"Tameness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Mendelssohn was distinctly feminine, and it follows that his music should be played by men and not by women, otherwise we get a suggestion of softness and tameness that is apt to pall. Man, like Deity, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... after the year 1746, where she gave vent to her political partiality, to the great offence of the rabble of that city. Being zealous in their loyalty, when there was no danger, in proportion to the tameness with which they had surrendered to the Highlanders in 1745, the mob inflicted upon poor Jean Gordon no slighter penalty than that of ducking her to death in the Eden. It was an operation of some time, for Jean was a stout woman, and, struggling with her murderers, often got her head above water; ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... and fish are used much as they seem to have been in the earlier period of Greek civilisation, as relish and supplement to fruits, vegetables, and farinaceous dishes, rather than as the principal element of food. As their training and their extreme tameness indicate, domestic creatures, even those destined only to serve as food or to furnish clothing, are treated not indeed with tenderness, but with gentleness, and without either the neglect or the cruelty which so revolt ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... learn that it is hard to live. It is not so hard to fight, and it is easy to rest neutral, but to be fighter and bearer both, to stand staunch, holding ever to the issue, and yet, without tameness, to take rebuff and wait, there's the true course and the heroic. It is difficult when one has been conquered to know it. It is difficult to honour an outgrown ideal, which cost us, nevertheless, comfort and prestige—prizes which youth scorns and which oncoming age, pathetically ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... boiled up from the bottom of the oozy harbor as the Hatteras dropped her hook; and the sharks moved about, all the more shuddery in their tameness. Two launches were making for the steamer, and Bedient, sheltering his eyes from the light, discovered the little Captain standing well-forward on the nearest—a puffy, impatient face, pathetically unconscious ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... was a calamity. Nevertheless the great end had, in the main, already been accomplished. Borrow had broken through the tameness of the regulation literary memoir, and had shown the naked footprint on the sand. The 'great unknown' had gone down beneath his associations, his acquirements and his adventures, and had to a large extent revealed himself—a primitive man, with his breast by ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... directly over its head while it squatted upon the mud, and when disturbed flying into a fig-tree before the hotel piazza, just as the dear little ground doves were in the habit of doing. To me, who had hitherto seen the green heron in the wildest of places, this tameness was an astonishing sight. It would be hard to say which surprised me more, the New Smyrna green herons or the St. Augustine sparrow-hawks, —which latter treated me very much as I am accustomed to being treated by village-bred ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... Friday (June 2) the good protestants met in Saint George's Fields, at the summons of Lord George Gordon; and marching to Westminster, insulted the lords and commons, who all bore it with great tameness. At night the outrages began by the demolition of the mass-house ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... consequences of cowardice in the sufferers, who are harassed and oppressed, only because they suffer it without resistance. We are, therefore, to remember, whenever the pest, here threatened, shall invade us, that submission and tameness will be certain ruin, and that nothing but spirit, vigilance, activity, and opposition, can preserve us from the most hateful and reproachful misery, that of being plundered, starved, and devoured ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... us,—when, perhaps, even supernatural agents are introduced, the reader may indulge, indeed, in occasional day-dreams, but will be so little reminded by what he has been reading, of anything that occurs in actual life, that though he may perhaps feel some disrelish for the tameness of the scene before him, compared with the fairy-land he has been visiting, yet at least his judgment will not be depraved, nor his expectations misled; he will not apprehend a meeting with Algerine banditti on English shores, nor regard the old ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... rifle work. In comparison with any sheep, goat, ibex, markhor and even deer hunting, it must be rather mild sport. A level grassy plain with more or less bushes and small trees for use in stalking is a tame scenario beside mountains and heavy forests, and it seems to me that this sameness and tameness of habitat naturally fails to stimulate the mental development of the wild habitants. In captivity, excepting the keen kongoni, or Coke hartebeest, and a few others, the old-world antelopes are mentally rather dull animals. They seem to have few thoughts, and seldom ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... plenty of water-fowl by diving under them and pulling them under the water by the legs before they have time to make any noise. By this method they do not frighten the rest away, and this accounts for the birds' extreme tameness. ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... this man the appearance of some god of the forest who had just come forth from its primeval depths bringing with him the laurels of wood and mountain crag and sky, some king standing on the edge of the wood amazed at the flatness and tameness of the valley and plains. Umapine stood there the embodiment and glorification of Indian manners, costume, and tradition, a vivid picture of Indian life and story. The waymarks of such a life are, always tense with interest: ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... conferred on them are daggers put into the hands of assassins, to be plunged into our own bosoms in the moment the thrust can go home to the heart. Moderation can never reclaim them. They deem it timidity, and despise without fearing the tameness from which it flows. Backed by England, they never lose the hope that their day is to come, when the terrorism of their earlier power is to be merged in the more gratifying system,of deportation and the guillotine. Being now hors de combat myself, I resign ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... and your Dean were alike? I never saw your Chancellor, nor his chaplain. The latter has a good deal of learning, and is a well-wisher to be an author: your Chancellor is an excellent man. As for Patrick's bird, he bought him for his tameness, and is grown the wildest I ever saw. His wings have been quilled thrice, and are now up again: he will be able to fly after us to Ireland, if he be willing.—Yes, Mrs. Stella, Dingley writes more like Presto than you; for all you superscribed the letter, as who should say, Why should not ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... blood cooled he lost faith in even this sacrifice. Could anything change the leopard West into the tameness and serenity of the ox? "No," he decided, "nothing but death will do that. This generation, these fierce and bloody hearts, must die; only in that way can the tradition of violence be overcome and a new ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... this corner by the haven is the most interesting portion of Bude, which some visitors have condemned as an unattractive place. Certainly the growth of lodging-houses has not added to its charm, as these houses have all the tameness, though doubtless also the convenience, of modern street-architecture. It is by the haven and on the banks of the now useless canal that there is anything of an old-world atmosphere. As compared with places like Polperro or Boscastle, Bude has a touch of the commonplace, but its coast ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... hideous statues which ornament the public squares, (Charles XII. not among them, and the imbecile Charles XIII. occupying the best place); we grew tired of the monotonous perambulators on the Forrbro, and the tameness and sameness of Stockholm life in winter: and therefore hailed the lengthening days which heralded ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... tone. Nineteenth and twentieth century writers may modestly assert that it is the fault of their inadequacy to represent poetry, and not a fault in the poetic character as such, that accounts for the tameness of their ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... his sophisticated self, and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress.[38] Agreeably to this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, when not supported by great occasions (and even the occasion itself sometimes fails him), is too apt to fall into tameness and common-place,—to want movement and picture; while, at the same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it does not possess the music which might be expected from a lyrical and voluptuous poet. ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... next day they were all amazed at the remarkable tameness of the herds which passed on every side. A drove of at least a hundred zebra paused within fifty yards of them, gazing curiously, and not until Bakari flourished a spear did they whirl and dash away. At another time a ...
— The Rogue Elephant - The Boys' Big Game Series • Elliott Whitney
... speech, bold in act, generous, warm-hearted, hospitable. His chief faults were an addiction to self-indulgence and luxury, a passionate abandon to the feeling of the hour, whatever that might happen to be; and a tameness and subservience in all his relations towards his prince, which seem to moderns almost incompatible ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... to one side and looked at us, and within a hundred yards of half a dozen antelope. To any lover of nature it could not help being a delightful thing to see the wild and timid creatures of the wilderness rendered so tame; and their tameness in the immediate neighborhood of Gardiner, on the very edge of the Park, spoke volumes for the patriotic good sense of the citizens of Montana. Major Pitcher informed me that both the Montana and Wyoming people were co-operating with ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... "But this tameness, however contemptible, cannot be censured; for the first drop of blood shed in civil and unnatural war will make a wound that years, perhaps ages, may not heal.... The indiscriminate hand of vengeance has lumped together ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... cases has sufficed; no animal is more difficult to tame than the young of the wild rabbit; scarcely any animal is tamer than the young of the tame rabbit; but I do not suppose that domestic rabbits have ever been selected for tameness; and I presume that we must attribute the whole of the inherited change from extreme wildness to extreme tameness, simply to habit ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... cell has become the madman's cell: that it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness of German practice. The Germans sterilise thought, making it active with a wild virginity; which can ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... gallant BRUNSWICK spoke; 'Shall we with tameness bear the Gallic yoke! 'Will ye, O Veterans, inur'd to pains 'And toils of War, drag ignominious chains? 'Turn and behold! behold where hostile bands 'Seize on your properties, lay waste your lands, 'Your daughters, wives, snatch'd forcibly away, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... chargeable with a Design to degrade the Dignity of our nature by comparing Men with Beasts. Let me just observe that I have mentiond only the more excellent Properties that are to [be] found among Quadrupeds. Had I suggested an Idea of the Vanity of the Ape the Tameness of the Ox or the stupid Servility of the Ass I might have been lyable ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams
... Historical Spectacle of India in the Empress Theatre, and Miss WEE-WEE made the criticism that the fall of Somnath was accomplished with a too great facility, since its so-called defenders did lie down with perfect tameness and counterfeit death immediately the army of Sultan MAHMUD galloped ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... neither sow nor reap in Ireland, pay no taxes there, and bear no burdens, who find the alien oppression most intolerable. This explains the extreme bitterness with which Mr. Davitt in some recent speeches and letters denounces the tameness of the Irish people, and rather amusingly berates the British allies of his Parnellite associates for their failure to develop any striking and sensational resistance to the administration of law in Ireland. I have printed in this edition[2] an instructive account, furnished to me by ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... the most interesting aspect of this familiar bird is its tameness, not to say attachment to ourselves, and so marked is its complete absence of fear that it is a wild bird in name only, and indeed few cage birds are ever so bold as to perch on the gardener's spade on the look-out for ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... indeed, if Theodosius had purchased, by the loss of honor, a secure and solid tranquillity, or if his tameness had not invited the repetition of injuries. The Byzantine court was insulted by five or six successive embassies, and the ministers of Attila were uniformly instructed to press the tardy or imperfect execution ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... pansies and rosemary; and, besides, you know, mamma, the other boys will throw stones at him.' That settled it, and Dick (as they gravely informed me they had named him) was left to enjoy his flowery home. Occasionally, when cutting flowers, I noticed the exceeding tameness of the little creature, and was often assured by the boys, 'Our Dick is the very best toad in town.' However, I noticed nothing uncommon until two or three weeks after they had brought him home, when I was attracted by their peals of laughter, and presently heard them ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... volume, we can warrant equal entertainment in all its other parts, and shall heartily wish the gentleman all happiness with his poet.—To us, there appears a thorough perversion of taste, in the conception and execution of the whole; and we are disgusted with the tameness of the verse, the vulgarity of the thoughts, and the barbarity of the manners. If this style of writing be continued, we may expect not only the actions of Vindomarus or Ariovistus to be celebrated, but we may perhaps ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... may be attached to those investigations in animal psychology which trace the inheritance of individual characteristics. The laboratory psychologist studies, for instance, the laws according to which qualities like savageness and tameness are distributed in the succeeding generations. He studies the proportions of those traits in hundreds of mice, which are especially fit for the experiment on account of their quick multiplication. But this may lead immediately to important results for the farmers with reference ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... to solicit the government for the president, Nuno de Guzman; but was shipwrecked on the coast near Coatzacualco, and had to return to Mexico. Estrada died soon after being superseded, which he owed more to his own tameness than to any right the members of the court could found on his majestys orders, which left the government entirely with him, without saying any thing of the association of Guzman; who yet usurped the sole government to himself as president. Estrada was ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... to the meekness, to the tameness, as they will have it to be, of the character of Mr. Hickman. And yet Lovelace owns, that he rose upon him with great spirit in the interview between them; once, when he thought a reflection was but implied on Miss Howe[50]; and another time, when he imagined himself ...
— Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript • Samuel Richardson
... above was published, the protected flocks of tame wild ducks have become one of the most interesting sights of Florida. At Palm Beach the tameness of the wild ducks when within their protected area, and their wildness outside of it, has been witnessed by ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... is quite comprehensible. It is a discourse against all those who confound virtue with tameness and smug ease, and who regard as virtuous only that which promotes security and tends ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... for Malcolm Stewart, who had learnt to believe it mere dishonour and tameness to forgive the son for his father's deeds. A cloistered priest could hardly do so: pardon to a hostile family came only with the last mortal throe; and here was this warlike king forgiving as ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... vapours moving on like shadowy isles, Athwart the pale, gray, spectral cope of heaven, With what a feeble, inefficient glow Looks out the Day; all things are still and calm, Half wreathed in azure mist the skeleton woods, And as a picture silent. Little bird! Why with unnatural tameness comest thou thus, Offering in fealty thy sweet simple songs To the abode of man? Hath the rude wind Chilled thy sweet woodland home, now quite despoiled Of all its summer greenery, and swept The bright, close, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... provided with amusement, inasmuch as Ted Flaggan allowed the effervescence of his sympathetic spirit and wayward fancy to flow over in long discourses on Algerine piracy and practice in general, in comparison with which the "Arabian Nights" is tameness itself. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... about mothers-in-law. Nor is it only from the point of view of particular amateurs of the sensational such as myself, that it is permissible to say, in the words of Cowper's Alexander Selkirk, that "their tameness is shocking to me." The whole modern world is pining for a genuinely sensational journalism. This has been discovered by that very able and honest journalist, Mr. Blatchford, who started his campaign against Christianity, ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... among the trees at a little distance from Stratford. Next we see the shabby old dwellings, intermixed with mean-looking houses of modern date, and the streets being quite level, you are struck and surprised by nothing so much as the tameness of the general scene; as if Shakspeare's genius were vivid enough to have wrought pictorial splendors in the town where he was born. Here and there, however, a queer edifice meets your eye, endowed with the individuality that belongs only to the domestic architecture of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Angel,—almost as the devout soul blesses God, when it finds a spring that He has made to rise out of the sands. Having found you, I was content. I thought that I could live always, as other men do, in the tameness of Town and Law; but I could not, unless you refused to go with me into the Nature that my spirit demands as a part ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... but the old impulse renewed; this new hope is a justified remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in this second campaign, takes the field conscious that it has indomitable enemies and ready to sign a reasonable peace, and even to capitulate before superior forces. Such tameness may be at first merely a consequence of exhaustion and prudence; but a mortal will, though absolute in its deliverances, is very far from constant, and its sacrifices soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home. The old ambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious and extravagant; ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... played, or sung, for he was musically drunk, as if with champagne. Learned Germans might shake their heads and talk about shallowness and contrapuntal rubbish, his crescendo and stretto passages, his tameness and uniformity even in melody, his want of artistic finish; but, as Richard Wagner, his direct antipodes, frankly confesses in his "Oper und Drama," such objections were dispelled by Rossini's opera-airs as if they were mere delusions of the ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... same specific denomination." Few naturalists will agree with this author that such slight differences are sufficient to separate as distinct species the wild and domestic rabbit. How extraordinary it would be, if close confinement, perfect tameness, unnatural food, and careful breeding, all prolonged during many generations, had not produced at least some effect! The tame rabbit has been domesticated from an ancient period. Confucius ranges rabbits among animals worthy to be sacrificed ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... character analysis,—is in the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal. The two authors have sacrificed their individualities in a mistaken effort to follow the fashion's lead, resulting in a most ineffective compound of tameness and sensationalism. Amazing adventures are undergone by each heroine before she is one-and-twenty. Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have their existences crushed out by the heartless conduct ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... an interest and a friendly feeling for one who furnished them food, and who was always careful to avoid injuring them or giving them any unnecessary alarm. He could not, of course, take up a fish in his hand, any more than a chicken will submit to handling; but as to the comparative tameness of the two, the fish is more approachable than the chicken. That they knew and expected the diver at the usual hour was a conclusion impossible to deny, as also that they grew into familiarity with him, and were actuated by an intelligent recognition ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... barbaric language, scenes of barbaric grandeur, which in these days are never witnessed; and, which, though the modern muse may imagine, she generally fails in attempting to pourtray, from the violent desire to be smooth and tuneful, forgetting that smoothness and tunefulness are nearly synonymous with tameness and unmeaningness. ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow
... University of Chicago. Of both these writers I shall have something to say. But first and generally, if you ask me why all their pleas have not yet prevailed, I will give you my own answer—the fault as usual lies in ourselves—in our own tameness and incuriosity. ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... profound reflection presenting, doubtless, quite a new revelation to an unsophisticated world, which had so long submitted in reverential tameness to the self-evident impossibility ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... directions, or shall I say less depraved, than similar crowds in our great cities. They are easily pleased, and laugh at the simple and childlike, but there is little that hints of an impure taste, or of abnormal appetites. I often smiled at the tameness and simplicity of the amusements, but my sense of fitness, or proportion, or decency was never once outraged. They always stop short of a certain point,—the point where wit degenerates into mockery, and liberty into license: nature ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... of persons at their tameness, 25. Bees intended for the comfort of man. Properties fitting them for domestication. Bees never attack when filled with honey, 26. Swarming bees fill their honey bags and are peaceable. Hiving of bees safe, 27. Bees cannot ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... father; but he was not their founder, for he would not have believed a word of what they ultimately came to say. Nor is this the conventional notion of the old man not keeping pace with the audacity of the young. Morris would have been disgusted not with the wildness, but the tameness of our tidy Fabians. He was not a Socialist, but he was a Revolutionist; he didn't know much more about what he was; but he knew that. In this way, being a full-blooded fellow, he rather repeats the genial sulkiness ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... proposed that to enable the British public to take its annual bolus at Burlington House with less nausea, the Royal Academy should introduce a band of some sort, so that under the influence of its inspiriting strains the masterpieces might be robbed of a little of their tameness, the portrait of My Lord Knoshoo might seem less out of place in a public Exhibition, and the insanities of certain demented colourists might be made less obtrusive monopolists of one's attention. Therefore, when "a musical lady and her daughters" applied to me for ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... of the woods and their richness in flowers—"just fair scatted up wi' geranniums and the rest o' them:" offering to take the expedition by the nearest way to the treasures, and especially insisting on the number and beauty and tameness of the pheasants, till Mr. Byles was charmed and was himself surprised at the humanising influence ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... Reve and her rather too fervid love would not get in the way of Storri's dinners at the Harleys'. For a time he should go there but once a week. When despair had chilled Dorothy to tameness he would go oftener. Just then he must give her terrors opportunity to ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... ground, for which, indeed, the peculiar construction of their beak is entirely unfitted. They were perfectly fearless of the dogs, which, on their part, were too well trained to touch them; and their funny way and their extreme tameness were a source of constant amusement to the ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... and Queen Anne periods—which may be regarded as one, for present purposes—was classical, or at least unromantic, in its self-restraint, its objectivity, and its lack of curiosity; or, as a hostile criticism would put it, in its coldness of feeling, the tameness of its imagination, and its narrow and imperfect sense of beauty. It was a literature not simply of this world, but of the world, of the beau monde, high life, fashion, society, the court and the town, the salons, clubs, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the king; but she was told that it would be all in vain, because so spiritless and faineant was he that he not only neglected to avenge affronts put upon others, but endured with a reprehensible tameness those which were offered to himself, insomuch that whoso had any ill-humour to vent, took occasion to vex or mortify him. The lady, hearing this report, despaired of redress, and by way of alleviation of her grief determined to make the king ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... destroy if I had the power! If the very trees on the road hither could have had feeling, I would have torn the bark from their stems with my own hands! If a bird, native of your skies, had flown into my bosom from very tameness and sport, I would have crushed it dead at my feet! And do you think that you shall escape? Do you think that I will not avenge the deaths of my husband and my children ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... that there was no settlement within miles—miles of pathless swamp. I knew that no one could either see or hear me—no one was at all likely to come near the lake; indeed, I felt satisfied that my faithless boat was the first keel that had ever cut its waters. The very tameness of the birds wheeling round my head was evidence of this. I felt satisfied, too, that without some one to help me, I should never go out from that lake: I must die on the islet, or drown ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... flame of minstrel fire. O happy tribe of choristers! no interruption mars The concert of your harmony, nor ever harshly jars A string of all your harping, nor of your voices trill Notes that are weak for tameness, that ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... expression. Here is a terra-cotta head of Corneille, of very indifferent workmanship; and much inferior to a similar representation of him at Rouen. The terra-cotta head of Rousseau is considerably better. But the marble bust of Voltaire, by Houdon, throws every thing about it into tameness. It is as fine as is the terra-cotta bust of the same person which Denon possesses. Here, however, the poet is in a peruque, or dress-wig. His eyes sparkle with animation. Every feature and every muscle seems to be in action: and yet it is perfectly free from ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... to visit the most romantic and interesting spots in the island accessible to an adventurous woman. At first she confined herself to the neighbourhood of Reikiavik. She journeyed, for instance, to the island of Vidoe, the cliffs of which are frequented by the eider-duck. Its tameness while brooding is very remarkable. "I had always looked," she says, "on the wonderful stories I had heard on this subject as fabulous, and should do still had I not been an eye-witness to the fact. I approached and laid my hands on the birds while they were sitting; ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... breakfast, and the other for a respite: the groups, therefore, on or about the bridge, if any at all, were loose in their array, and careless. We passed through them rapidly, and, on my part, uneasily; exchanging a few snarls, perhaps, but seldom or ever snapping at each other. The tameness was almost shocking of those who, in the afternoon, would inevitably resume their natural characters of tiger cats and wolves. Sometimes, however, my brother felt it to be a duty that we should fight in the morning; particularly when any expression of public joy for a victory,—bells ringing ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... blood; and it is singular that the physician who attended me—a grave gentleman, with a wig—considered that this was of service to me. I know it frightened me heartily, and prepared me for a visit from Master Frank, which I endured with a tameness he would not have experienced, had the usual current of blood flowed in my veins. But sickness and the lancet make one very tolerant of sermonizing.—At last, in consideration of being relieved from his accursed presence, and the sound of his infernally calm voice, I slowly and reluctantly ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... as if she were behaving in a very unexpected way. A tamed Marjorie was something new in his experience; and tameness at this juncture was particularly surprising. Francis was beginning to feel like a brute, which may have been ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... yeoman who has allowed his son to become a gentleman. Lear screams: "To have a thousand with red burning spirits. Come hissing in upon 'em,"—while Edgar shrieks that the foul fiend bites his back. At this the fool remarks that one can not believe "in the tameness of a wolf, a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath." Then Lear imagines he is judging his daughters. "Sit thou here, most learned justicer," says he, addressing the naked Edgar; "Thou, sapient sir, sit here. Now, you ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... had by some mistake slaughtered it at the shambles, he would not have rued his bloody blunder more than I now rue mine. Will you ever forgive me?'... 'You know I am a scoundrel, Jane?' ere long he inquired wistfully, wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness; the result of weakness rather ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... hurt it had received, and showed so great a degree of affection to its protector, that it would run after him like a dog, hop upon his shoulder, nestle in his bosom, and eat crumbs out of his hand. Tommy was extremely surprised and pleased to remark its tameness and docility, and asked by what means it had been made so gentle. Harry told him he had taken no particular pains about it; but that, as the poor little creature had been sadly hurt, he had fed it every day till it was well; and that, ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... July, as they were pursuing their course through one of the meadows of the Sweet Water, they beheld a horse grazing at a little distance. He showed no alarm at their approach, but suffered himself quietly to be taken, evincing a perfect state of tameness. The scouts of the party were instantly on the look-out for the owners of this animal; lest some dangerous band of savages might be lurking in the vicinity. After a narrow search, they discovered the trail of an Indian party, which had evidently passed ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... Wales in 1811, and in the following year he was married to Miss Browne. His appointment as adjutant to the Northamptonshire Militia caused them to take up their residence at Daventry, a neighbourhood by its tameness strangely contrasting with her "own mountain-land." But she was not to be long away from her old home. The next year, on the reduction of the corps, a return was made to Bronwylfa. Mrs. Hemans was never again, until death parted them, to leave ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... subject, as far as the mental powers of animals are concerned, so blends into instinct, on which I shall treat in a future work, that I will here only remind the reader of the many cases which occur under domestication, and which are familiar to every one—for instance the tameness of our animals—the pointing or retrieving of dogs—their not attacking the smaller animals kept by man—and so forth. How much of these changes ought to be attributed to inherited habit, and how ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in "Hamlet" and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild—the mallard—thought, which 'mid falling dews ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of the millions of bees which worried us to death there, not to speak of the swarms of flies, mosquitoes and ants, and myriads of butterflies which came to settle in swarms upon us. It was indeed curious to note the wonderful tameness of the latter, as they had never seen a human ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... and Sung mark two great epochs in the history of Chinese art, literature and thought, but whereas the virtues and vices of the T'ang may be summed up as genius and extravagance, those of the Sung are culture and tameness. But this summary judgment does not do justice to the painters, particularly the landscape painters, of the Sung and it is noticeable that many of the greatest masters, including Li Lung-Mien,[672] were obviously inspired by Buddhism. The school which had the greatest influence on ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... more slender in her proportions than the male; she carries her head even with the line of her back, and wants the majestic courage of the lion, but she is more agile. Her temper is more irritable, and Mr. Gordon Cumming says:—"She is more dangerous before she has been a mother; yet every vestige of tameness or docility vanishes when she is a mother, and she is then in a constant state of excitement, getting into the most violent fury if any one should attempt to touch her cubs." The story of the lioness which one night attacked one of the horses of the Exeter mail has ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... in report of the extreme tameness, grace, and affectionateness of this bird do sportsmen agree also in the treatment and appreciation of these qualities. Thus says Mr. Salmon: "Although we shot two pairs, those that were swimming about did not take the least notice of the report ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... his signals—it is his style of handwriting. Ellsworth possessed in a remarkable degree the skill of imitating these peculiarities, and thus he deceived the Union operators easily. Edison says that while apparently a quiet man in bearing, Ellsworth, after the excitement of fighting, found the tameness of a telegraph office obnoxious, and that he became a bad "gun man" in the Panhandle of Texas, where he was killed. "We soon became acquainted," says Edison of this period in Cincinnati, "and he wanted me to invent a secret method of sending despatches so that an intermediate ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... he had taken to Chapel Pond (a retired but rather uninteresting spot), and who expressed a little disappointment at its tameness, saying, of this "Why, Mr. Phelps, the principal charm of this place seems to ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... imperious in such ardent, such concentrated and untiring worship, a demand which surely could not be overlooked or set aside. The tameness, the half-heartedness of Western prayer and Western praise had no place here. This prayer was hot as the sunlight, this praise was a mounting fire. The breath of this human incense was as the breath of a furnace pouring forth to the gates of the Paradise of Allah. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... spite of it being differently painted and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and used to taking a certain number of mechanical steps. This would not work in the hotel; because a lift has no habits. It is typical of the real tameness of machinery, that even when we talk of a man turning mechanically we only talk metaphorically; for it is something that a mechanism cannot do. But I think there is only one real objection to my story of Mr. Moose in the New York hotel. And that is unfortunately ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... class, says that his people are all descended from this Pengiran Bandahara of Johore, and that the name Burong Pingai is derived from the circumstance that their ancestor bad a pigeon of remarkable tameness. ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... time, and he can turn for relief to the epistle "Studiosus" addresses to "Alcander." If the lines of "The Minstrel" who hails, like Longfellow in later years, from "The District of Main," fail to satisfy him, he cannot accuse "R.T. Paine, Jr., Esq.," of tameness when he exclaims:— ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the curious things about them, what seems most inexplicable is their tameness. They have no mistrust, but eye you with an intelligent, knowing look while bringing their young to feed within half a dozen feet of you. They perch on the croquet-arches in the midst of a noisy game. They sing directly over your head with the utmost spirit and vivacity, hardly ceasing all ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... embellishment, to be severely censured by some, and lavishly praised by others. The late keen and consummate observer of landscape scenery, Sir Uvedale Price, harshly condemns the too frequent cold monotony and tameness of many of Mr. Browne's creations, and his never transfusing into his works any thing of the taste and spirit which prevail in the poet Mason's precepts and descriptions; and in one of his acute, yet pleasant pages, he alludes to his having but one and the same plan of operation; Sangrado-like, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... remark ... will you believe me when I say, that, of the various palaces, or large mansions visited by me, that of the EMPEROR is the least imposing—as a whole? The front is very long and lofty; but it has a sort of architectural tameness about it, which gives it rather the air of the residence of the Lord Chamberlains than of their regal master. Yet the Saloon, in this palace, must not be passed over in silence. It merits indeed warm commendation. The roof, which is of an unusual height, ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... Mr. Finn is a very clever young man certainly; but I don't think we can support ourselves by his plan of Irish reform." Sir Orlando had been a little carried away by his own eloquence and the Duke's tameness, and had interrupted the Duke. The Duke again looked ducal, but on this occasion Sir Orlando did not observe his countenance. "For myself, I think, I am in favour of increased armaments. I have ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... of phantom saliva. Attended by his teams of elegant horses, and surrounded by a general halo of gambling, racing, tourneying and cock-fighting, he seems to shake his lank hair sadly over the poor modern carnival, and say, "Their tameness is shocking to me." ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... figure, the breasts, on which my godson hangs, peeping through the lace like some luscious fruit,—all this stabbed me in the eyes and in the heart. In vain did I stick cornflowers in my curls, in vain set off with cherry-colored ribbons the tameness of my pale locks, everything looked washed out when Renee appeared—a Renee so unlike the one I expected to find in ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... man, thereby indicating his faith in a truth which he instinctively considers as ultimate—the truth of love. These prophecies have not for their vision the fettering of the world and reducing it to tameness by means of a close-linked power forged in the factory of a political steel trust. One of the religions has for its meditation the image of the Buddha who is to come, Maitreya, the Buddha of love; and ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... scoundrel, Jane?" ere long he inquired wistfully—wondering, I suppose, at my continued silence and tameness, the result rather of weakness than ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... which has now been described, varying from grandeur to tameness, from fertility to barrenness, from extreme beauty to extreme ugliness, but always possessing, at least, the recommendation of being new, the wanderers in the Bush are delighted to range. There is a charm to enterprising spirits ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... whence came the woods on fire? There were no inhabitants upon the island, and that the natives of the continent did not visit it was demonstrated, if not by the want of all signs of such visits, yet by the tameness of the kangaroo, an animal which, on the continent, resembles the wild deer in timidity. Perhaps lightning might have been the cause, or possibly the friction of two dead trees in a strong wind; but ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... in his old lunes again. He so takes on yonder with my husband; so rails against all married mankind; so curses all Eve's daughters, of what complexion soever; and so buffets himself on the forehead, crying 'Peer out, peer out!' that any madness I ever yet beheld seemed but tameness, civility, and patience, to this his distemper he is in now. I am glad the fat ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... the admiration and attendance of the young nobility, and the favor of the nation, were so many crimes in the eyes of a sovereign who already began to feel her own unpopularity; and Elizabeth, who was not of a spirit to endure public and unmerited slights with tameness, found it at once the most dignified and the safest course, to seek, before the end of the year, the peaceful retirement of her house of Ashridge in Buckinghamshire. It was however made a condition of the leave of absence from court which ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... I do, Maggie. You must remember that Jack was not a Stamboul dog. He belonged to Pera, where Europeans live, so there is a strong probability that his unusual tameness and beauty won other friends for him when we ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... heartburning, distrust, and mutual accusation. Perhaps it may labor under worse evils. There is no vigor anywhere, except the distempered vigor and energy of France. That country has but too much life in it, when everything around is so disposed to tameness and languor. The very vices of the French system at home tend to give force to foreign exertions. The generals must join the armies. They must lead them to enterprise, or they are likely to perish by their hands. Thus, without law or government of her own, France gives law to all the governments ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... through which I waded were bent down with the ripe berries which grew on them. A herd of small, dark brown deer feeding among the bushes hardly moved out of my way. I wondered at their tameness, but thought it must be because no man had ever come within ...
— Anting-Anting Stories - And other Strange Tales of the Filipinos • Sargent Kayme
... blame, but say that so it is: some people praise this homeliness overmuch, as if the land were the very axle-tree of the world; so do not I, nor any unblinded by pride in themselves and all that belongs to them: others there are who scorn it and the tameness of it: not I any the more: though it would indeed be hard if there were nothing else in the world, no wonders, no terrors, no unspeakable beauties. Yet when we think what a small part of the world's history, past, present, ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... from Buxton, I was so confident of the bird's tameness I used to carry him in my hand out to the tulip tree, and there I often sat and read, while Richard would pry into the moss and the bark of the tree, searching for insects, and though he could fly well by this time, he did not try to do so, but seemed content ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... romantic notions, prepares us for events much more ludicrous and eccentric, than those in which the plot allows her to be concerned; and the young lady herself is scarcely more disappointed than we are, at the tameness with which her amour concludes. Among the various ingredients supposed to be mixed up in the composition of Sir Lucius O'Trigger, his love of fighting is the only one whose flavor is very strongly brought out; and the wayward, captious jealousy ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore
... fond and jealous maid, what crimes thy innocent passion can create, when it extends beyond the bounds of reason! Ah too, too nicely tender Sylvia, that will not give me leave to cast a thought back on my former glory; yet even that loss I could support with tameness and content, if I believed my suffering reached only to my heart; but Sylvia, if she love, must feel my torments too, must share my loss, and want a thousand ornaments, my sinking fortune cannot purchase her: believe me, charming creature, if I should love you less, I have a sense ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... limb ten feet up a thorn tree. They contemplated us with the preternatural gravity of very young children, and without the slightest sign of fear. We coveted them as pets for Billy, but soon discovered that their apparent tameness was grounded on good, solid common sense. The thorns of that thorn tree! We left them sitting ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... mediocrity is none too common. The best short stories of the year are probably those by M. Almedia Bretholl and Eleanor Barnhart; the others are mainly juvenile work. Roy W. Nixon and Miss Coralie Austin represent the extremes of excitement and tameness, with "A Bottle of Carbolic Acid" on the one hand, and with "Jane" and "'Twixt the Red and the White" on the other. Both of these authors possess substantial ability. David H. Whittier is developing along classic lines, and will be a prominent ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... to the bar of the public; he makes them "hold up their culprit paws," and pinches their ears to make them say what he pleases. His pages are crowded with their names; unutterable names; names which reduce "arms! and George! and Brunswick!" into tameness and insignificance. If such means of defending Christianity are successful, I shall no longer doubt that it was possible for the Devil Asmodus to have been corked up in a bottle by the hard words of ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... actor of all: he had more confidence than Edmund, more judgment than Tom, more talent and taste than Mr. Yates. She did not like him as a man, but she must admit him to be the best actor, and on this point there were not many who differed from her. Mr. Yates, indeed, exclaimed against his tameness and insipidity; and the day came at last, when Mr. Rushworth turned to her with a black look, and said, "Do you think there is anything so very fine in all this? For the life and soul of me, I cannot admire him; and, between ourselves, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... ordering the recognisances to be cancelled; and with this concession the House was satisfied, to the great vexation of the Jacobites, who had hoped that the quarrel would be prosecuted to some fatal issue, and who, finding themselves disappointed, vented their spleen by railing at the tameness of the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... portion of it at least, we must be content with the useful, and lay no great claims to the beautiful; the rivers and bays giving us some compensation in their admirable commercial facilities, for the sameness, not to say tameness, of the views. We mention these things in passing, as a people that does not understand its relative position in the scale of nations, is a little apt to fall into errors that do not contribute to its character ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... You can but smile at it. To Americans it must forcibly recall the treeing of a 'coon. The deer need keep no watch, there are no wolves to pull them down; and it is quite probable that the absence of any danger of that kind is the reason of their tameness even more than the fact that they are not chased by man. Nothing comes creeping stealthily through the fern, or hunts them through the night. They can slumber in peace. There is no larger beast of prey than a stoat, or a stray cat. But they retain their ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the good protestants met in St. George's fields, at the summons of lord George Gordon, and marching to Westminster, insulted the lords and commons, who all bore it with great tameness. At night, the outrages began, by the demolition of the mass-house ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... that the moment the French side was quitted all was barren and worthless; I found, however, on the contrary, that the mountain-scenery greatly increased in sublimity the nearer we advanced towards Roncesvalles, and on our return that which had looked well on our way had dwindled into tameness in comparison with what we had left. Our driver, in the true spirit of his country, laboured to convince us that even the Basque on the Spanish side was inferior to that on the French—a fact we ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... by preference, should be of local interest. As the doctor himself delighted in surprises of a terrifying or horrifying nature, it was unlikely that his inventions in that direction would be characterized by tameness. He would not, when hard pressed on a dull day, allow a fastidious care of even his own reputation to impede the development of one of his surprises. If the town of Bellevue was to stagnate mentally, it would not be the fault of George ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... attracted something in him. Through her eyes he was able to see the tameness of Welsley, a dear tameness, safe, cozy, full of a very English charm and touched with ancient beauty, but still——! Would the petals of Rosamund ever curl up and go brown at the edges from living at Welsley? No, he could not imagine that ever happening. A ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... rather made, as your brother, and Singleton, and Solmes, were resolved to find out whether what was reported of your marriage were true or not, that they might take their measures accordingly; and in hopes to prevent that mischief, which I have been but too studious to prevent, since this tameness has but invited insolence from ...
— Clarissa, Volume 5 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... skill of execution did not decline for several centuries; but the lofty ideal was lost sight of, and gross appeals to human passions were made by those who sought to please corrupt leaders of society in an effeminate age. The turgidity and luxuriance of art gradually passed into tameness and poverty. The reliefs on the Arch of Constantine are rude and clumsy compared with those on the Column of ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... the dexterity of criminals in the mystery of evasion; or to show with what complete impunity men may conspire against the commonwealth; with what safety assassins may attempt its awful head. Everything is secure, except what the laws have made sacred; everything is tameness and languor that is not fury and faction. Whilst the distempers of a relaxed fibre prognosticate and prepare all the morbid force of convulsion in the body of the state, the steadiness of the physician is overpowered by ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... the boy felt very miserable. He had been up all night, going through adventures that were, in spite of their tameness, unusually exciting, and he was suffering from a nervous depression which robbed him of appetite as much as did his companion's words. For instead of being merry, confidential, and companionable, Bob scarcely opened his lips now without assuming the overbearing bullying tone he had heard so often ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... trains moved back and forth, took up in succession the rear brigade and forwarded them on the march. The men enjoyed these lifts. They scrambled aboard, hung out of the window, from the platform and from roof, encouraged the engine, offered to push the train, and made slighting remarks on the tameness of the scenery. "Not like God's country, back over the mountains!" They yelled encouragement to the toiling column on the red roads. "Step spryer! ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... which everywhere abound in the neat, well-kept gardens, that surround the dwellings of the wealthier inhabitants, with the broad, bright, blue inland sea that forms the foreground to the picture, give to it such a lively and agreeable character, that it takes from it all appearance of tameness and monotony. ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... drawn up around us, as we were marched through the streets to the city prison, and attempted many demonstrations of their feeling toward us. There seemed to be little sympathy between the soldiers and the populace. The former muttered pretty strong expressions of disgust for the previous tameness and present boldness of the latter, and once or twice when jostled, plied their bayonets. The privates were immediately sent to camps Morton and Douglass. The officers were kept at the city prison in Cincinnati for three days. During that time, we were reinforced by a good many ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... wings and long throats, who used to come and meet their master hissing and fluttering." In 1866 an owl—for Browning still indulged a fantasy of his own in the choice of pets—was "the light of our house," as a letter describes this bird of darkness, "for his tameness and engaging ways." The bird would kiss its master on the face, tweak his hair, and if one said "Poor old fellow!" in a commiserating voice would assume a sympathetic air of depression.[86] Miss Barrett lived hard by, in Delamere ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... tangles, where it chooses to live. Peering at you through the green undergrowth with an eye that seems especially conspicuous because of its encircling white rim, it is at least as sociable and cheerful as any member of its family, and Mr. Bradford Torrey credits it with "winning tameness." "Wood-bird as it is," he says, "it will sometimes permit the greatest familiarities. Two birds I have seen, which allowed themselves to be stroked in the freest manner, while sitting on the eggs, and which ate from my hand as ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... from the windows, and happen to fall on the ground, they immediately help with the light and begin to look for what has fallen; that they stop of their own accord before the windows from which they know they are used to receive alms; and that with all their tameness on these occasions, so that they are more like lambs than dogs, they are lions in the hospital, keeping guard with great ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... it may be stated once for all that the view which this face of the mountains presents is never a satisfying one. The same is true in even greater degree of the southern face, all photographs agreeing with all travellers as to its tameness. There is only one face of the Denali group that is completely satisfying, that is adequate to the full picturesque potentiality of a twenty-thousand-foot elevation. The writer has seen no other view, no other aspect of it, comparable to that of the northwest face from Lake Minchumina. There the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... Sometimes flying from blood and sometimes pouring it freely. Yet he was English at heart. If his words were too many; if Fancy's Furniture lookt rather scant in a whitewasht homely apartment; If in his rural designs there is sameness and tameness; if often Feebleness is there for breadth; if his pencil wants rounding and pointing; Few of this age or the last stand out on the like elevation. There is a sheepfold he rais'd which my memory loves to revisit, Sheepfold whose wall shall endure when there is not a stone of the palace. Still there ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various
... his mouth with water, and squirts it into their eyes and under their feathers. They are curiously plucked on the back and about the tail, where only the long tail-feathers are allowed to grow. Their tameness in the hands of their masters is quite remarkable; they suffer themselves to be turned and held in any direction. But when set down, at any stage of the journey, they stamp their little feet, stretch their necks, crow, and look about them for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... of humanity's reach, I must finish my journey alone, Never hear the sweet music of speech, I start at the sound of my own. The beasts that roam over the plain My form with indifference see; They are so unacquainted with man, Their tameness is shocking ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... them to hear about the abundance and tameness of the monkeys, although it was scarcely news; but how tame they must have been when I, the stranger not to the manner born—not naked, brown-skinned, lynx-eyed, and noiseless as an owl in his movements—had yet been able to look closely at them! Runi only remarked, apropos ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... when no warning-cry is uttered by the parent bird. This shrinking, and, in some cases, hiding from an object corning swiftly towards them, is the "wildness" of young birds, which, Darwin says again, is greater in wild than in domestic species. Of the extreme tameness of the young rhea I have already spoken; I have also observed young tinamous, plovers, coots, &c., hatched by fowls, and found them as incapable of distinguishing friend from foe as the young of domestic birds. The only difference between the young of wild and ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... that Eden might have looked so in its innocence, for all the orchards were abloom and the distant hills were tremulous and aerial in springtime gauzes of pale purple and pearl. But in any garden, despite its beauty, is an element of tameness and domesticity, and Alan's eyes, after a moment's delighted gazing, strayed wistfully off to the north where the hills broke away into a long sloping lowland of pine and fir. Beyond it stretched the wide expanse of the lake, flashing ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of those examples of humor and of jocose speech for which Charles Lamb in his lifetime was well known. These (not his best thoughts) can be separated from the rest, and may attract the notice of the reader, here and there, and relieve the tameness of a not ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... the susceptibility of the surface to vibrate, and may sometimes in part account for the wildness or apparent tameness of birds and animals. Should any one doubt the existence of such tremors, he has only to lie on the ground with his ear near the surface; but, being unused to the experiment, he will at first only notice the heavier sounds, as of a waggon or a cart-horse. In recent experiments with ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... called tame animals. Most of the wild animals in menageries very quickly learn to distinguish one person from another, to obey the call of their keeper and to come to be fed, although certainly they would be dangerous even to the keeper if he were to enter their cages. To my mind, tameness is something more than merely coming to be fed, and, in fact, many tame animals are least tame when they are feeding. Young carnivores, for instance, which can be handled freely and are affectionate, very seldom can be touched whilst they are feeding. The real quality of tameness ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar extravagance is probably due to the influence of those masters of hyperbole, the Provencal poets. When a troubadour professed his readiness to obey his lady in all things, he made it incumbent upon the next comer, if he wished to avoid the imputation of tameness and commonplace, to declare himself the slave of her will, which the next was compelled to cap by some still stronger declaration; and so expressions of devotion went on rising one above the other like biddings ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... worked, in the long run, to his benefit; for he had taken these birds to one and another of the great dealers, who thus came to know that in the little shop on Avenue B were to be found canaries the like of which for tameness and for rare beauty of note could not be bought elsewhere in all New York. Thereafter, as his young birds grew up, learning from Andreas himself the lesson of gentleness, and from his teaching-birds the lesson of sweetness of note, he had no lack of ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... length, and entirely silenced his antagonist, whom he described to Mr Brandram (20th Nov.) as "an unprincipled benefice-hunting curate." "You will doubtless deem it too warm and fiery," he writes, referring to his reply, "but tameness and gentleness are of little avail when surrounded by the vassal slaves of bloody Rome." {212a} Borrow's response to the "benefice-hunting curate" not only silenced him, but was listened to by the General Committee of the Society ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... of La Boulaye's crime, however, was but too clear, and despite the hesitancy on the part of the jury, despite the unwonted tameness of Tinvillle's invective, the Tribunal's course was well-defined, and admitted of not the slightest doubt. And so, the production of evidence being dispensed with by Caron's ready concurrence and acknowledgment of the offence, the President was on the point ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... from the woods— Lull'd by the still and everlasting sameness, Close to the mansion, like domestic broods, Fed with a "shocking tameness." ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... southward, avoiding a tangle of forest in which the lagoon ended, and clambering along a volcanic ridge with the sea often sheer on our right. It was in this lagoon, by the way, that we afterwards learned to take our wild duck, scores of which paddled about quite tamely on its surface, their tameness promising poorly for human hospitality on the farther side ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... tameness and stupidly acquiescent spirit in people generally was witnessed during the intensely severe frosts of the early part of the late winter (1882-3), when incalculable numbers of sea-birds were driven by hunger and cold into ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... mannerisms of style, and though it might inspire many, it was very unlikely to create a rut for any one else. He liked to call himself "the inimitable," and so, in a way, he was. Imitations of him were, of course, tried: but they were all bad and obvious failures. Against the possible tameness of the domestic novel; against the too commonly actual want of actuality of the historic romance; he set this new fantastic activity of his, which was at once real and unreal, but where the reality had a magical touch of the unfamiliar and the very unreality was stimulating. He might have a hundred ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... fallen into Mrs. Oliphant's mistake, the little shock of surprise which the first-night audience would have felt when the screen was thrown down would have been no compensation at all for the comparative tameness and pointlessness of the preceding passages. Thus we see that the greater part of our pleasure arises precisely from the fact that we know what Sir Peter and Charles do not know, or, in other words, that we have a clear vision of all the circumstances, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... animal kingdom, besides the elephants, I was much struck by the number and tameness of the ravens of Ceylon. In every small town and village may be seen multitudes of these birds, that come up to the very doors and windows and pick up everything. They play the part of scavengers here, just as dogs do in Turkey. The horned ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... thrilled through the country at a moment when men were roused by news of resistance in the north. Since the accession of James Scotland had bent with a seeming tameness before aggression after aggression. Its pulpits had been bridled. Its boldest ministers had been sent into exile. Its General Assembly had been brought to submission by the Crown. Its Church had been forced to accept bishops, if not with all their old powers, still with authority as ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... will face death to outface that stinging truth. Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... certain respects, be described as the Old, tamed down; but in productions of genius, tameness is not generally considered a merit. The loss incurred by the prohibition of an unrestricted freedom of satire the new comic writers endeavoured to compensate by a mixture of earnestness borrowed from tragedy, both in the form ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... or humility, or anything but what it is, that supreme pride that seeks from the world its highest, the allegiance of love, in return for its own love of what is true and grand. Finding a denial in those it meets, it draws away in a silence that to people who rate assertion as power seems tameness, for its action is beyond them, like sights that need a telescope, or sounds out of reach of the ear. Pride like this has two possibilities. It is a Saint Christopher that will serve only the highest. That unfound, it grows bitter, and shrinks more and ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... notorious murderer among others. Their language was not very choice when addressing the jailers, but sympathetic enough when talking among themselves and inquiring of one another, "What's your man up for?" or, "How did your mate get copped?" I felt painfully conscious of the tameness of my reply: "It's a friend: incitement to murder." How far more respectable murder itself would have sounded in the midst of such ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... both of hers. "I 'won't be thinking' anything," he said, "only what you would like me to think. Listen—when a man finds a wounded bird out in the winter woods, he'll bring it home to care for it. And he 'won't be thinking' the worse of its helplessness and tameness. Of course I know—but tell me your ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... stand the orderly tameness of your green England, think you, after this?" he exclaimed, with a comprehensive gesture of his hand. "No, no! When death comes—and 'twill not be long coming—let it find me with my face turned to ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... bears!—which, after the first outbreak of music, began to dance with the girls all the figures of French quadrilles, with the utmost accuracy, and with as much ease as if they were highly educated gentlemen. At first the guests were alarmed; but, seeing the extra ordinary tameness of the beasts, struck with amazement, they seemed to have been pleased with this extraordinary sight. After the dance was over, their bear-ships conducted themselves with the utmost propriety, and, at a sign from ...
— Scientific American magazine, Vol. 2 Issue 1 • Various
... walk I was surprised at the extraordinary tameness of the smaller landbirds: a thrush (Turdus magellanicus) almost allowed me to knock it down with my cap, and some other birds were quite as familiar as our robin in winter—a pair of loggerhead ducks (Brachypterus ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... endurance. A little spirit and "spunk" would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind, considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering them up in ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... passage of the play, that after line 34, when Macbeth and Macduff go off fighting, and Macbeth is killed, are probably, as the Cambridge editors suggest, by another hand than Shakespeare's. Their tameness and their constrained rhythm are not Shakespearian work, particularly at this period of his life, and in the writing of such a scene. "Nor would he," as the Cambridge editors say, "have drawn away the ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... among the plantain stems, having by a reckless movement fallen out of the house. Thanks be there are no mosquitoes. I don't know how I escaped the rats which swarm here, running about among the huts and the inhabitants in the evening, with a tameness shocking to see. I turned in again until six o'clock, when we started getting things ready to go up river again, carefully providing ourselves with a new stock of poles, and subsidising a native to come with us and help ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... can't be helped—thank you for the good care you took of the poor ducks,' said Louis, kindly; and as he walked on through the gate, he gave a long sigh, and said, 'My dainty ducks! So there's an end of them, and all their tameness!' But the smile could not but return. 'It is lucky the case does not come before the bench! but really that woman deserves a ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the winter of 1874-75. They attracted attention all over the country. Several other flights of them have occurred during the century. When this bird comes, it is so unacquainted with man that its tameness is delightful to behold. It thrives remarkably well in captivity, and in a couple of weeks will become so tame that it will hop down and feed out of its master's or mistress's hand. It comes from far beyond the region of the apple, yet it takes at once to this fruit, or rather to the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... form which may be adopted. Yet a square house is not so agreeable to the eye as an oblong. Thus, a house should stand somewhat broader on one front than on another. It should also be relieved from an appearance of monotony and tameness, by one or more wings; and such wings should, at their junction with the main building, retreat or advance a sufficient distance from a continuous line, as to relieve it effectually from an appearance of stiffness, ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen |
