the same church, a separate bench, or a separate apartment in the church is allotted to them; for beside the white man they dare not sit, while engaged in devotional exercises. The black man's children are not gathered together in the same school room, with the white man's. They are denied in free, as well as in slave States, the right of suffrage, or any participation, whatever, in civil affairs. All this is true of free, as well as ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... altars. And by the way, my own figure reminds me to inquire of you whether you are not sometimes struck with a want in him—a want very grave in poetry, and very strange in antique poetry—the want of devotional feeling and conscience of God. Observe, that all antique poets rejoice greatly and abundantly in their divine mythology; and that if this Ossian be both antique and godless, he is an exception, a discrepancy, a monster in the history of letters and experience of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... July, at day break, the inhabitants of Savannah were assembled on the strand for the purpose of designating the wards of the town, and assigning the lots. In a devotional service, they united in thanksgiving to God, that the lines had fallen to them in a pleasant place, and that they were about to have a goodly heritage. The wards and tithings were then named; each ward consisting of four tithings, and each tithing of ten ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... in instilling nobler conceptions. Society grew up without the belief of God or immortality; but in this very poverty the system met its downfall. The deep yearnings of the human heart craved satisfaction. The inextinguishable poetry of the soul yearned for the spiritual; the devotional instincts of human nature caught the first notes of that heavenly melody to which they were naturally ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... extraordinary gifts as a painter, and these he heightened and intensified by labour and industry the most ceaseless. It would be difficult to conceive any one endowed with a keener sensibility to colour, or with a more devotional love for its glories; it would be equally hard to estimate the enhancement of the worth of English art effected by the colour of Turner. It should be remembered that he appeared at a time when coldness of tone was almost a fashion in painting. The chilliness of the shadows ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... Mantidae, which forms the subject of this article, includes species that maybe easily recognized by their large size, their enormous, spinous fore legs, which are adapted for seizing other insects, and from their devotional attitude when watching ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... Sarah was an ardent Protestant, of a strict Calvinist type, and she had taken up the impression that Miss Lesley must needs be a Romanist. Now this was not the case, for Lesley had always been allowed to go to her own church, see her own clergyman, and hold aloof from the devotional exercises prescribed for the other girls. But Sarah believed firmly that she belonged to the Church of Rome, and she did not feel at all easy in her mind at staying under the same roof with her. She made this remark to Miss Brooke on the third day after Lesley's arrival, and was offended ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... as Clare supposes, written about the commencement of the 18th century, and the unknown author appears to have been deeply imbued with the spirit of the popular devotional writers of the preceding century, as Herbert, Quarles, &c., but seems to have modelled his smoother and more elegant versification after that of the poetic school of ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... is paid to its appropriate duties, the crew are by no means satisfied, and but too readily contract, by degrees, the habit of neglecting their obligations both to God and man. On the contrary, if the day be entirely taken up with devotional exercises, to the fatigue of their minds and bodies, they are exceedingly apt, after a time, to vote the "whole concern," as they call it, a bore, and to make up for this forced attention by the most scandalous indecencies, when out of ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... others perhaps, the most remarkable for rigid morality. They brought with them, their religious principles, and sectional prepossessions; and acting upon those principles acquired for their infant colony a moral and devotional character rarely possessed by similar establishments. While these sectional prepossessions, imbibed by their descendants, gave to their religious persuasions, an ascendency in that section of country, ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... the others seemed to get the full swing of it, and then the lines rose and fell sadly and monotonously in the darkness. I don't know why, but I at once got the impression that those motherless little creatures were under a vague belief that their performance was devotional, and was really filling the place of an evening hymn. A brief and indistinct kind of recitation, followed by a dead silence, broken only by the slow creaking of new timber, as if the house were stretching itself to sleep too, confirmed my impression. Then ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... them, saying that they scratched his legs. Mistress Cross might have persuaded him out of this nonsense, but did not see fit to do so. She also humors him in the matter of taking him to the Papist church at Johnstown whenever the roads are open, he having become highly devotional in his second childhood. I was vigorously opposed to indulging this idea of his, which is almost as sinful in her as it is superstitious and silly in him; but she would go her own gait, and so she may for all ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... commentary on the Bible is not exactly a scholarly work; it is above all a devotional work, written, as the Germans say, fur Schule und Haus, for the school and the family. The masses, to whom Rashi addressed himself, were not so cultivated that he could confine himself to a purely grammatical exposition or to bare ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... scientific authority has ever been claimed for these sacred Hebrew writings. They were simply designed as a rule of human faith and conduct, ostensibly having the divine sanction, and containing historical, devotional, didactic, and prophetical writings, to be read through, at least once a year, in ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... have been founded, sometime other, by the Virgin giving one rosary to Saint Dominic, and the Infant Saviour giving another to Saint Catharine of Siena. Pope Gregory is not so imposing, but he is nearer hand. I could not distinctly make out whether the Association was entirely devotional, or had an eye to good works; at least it is highly organised: the names of fourteen matrons and misses were filled in for each week of the month as associates, with one other, generally a married woman, at the top for zelatrice: the leader of the band. Indulgences, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... says Miss Evans, 'was known to have subsisted principally upon the sale of his German hymnbook, and other devotional works, for which he was a colporteur.' Weary of piety, Lord Stanhope became a hired assassin. Perhaps this nonsense still has its believers, seduced by 'Lady Caroline Albersdorf, nee Lady Graham,' ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... 19-4650. Under this head I shall notice two pretty volumes of the devotional kind; of which the subjects are executed in red, blue, &c.—and of which the one seems to be a copy of the other. The borders exhibit a style of art somewhat between that of Julio Clovio and what is seen in the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... I have called this book a Devotional History, because the subject is one which has to be studied with the heart as well as the head. But I have not on this account written in the declamatory and interrogatory style common in devotional works. I have to ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... must be remembered I was just off a cruise after long months spent in warlike solitude on board ship. So, though St. Sophia, with its size and its legend, had struck me as being the most profoundly devotional edifice I had ever seen—an impression which the sight of St. Peter's at Rome and of the Cathedral of Seville has never removed—my attention and curiosity were much more drawn to the earthly representatives of the houris promised ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... she meditates over her New Year's hymn. Into this devotional lyric Browning has breathed the spirit of all true life ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... to have any very strong desire for witnessing the devotional exercises of good Mr. Whitfield and his congregation, and proposed that George Warrington should take Hetty in; but Het was not to be denied. "I will never help you in another exercise as long as you live, sir," cries Miss Hetty, "if you don't come on,"—while ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... devotional books which are printed in the country. Here is one selected at random, 'The Life of St. Jacintha.' It lies on a young girl's work-table. A knitting-needle marks the place at which the gentle reader left ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... contains, in fifty verses, imagery as grand and sentiments as beautiful, as perhaps can anywhere else be found, within the same compass, in any language. It certainly speaks well for the intellectual acumen of these young men, and for their devotional instincts, that they should have selected so noble a theme. As their main object was to improve themselves in the command of language, and in the power of expression, they could not have chosen a subject more appropriate, than the Psalmist's description of ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... had seen very little of him. His devotional studies and habits seemed to draw him from the idle pursuits of myself and my uncle's guests; and Aubrey was one peculiarly susceptible of neglect, and sore, to morbidity, at the semblance of unkindness; so that he required to be sought, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... instances I shall mention presently, as a result of their barbarism. Saracenic Mahometanism, on the contrary, gives me an apposite illustration of what I mean by an "interior" people, if I may borrow a devotional word to express a philosophical idea. A barbarous nation has no "interior," but the Saracens show us what a national "interior" is. "In former ages," says the author to whom I have referred, Mr. Southgate, "the bosom of Islamism was riven with numerous feuds ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... fulminations, declaring Bohemia to be under interdict and so on. Nobody in Bohemia took the least notice of Andrew's little efforts; Church and people went solidly with their King on this occasion, and carried on their devotional exercises as before. ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... if it were the function of verbal rhythms and metres to do this sort of thing at all, could not with any propriety have the closely related equivalents that they have here. No; to ask for this kind of effect is really to ask for nothing more valuable than the devotional crosses and altars into which a perverted wit led some of the seventeenth-century poets to contrive their verses in unhappy moments, or Southey's Lodore, in which there is a fond pretence that verbal rhythms are water.[3] It is just as difficult to explain why verbal rhythms will ...
— The Lyric - An Essay • John Drinkwater
... England, are of the same general import. The wesleyans, and the society of friends, entertain some opinions at variance with these symbols; but in their ordinary teaching, all parties employed nearly the same theological and devotional terms. Their views of church government, and of ritual observances, were the chief points of dissonance; but in scattered settlements of recent formation these distinctions were rather matters of recollection than of practice. There were no diocesan, no ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... before her Father in Heaven; attaining once more the wonderful human moment when the creature who crouches on this rim of earth implores pardon for her trespass from the beneficent Creator of things. But to-day her devotional mood was interrupted by sudden thought and sensation of Owen's presence; she was forced to look up, and convinced that he was very near her, she sought him amid the crowd of people who sat and knelt in front of her, blackening the dusk, a vague darkness in which she could at first distinguish ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... expressed by the face being directed towards the heavens, with the eyeballs upturned. Sir C. Bell remarks that, at the approach of sleep, or of a fainting-fit, or of death, the pupils are drawn upwards and inwards; and he believes that "when we are wrapt in devotional feelings, and outward impressions are unheeded, the eyes are raised by an action neither taught nor acquired." and that this is due to the same cause as in the above cases.[26] That the eyes are upturned during ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakespeare—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?" This is the spirit of a joyous but devoutly grateful expectance, in which I would have myself approach the reading of a great book. The gratitude I surely owe the author, for there is no great book but has come like refined ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... opportunity will allow, in the stillness of night, when sleep hath overpowered the eyes of the village, she ventures to my tent, and we enjoy the company of each other; but believe me, my brother, our passion is innocent as devotional love. Hence I dwell here in the manner you have witnessed, and while she visits me delightful will pass the hours, until Allah shall execute his appointed decrees, and reward our constancy in this world, or consign us to the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... gave to such of their employers as cared to be present every note as it was written, in its full value. As never before, it struck Mrs. Arnot as a performance. The service she had attended hitherto was partly the creation of her own earnest and devotional spirit. To-night she was learning to know the service as it ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... wished to make sure of her own safety, however matters might turn out in the next world. She had a devotional vein, went to mass privately, had a seat at the Church of the Capucins, and an apartment for retreat in a convent. During her last illness the Marquise de la Ferte-Imbault, who did not love her mother's freethinking friends, excluded them, and sent for a ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... beautiful every time one saw them, for that happens with all such things; also, I think one would not get tired of the bathers, nor their costumes, nor of their ingenuities in getting out of them and into them again without exposing too much bronze, nor of their devotional ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of the long rows of tired, haggard, perspiring, praying pilgrims, who stood patiently for hours in the broiling August sun, moving only when permitted, and then at a snail's pace, towards their Mecca. Plebeian though the majority of faces were, their devotional, solemn, rapt expressions for the time being ennobled ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... In the midst of their devotional exercises a powerful body of Indians made a sudden onslaught upon the village. They had crept up in their usual stealthy way, under cover of trees and bushes, and their wild yells as they assailed the outlying houses were the ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... beat a lively rat-a-plan on the board. The head of a wooden idol couldn't stand this treatment more than a minute. The fiddler twisted and turned, but his head went like a triphammer on the seat. I have never seen a devotional attitude so deceptive, or one that produced less favorable results. The young man rose from his knees, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... she did not immediately rise, but remained a certain time in the same position of worship to cultivate a proper frame of mind, her long, sallow face upraised, her mouth firmly closed, and her eyelids quivering a little from the devotional force with which she kept her eyes shut; her thin bust, very erect, was encased in a black jacket as in a coat of steel. But when Miss Reed considered that a due period had elapsed, she opened her eyes, and, as she rose from her knees, bent over to a lady ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... contemporary historian bears out the statement of the old canon of Aberdeen. Froissart, Fordun, and Barbour all agree that the devotional pilgrimage of the Good Sir James was not destined to be accomplished, and that the heart of Scotland's greatest king and hero was brought back to the land of his nativity. Mr. Tytler, in few words, has so graphically recounted the leading events of this ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... enemy (Eudes, Duke of Aquitaine), who, as already stated, had been compelled to do homage to the Frankish crown. Pepin soon had no sharer in his power or fame. Carloman was not made for a soldier, and, under the sudden impulse of devotional feeling, resigned his office in 747, and retired into ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... skirted the literary horizon, and ere long darkly disappeared; of a lofty, sensitive nature, that met a staggering blow, and reeled to earth, no more to soar aloft. And, though I have never known the details of that early disappointment, I regard, with overflowing reverence, sympathy, and devotional affection, the suffering, uncomplaining heart that struggles silently on, with its wreck of youthful ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... is stripped off. The performance of high mass on the continent must impress every mind, where a spark of fancy glows, with that awful melancholy, that sublime tenderness, so near a-kin to devotion. I do not say, that these devotional feelings are of more use, in a moral sense, than any other emotion of taste; but I contend, that the theatrical pomp which gratifies our senses, is to be preferred to the cold parade that insults the understanding without reaching ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... her to go into the church for a while. In the dim, cool, and immense building a profound sensation of comfort came over her. She had never been of a religious disposition, but she could never enter a place of worship without experiencing a devotional feeling and, without clothing her prayers in definite form, she had yet always thought to find a way to send up her wishes to Heaven. At first she wandered round the church in the manner of a stranger visiting a beautiful edifice, then ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... relief in the anticipation of a sermon, quite new to him. When he next made his bow to his hostess, he was greeted by a pleasant sparkle of refreshments. Mrs. Chump herself primed him with Sherry, thinking in the cunning of her heart that it might haply help the inspiration derived from his devotional exercise. After this, pen ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... occasions Mr. Hale and perhaps others, but usually Mr. Noyes or Mr. Parris officiated. We may suppose, from what we know of their general deportment in connection with these scenes, that their performances, under the cover of a devotional exercise, expressed and enforced a decided prejudgment of the case in hand against the prisoners, and partook of the character of indictments as ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... departure, Dona Luisa went alone to the churches until Chichi in an outburst of devotional ardor, suddenly surprised ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... the time passed he knew not, so was he absorbed in the communion which his spirit held in heaven with the most gracious of beings. But the bell of the palace striking the matin hour, reminded him he was yet on earth; and looking up his eyes met those of Helen. His devotional rosary hung on his arm; he kissed it. "Wear this, holy maid," said he, "in remembrance of this hour!" She bowed her fair neck, and he put the consecrated chain over it. "Let it bear witness to a friendship," added he, clasping ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... I saw Mr. Gray in church. My eyes were on him when he entered. I noticed that all the lines of his face were drawn down, and that the whole aspect and bearing of the man were solemn and devotional. He moved to his place with a slow step, his eyes cast to the floor. On taking his seat, he leaned his head on the pew in front of him, and continued for nearly a minute in prayer. During the services I heard his voice in the singing; and through ...
— All's for the Best • T. S. Arthur
... of the Welshman." This work, which has gone through almost countless editions, is written in two common easy measures, and the language is so plain and simple that it is intelligible to the homeliest hind who speaks the Welsh language. All of the pieces are of a strictly devotional character, with the exception of one, namely, a welcome to Charles, Prince of Wales, on his return from Spain, to which country he had gone to see the Spanish ladye whom at one time he sought as bride. Some of the pieces are highly curious, as they bear upon events ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... a deep devotional sentiment that pervaded the character of Galileo. Before he died, he became totally blind; yet he did not despair. Like Milton, he labored on for mankind—nay, pursued his scientific studies, inventing mechanical substitutes for his loss of vision, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... you are so weary?" and, without waiting for a reply, she unclasped the lids of her little Bible. "Are you reading the Bible by course? Where do you like best to read, for devotional reading ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... to recommend vaccination; but, though two or three complied with this request, the great majority were either silent or openly hostile. The Oblate Fathers, whose church was situated in the very heart of the infected district, continued to denounce vaccination; the faithful were exhorted to rely on devotional exercises of various sorts; under the sanction of the hierarchy a great procession was ordered with a solemn appeal to the Virgin, and the use of the rosary ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... pipe-organ, few are so marked by that purposeless rambling organists are so prone to, as the "Fantaisie." The "Melody and Intermezzo" of opus 20 makes a sprightly humoresque. The "Andante Religioso" of opus 17 has really an allegretto effect, and is much better as a gay pastorale than as a devotional exercise. It is much more shepherdly than the avowed "Pastorale" (opus 20), and almost as much so as the "Eclogue," delicious with the organ's possibilities for reed and pipe effects. The "Romanza" is a gem of the first water. A charming quaint effect is got ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... the chapel. When lunch time came he had not returned. His absence caused me such misery that I myself was astonished at the violence of my pain. I came up to my room afterwards, and to ease my heart I wrote a page of my journal, a devotional page, seeking to revive my fainting spirit at the glowing memory of my girlhood's faith. Then I read a few pieces, here and there, of Shelley's Epipsychidion, after which I went down into the park looking for Delfina. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... secrets, of beauty is not necessarily to diminish his name. He was essentially a man for whom the visible world existed, and in the manner in which he wore himself out in his efforts to reshape the visible world he proved himself one of the great men of his century. His life was, in its own way, devotional ever since those years in which Burne-Jones, his fellow-undergraduate at Oxford, wrote to him: "We must enlist you in this Crusade and Holy Warfare against the age." Like all revolutions, of course, the Morris revolution was a prophecy rather than an achievement. ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Church is a very ancient structure; some persons now propose to ceil it, a project which, as a matter of taste and feeling, I utterly disapprove. At present, it is open to the rafters, and is accordingly spacious, and has a venerable appearance, favourable, when one first enters, to devotional impressions.' ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... of little statuettes of gods of glazed pottery, and often of bronze, silver, and even of gold, show how common was the custom of wearing such devotional objects. Children especially wore figures of Bes, and less commonly Taurt, the protecting ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... fourth damsel retired and the fifth, coming forward, spoke as follows: 'I also will repeat what occurs to me in the way of devotional anecdotes. Meslemeh ben Dinar used to say, "The making sound the secret thoughts covers sins, both great and small, and when the believer is resolved to leave sinning, help comes to him." Also, "Every piece of good fortune, that does not draw one nearer ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... stood, slightly above them, a lady, with two long plaited flaxen tresses descending on her shoulders, under a black silken veil, that disclosed a youthful countenance, full of pure calm loveliness, of a simple but dignified and devotional expression, that might have befitted an angel of charity. A priest and a lady were dispensing loaves and warm garments to the throng around; but each gift was accompanied by a gentle word from the ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... crowned with light-brown hair now restored to order, there emanated an aroma of aloofness and purity. Rarely had he had this feeling with regard to any woman; nor had he had it in the case of Marcolina when they were within four walls. A devotional mood, a spirit of self-sacrifice knowing nothing of desire, seemed to take possession of his soul. Discreetly, in a respectful tone such as at that day was customary towards persons of rank, in a manner which she could not but regard as flattering, he enquired whether it was her purpose to resume ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... principles of humanity. But they suffered most from mortification of feeling. To think that they should have treated the Presiding Elder of the District after such a fashion, was deeply humiliating; and the idea of the whole affair getting abroad, interfered sadly with their devotional feelings throughout the ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... which I am now addressing,—that the middle classes in its cities, which will be the depositaries of its increasing political power, and which elsewhere are opposed in their hearts to the Catholicism which they profess,—are here so sound in faith, and so exemplary in devotional exercises, and ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... it was! With slow, devotional steps I approached the valley. There was a thin veil of snow over the upper trail. It was smooth and unbroken as I came upon it, following the blazed trees in my way. Footprints of bear and fox, squirrel and coyote, were traceable. ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... was left at length with the job-printing orders from the town, and the circulation of the Charente Chronicle fell off by one-half. Meanwhile the Cointets grew richer; they had made handsome profits on their devotional books; and now they offered to buy Sechard's paper, to have all the trade and judicial announcements of the department ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... portrayed in the story of the days of his decline. A time came when, from the failure of sight, he must desist from his literary labours: his Marquesan hymns, grammars, and dictionaries; his scientific papers, lives of saints, and devotional poetry. He cast about for a new interest: pitched on gardening, and was to be seen all day, with spade and water-pot, in his childlike eagerness, actually running between the borders. Another step of decay and he must leave his garden also. Instantly a new occupation was devised, and he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... intelligence. It arises from the fact, apparent to any discriminating observer, that as a general rule the most truly pious of the illiterate disciples of religion, those who have the most of its devotional feeling and its humility, do certainly manifest more of the operation of judgment in their religion than is evinced by those of less solemn and devout sentiment. The former will unquestionably be found, when on the same level as to the measure of natural faculty and the want of previous cultivation, ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... occasion is the difference between the manners of a Protestant and Catholic community so strongly marked as on the Sabbath. In the former, a sober seriousness stamps the deportment of the people, even when they are not engaged in devotional exercises; in the latter, worldly pleasures and religious forms are pursued, as it were, at the same time, or follow each other in incongruous succession. We would not have the day made tedious, and it can only be so to triflers; ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... life of the Virgin it has nothing to do. These subjects have been discussed comprehensively and finally in Mrs. Jameson's splendid work on the "Legends of the Madonna." Out of the great mass of Madonna subjects are selected, here, only the idealized and devotional pictures of the Mother and Babe. The methods of classifying such works are explained in ...
— The Madonna in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... circumstances have brought them, for the present, to a dead halt. But for the burst of golden sunshine let into my sad destiny by this opening Leap Year, I should be growing pale with suspense—for you know the great Grand Duke, though courteous and devotional, did not speak out in a perfectly satisfactory manner. I knew he meant it; for no robin's nest in laying time was ever so full of warm and brooding love as those blue eyes of his. But a cruel fate took him hence before the thrilling word was spoken, and left ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... the gods of her childhood so earnestly at the side of her mother and sister; and much as she longed, just on this day, to pray for blessings on her beloved king, all her efforts were in vain; she could arouse no devotional feeling. Kassandane and Atossa knelt at her side, joining heartily in the very hymns which to Nitetis ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... all sorts of brilliant colors, and constantly changing hue and brilliancy with every variation of the person's thought and feelings. He will see this aura flooded with the beautiful rose-color of pure affection, the rich blue of devotional feeling, the hard, dull brown of selfishness, the deep scarlet of anger, the horrible lurid red of sensuality, the livid grey of fear, the black clouds of hatred and malice, or any of the other hundredfold ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... Harewood, not having any strong musical bias, did not greatly appreciate the career that Lance had chalked out for himself; and while thrilled by the boy's devotional feeling, thought it tinged by enthusiasm, and had seen enough of Cathedral singing-men to have no wish to see him among them. If the loss of time was to prevent a University career, he thought book-selling under ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... by a strong devotional spirit, which finally became highly fanatical. He assumed the title of Prophet, asserting that God had called him in an omnibus, in these words:-'Thou are Elijah, the Tishbite. Gather unto me all the members of Israel at the foot of Mount ...
— The Narrative of Sojourner Truth • Sojourner Truth
... again, watching her other neighbour and the girl. A violinist had begun to play the Cesar Franck Sonata. It was Pierson's favourite piece of music, bringing him, as it were, a view of heaven, of devotional blue air where devout stars were shining in a sunlit noon, above ecstatic trees and waters where ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... bound to say that this strongly devotional turn was not always accompanied by the practical virtues; but neither was it strikingly divorced from them. A few men, I remember, who belonged to the ancient order of hypocrites, but not many. Old Jim Cushman was our favorite representative scamp. He used to vex ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... this devout Christian that never, during her life, whether in prosperity or adversity, did she omit that daily self-communion and self-examination, and those private devotional exercises, which would best prepare her for the self-control and self denial by which she was, for more than half a century, so eminently distinguished. It was her habit to retire to her own apartment every morning after breakfast, there to devote an hour ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... humble breakfast was provided for them, and then they began to look about to see what resources their prison afforded to beguile the weary hours. A few books were found, such as an odd volume of Horace, and a few volumes of devotional treatises, which had long been slumbering, moth-eaten, in these deserted cells, where, in ages that were past, monks had performed their severe devotions. The king immediately systematized the hours, and sat down to ...
— Maria Antoinette - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... to repeat this text a prescribed number of times, 108 or more, every day. To those pupils who show their devotional ardour by continual repetition of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... substance in order to break the horrors of that fall, but all above, around, and beneath me, was empty air;—the effort burst the chains of that ghastly slumber, and I awoke with a short stifled cry of terror, exclaiming with devotional fervour, "Thank God! it ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... astonished them. Although he had returned with avidity to all the devotional habits in which he had been trained, yet he always expressed himself unfit to receive the Holy Communion, and delayed to make that formal confession of his sins, which the religious habits of the age imposed ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... in the school-rooms, chapel-services at various times as the different sets of workmen come and go, and flourishing schools for the mere child up to the actual young man, supply all the spiritual, intellectual, and devotional requirements of the work-people; games, gardening, excursions, and a general friendliness between masters and people, form their social happiness; and useful arts taught and about to be taught, help to make ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... aloud, giving the voice character appropriate to its sentiment, phrasing it intelligibly, observing the emotional portent, and coloring it accordingly. If the poem be narrative, tell the story with life and vitality; if it be dramatic, attempt to impersonate the characters concerned; if it be devotional, recite with dignity and devotional quality. Finally, when both words and music are well in the mind, if possible with an accompaniment, but certainly standing, sing the song. Sing, making a compromise between the strict rhythmical value of the notes and the demands of the sense ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... his red velvet throne under the big crucifix. The congregation (there were a good many men) was following the service very devoutly, but there were a great many people walking about and stopping at the different chapels which rather takes away from the devotional aspect. Unfortunately the sermon had only just begun, so we didn't hear any music. The organ is very fine and they have a very good choir. Neither did we hear the famous chimes, which we regretted very much. Some of the bells have a beautiful sound—one in particular, ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... genial face of Haydn, as seen in his portraits, measures accurately the character of his music. In both we see health fulness, good-humor, vivacity, devotional feeling, and warm affections; a mind contented, but yet attaching high importance to only one thing in life, the composing of music. Haydn pursued this with a calm, insatiable industry, without haste, without rest. His works number eight hundred, comprising cantatas, symphonies, oratorios, masses, ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... age, Sir Henry Wotton. The completion of his studies and the failure of court expectations were followed by a passage of rural retirement—a first pause of the soul previous to the deeper conflicts of life. His solitariness was increased by sickness, a period of meditation and devotional feeling, assisted by the intimations of a keen spirit in a feeble body—and out of the furnace came forth Herbert the priest and saint. All that knowledge can inspire, all that tenderness can endear, centres about that picture of the beauty of holiness, his brief pastoral career—as ...
— Gifts of Genius - A Miscellany of Prose and Poetry by American Authors • Various
... the majority of the tragedies of that time: which were filled with a solemn grandeur, and which had for their chief personages priests or kings. Above all, the dignity of this magnificent permanent scene was in keeping with the devotional solemnity of the early theatre: when an inaugural sacrifice was celebrated upon an altar standing in front of the stage, and when the play itself was in the nature ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... devotional side of her lover's nature engrossed her thoughts. She recalled to her mind all that he had taught and explained to her about the views and religion of the tragic Pharaoh, the world's first ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... Lincoln, President of the United States, cordially concurring with the Congress of the United States in the penitential and pious sentiments expressed in the aforesaid resolution and heartily approving of the devotional design and purpose thereof, do hereby appoint the first Thursday of August next to be observed by the people of the United States as a day ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... bearing the stamp of genius and worth. Yet Emerson's personality is seen in its many intellectual and serious poems, and in the small number of its purely religious selections. With two or three exceptions he copies none of those devotional poems which have attracted devout souls.—His poetical sympathies are shown in the fact that one third of the selections are from the seventeenth century. Shakespeare is drawn on more largely than any other, no less than eighty-eight selections ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... slightest imputation on the morals or the manners of Hampden. What was the opinion entertained respecting him by the best men of his time we learn from Baxter. That eminent person, eminent not only for his piety and his fervid devotional eloquence, but for his moderation, his knowledge of political affairs, and his skill in judging of characters, declared in the Saint's Rest, that one of the pleasures which he hoped to enjoy in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... paraphrase of the Hymns of the Brahmo Somaj of India, as I find them in Mozoomdar's account of the devotional exercises of that remarkable religious development which has attracted far less attention and sympathy from the Christian world than it deserves, as a fresh revelation of the direct action of the Divine Spirit ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... bearing the above title, were written exclusively for perusal, and are arranged as a connected whole. The author has adopted this form to avail himself of the devotional frame of mind, presupposed on the part of the reader, in this species of composition; but he has not deemed it as necessary to preserve with strictness the conventional style of the pulpit, for which these discourses were never intended: they may, consequently, ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... with regard to devotional exercises, for in the desert where they had lived there was neither church nor priest, their faith, as was already said, consisted in this—that God, just and good, had so much pity for the poor mothers whose children were left on earth, that he allowed them ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... brindled Persian cat, is a great beauty, and seems a particular favourite. I think we would have got on well together if he could have spoken English, or I French or Latin; but helas! I once saw at Lord Yarmouth's house a Persian cat, but not quite so fine as that of the Bishop. He gave me a Latin devotional poem and an engraving of himself, and I came ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... cause, and from the external prettiness of the book, being a Glasgow reprint, by the celebrated Foulis, and gaily bound, I was induced to look into it; and finally read it many times over, partly out of some sympathy which, even in those days, I had with its simplicity and devotional fervor; but much more from the savage delight I found in laughing at Tom's Latinity. That, I freely grant to M. Michelet, is inimitable; else, as regards substance, it strikes me that I could forge a better De Imitatione myself. But there is no knowing till one ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... child; you are too worn out for all and any of these things that you usually take pleasure in, and yet you take up the Bible and expect to feel devotional and be greatly edified, even to find that Malachi has a special message for you. And you berate yourself for hardheartedness and coldheartedness. When you are so weary, don't you see that your ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... Mr. McGuffie senior were those of the natural man, and Mr. McGuffie junior had never been present at any form of family prayers, nor had he attended a Sunday-school, nor had he sat under any minister in particular. He had no training in devotional exercises, although he had enjoyed an elaborate education in profanity under his father and the grooms, and so his form of prayer ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... evidence had not been wanting of the moral slackness in the African Church. A large number of lay people apostatized, and a good number of bishops and priests handed over to the pagan authorities, besides the devotional objects, the Scriptures and the muniments of their communities. In Numidia, and especially at Constantine, scandalous scenes took place. The cowardice of the clergy was lamentable. Public opinion branded with the names of traditors, or traitors, those who had weakened and given ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... devotional mind no doubt disliked the turmoil of this garden, crowded with spirited youths; the tone of pagan art was not in accordance with his ideal, and so he learned from Masaccio and Lippi that love of true form and harmonious composition, which ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... other unmusical Christian. The average Anglican chant is one of the most unimaginative, unpoetical things in the world. It always reminds me of the cart-horse parade on Whit Monday. A brown Gregorian is so much more devotional." ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... recovery Concerned for his noble patron, and urged by Dr. George Spalatin, his friend at court, to prepare a "spiritual consolation" for the Elector, Luther wrote "The Fourteen of Consolation," one of his finest and tenderest devotional writings, and, in conception and execution, one of the most original of ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... of Hungary, "a woman unacquainted with the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and revenge. Aided by those ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... which seemed to re-echo from every wall. Throughout the night people evidently came in and went out, got up and lay down again, paying no attention to time in the disorder in which they lived, amid shocks of passion which made them hurry to their devotional ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... on the ground that it gave rogues and hypocrites an opportunity to impose on honest folk. He was punctilious in his attendance at church, and unfailing in his responses, though not of a particularly devotional temperament. On one occasion, at least, his sincerity is not to be questioned. He had been deeply irritated by some encroachments on the boundaries of certain estates, and had gone to church that forenoon with his mind full of the ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Wordsworth, who long outlived them, dying in 1864. Such—to bring two extremes together—are the critic and poet Matthew Arnold, the poet and theologian John Henry Newman. Intimately associated in our thought with the latter, who has enriched our devotional poetry with one touching hymn, is Keble, the singer par excellence of the "Catholic revival," and the most widely successful religious poet of the age, though only very few of his hymns have reached the heart of the people like the far more direct and fervent work of the Wesleys ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... of a Danish friend in Copenhagen. She had been trying to read in English a certain devotional book, but said she couldn't seem to grasp the meaning of the English words. They eluded her, and so the book didn't help ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... I would not be understood to recommend that any person who does not love the Bible, and the doctrines which it inculcates, and who does not seek after that purity of heart which it every where enjoins, should conduct devotional exercises in school; but I would respectfully inquire whether any who do not delight in such exercises, and who do not esteem it a privilege to lead the devotions of those under their charge, do not lack an essential qualification to teach school. Our laws ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... taste had once again, been consulted in its decorations; her hand, feeble as it was, had twined the lovely wreaths of luscious flowers and arranged the glowing fruit. With some difficulty she had joined in the devotional service performed by her uncle in the little temple—borne there in the arms of old Reuben, for her weakness now prevented walking—and on the evening of the Sabbath in the Festival, she reclined on one of the luxurious couches within the tent, through the ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... that there is a printing-house at Corte, and a bookseller's shop, both kept by a Luccese, a man of some capacity in his business. He has very good types; but he prints nothing more than the publick manifestoes, calendars of feast days, and little practical devotional pieces, as also the "Corsican Gazette," which is published by authority, from time to time, just as news are collected; for it contains nothing but the news of the island. It admits no foreign intelligence, nor private ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... you—except—I suppose there would be no objection to my having a few finer steel pens. 'And to explain his wants, he took up his Prayer-Book, which his sister had decorated with several small devotional prints. Copying these minutely line by line in pen and ink, was the solace of his prison hours; and though the work was hardly after drawing-masters' rules, the hand was not untaught, and there was talent and soul enough in the work ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge |
