"Limpidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (1797-1854), and chosen, with a half-didactic purpose, to contrast the peasant's honest rudeness and straightforwardness with the refined sophistication and hypocrisy of the higher classes. George Sand, with her beautiful Utopian genius, poured forth a torrent of rural narrative of a crystalline limpidity ("Mouny Robin," "La Mare au Diable," "La Petite Fadette," etc., 1841-1849), which is as far removed from the turbid stream of Balzac ("Les Paysans") and Zola ("La Terre"), as Paradise is from the Inferno. There is an echo of Rousseau's gospel of nature in all ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... Her extreme limpidity was almost provoking, and I felt for the moment that she would have been more satisfactory if she had been less ingenuous. "Do you suppose it's something to which Jeffrey Aspern's letters and papers—I mean the things in her ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James
... critic, {399a} "passages in Lavengro which are unsurpassed in the prose literature of England— unsurpassed, I mean, for mere perfection of style—for blending of strength and graphic power with limpidity and music of flow." Borrow's own generation would have laughed at such a value being ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... wise man's meditations could be of some use to you, sir, I will inform you how such proof of God's existence, better than the proof of St. Anselm, and quite independent of that resulting from Revelation, appeared to me suddenly in unclouded limpidity. It was at Seez, five and twenty years ago when I was the bishop's librarian. The gallery windows opened on a courtyard where, every morning, I saw a kitchen wench clean the saucepans. She was young, tall, ...
— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France
... the Portraits might form the subject of a separate study. Abjuring antithesis and epigram on the one hand, pomp and declamation on the other, it has yet none of the limpidity, the rapid flow, the incisive directness, of classical French prose. On the contrary, it is full of shadings and undulations. It abounds in caressing epithets, and in figures sometimes elaborated and prolonged to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... own latter history will best explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father. These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... greatest intelligence. It carries us back to another phase of life in Carpaccio's Venice, seen through his observant, humorous eyes, and if there is nothing in his colour distinctive of the impending Venetian richness, it is still arresting in its brilliant limpidity; it seems drawn straight from the transparent canals and ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the honour was no less great for Dante: public lectures on the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... silvery bells,—these are a few of the least exuberant notices. Was it not Heine who called "Thalberg a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler—a pianist"? The limpidity, the smoothness and ease of Chopin's playing were, after all, on the physical plane. It was the poetic melancholy, the grandeur, above all the imaginative lift, that were more in evidence than mere sensuous sweetness. Chopin had, we know, his salon side when he played with elegance, brilliancy ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker |
