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Masterful   Listen
adjective
Masterful  adj.  
1.
Inclined to play the master; domineering; imperious; arbitrary.
2.
Having the skill or power of a master; indicating or expressing power or mastery. "His masterful, pale face."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Masterful" Quotes from Famous Books



... spoke. I, at least, had fallen completely under the spell of this masterful woman. Right or wrong, I could not restrain a feeling ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve

... declares itself in the altered course of her policy alike in France, Ireland, and Scotland. In Ireland, for instance, an incomplete yet serious and high-purposed effort is made to bring, if not justice, at least law to the hapless populations beyond the Pale. Henry VIII again, like Edward I, is a masterful king. In politics, in constructive genius, he even surpasses Edward I. He abandons the folly of an empire in France, and though against Scotland he achieves a triumph signal as that of Edward, he has no thought of reverting ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb

... of an article. In a man of weakish literary vanity—Jeffrey was evidently full of it—there may well be a constant itch to set his betters right in trifles, as Gifford thought that he could mend Southey's adjectives. To a vain editor, or a too masterful editor, the temptation under the anonymous system is no doubt strong. M. Buloz, it is true, the renowned conductor of the Revue des deux Mondes, is said to have insisted on, and to have freely practised, the fullest editorial prerogative over articles ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... teleologico-theistic principle and secure themselves against it, it is all of no avail, the principle stands at the gate and clamors loudly for admission; and if Grottewitz could but bring himself to undertake a study of Wigand's masterful work, perhaps his heresy would increase and we might perhaps then find another article in the "Sozialistische Monatshefte" tending still more strongly toward ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... likes to help her mother and be useful. When I go back I say to her, 'Now don't worry any more, dear; leave all to me,' and I run the house and make them all c-ringe before me. Even the cook is afraid of me. She says I have such 'masterful ways.'" ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... "Trotty," the eldest, was by this time a girl of eight, Melvin a stout sober youth of six, "Pinny" (Eugene, Jr.) a shrewd little rascal of four, and "Daisy" (Fred), his mother's boy, a large-eyed, sturdy youngster of nearly three masterful summers. The family was quickly settled in a small but convenient flat on Chicago Avenue, three blocks from the Lake, and a little more than a mile's walk from the office, a distance that never tempted Field to exercise his legs except on one occasion, when it afforded him a chance ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... not for fine bread nor glutton-like do I long for dainty dishes. I look to somewhat nobler and higher: indeed I would desire nothing less than to be married by the King and become the mother of a beautiful Prince, a model of form and in mind as masterful as valorous. His hair should be golden on one side and silvern on the other: when weeping he should drop pearls in place of tears, and when laughing his rosy lips should be fresh as the blossom new-blown." The Shah was amazed with exceeding amazement to hear the wishes of the three sisters, but ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... The masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept heaven seemed to thrill with sound ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame

... promise held out that, after haying or the first hoeing, we should go a-fishing on Beaver Pond, and sometimes the promise was kept. He was a masterful trailer for pickerel; he put into it the same energy as into his axe and scythe. In the same way that I was allowed to drive his mare Nancy by holding the slack of the reins, did I have my part in the fishing excursions. ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee

... spiteful, masterful woman, that ever was!" Maria exclaimed; "too mean to live, and too cunning to breathe. She's ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner

... cave, in fact he visited us there once, lowering his dignity sufficiently to squeeze into the narrow passageway, and playing Bill a game of chess at our club table. He seemed quite pleased with our work, and complimented us very highly on the masterful way in which we had built the underground house. We told him that we had organized a club of the older fellows to play indoor games and have occasional spreads, but we did not tell him that most of our spreads ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond

... tree, and then the recovery of it, is in its kind matchless in fiction. Wonderfully fine too are many of the touches in "Moll Flanders": the whole story of her descent from the honesty of a simple serving-maid to the horrors of Newgate and transportation, is so masterful, the art is so consummate, the impersonation by Defoe of the character of a subtle trollop full of roguish moralizings and thin sentimentalities, is so extraordinary, that one can never cease to deplore that, not the subject of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne

... mistress! Her brother's marriage had incensed her even more than Piotr Andreitch; she set herself to give the upstart a lesson, and Malanya Sergyevna from the very first hour was her slave. And, indeed, how was she to contend against the masterful, haughty Glafira, submissive, constantly bewildered, timid, and weak in health as she was? Not a day passed without Glafira reminding her of her former position, and commending her for not forgetting herself. Malanya Sergyevna ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev

... went on, a little hurriedly, "Eldred, if this intolerable state of things means that you really imagine I am—how does one put anything so detestable?—growing . . . too fond of Mr Richardson, you can set your mind at rest. Morality apart, you are much too masterful, too large—in every way—to leave room for any one else in a woman's heart, once she has let ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... he was masterful, he brought the spring with him; he "carried on," as Sarah put it, until he had actually out-distanced the soldier, and had her in his arms, kissing her as she ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... his twelfth year passed under the open sky in the sunshine in summer and in winter working after school in town where men were wanting, and where a boy could always find work. He grew brown and lean, and as his voice grew squeaky and he sang alto in the school, he became more and more crafty and masterful. The fact that his mother was the teacher, did not give him more rights in school than other boys, for she was a sensible woman, but it gave him a prestige on the playground that he was not slow to take. ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... she found herself making impetuous declaration, "fer ye ter take no sich masterful tone, Bas. Matters hain't ended yet." But here she caught herself up. Her anger had flashed into her tone and it was not yet time to let it leap—so she laughed disarmingly as she read the kindling of sullen anger in his eyes and added, "I don't allow no ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... very masterful men," observed the professor; "you must have your own way, I suppose. But be careful that you are not seen by anybody, as the suspicions of these Russians are easily aroused, and it would then, perhaps, be very awkward for us both. Shall we go ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... found her daring visit to Lenorme stranger and more fearful than she had expected: her courage was not quite so masterful as she had thought. The next day she got Mrs Barnardiston to meet her at the studio.-But she contrived to be there first by some minutes, and her friend found her seated, and the painter looking as if he had fairly ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald

... would have to stop coming to me." Marian put it thus, indefinably, as a picture of privation from which her companion might shrink. Such were the threats she could complacently make, could think herself masterful for making. "But if he won't take you," she continued, "he shows ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James

... showing the masterful manner in which the poor German people are led astray that most of the men making these declarations for annexation are able at the same time to cry that Germany is fighting a defensive war and is prevented from making peace ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard

... excuse is that I am a heavy sleeper. So automatic is the process, that I was wrapped in sheets and darkness before it occurred to me that I had placed the trousers I had just doffed under the mattress on which I now lay. I could not help thinking how the masterful Perkins would take it when he came to look for them in the morning. I conceived him picking up my dinner-jacket here, my waistcoat there, and wandering round the room in a hopeless quest for the complement of my suit, trying to recall the events of the previous night and to remember whether I ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various

... who devoted whole treatises to style alone. The obsession of style is well exemplified by a comparison of Dionysius and Longinus in their discussion of Sappho's literary art. Longinus praises her passion, and her masterful selection of images which realize it for the reader, while Dionysius, no less enthusiastic, points out that in the ode which he quotes there is not a single case of hiatus. Dionysius is here much the more characteristic ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark

... opportunity surpassed my expectations, and with a step full of nerve I pushed forward and took my stand again directly in front of her. She gave no token of seeing me; but I did not hesitate on that account. Exerting all my will power, I first subjected her to a long and masterful look, and then I spoke, directly and to the point, like one who ...
— The Bronze Hand - 1897 • Anna Katharine Green (Mrs. Charles Rohlfs)

... be pardoned, is swatting a butterfly with a sledge-hammer! Poor little Lucretia, described by the excellent M. Moinet as a "bon petit coeur,'' is enveloped in the political ordure slung by venal pamphleteers at the masterful men of her race. My friend Rafael Sabatini, than whom no man living has dug deeper into Borgia history, explains the calumniation of Lucretia in this fashion: Adultery and promiscuous intercourse were the fashion in Rome at the ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure

... last was impossible; she should be obliged to tell Bessie; but she did not oppose the young man whose manner was so masterful, and whom she led to the great, cheerless room with its smoky chimney down which the winter wind was roaring with a dismal sound, while across the hearth a huge rat ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... the flock. How meek and gentle his demeanour when he whinnies over the gate for bananas, or screws his head beneath the kitchen shutter and shuts his eyes and opens his lips, tempting his mistress to treat him to unknown dainties! And for all his masterful spirit did he not once fly from Jonah? During one of Tom's many absences ex-trooper George was chief assistant in the administration of the affairs of the Island, between whom and Christmas cordial companionship was manifested; for George, in his understanding of horses, knew how to flatter and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... his smithy; he reeled like a drunken man; His heart was riven with anguish; his brain was brooding a plan. Straight to his anvil he hurried; started his furnace aglow; Heated his iron and shaped it with savage and masterful blow. Sparks showered over and round him; swiftly under his hand There at last it was ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... mouth, the curly hair and the broad nostrils: in every way it is a typical work of the sculptor. There are two other early Baptists, both in the Bargello. The little relief in Pietra Serena[63] is a delightful rendering of gentle boyhood. The modelling shows Donatello's masterful treatment of the soft flesh and the tender muscles beneath it. Everything is subordinated to his object of showing real boyhood with all the charm of its imperfections. The head is shown in profile, thus enabling us to ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford

... that have been so long left undone have now been done in a masterful way. If we refer to the accompanying illustrations, we can see how effectively the public is being led ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... his eyes open. I couldn't remember the eyes. Jane told me they were blue; but I think what she said was the sort of impression the face produced upon me. A man not unjust or harsh in his dealings with myself, but very strong and masterful. A man who would have his own way in spite of anybody. A father who ruled his daughter as a vessel of his making, to be done as he would with, and ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen

... Thoburn. I doubt whether many other missionaries, if indeed any other, have wrought more for the redemption of that people than this sturdy American of ample common—and uncommon—sense, of wide vision, of sublime faith and of masterful generalship. ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones

... Caroline, Madge, Amelia— These I reckon the essence of prose!— Cavalier Katherine, cold Cornelia, Portia's masterful Roman nose, Maud's magnificence, Totty's toes, Poll and Bet with their twang of the sea, Nell's impertinence, Pamela's woes! Anna's the ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... was attained by the united action of one party and the aid of a minority of the other party. The co-operation of the Democratic members had gained for the cause of emancipation a whole year. The action was of transcendent importance,—lofty in conception, masterful in execution. Slavery in the United States was dead. To succeeding and not distant generations its existence in a Republic, for three-quarters of a century, will be an ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... than had ever been reached in all previous efforts of man at Nation building. From day to day he had watched, with his hand on the key-board, the development and trend of events. They had resulted as he had planned, and he had become the most conspicuous, the best loved, and the most masterful of living man in the control of the future. In his death the Union lost its most sagacious and best trusted leader, and, the South its ablest, truest, and ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... was an unbought man, and whose future election depended upon the number of convictions he secured for the State, now opened his case with such decision, vigor, and masterful certainty that the policemen and other friends of the defendant began to quake for the boss of ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... the need of legislation was far less urgent. Employers could not be so masterful in the treatment of their employees or so parsimonious in their distribution of wages, because the laborer always had the option of leaving the factory for the farm, and land was cheap. Women and children were not exploited ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe

... achieved no man was able to turn his thoughts to sleep, in fact the sun had been up some hours before this was possible. The day produced a complexity of events in the handling of which Col. Bromfield proved himself to be at once human and masterful. In the first place, a "battle surplus" had to be decided upon. This was a small group of officers and men, selected as far as possible from each rank and from each type of specialists, who remained behind ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson

... shadows, the ungainly movements of the Spartan, who was opening a door,—all this passed after the manner of a vision. And as in a vision Democrates saw a stranger stepping through the inner portal, as at Lycon's summons—a man of no huge stature, but masterful in eye and mien. Another Oriental, but not as the obsequious Hiram. Here was a lord to command and be obeyed. Gems flashed from the scarlet turban, the green jacket was embroidered with pearls—and was not half the wealth of Corinth in the jewels studding ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis

... ride, but we finished it in silence. Verplanck was, as I recalled, a large masterful man, one of those who demanded and liked large things—such as the estate of several hundred acres which we ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve

... beating upon his eager face and the beautiful head of his charger. I knew, of course, by the strange coats that they were English. It was the first sight that I had ever had of them, but from their stout bearing and their masterful way I could see at a glance that what I had always been told was true, and that they were excellent people to ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... His attitude toward Argyl was at all times deferential, eloquent of respectful admiration. Hapgood was nothing if not urbane. Toward Conniston, however, he did not once glance. To his way of thinking, evidently, there were but three people in the room—the wonderfully masterful Mr. Crawford, the radiantly beautiful Argyl, the deeply appreciative Hapgood—and certain ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory

... not daunten Death with thy stern voice and masterful eye, though thou canst quell a score of other foes ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... I was so startled by the unexpected appearance of this remarkable figure that I had not, until now, noticed that a large lion had followed him into the room and was lying quietly at his feet. I was not afraid; indeed, the king of beasts seemed but a part of the man's masterful presence. I do not think I would have seen the animal but that his enormous body was lying directly before my eyes on the floor. My uncle had been sitting with his head resting upon his hand at the table. Suddenly he rose and a strange, guttural sound—it ...
— The Master of Silence • Irving Bacheller

... women who interest us most, for the men of the race, masterful and brave, heroic even in certain great crisis, have often shown themselves ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... note-book, so he was evidently taking the matter seriously. The policeman, however, was flustered. His thoughts ran on Elkin, whereas this masterful person from London insisted on discussing ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy

... that cross the brain in a sleepless night, he saw a dark, compact multitude wait, with breath suspended, to catch the notes that fell like raindrops from his fingers; saw himself the all-conspicuous figure, as, with masterful gestures, he compelled the soul that lay dormant in brass and strings, to give voice to, to interpret to the many, his subtlest emotions. And he was overcome by a tremulous compassion with himself at the idea of wielding such power over an unknown multitude, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson

... resisting the masterful spirit of the young steel magnate, and Popova was led away to a remote apartment, where a single shelf, sparsely set with bottles, made a weak effort to reproduce the fabled ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade

... the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play. And I suppose my mother felt this, as so many have felt it: like others she was a little scared at first to find herself skipping again, with this masterful child at the rope, but soon she gave him her hand and set off with him for the meadow, not an apology between the two of them for the author left behind. But near to the end did she admit (in words) that he had a way with him which was beyond her son. 'Silk and ...
— Margaret Ogilvy • James M. Barrie

... as with the students of the Chugakko, who are beginning to call me 'Teacher' instead of 'Sir,' and to treat me as a sort of elder brother. (I objected to the word 'master,' for in Japan the teacher has no need of being masterful.) And I feel less at home in the large, bright, comfortable apartments of the Normal School teachers than in our dingy, chilly teachers' room at the Chugakko, where my desk is next to that ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn

... adoring, indulgent, whimsical, and singularly tactful in spite of his absent-minded lapses. To Olive, indeed, he seemed to be the only man at all well worth the while. Nevertheless, as now, it sometimes became imperative to be a little masterful in summoning him back to present consciousness just long enough to extract an answer from him. Therefore she tapped the table sharply with the corner ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... rather younger than Douglas—forty-five at the most—a tall, straight, broad-chested fellow with a clean-shaved, prize-fighter face, thick, strong, black eyebrows, and a pair of masterful black eyes which might, even without the aid of his very capable hands, clear a way for him through a hostile crowd. He neither rode nor shot, but spent his days in wandering round the old village with his pipe in his mouth, or ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... L. He is a fine-looking man of about sixty, with a pleasant personality, a good deal of charm and that masterful self-possession which sometimes marks the man of affairs. It is always evident that the most delightful intimacy exists between himself and ...
— The Thirteenth Chair • Bayard Veiller

... Tribune's scope; its editorial tone was for its audience persuasive and convincing; and the Tribune was one of the great educational influences of the country. Beside it stood the New York Times, edited by Henry J. Raymond, an advocate of moderate anti-slavery and Republican principles, with less of masterful leadership than the Tribune, but sometimes better balanced; and the Herald, under the elder James Gordon Bennett, devoted to news and money-making, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... of eager young writers; and Dr. Hyde was organizing the Gaelic League, to give back to Ireland her language and civilization, and translating from the Gaelic "The Love Songs of Connacht" (1894) into an English of so new and masterful a rhythm, that it was to dominate the style of many of the writers of the movement, as the burden of the verse was to confirm them in the feelings and attitudes of mind, centuries old and of to-day, that are basic to the Irish Gael. Even in ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt

... all the blame." He raised his face slowly until his eyes met hers. They were not the eyes she had known. They were the eyes of a man who had been crushed, who had been powdered between the wheels of Fate. The old masterful quality, the old indomitable will that stirred her anger and admiration were gone, and in their place were coals of sorrow and ashes of defeat. For a moment she held back; then, with arms outstretched, she fell upon ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead

... of a man who had so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to despatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read from the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and from the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision—the greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... imprudently used. He not only comforted their declining years with every aid his affection could suggest, but he did everything in his power to assist his stepbrother Johnston—a hopeless task enough. The following rigidly truthful and yet kindly letters will show how mentor-like and masterful, as well as generous, were the relations that Mr. Lincoln held to these friends and ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... Mr. Carlyle first found a responsive encouragement to the profoundly positive impulses of his own spirit.[6] There is, indeed, a whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly implied, for forms of intellectual activity that ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley

... A peculiar reluctance kept him from kissing her lips, but he felt he might have done that if he wished. Instead, he lay perfectly still, looking at her and listening to the army of bees that sang the sustained masterful song of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... to me," said the masterful Rat. "Here, you with the lantern! Come over this way. I want to talk to you. Now, tell me, are there any shops open at ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame

... the room, but the masterful touch that usually accompanied Dexie's fingering was now wanting, for it was a trembling hand that followed the printed notes. More the once she faltered, but after a period of waiting she would repeat ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth

... a story of Massena which illustrates the masterful purpose that plucks victory out of the jaws of defeat. "After the defeat at Essling, the success of Napoleon's attempt to withdraw his beaten army depended on the character of Massena, to whom the Emperor dispatched a messenger, telling him to keep his position for two hours longer at ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... tombstones of nations Of chieftains who masterful trod, The sentence which time has engraven, That they ...
— Poems • Frances E. W. Harper

... had commenced, and the winter had settled down for good, and the days had grown short and gloomy, we noticed a change in your manner—one of which you, perhaps, were not fully conscious. Your conversation became masterful and abrupt; you made us feel that we were your hired men, and were no longer partners in a future and nobler enterprise. Gradually the certainty dawned upon us that you had repudiated your compact, and ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson

... among them is the most expert. And at that, the expert, even when we can identify him, is, likely as not, too busy to be consulted, or impossible to get at. But there are people whom we can identify easily enough because they are the people who are at the head of affairs. Parents, teachers, and masterful friends are the first people of this sort we encounter. Into the difficult question of why children trust one parent rather than another, the history teacher rather than the Sunday school teacher, we need not try to enter. Nor how trust gradually spreads through a newspaper ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... accordance with Mill's dictum that only in that way can the truth be obtained). In my quest for criticism and advice, I fortunately decided to submit my manuscript to Professor William James of Harvard University, the most eminent of American psychologists and a masterful writer, who was then living. He expressed interest in my project; put my manuscript with others on his desk—but was somewhat reserved when it came to promising to read my story. He said it might be ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... him human inventions, subject to the conditions of existence belonging to all organisms, its generous infancy capable of blind sacrifices, its self-contained and masterful manhood, in which the early sweetness was changed by the authoritative imposition of its power, and its inevitable age, with a long agony, in which the sick man, guessing his speedy end, clings to life with all ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... equal to the emergency. His confidence, moreover, communicated itself to her. She saw that he did not jerk or saw on the reins at first, but, bracing his large powerful frame, drew steadily back, and that the horses yielded somewhat to his masterful grasp. ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... was no uncommon sign: duty and prayer ordered her life. Her sufferings, I say, had been great, but they had been encountered by a fortitude that was greater still. Throughout all her life, indeed, she was the most notable example that our time has produced of the masterful power of man’s spiritual nature when at its highest to conquer in its warfare with earthly conditions, as her brother Gabriel’s life was the most notable example of the struggle of the spiritual nature with the bodily when the two are equally equipped. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... into the fire: "As far as I can gather it must be your masterful ways at the Hospital Committee that have impressed her, and especially your unheard-of tyrannical methods with her ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... it was that fellow, Andrew Carson. Richard Anthony has not been considered a bad fellow else he would never have become the Mayor of Southampton; and for fifteen years Mary and I have got on very well together, save for the little disputes which have arisen from her over masterful disposition. But she is a good wife—none could wish for better—though she is given to flame out at what she considers unrighteous dealings; but every woman has her faults, and every man too as far as that ...
— The Bravest of the Brave - or, with Peterborough in Spain • G. A. Henty

... regarded the mild Methodistic contour of his breast and shoulders above the table, and entertained the wild idea of asking him to evoke a blessing. To complete the confusion of his appearance, he was called "Senor" Perkins, for no other reason, apparently, than his occasional, but masterful, use ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte

... not called East until the October following the election. His removal of course caused keen regret along the coast; but Colonel George Wright, his successor in charge of the Department of the Pacific, proved a masterful man and in every way equal to the situation. In the long run, Colonel Wright probably was as satisfactory to the loyal people of California as General Sumner had been. The five thousand troops were not detailed for duty in the South. Like the first detachment of fifteen ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley

... out upon the sea; but the darkness prevailed, and he became aware of a vague disquiet which stirred within him. The conversation of Jules Thessaly impressed him strangely, not because of its hard brilliance, but because of a masterful certainty in that quiet voice. His words concerning Newman and Saint Saens were spoken as though he meant them to be accepted literally—and there was something terrifying in the idea. For he averred that which many have suspected, but which few have claimed to ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... was as a prisoner who would fain cling to his prison after pardon has reached him, because he is conscious that the pardon is undeserved. And it may be that there was still left within her bosom some remnant of that feeling of rebellion which his masterful spirit had ever produced in her. He was so imperious in his tranquillity, he argued his question of love with such a manifest preponderance of right on his side, that she had always felt that to yield to him would be to confess ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope

... greed."[160] "England may well be proud of possessing in Wentworth a nobler if a less practical statesman than Richelieu, of the type to which the great cardinal belonged."[161] Again Wentworth was "the high-minded, masterful statesman, erring gravely through defects of temper and knowledge."[162] From Macaulay we carry away the impression that Wentworth was very wicked and that Cromwell was very good. Gardiner loved Cromwell not less than did Macaulay, but thus ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes

... you're a stunning-looking fellow. These Yankee girls all love you at first sight—the tall, straight, sinewy figure, strong and swift in every movement, the finely chiselled face, the deep-set, dark brown eyes under their heavy brows, that big masterful ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... diplomatist like Bernhard von Buelow appears to be best adapted to the personal and political necessities of the present situation." Count Buelow, indeed, though, like Bismarck, a "realist," utilitarian and opportunist in his policy, made no effort to emulate the masterful independence of the great chancellor. He was accused, indeed, of being little more than the complacent executor of the emperor's will, and defended himself in the Reichstag against the charge. The substance of the relations between ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... peoples, and also in the Aegean country. In fact, though they conquered and occupied the Aegean country, they took on the best of the Minoan civilization.[2] As marauders, pirates, and conquerors, they were masterful, but they came in conflict with the ideas developed among the Semitic people of Asia and the Hamitic of Egypt. Undoubtedly, this conquest of the Minoan civilization furnished the origin of many of the tales or folklore that afterward were woven ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... happened to be in the Waiting-Room at the Station, and a coarse but masterful Claim Agent, or some one else equally Terrifying, happened to come across the Room at her, she could feel her Little Heart stand still, and she would say, "This is where I get it." After he had gone past, on his way to the Check-Room, ...
— More Fables • George Ade

... remarked Rose, "that your future husband is a masterful person who intends you to 'toe the line.' But if it's his heart line, it ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... brief rest, after which Luigi and Stella did an acrobatic performance of tumbling and balancing in which at the end Cleofonte joined with a masterful air, punctuating the acts with cries and handclaps, and at the end of each act they all bowed and kissed the tips of their fingers right and left to the imaginary audience. The rehearsal ended in ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... his blood rose in his throat, and his hands hardened one upon the other, as he leaned over the stone sill and drew the night air sharply between his closed teeth; and he resolved then to leave Rome and to go on in search of strange lands and masterful deeds. On such nights, when the wind blew down the river in the spring, it brought to him all the hosts of fancy, spirit armies, ghostly knights, and fairy maidens, and the forecast shadows of things to come. There was a tragic note, also; for on his right, as he looked, there rose the dark ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford

... But the great and masterful presentations of the ideal are somehow neither the one nor the other. They present ideal beauty with just that definiteness with which nature herself sometimes presents it. When we come in a crowd upon an incomparably beautiful face, we know it immediately as an embodiment of the ideal; while ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... to write any more but rather to enter the service of the State. In Griboyedov we have a sad example of a great talent virtually buried alive by the censor. His comedy, "Intelligence Comes to Grief," is a masterful work, sparkling with satiric warmth, the equal of which it would be hard to find anywhere. This first work, rich in promise, was never published nor produced. Discouraged, the author renounced literature, and on the advice of his mother, accepted a position ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky

... of the great solid qualities. Self-restraint, self-mastery, common-sense, the power of accepting individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunction with others, courage and resolution—these are the qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled from the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... will of his employer; or, in any case, what was his soul that any care for it should come into competition with the will of the Marchese Lamberto di Castelmare? Niccolo would have been profoundly ashamed at admitting to any one of his own class that the family he served were not so great and so masterful as to render it a matter of course that their will must ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope

... word. He had gone into every detail, known everything that went on, sometimes sat up all night over it. And he had always chosen his agents himself, prided himself on it. His eye for men, he used to say, had been the secret of his success, and the exercise of this masterful power of selection had been the only part of it all that he had really liked. Not a career for a man of his ability. Even now, when the business had been turned into a Limited Liability Company, and was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... fought feebly, but it was useless, and, in two minutes, our masterful Ethiop had led us all away ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... took charge of the fortifications, and thus, in the breaches of a remote Syrian town, the former prisoner of the Temple and the ancient school friend of Napoleon joined hands to wreck that dream of a great Eastern empire which lurked in the cells of Napoleon's masterful intellect. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... servant. But I presume it's too late now, and I presume she's got to go on suff'rin' for you and wonderin' what she's done to offend you when you don't come, and what she's done when you do, with your stuck-up, masterful airs, and your double-faced ways. But don't you try to pretend to me, Lemuel Barker, 't you care the least mite for her any more, 'f you ever did, because it won't go down! 'N' if S'tira wa'n't such a perfect little blind fool, she could ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells

... and warned Orange that some event of the kind would happen. But the pleasure she took in this confirmation of her own prophetic gifts was alloyed by the fear that Reckage, now at liberty, would prove a masterful, jealous, and embarrassing lover. Nor were her forebodings on this score lessened when he arrived, evidently in a strange mood, a quarter of an hour before the appointed time. His eyes travelled over her face with a consuming scrutiny to which she was unaccustomed and for which she found herself ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes

... Switzerland together, and of course talked over the matter a good deal. However, except for my friend's insistence, I should not have allowed my name to appear as joint author, and I doubt whether I ought to have yielded. But he is a masterful man ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... being alarmed at this, as another man might, it was answered by a certain humourous play of face; a slight significance of lip and air, quite difficult to characterize. It was not arrogant, nor arbitrary; I do not know how to call it masterful; and yet certainly it expressed no dismay and no apprehension. Perhaps it expressed that he intended to be in a different category from other men. Perhaps he thought Mrs. Bywank meant to read him ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner

... her head. ''E'll never get over bein' bested by the men. 'E's always been so masterful all 'is life, an' they've mastered 'im ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin

... that steered his steamer Many a year through the Sound of Mull, He that was never a Celtic dreamer, But a captain of captains masterful: O Death, thou madest the world more dull When you nailed him down in his narrow bier, And sent his ghost into Charon's hull; But where are the snows ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes

... up these flat-topped houses, these precipitous walls beneath which winds the darkened causeway. One seems to be travelling in a mountain gorge with, above, a thin ribbon of sky, fluid blue, flawless of cloud, like the sea. He, that so masterful sun, has given Florence the apathetic, beaten aspect of a southern town; he and the temperate sky have fixed the tone for ever; and the nimble air—"nimbly and sweetly" recommending itself— has given the quaintness and the freaksomeness of the North. This ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... a power on earth from the start—and that by the masterful quality of their mind and spirit. They had endless pluck, intellectual and moral. They believed that the kingdom in this world was with ideas. It was, you might say, one of their original Yankee notions that it ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... all the woods lay asleep in the shadow, and only the weather-cock on the uppermost gable of the roof was turning in the light wind of dawn), it seemed to him that the time favoured a bold deed and a masterful entrance. ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... manly conformity of their every-day practice to their creed, which contrasts sharply with what we see among most Europeans, who profess extreme unworldliness and humiliation on one day of the week, and act in a worldly and masterful manner during the remaining six. Although many years have passed since that time, I still find the old feelings in existence—for instance, that of looking on ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... my features, my manner, my gait, my speech, a masterful passion—not a passion dried thin with the heat of asceticism, not a passion with its face turned back at every step in doubt and debate, but a full-blooded passion. It roars and rolls on, like a flood, with the cry: ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore

... visited his rich sister at Bruseth, but to-day he had taken his weary way up there, and the two masterful old folks sat now facing ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer

... down into her eyes, bending over her, smiling, pressing, confident, masterful (Page ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... one heard her murmur those words? Would the Senate know that some one in a gondola had caught the new title from her own lips? And so—perchance—to punish the indiscretion—for the Senate was masterful, never-to-be-disobeyed, and the matter was not to be known until it should be declared by that solemn body of world-rulers. And if the gondoliero had carried her word to the Palazzo San Marco——? What if he had been sent there by the Senate itself to watch and see if she were already woman enough ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... eat since morning, but he did not feel hungry. He was faint from grief and despair. To encounter a man of the world like Mr. Wygant, cold and merciless and masterful—that was a terrible ordeal for him. The man seemed to him like some great fortress of evil; and what could he do, save to gaze at ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... had come to the conclusion that there was much about him which I did not and could not understand. In the first place, for any man to choose to live, solitary, in such an abode as the Bell House was remarkable. Why had the masterful Eurasian retired to that retreat in company with his black servitor? I thought of my own case, but it did not seem to ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... have it over," replied Dave, getting up with a brave, effort. Truly, if he carried that determined front to his lady-love he would look like a masterful lover. But when he got to the door he did not ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... merges into the man, and we must leave him. Strong of purpose, clear-headed and masterful, Louis the Fourteenth ruled as King of France for seventy-two years—the most powerful monarch in Christendom. Handsome in person, majestic in bearing, dignified, lavish, and proud; ruling France in one of the most splendid periods of its history—a period ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... remained cheerfully masterful, and picturesquely flamboyant, without even an occasional betrayal of the bitterness which makes the one attribute savour of insolence, and the other of oppression, his wife had regarded him as exactly fulfilling the part ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore

... 'Servant's Hall' has no eyes. That the maid in her cap and apron has not the same burning passions as idle Madame in her silks and laces. That the man has not his own easy-going vices just as alive and masterful as the base appetites ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... sum up an examination minute and masterful. Not only is the testimony of the Epistle of Polycarp adduced, but also that of Irenaeus; that of the letter of the Smyrnaeans, giving the account of the martyrdom of Polycarp; that of Lucian, and that of Origen (middle ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various

... few fundamental mistakes that the Iron Chancellor ever made was to permit Leopold to snatch the Congo from under the very eyes and hands of Germany. I quote this episode to show that when it came to business Leopold made every king in Europe look like an office boy. Even so masterful a manipulator of men as Cecil Rhodes failed with him. Rhodes sought his aid in his trans-African telegraph scheme but Leopold was too shrewd for him. After his first audience with the Belgian king Rhodes said to Robert Williams, "I thought I ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... subdue her by fear. The secret of her honour is in our hands, and she will never dare to rebel. She plainly loves Bertrand of Artois, whose languishing eyes and humble sighs contrast in a striking manner with your haughty indifference and your masterful ways. The mother of the Princes of Tarentum, the Empress of Constantinople, will easily seize an occasion of helping on the princess's love so as to alienate her more and more from her husband: Cancha will be the go between, and sooner or ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... and inexperienced, and Tom Cowell's declaration of love and somewhat masterful wooing had taken her by storm. She had hardly realized that he was dear to her beyond friendship, when he asked her to be his wife, and, in spite of the suddenness of her betrothal, if the bright, dimpling smile and sunny eyes might be taken as a sign, she was a ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins

... perish; and so I. The slug must procreate its kind, or its kind will perish; and so I. The need being the same, the only difference is in the expression. In all life come times and seasons when the individuals are aware of dim yearnings and blind compulsions and masterful desires. The senses are quickened and alert to the call of kind. And just as the fish and the reptile glimmeringly adumbrate man, so do these yearnings and desires adumbrate what man in himself calls "love," spelled all out in capitals. I repeat, the need is the same. From the amoeba, up ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... David about his life, asking questions briskly, as though he were accustomed to command; and David felt more and more every moment that he was as a child before this masterful and wary man. He told him of his early life, and of his visions, and of his desire to know God, and of the light that he set in the rocks; and then he told him of his adventure with the pirates, not forgetting the treasure. The priest heard him with great ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... Gurdun's brother's son) with a big nose, long and pendulous; Gilles' brother Bartholomew, and others whom it would be tedious to mention. Gilles himself looked well knit for the business in hand; all the old women agreed that he would make a masterful husband. They stabled their horses in the inn-yard, and went into the church porch ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... masterful a man to keep his silence altogether; he was, besides, so content upon the whole that he was sure he could hold his temper in check, and the better to take breath for a long speech, he took the little boy from his shoulder and planted ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... romance was his own. Others have told of the Western mountains and pictured the great desert of the Southwest, but none has painted with so masterful a hand the great prairies of the Northwest, shown the lavish hand with which Nature pours out her gifts upon the pioneer, and again the calm cruelty with which she effaces him. In the midst of these scenes his ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... anything that he did not know, and never found anything that he could not do. This Admirable Crichton was spangled all over well-earned badges, indicating his accomplishments. We really might have gone off, the whole lot of us, masterful staff officer, dainty registration clerks, highly efficient stenographer, etc., and had a good time; he would have run the show perfectly well without us—a Hirst, a Jimmy Wilde, a "Tetrarch," ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... be sure I shall be pleased to help you all I can," Sister Martha assures him. "And I have many friends among the miners. It will be some time before they will accept your protestations in good faith. You must know that your masterful knowledge of the law has kept many of them from winning their suit for damages against the Paradise Company. If you do something to prove your sincerity it will win you ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams

... eternal fitness of things. Experience was well enough, but special creation was better, and Peter was immediately appointed, his name being asked by the chairman afterwards as a formality. From the beginning he took up a masterful position, receiving his human cargo at the junction and discharging it at the station with a power that even Drumtochty did not resist, and a knowledge of individuals that was almost comprehensive. It is true that, ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... slipped into my overcoat pocket, and I suffered him to deprive me of my weapon without a murmur. Nor was this simply because Raffles had the subtle power of making himself irresistible at will. He was beyond comparison the most masterful man whom I have ever known; yet my acquiescence was due to more than the mere subjection of the weaker nature to the stronger. The forlorn hope which had brought me to the Albany was turned as by magic into an almost staggering sense of safety. Raffles would help me after all! A. J. Raffles ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... in his replies. Moreover, while by his manner he had pedestaled and prayed to her as to a goddess, when they were alone and before her mother came, Dorothy now observed that Richard carried himself in a manner easy and masterful, and as one who knows much in the presence of ones who know little. This air of the ineffably invincible made Dorothy forget the adoration which had aforetime glowed in his eyes, and she longed to ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... enough," she whispered. His only answer was to tighten the arm behind her. She sighed and let that masterful strength bear her where it would. She forgot that this man was little more than a savage, that they would part at dawn. The blood has no memories, no reflections, no regrets for the past, no consideration of ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather

... "Maragha" lit. rubbed his face on them like a fawning dog. Ghanim is another "softy" lover, a favourite character in Arab tales; and by way of contrast, the girl is masterful enough. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... Jonathan! Whatever's come over you to make you so masterful. Well, yes then—I suppose a bargain's a bargain, all right. But before your side of it's paid up you've got to go right over and paint that porch of yours ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... had no sooner quitted the house than M. Gandrin opened a door at the side of his office, and a large portly man strode into the room,—stride it was rather than step,—firm, self-assured, arrogant, masterful. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... side we are now directly above the tomb of that masterful Countess of Buckingham, mother of Charles the First's favourite, whose own pompous monument will be found in Henry VII.'s Chapel. In the vault {86} beneath lay for more than a century the withered mummy of a French princess, the coquettish Kate, whom Henry V. courts so ardently in Shakespeare's ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith

... was a masterful sort of woman, and that night it seemed like she was possessed. The way she talked made me think of the Day of Pentecost and the gift of tongues. And finally she got to the minister! I'd been wonderin' all along if she was goin' to let him off. ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall

... the two-thirty session," he said. And the Wolf, huge and masterful, disappeared with a stealthy tread, and the door closed softly ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott

... knew. Haddingly was one of those uncomplainingly meek men who never stand up for themselves. It is a curious fact, but it is a fact, that a really helpless person gets things done for him which the most aggressive and masterful men cannot accomplish. The success in life of women of the "clinging" kind is ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham

... side, watched in admiring silence the easy grace of his greeting and the masterful way in which he took possession of Joyce's suit-case and trunk checks. When he turned to her to acknowledge his introduction as respectfully as if she had been forty instead of fourteen, her admiration shot up like mercury in a thermometer. ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston

... with an angry flash in his eyes, and he was about to burst out with some fierce retort; but in those brief moments it seemed to him that it was not Glyn's but the Colonel's masterful eyes that were gazing down into his, as, truth to tell, they had more than once looked down upon his father in some special crisis when in the cause of right the brave English officer had with a few words mastered the untutored Indian chief, and maintained his position ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn

... gross exaggeration, but it has a modicum of truth in it. In the eyes of well-trained Russian officials M. Witte was a titanic, reckless character, capable at any moment of playing the part of the bull in the china-shop. As a masterful person, brusque in manner and incapable of brooking contradiction, he had made for himself many enemies; and his restless, irrepressible energy had led him to encroach on the provinces of all his colleagues. Possessing as he did the control ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... them, as vigorous as they, strode Adoniram Purdon behind his team, the reins tied together behind his muscular neck, his hands grasping the plow with the masterful sureness of the successful practitioner of an art. The hot, sweet spring sunshine shone down on 'Niram's head with its thick crest of brown hair, the ineffable odor of newly turned earth steamed up about him like incense, the mountain ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... lack of strength, And kept them at arm's length. Then the war came - The world was all aflame! The men we had thought dull and void of power Were heroes in an hour. He who had seemed a slave to petty greed Showed masterful in that great time of need. He who had plotted for his neighbour's pelf, Now for his fellows offers up himself. And we were only women, forced by war To sacrifice ...
— Poems of Purpose • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... as the last effort of that Tudor policy which had so long hindered an outbreak of strife between the nation and the Crown. Differ as the Tudors might from one another, they were alike in their keen sense of national feeling and in their craving to carry it along with them. Masterful as Henry or Elizabeth might be, what they "prized most dearly," as the Queen confessed, was "the love and goodwill of their subjects." They prized it because they knew the force it gave them. And Cecil knew it too. He had grown up among the traditions of the ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... did you do then?" demanded the stranger, rising from his seat with sudden energy, his voice deep, insistent, masterful. ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... and good fame once said: "The forces that have made me? Well, first my mother, second my poverty, third Felix Holt. That masterful son of George Eliot became an ideal of my youth, and unconsciously I began to ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller

... first impression is one of delight with the quaint symbolic illuminations wrought by the nuns of Ephrata upon the margins. But those who know music declare that the melodies are lovely, and that the whole structure of the harmonies is masterful, and worthy of the fame they had in the days when monks and nuns performed them under the lead of Brother Friedsam himself. In the gallery of Zion house, but concealed from the view of the brethren, sat the sisterhood, like a company of saints in spotless ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... of Henry VIII.'s reign can indeed only be solved by realising the misrule of the preceding century, the failure of parliamentary government, and the strength of the popular demand for a firm and masterful hand. It is a modern myth that Englishmen have always been consumed with enthusiasm for parliamentary government and with a thirst for a parliamentary vote. The interpretation of history, like that of the Scriptures, varies from age to age; and present ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard

... of more important and pressing daily business, we spasmodically bethink ourselves, and for a little while seek for the light of God's felt presence to shine upon us, we shall not get it. But if we lay a masterful hand, as we ought to do, on these divergent desires that draw us asunder, and bind ourselves, as it were, together, by the strong cord of a resolved purpose carried out throughout our lives, then we shall certainly not ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... you cantering off, Master Nat," said Samson, as, with keen appreciation of his masterful position, he tied his brother as tightly as he could, while Nat resisted and struggled so that he had to be held by Samson's companion, his steel headpiece falling off in the encounter. "That's got him, I think," said Samson, tightening ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn

... was rumoured that Bridget McCaura, of Moher Farm, had sheltered Dark Andy. Bridget was a warm woman, a "woman of three cows," a masterful old maid, who in her time had refused many a pretty fellow, perhaps because she suspected them of hankering after her live stock, her poultry, and her sixty acres of rocks. Then the old parish priest, Father Peter Flannery, rode over to see her. Bridget ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various

... the door in," said Mr. Stott in his masterful manner, but Wallie already had run for ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... outside the factory gates, the soul irresistibly compelled her to sing, and a wild song came from her lips, hymning the marshlands. And into her song came crying her yearning for home, and for the sound of the shout of the North Wind, masterful and proud, with his lovely lady the Snow; and she sang of tales that the rushes murmured to one another, tales that the teal knew and the watchful heron. And over the crowded streets her song went crying away, ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany

... seem extraordinarily early to have to get up, even though Bee is to be married at eleven o'clock to-day," she murmured. "Certainly, Martha is a most masterful person. Well, I don't mind so much, as it is ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade

... follow. I felt as though I were about to fly off, at some immense tangent, into an outer space hitherto unknown even in dreams. And so singular was the result produced upon me that I was uncommonly glad to anchor my mind, as well as my eyes, upon the masterful personality of the doctor at my side, for there, I realised, I could draw always upon the forces ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... his usual rather masterful tone, 'has Tom——' and then he stopped, for Tom Brick, a labourer on a neighbouring farm, was there to answer for himself. 'Have you brought the ferrets?' the boy went on, turning to him. 'I suppose it's too late to do ...
— Miss Mouse and Her Boys • Mrs. Molesworth



Words linked to "Masterful" :   virtuoso, masterly, consummate



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