"Temperament" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... four types of temperament given in the formal classification are represented among children in school. The choleric type is energetic, impulsive, quick-tempered, yet forgiving, interested in outward events. The phlegmatic type is impassive, unemotional, slow to anger, ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... will call for us to-morrow morning, on her way to Scotland, and I must hire a boat to-night, and get our luggage prepared for a start. A short notice, dear Flora, to a sad but inevitable necessity, I thought better for a person of your temperament, than a long and tedious anticipation of evil. Now all is prepared for the voyage, delay is not only useless, but dangerous. So cheer up, darling, and be as happy and cheerful as you can. Let us spend the last night at home pleasantly ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... infantry," he had occupied the first rank in this branch of the service,[680] and his experience was as highly prized as his impetuous valor upon the field of battle. The brilliancy of his executive abilities seemed to all beholders indispensable to complement the more calm and deliberative temperament of his elder brother. It was natural, therefore, that the admiral, while pouring out his private grief for one who had been so dear to him, in a touching letter to D'Andelot's children,[681] should experience as ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... went. I hope I am not a prig, and, whatever I am or am not, priggishness had no part in my feelings then. Under ordinary circumstances I should not have enjoyed myself in a place like that. Mine is not the temperament—I shouldn't know how. I must have appeared the most solemn ass in creation, and if I had come there with the idea of amusement, I should have felt like one. As it was, my feeling was not disgust, but unreasonable disappointment. Certainly I did not wish—now that I had seen ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to give force to my narrative, it will be necessary for me to be more personal in some particulars than I could have chosen, and to revert to certain details of my early history belonging to that category which people of my profession or temperament are wont to dismiss as "emotional." I have had strange occasion to learn that this is a deep and delicate word, which can never be scientifically used, which cannot be so much as elementally understood, except by delicacy ...
— The Gates Between • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... to continue to oppose Maizie. For one of her sluggish temperament, Maizie could turn decidedly disagreeable ...
— Jane Allen: Right Guard • Edith Bancroft
... fact. But it seems he cannot help it: his Hobby is too strong for him; regardless of curb and bridle in this instance. Let us pity a man of genius, mounted on so ungovernable a Hobby; leaping the barriers, in spite of his best resolutions. Perhaps the poetic temperament is more liable to such morbid biases, influxes of imaginative crotchet, and mere folly that cannot be cured? Friedrich Wilhelm never would or could dismount from his Hobby: but he rode him under much sorrow henceforth; under showers of anger and ridicule;—contumelious words ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... The whole empire of Asia, therefore, from the capital at Susa, out to the extreme limits and bounds to which Cyrus had extended it, yielded without any further opposition to his sway. He felt strong in his position, and being young and ardent in temperament, he experienced a desire to exercise his strength. For some reason or other, he seems to have been not quite prepared yet to grapple with the Greeks, and he concluded, accordingly, first to test his powers ...
— Darius the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... which resist all affectionate emotions except those of the family. With a beauty that was partly Spanish, she had eyes which her friend Louise de Chaulieu declared could ripen peaches. Her coldness was not what physicians call congenital; her temperament was an acquired one. Marrying from reason a man whose mental insufficiency is very apparent, she made herself love him out of pity and a sense of protection. Up to the present time, by means of a ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the following of my orders. Any one who knows how persons become mesmerized can attest that it was not the operator who forces them under it against their will, but it is a peculiar state into which any one who has within themselves this temperament can place themselves where any one who knows how can have control. It is not the will of the operator. I therefore dismiss this as unworthy of consideration in ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... could have said, by asking me not to say it. That is the worst of Hester. The partition between her mind and that of other people is so thin that she sees what they are thinking about. Thank God, Rachel, that you are not cursed with the artistic temperament! That is why she has never married. She sees too much. I am not a match-maker, but if I had had to take the responsibility, I should have married her at ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... a man of a highly nervous temperament, and it is just this sort of man who keeps his head in an emergency, whilst your level-headed, phlegmatic individual loses his balance. His first thought was of the children, his second ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... through the post, fifty men had rushed out to the search, cursing, sobbing, or praying, each according to his own temperament; for nowhere in all the Northland was a girl more beloved than was Jean Fitzpatrick. Summer and winter, the days were full of little kindnesses of hers, so that her disappearance was not a signal for a "duty" search, but one in which every man worked as though he alone had been to blame ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... express your life will probably never down, for the reason that men vary in temperament and inclination. Some men have no capacity for certain sins of the flesh; others there be, who, having lost their inclination for sensuality through too much indulgence, turn ascetics. Yet all sermons have but one theme: how shall life be expressed? ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... sufficiently straightforward. Instead of honestly telling people what she wanted them to do, she liked to manage them into it; and this managing involved at most times more or less dissimulation. She dearly loved to conduct her affairs by a series of little secrets. This is a temperament which usually rests on a mixture of affection and want of courage. We cannot bear to grieve those whom we love, and we shrink from calling down their anger on ourselves, or even from risking their disapprobation of our conduct, past or proposed. Now, it had been for some ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... as he was, he still did not see quite straight on this occasion. Between me and my twin sister, enclosed in one body, there never was any struggle, but instinctive reverence for life withheld both of us from fighting for existence. Hers was the stronger temperament, and she ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... at this time, "how I would put myself at the head of the Jews, weapons in hand, and make them independent!" Eventually he abandoned in disgust the attempt to gain a classical education in the schools of his native city and entered the commercial high school in Leipzig. Here again his fiery temperament could not brook the restraints imposed upon him and he presently returned to his ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... rash though pardonable confidence in coming times, he addressed her in high spirits as his darling future wife. Probably there cannot be instanced a briefer and surer rule-of-thumb test of a man's temperament—sanguine or cautious—than this: did he or does he ante-date the word wife in corresponding with a sweet-heart ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... kilometers but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang 'hosannah' and overdid it so, that some persons there of lofty ideas wouldn't shake hands with him at first—he'd become too rapidly reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat, it's a legend. I give it for what it's worth. So that's the sort of ideas we have ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... temperament, the Unemployed cheered his drooping spirits by murmuring, "Better luck to-morrow!" Then he retired to his rather damp quarters ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... that he appears before them only as a substitute for his very intimate and particular friend, General Vardant. He, too, has a wonderful prolixity of compliments to bestow upon the free, the patriotic, the independent voters of the very independent district. He tries to be facetious; but his temperament will not admit of any inconsistencies, not even in a political contest. No! he must be serious; because the election of a candidate to so high an office is a serious affair. So he will tell the "Saw-pit men" a great deal ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... her church could be such a monstrous and imbecile institution as to expect her to take on the impossible job of making Edward Ashburnham a faithful husband. She had, as the English would say, the Nonconformist temperament. In the United States of North America we call it the New England conscience. For, of course, that frame of mind has been driven in on the English Catholics. The centuries that they have gone through—centuries of blind and malignant oppression, of ostracism from public employment, of ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... not, however, altogether fair, for the motives of the Democrats were deeply rooted in their own peculiar temperament. In the last analysis, what had held their organization together, and what had enabled them to dominate politics for nearly the span of a generation, was their faith in a principle that then appealed powerfully, and that still appeals, to much in the American character. ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... enchanting personality, and there would not be a woman under heaven so worthy of affection, if she only knew what it was, and if she had as sensitive a nature as she has a reasonable mind. But with the temperament we know she possesses, there is nothing to be said except that she is the most lovable of all things not good, and the most delightful poison that nature ever concocted." Browning himself says he first sketched her character from Mathews, but finding that rather artificial, he used Voiture ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... affected; and rather pleased with the occasion, which would furnish him with pretences to withdraw himself gradually from an intercourse by this time become equally cloying and unprofitable. Being well acquainted with the mother's temperament, he guessed the present situation of her thoughts, and concluding she would make the jeweller a party in her revenge, he resolved from that moment to discontinue his visits, and cautiously guard against any future interview with the lady whom he ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... was drinking thick dish-water of a greenish-yellow color. But its effects are particularly pleasant. An irresistible sleep seizes you, and lasts twelve, twenty-four hours, or even more, according to the dose, and the temperament of the individual. Delicious ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... we expected. I fear my own faith was weak, but I believe Hubbard's was strong—his was the optimistic temperament. How glad we were to feel the river current as it caught the canoe and hurried it on to the rapid! Suddenly, as we turned a point in the stream, the sound of the rushing waters came to us. A few moments more and we were there. Just above the rapid we ran the canoe ashore, and Hubbard ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... justify to her own mind the intensity of her love, but because this period of trial, to which she had assigned a term, enabled her to temper and divert the violence of Djalma's passion—a task the more meritorious, as she herself was of the same ardent temperament. For, in those two lovers, the finest qualities of sense and soul seemed exactly to balance each other, and heaven had bestowed on them the rarest beauty of form, and the most adorable excellence of heart, as if to legitimatize the irresistible attraction which drew and bound them ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... could have yielded to the elder, in some degree, without wounding his pride. If one had been more prominent than the other in effecting the revolution by which Amulius was dethroned, or if there had been a native difference of temperament or character to mark a distinction, or if either had been designated by Numitor, or selected by popular choice, for the command,—all might have been well. But there seemed in fact to be between them no grounds of distinction whatever. ...
— Romulus, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tavern parlours, and the revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic temperament, and without religious exaltation, drops as if by nature into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is a man to do in this ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fury of her speech I seem to look again into the strangely reticent temperament of the islanders, and to feel the passionate spirit that expresses itself, at odd moments only, ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... blind obedience. At the same time he also wrote to Don Pedro Mascaregnas, that Xavier and Rodriguez were wholly at the king's command; and that they should always remain in Portugal, in case his majesty desired it. Notwithstanding which, he thought a temperament might be found, which was, that Rodriguez might be retained in Portugal, and Xavier permitted to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... English letters, Thackeray is prince of humorists. He could see right through a brick wall, and never mistook a hawk for a hernshaw. He had a just estimate of values, and the temperament that can laugh at all trivial misfits. And he had, too, that dread capacity for pain which every true humorist possesses, for the true essence of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... little sighs judiciously thrown in here and there, just at the right places; everything, let me own, that could present a dutiful daughter as a pattern of propriety—and nothing, let me add, that could produce an impression on my insensible temperament. If I had not been too discreet to rush at a hasty conclusion, I might have been inclined to say: her mother's ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... other vortices. The desire body exhibits all the colors and shades which we know and a vast number of others which are indescribable in earthly language. Those colors vary in every person according to his characteristics and temperament and they also vary from moment to moment as passing moods, fancies or emotions are experienced by him. There is however in each one a certain basic color dependent upon the ruling star at the moment of his birth. The man in whose ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... time Yan had so concentrated all his powers on the shanty that he had scarcely noticed the birds and wild things. Such was his temperament—one idea only, and that with all ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... by temperament, and looked about him to see if he could not make some one's acquaintance. Sitting on the same bench with him—for he was in City Hall Park—was a boy of about his own age apparently. To him Sam determined to make ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... sparkle of colour, to be achieved for its own sake. Indeed this phase of Venetian sixteenth-century colour belongs rather to those artists who issued from Verona—to the Bonifazi, and to Paolo Veronese—who in this respect, as generally in artistic temperament, proved themselves the natural successors of Domenico and Francesco Morone, of ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... effect on Pole of the commissioners' arrival "there needed not," as they said themselves, "many words to declare."[384] His eager temperament, for ever excited either with wild hopes or equally wild despondency, was now about to be fooled to the top of its bent. On the pope's behalf, he promised everything; for himself, he would come as ambassador, he would come as a private person, come in any ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... of them had all of its characteristics at once. Hence temperaments determined according to these four categories do not really exist, and the categorical distinction can have no practical value. If, however, we make use of the significant general meaning of temperament, the apparatus of circumstance which is connected with this distinction becomes superfluous. If you call every active person choleric, every truculent one sanguine, every thoughtful one phlegmatic, and every sad one melancholy, you simply add a technical expression to a few of the thousands of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... for the later half of his life, was profoundly morne, there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the saeva indignatio of Swift; acting on the kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... replied Mrs. Greyle, readily enough, "I ought to know—I married Valentine Greyle, and I knew Stephen John, and I saw plenty of both, and something of their father, too, and a little of Marcus before he emigrated. This man does not possess one Single scrap of the Greyle temperament!" ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... amongst the very slender circle of my acquaintance; and finally, which perhaps was the crowning grace to all these elements of happiness, I suffered not from the presence of ennui, nor ever feared to suffer: for my temperament was constitutionally ardent; I had a powerful animal sensibility; and I knew the one great secret for maintaining its equipoise, viz., by powerful daily exercise; and thus I lived in the light and presence, or, (if I should not be suspected of seeking rhetorical expressions, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... little manner that I had acquired, there was, and always will be, an under stratum of bashfulness, or sheepishness, or mauvaise honte, call it which you will; and the torture, the breaking on the wheel, with which a man of that temperament perceives the eyes of a whole courthouse, for instance, attracted to him, none but a bashful man can understand. At length I ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... The Garden Without Walls. The nature of his life now seemed fixed. To the task of novel-writing he had brought a temperament highly idealistic and romantic, a fresh and vivid imagination, and a thorough literary equipment. His life, as he planned it, held but one purpose for him, outside the warmth and tenacity of its affections—the triumph of the efficient purpose in the ...
— Carry On • Coningsby Dawson
... the lords of life,— I saw them pass In their own guise, Like and unlike, Portly and grim,— Use and Surprise, Surface and Dream, Succession swift and spectral Wrong, Temperament without a tongue, And the inventor of the game Omnipresent without name;— Some to see, some to be guessed, They marched from east to west: Little man, least of all, Among the legs of his guardians tall, Walked about with puzzled look. Him by the hand dear Nature ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... in addition—but these things that were to be the real salvation of him he did not reckon—his gift of laughter, sadly repressed of late, and the philosophic outlook and mercurial temperament which are the stock-in-trade of your adventurer in ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... of France: the quality of courage. It is not unintentionally that it comes last on my list. French courage is courage rationalized, courage thought out, and found necessary to some special end; it is, as much as any other quality of the French temperament, ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... of Marie Laguay, a pretty and good-humoured but quite 'unfortunate' young woman—'the height of honesty and dissoluteness'—who might be met in the public gardens, chaperoned solely by a nice little boy. Jeanne de Valois was not of a jealous temperament. Mademoiselle Laguay was the friend of her husband, the tawdry Count. For Jeanne that was enough. She invited the young lady to her house, and by her royal fantasy created her Baronne Gay d'Oliva ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... about the house, doing her nameless, innumerable household duties. Her voice was rich, and full, and womanly; and the singing was not the fragmentary, sparkling gush of good spirits, and the mere overflow of a happy temperament—it was a deep, sweet, inward music, as if a woman's soul were intoning a woman's thoughts, and as if the woman ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... no objection," answered Wallace; and putting the hand she presented to him into that of Lord de Warenne, he added, "I am not of a sufficiently gay temperament to grace the change; but this earl may not have the same reason for declining so ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... liked Ellen; she appeared equally alive and trustworthy; of the butler I could not say as much. He struck me as secretive. Also, he had begun to manifest a certain antagonism to myself. Whence sprang this antagonism? Did it have its source in my temperament, or in his? A question possibly not worth answering and yet it very well might be. Who ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... Reginald Palliser accepted the change in his circumstances as tranquilly as if it had been but a migration from the red room to the blue. He took good fortune with the same easy indolent air with which he had endured evil fortune. He had the Horatian temperament, uneager to anticipate the future, content if the present were fairly comfortable, sighing for no palatial halls over-arched with gold and ivory, no porphyry columns, or marble terraces encroaching upon the sea. He was a man to whom it had been but a slight affliction to ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Peter Paul's temperament, however, was not one that could adapt itself to a stagnant existence; so when his three weeks on shore are ended, we see him on his way from the Home Farm to ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... required for conning the brig, so that he could attend to nothing else. After a shot had gone through the deck, he heard cries proceeding up the hatchway as if some one had been hurt below, but he had no time to inquire who was the sufferer. Though from his natural temperament he took a pleasure in being under fire, still he never so heartily wished himself out of it as he did at present. It would have been a different matter had he been able to defend his ship instead of being compelled to glide slowly by and be peppered ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... as Gipps was necessarily the medium of announcing their views to the colonists, and carrying them into force, he became unpopular with the Sydney colonists also. No man has ever occupied a more trying position; and a somewhat overbearing temperament was not at all suited ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... even disquieted myself, although I am of a cold, calm temperament, and not easily disturbed. I feared for my country. And I was not wholly tranquilized by the verdicts rendered as above. It seemed to me that there was still room for doubt. In fact, in looking the ground over ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... beginning to understand you; I have mistaken the whole situation. Here have I been thinking myself the only man in the place capable of appreciating its beauties properly—the only poetic and artistic temperament amongst you all—and I gradually awake to find myself but a humdrum, commonplace man of the world, who has dropped into a nest of sweet things: earth, sea, and sky combining to form pictures of beauty; picturesque rural life; an interesting and mysterious ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... strangers, ungrateful, imitative and watchful of his companions and neighbours, vain, and under the spur of vanity industrious and persevering, teachable up to a quickly reached limit, fond of undefined games and practical jokes, too happy and careless to be affected in temperament by his superstitions, too careless indeed to store water even for a voyage, plucky but not courageous, reckless only from ignorance or from inappreciation of danger, selfish but not without generosity, chivalry or a sense of honour, petulant, hasty ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... his Company, too, which would have lost a valuable freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated. The pleasure of disappointing the Monterists was also very great. Authoritative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain Mitchell was no democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt for parliamentarism itself. "His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera," he used to say, "whom ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... fact that he considered himself a great-grandson—not in the direct line, of course—of the famous Bruce, in whose honour he had named his son Yakoff.[51] He was the sort of man who is called "very good-natured," but of a melancholy temperament, fussy, and timid, with a predilection for everything that was mysterious or mystical.... "Ah!" uttered in a half-whisper was his customary exclamation; and he died with that exclamation on his lips, two years ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... way of such fellows as Simone, that are of the suspicious temperament and quick to regard folk as their enemies, to overlook, in their computation of the perils that threaten their cherished purposes, the gravest danger of all. Simone had plenty of enemies in Florence, and he thought that he had provided against all of them, or, at ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... young man, whose mercurial temperament no trouble could repress, had gone away in excellent spirits, leaving her an address where she could always find him, and give him regular news of his aunts, though he made her promise to give them, as yet, no tidings in return, Elizabeth sat still, watching the sun decline and the shadows lengthen ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... At Stockholm the notables of the city crowded to pay their respects—on foot, in order not to disturb the invalid with the sound of carriages and horses. He was not, however, very accessible. By temperament he shrank from either publicity or fame; and in his state of physical and mental suffering he had no heart for the honours showered upon him. He systematically discouraged the forerunners of the modern interviewers ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... was of a very different temperament. He had hope enough in his one single nature to serve the whole castle, if only it could have been shared. The veil between him and the future glowed as if on fire with mere radiance, and about to vanish in flame. It was not that he more than one of the rest imagined ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... to school in both countries, and I found, in the boys of the North, something at once rougher and more tender, at once more reserve and more expansion, a greater habitual distance chequered by glimpses of a nearer intimacy, and on the whole wider extremes of temperament and sensibility. The boy of the South seems more wholesome, but less thoughtful; he gives himself to games as to a business, striving to excel, but is not readily transported by imagination; the type remains with me as cleaner ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... monotony about the new life, and the good deeds that accompanied it, which, to a man of ardent temperament, was apt to pall. And Elk Street, instead of giving him the credit which was his due, preferred to ascribe the change in his behaviour to what they called being "a bit barmy ...
— Deep Waters, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... friends corroborates the malice of enemies it is in ascribing to the English an individualism, hard-shelled beyond all human parallel. The Englishman's country is an impregnable island, his house is a castle, his temperament is a suit of armour. The function common to all three is to keep things out, and most admirably has he used them to that end. At first, indeed, he let everybody in; he had a perfect passion for being conquered, and Romans, Teutons, Danes, and Normans in succession plucked and ate the ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... experience had revealed, must be taken forthwith and traveled by forced marches. Before they left the woods she must have led him through all the gradations of domestic climate between their present frosty if kindly winter, and summer, or, at least, a very balmy spring. From what she knew of his temperament she guessed that once she began to thaw he would forthwith whirl her into July. She must be prepared to accept that, however—repellent though the thought was—she assured herself it was most repellent. She prided herself on her skill at catching and checking herself in self-deception; ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... canopee did you come from anyway? You don't live hereabouts, do you?" asked Mr. Follet, who was of the restless, nervous temperament which must know ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... although circumstantially telling against him, was not of sufficient weight or directness to warrant a conviction upon the charge preferred against him. He had employed eminent legal counsel, and their hopeful views of the case had communicated themselves to the mercurial temperament of the prisoner, and visions of a full and entire acquittal from the grave charge under which he was laboring, ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... Georges' college days, "may be seen a restless-looking little boy, thinner and paler than the others, whose round black eyes seem to shine with a somber brilliance. These eyes, which, eight or ten years later, were to hunt and pursue so many enemy airplanes, are passionately self-willed. The same temperament is evident in a snapshot of this same period, in which Georges is seen playing at war. The college registers of this year tell us that he had a clear, active, well-balanced mind, but that he was thoughtless, mischief-making, disorderly, careless; that he did not work, and was undisciplined, though ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... second time Mr. Judson the draper had worked himself into a little passion, and the conversation had to be discontinued for some minutes while he cooled down to his ordinary temperament. ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... to consume. She was compelled, at these parties, to spend most of her time at the refreshment table, for she could not dance with anybody except other women and very old men; Tamoszius was of an excitable temperament, and afflicted with a frantic jealousy, and any unmarried man who ventured to put his arm about the ample waist of Marija would be certain to throw the orchestra ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... affection of a lioness. She might lick her cubs with the tongue of a tiger, but her temperament, stirring beneath ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... time. I don't intend to give a day less than six weeks to it. I'm looking forward to the tranquilising effect of the antique some myself," he added, hedging. "I find these new self-risers that we've undertaken to carry almost more than my temperament can stand. They went up from an output of five hundred dollars to six hundred and fifty thousand, and back again inside seven days last month. I'm looking forward to examining something that hasn't moved for a couple of thousand ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... unjust aggression the German Social Democrats should declare a military strike—German Socialists have refused to assent. The dramatic oratorical duel which took place between the French and the German delegates at the Congress of Stuttgart illustrates the differences between the national temperament of the Frenchman and the German. When called upon to proclaim the military strike, the German Socialists gave as an excuse that such a decision would frighten away from the Social Democrat party ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... have no tears to shed. No, my child, your heart has nothing to do with this. Your lack of tears proceeds not from any want of affectionate resolve to love, God, but from the absence of sensible devotion, which does not depend at all upon our heart, but upon our natural temperament, which we are unable to change. For just as in this world it is impossible for us to make rain to fall when we want it, or to stop it at our own good pleasure, so also it is not in our power to weep from a feeling of devotion when we ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... (and perhaps I may add for persons of my temperament), I can say, without hesitation, that I would just as soon take a dose of arsenic as I would of alcohol, under such circumstances. Indeed on the whole, I should think the arsenic safer, less likely to lead to physical and moral degradation. ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... cheeks the blood flowed richly—the color came and went with every breath she drew, it seemed, at times. That was when she was excited. But ordinarily she was of a placid temperament, and her brown eyes were as deep as wells. She possessed the power of looking searchingly and calmly at one without making her ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... coffee-pot, standing like a guardian angel between you and him! And in those many vital psychological moments, during the honeymoon, which decide for or against the romance and happiness of all the rest of married life— Those critical before-breakfast moments when temperament meets temperament, and will meets "won't"— What is it that halts you on the brink of tragedy, And distracts you from the temptation to answer back? It is the absorbing anxiety of watching the coffee boil! What is it that warms his veins and soothes ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... their salt sprang into sudden life. Lady Agatha glanced at her, noticed her expression, and smiled a rich, sweet, gratified smile. She had made a disciple. To make a disciple was very pleasant to one of her temperament. Like most women, she was ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... oracles only prove that the older and wiser men in the community realised how dangerous they were, and the comparison with Greece leads to a consideration of certain essential differences between the Greek and the Roman temperament which made that which was meat for one into poison for ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... the man by the senator, often failed to understand his temperament. He was known as a hard hitter in parliamentary encounters. He never failed to give a Roland for an Oliver. In the heat of debate, he was often guilty of harsh, bitter invective. His manner betrayed a lack of fineness and good-breeding. But his resentment vanished ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... in Kyoto. To a man of his temperament enforced passivity on the eve of such epoch-making events must have been intolerable. He saw plainly that to drive the Taira from Shikoku was an essential preliminary to their ultimate defeat, and he saw, too, that for such an enterprise a larger measure of resolution and daring was needed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... sets aside a thousand dim notions which an ordinary understanding could only bring to light with great effort, and over which it would exhaust itself. But this higher activity of the mind, this glance of genius, would still not become matter of history if the qualities of temperament and character of which we have treated did ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... of the poet was now promising to be in the ascendant, but an untoward event ensued. In the ardent enthusiasm of his temperament, he was induced to espouse in verse the cause of the Paisley hand-loom operatives in a dispute with their employers, and to satirise in strong invective a person of irreproachable reputation. For this offence he was prosecuted before the sheriff, who sentenced him to be imprisoned for a few days, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... incongruous animal is man! how unsettled in his best part, his soul; and how changing and variable in his frame of body! the constancy of the one shook by every notion, the temperament of the other affected by every blast of wind! What is he, altogether, but a mighty inconsistency; sickness and pain is the lot of one half of him, doubt and fear the portion of the other! What a bustle we make about passing our ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... a jealous temperament," said Clara, looking down. "But all the Hallecks are fond of her. They think there is a great deal of good in her. don't suppose Ben himself thinks she is ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... this day se'night," wrote his friend Storer to Lord Auckland; "a more good-natured man or a more pleasant one never, I believe, existed. The loss is not only a private one to his friends, but really a public one to society in general."* Gaiety of temperament and sound sense, a quick wit and a kind heart, sincerity and love of society, culture without pedantry, a capacity to enjoy the world in each stage of life: these are seldom found united in one individual as they were in George Selwyn, and he is thus for us perhaps the pleasantest personality ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... do in the horse. In the ass and mule in almost all cases the period of incubation is short and the disease develops in an acute form. We find that the kind of horse infected has an influence on the character of the disease; in full-blooded, fat horses of a sanguinary temperament, the disease usually develops in an acute form, while in the lymphatic, cold-blooded, more common race of horses the disease usually assumes a chronic form. If the disease develops first in the chronic form in a horse in fair condition, starvation ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... makes a mistake. He knows if an attack is coming he may only have a few seconds in which to act. His rifle is loaded with the S.O.S. grenade and all he has to do to let it off is to press the trigger. All varieties of temperament are represented in these lonely sentries, hence occasionally ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... not merely rebellion against his will, but the assertion of her own. It occurred to him then that he could break her little body to pieces before he could force her to yield; and in his pride in this temperament, so like his own, he almost uttered the cry of "Brava!" that hung on his lips. He might have done so if Dorothea had not found it a convenient moment at which to make all her confessions at once and have them off her mind. It was best to do it, she ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... the temperament of a real boy to be very busy about nothing. If the power, for instance, that is expended in play by a boy between the ages of eight and fourteen could be applied to some industry, we should see wonderful results. But a boy is like a galvanic battery that is not in connection with anything; ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... is in temperament to his mother!—Answer me at once; there is no question of enemies, but ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the church in which this picture was originally placed is called San Romeo, who is St. Remi (or Remigio), Bishop of Reims. The painter, Giottino, the greatest and the most interesting, personally, of the Giottesque artists, was, as Vasari says, "of a melancholy temperament, and a lover of solitude;" "more desirous of glory than of gain;" "contented with little, and thinking more of serving and gratifying others than of himself;" "taking small care for himself, and perpetually engrossed by the works he had undertaken." He ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... obey the heavens?"—Dr. Johnson's assertion that "bloods" signify "countenances," is, I think, mistaken both in the thought conveyed—(for it was never a popular belief that the stars governed men's countenances)—and in the usage, which requires an antithesis of the blood,—or the temperament of the four humours, choler, melancholy, phlegm, and the red globules, or the sanguine portion, which was supposed not to be in our own power, but to be dependent on the influences of the heavenly bodies,—and the countenances which are in our power really, though ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... the sort of man to carry through the burden of a half-discovered secret. It needs a special temperament for this—one that is able to inspire fear in whomsoever it may be necessary to hold in check—a temperament with sufficient self-reliance and strength to play an open game steadily through to the end. Since Durnovo's plain-spoken ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... which, for some seven centuries, totally changed the face of Japan. For from the first ascendency of this military system down to our own days everything in society—ambitions, honors, the very temperament and daily pursuits of men, and political institutes themselves—became thoroughly unlike those of which our authoress was an eye-witness. I may almost say that for several centuries Japan never recovered the ancient civilization which ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... had thought a lot about that possibility. To a man of my temperament there was every temptation to have a go in and revenge the loss of the battleships forthwith. We might sup to-morrow night on Achi Baba. With luck we really might. Had I been here for ten days instead ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... Renfield, age 59. Sanguine temperament, great physical strength, morbidly excitable, periods of gloom, ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end in a mentally-accomplished ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... Nesbit is at her best when she sings of love and nature. Here she is close to her subject, and her temperament gives colour and form to the various dramatic moods that are either suggested by Nature herself or brought to Nature for interpretation. This, for instance, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Hamerton, an Irish gentleman, and one characterised by the true merry hospitality of his race. He had been a great sufferer, by the effects of the climate operating on him from too long a residence in these enervating regions; but he was, nevertheless, vivacious in temperament and full of amusing anecdotes, which kept the whole town alive. He gave us a share of his house, and what was more, made that house our homes. His generosity was boundless, and his influence so great, that he virtually commanded all ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... all my life," he says, "the creature of impulse, the sport of chance, the victim of my own uncontrolled and uncontrollable sensations, and of a poetic temperament." ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... a bad idea to stamp them out," here Seaton threw back his head with the challenging gesture which was characteristic of his temperament—"But what is called 'the liberty of the press'(it should be called 'the license of the press') is more of an octopus than a mosquito. Cut off one tentacle, it grows another. It's entirely octopus in character, too,—it only lives to ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... inexplicable realities in the dangerous stimulant of angry partisanship or the indolent narcotick of vague and hopeful vaticination: fortunamque suo temperat arbitrio. Both by reason of my age and my natural temperament, I am unfitted for either. Unable to penetrate the inscrutable judgments of God, I am more than ever thankful that my life has been prolonged till I could in some small measure comprehend His mercy. As there is no man ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... cried the doctor, in a rapture; and he snatched a morsel from a sort of fruit of which gentlemen of the sanguine temperament are remarkably fond; namely, the ripe cherry lips of Misa Day-Born, who ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... life into the rudiments of an immortal one, the beginning of heaven on earth. These restrain those opposites, which lead to crime and death. Love and Hate are as antagonistic as heat and cold, and the usefulness of both depends upon their proper temperament. Fig. 70 represents the antagonism of the Intellectual faculties to the Animal, the Emotional to the Criminal, the Volitive to the Enfeebling. It is not essential to discover in the nerve-substance the precise power from which an impulse originates. We may reasonably ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... these were certain to seize upon such an imagination as that of Burke, and lay the foundation of much of that high-souled mental poetry—one of his great characteristics; indeed, the circumstances of his youth were highly favorable to his peculiar temperament—his delicate constitution rendered him naturally susceptible of the beautiful; and the locality of the Blackwater, and the time-honored ruins of Kilcolman, with its history and traditions, nursed, as they were, by the holy quiet of a country life, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... common stock of spirits; as in an organ, whose pipes being uncovered, the air rushes into them; but the keys let go, are stopped again. Now, if by repeated acts of frequent entertaining of a favourite idea of a passion or vice, which natural temperament has hurried one to, or custom dragged, the face is so often put into that posture which attends such acts, that the animal spirits find such latent passages into its nerves, that it is sometimes ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... men have various ways of getting their will. Some fight, others play, still others threaten suicide if the money is not forthcoming. It is all a matter of temperament and peculiar style of ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... still behold a Creator—then, oh then, will my spirit mount, and indubitably associate with spirits of the just who expectant wait for their golden harps and glorious crowns from the Most High God. For human weaknesses, human failings, arising from our nature, springing from our temperament, which the Creator has ordained, shall be even thus, and not otherwise; for these have I ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 2 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... remember. He was always fond of outcasts—a true artistic temperament, that preferred to consort with actors and soldiers rather than with the beer-swilling middle-class of Berlin. Oh yes, I think we met over a game of chess. Then we wrote an essay on Pope together. Dear Gotthold! What do I not owe him? My position in Berlin, my ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... succeeded him successfully. Godwin was an able man, and got several earldoms for his wife and relatives at a time when that was just what they needed. An earldom then was not a mere empty title with nothing in it but a blue sash and a scorbutic temperament, but it gave almost absolute authority over one or more shires, and was also a good piece of property. These historical facts took place in or about the year ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... was not irrevocable. He makes a new transaction, lays the iniquity of his elect upon Christ, and puts the curse upon his shoulders which was due to them. Justice cannot admit the abrogation of the law, but mercy pleads for a temperament of it. And thus the Lord dispenses with personal satisfaction, which in rigour he might have craved; and finds out a ransom, admits another satisfaction in their name. And in the name of that Cautioner and Redeemer ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... he thought intently, weighing in his mind this idea that had come to him so suddenly. He was not blind to the risks it involved, but his eager temperament always inclined him to the most direct and often to the most dangerous course. His mind was made up, his ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... man not only of strong ambition but of arbitrary temperament. He could not tolerate the idea of a newcomer pre-empting what he had considered his premises. If he could not rule he was ready to ruin. That disposition accorded with both his mental and physical make-up. Bodily he was a bundle of bones and nerves without a particle of surplus flesh. ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... the young man too suspicious. He was of a sanguine temperament, and he tried to persuade himself that there was really no good reason to suspect Mr. Locke of unfair dealing. He laid considerable stress upon the favorable reports of the agents who had called upon him during ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... a good talker, genius and learning, even wit and eloquence, are insufficient; to these, in all or in part, must be added in some degree the talents of active life. The character has as much to do with colloquial power as has the intellect; the temperament, feelings, and animal spirits, even more, perhaps, than the mental gifts. "Napoleon said things which tell in history like his battles. Luther's Table-Talk glows with the fire that burnt the Pope's bull." Caesar, Cicero, Themistocles, Lord Bacon, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... The responsibility that thus rests on physicians is tremendous. That of the young people who wish to be married is also great, but very different. Theirs is to submit themselves fully and frankly to the physician's examination and advice. He may decide that it is safe to marry a person of stable temperament, but not one who is ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... Miss Pecksniffs, when they retired with Mrs Todgers from this place of espial, leaving the youthful porter to close the door and follow them downstairs; who, being of a playful temperament, and contemplating with a delight peculiar to his sex and time of life, any chance of dashing himself into small fragments, lingered behind to walk upon ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... have some knowledge. I represented County Down in the Imperial Parliament at Westminster before it was divided into constituencies, and in my later days I have maintained my close interest in Ulster. At the least, then, I may say that the temperament, the political and religious convictions, and the character of Ulster Unionists are not ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... heart of Spain. In a deeper sense it is her soul. Within it, extremes touch, but only to blend into a harmonious unit which manifests the Spanish temperament and character more truly there than in any other part of the world. In its Andalusian atmosphere the religious instinct of the Spaniard reaches its fullest embodiment. True, its bull-fights are gory spectacles; but they are also gorgeous and solemn ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... occupation and importance afforded her by the model village. In Paris there was no one afraid of her; no humble matrons to quail as her severe eyes surveyed wall and ceiling, floor and surbase. And being of a temperament which required perpetual employment, she was fain to fall back upon illumination, Berlin-wool work, and early morning practice of pianoforte music of the most strictly mathematical character. It was her boast that she had been thoroughly "grounded" ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... more unlike than were the father and son—mentally, morally, physically. Frederick Everett was a fair-haired, blue-eyed young man, of amiable, caressing manners, gentle disposition, and ardent, poetic temperament. His father, on the contrary, was a dark-featured, cold, haughty, repulsive man, ever apparently wrapped up in selfish and moody reveries. Between him and his son there appeared to exist but little of cordial intercourse, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... this tenor, Burr, adapting himself to the moods of his sedate ally, unfolded his purposes. The philosopher heard, acquiesced, and accepted the part assigned to him in the execution of the great business. Blennerhassett's temperament, however, was such as to check, in some degree, the full flow of Burr's exuberant speech. It was always with constraint and reservation that the latter communicated himself to the head of the house. Not so when in familiar converse with Madam Blennerhassett and Theodosia; uninfluenced by ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... Violent alternations of fear, anger, sorrow, terror, and disgust, with frequent disguises, flights, and all sorts of changes of residence, at length wear out the health and spirits of M. Permon—a man, apparently, who united dull enough intellect with all the vivacity of a Frenchman's mere temperament; and he dies in obscurity long before anything like order is re-established. We need not dwell on the particular fortunes of a not very interesting set of people; but may quote one or two more specimens of the sort of scenes which fill the greater ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... I have been informed, was about to obtain a professorship in the Conservatorio of Paris, when political circumstances diverted his course to America. He was the friend of General Moreau and President Madison. Of noble appearance, fine manners, and sensitive temperament, he for some time received the consideration due to his talents and acquirements, but, in after years, was sadly neglected, and finally died in Philadelphia, almost literally of want. His musical knowledge perished with him; his manuscripts (operas, oratorios, etc.) were, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stands alone. If the other contents of the Polycarpian Epistle are questionable, then it enforces our misgivings. If not, then this use of the notice is only another illustration of the over-suspicious temperament of modern criticism, which, as I ventured to suggest in an earlier paper, must be as fatal to calm and reasonable judgment in matters of early Christian history, as it is manifestly in matters of common life. The question ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... of the blade, Spedella, a melancholy enigma of a man, whose art embodied much of the finest shading and phrasing peculiar to himself; from whom even many of Bonaparte's discarded veterans were not above acquiring new technique and temperament! Men in those days were most punctilious about reputation, but permitted a sufficiently wide latitude in its interpretation not to hamper themselves or seriously interfere with their desires or pleasures. Thus, virtue did not become a burden, nor honor ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... said already of Thackeray's qualities and defects as a critic: and it has been pointed out that, in consequence of his peculiar impulsiveness, his strong likes and dislikes, his satiric-romantic temperament, and perhaps certain deficiencies in all-round literary and historical learning, his critical light was apt to be rather uncertain, and his critical deductions by no means things from which there should ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and adding every sort of knowledge which was akin to them. All this order and arrangement the goddess first imparted to you when establishing your city; and she chose the spot of earth in which you were born, because she saw that the happy temperament of the seasons in that land would produce the wisest of men. Wherefore the goddess, who was a lover both of war and of wisdom, selected and first of all settled that spot which was the most likely to produce men likest herself. And there you dwelt, having such laws ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... rouse her to interest in anything. She always said, and was probably right, that want of proper discipline in childhood was the reason of this variableness, which she deplored, but could neither combat nor conceal. Temperament must also have had something to do with it. Her nervous system was too highly strung, she was too sensitive, too emotional, too intense. She reflected phases of feeling with which she was brought into contact as a lake reflects the sky above it, and the ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... in human life, in war or peace, may depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... one of the most distinguished artists of the day, and Barine had inherited from him the elastic artist temperament which speedily rebounds from the heaviest pressure. To him also she owed the rare gift of song, which had been carefully cultivated and had already secured her the first position in the woman's chorus at the festival of the great goddesses of the city. Every one was full of her ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... disposition he was a little put out of humour by the realisation that this beauty would be evident to others beside himself. He was delighted to see once more the Comte, for whom his affection was in no way diminished. He asked him for confidential details about his wife's character and temperament, for she was almost a stranger to him because of the little time during which they had lived together. The Comte, with the utmost sincerity, as if he himself were not enamoured, told the Prince everything he knew about ...
— The Princess of Montpensier • Madame de La Fayette
... dowager lady Chia, in her heart and her eyes there was no one but her venerable ladyship, and her alone; and now in her attendance upon Pao-y, her heart and her eyes were again full of Pao-y, and him alone. But as Pao-y was of a perverse temperament and did not heed her repeated injunctions, she ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... by impatience, or the danger of waiting so long, he wrapped himself up in his cloak, and passed these three dangerous hours in a profound sleep on the bank of the river. So much did he possess of the temperament of great men, a strong mind in a robust body, and that vigorous health, without which no man can ever expect to ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... store-house for the extra supplies and appointed George Tucker and William Coon camp-keepers. Then they prepared packs containing jerked beef, flour, and bread, each weighing between forty and seventy-five pounds, according to the temperament and strength of the respective carriers. The following morning ten men started on their toilsome march to Bear Valley, where they arrived on the thirteenth, and at once began searching for the abandoned wagon and provisions which Reed and McCutchen had cached the previous Autumn, ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... walked through the park, he remembered that Mme. de Lorcy had lost her only two children when they were still of a tender age; that she was therefore free to will her property as she pleased; that she had a short neck, an apoplectic temperament; that Antoinette was her goddaughter; that although she was piqued with Count Larinski the count was adroit, and would find a way to regain her sympathies. The park appeared to him magnificent; he admired its long, regular alleys, which had the appearance of extending ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... Susy's wonder was merely the sense of novelty and inexperience, and a slight disbelief in the actual necessity of what she saw; while Clarence, whether from some previous general experience or peculiar temperament, had the conviction that what he saw here was the usual custom, and what he had known with the Silsbees was the novelty. The feeling was attended with a slight sense of wounded pride for Susy, as if her enthusiasm had exposed her ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... nervous, excitable, hysterical Arab temperament which is almost phrensied by the neighbourhood of a home from which he ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... and strengthen his delicate nature into more manly strength and vigor; there judiciously repress excessive sensibility, and increase confidence in himself and others; if it can possibly be avoided, do not expose him, while a child, to the tender mercies of those who do not understand his peculiar temperament, and who, however kind their ...
— Arthur Hamilton, and His Dog • Anonymous
... lines are cast in pleasant places: it becomes difficult not to slide into practical Antinomianism. What a place to live in for eleven years! yet Wilkins did so with success and general applause. He was inclined by temperament to the freedom of mellowed Independency rather than to the stiffness of the Presbyterians, who more successfully than their rivals resisted the enervating influences of life in Oxford. Circumstances as well as inclination led him to become an Independent: his marriage with Cromwell's sister, ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson
... regard to the subject, medium or seer. There are two distinct temperament in which the faculty is likely to be dominant, and capable of high and rapid culture. There is the nervous temperament associated, with a high muscular development, classified as the "mental-motive" ...
— How to Read the Crystal - or, Crystal and Seer • Sepharial
... two-thirds of this expenditure. I plead guilty to thirty-three per cent lack of economy; the extenuating circumstances were, a wish to let the members of my family do much as they pleased and have good things and good people around them, and a somewhat luxurious temperament of ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the conclusion of the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar nervous temperament foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the precious legacy of his friend. It was only by addressing his reason in repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating my entire fidelity, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... other professions besides the law, Monsieur Mouillard. I have studied Fabien. His temperament is somewhat wayward. With special training he might have become an artist. Lacking that early moulding into shape, he never will be ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... think I've got what you call the artistic temperament. I have never felt drawn towards ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... whimsical La Mascotte. The tables of the many cafes were filled, and hundreds walked to and fro under the bright arcades, or stopped to gaze into the shop-windows. Here the merchant seldom closes his shop till the band goes home. Music arouses the romantic, and the romantic temperament is always easy to swindle, and the merchant of Venice will swindle ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... them. Natures rich in all capacities and endowed with every kind of sensibility were frequent. Nor was there any limit to the play of personality in action. We may apply to them what Browning has written of Sordello's temperament: ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... bay, ships, and steamers, as a hustling, improving, and increasing town, laid out for a future provincial capital; the last will regard it as a dull, detached series of villages, which will some day be a large town. A modification of these causes, allowing for age, temperament, circumstances, and station in life, will explain any ordinary discrepancy in ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... not inherited his mother's nature, he revealed, as time went on, even less resemblance to the perfect reasonableness of his father's temperament. Ever since her first day in the house, Gabriella had been drawn to her father-in-law with an affection which his wife, for all her preoccupied kindness, had not inspired. She respected him for his calm strength, against which the boisterous moods of George reacted ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... materially progressed, often failed to reach them by over-finesse. Plautus with his bold brush pleased them. Surely a turbulent and motley throng they were, with the native violence of the sun-warmed Italic temperament and the abundant animal spirits of a crude civilization, tumbling into the theatre in the full enjoyment of holiday, scrambling for vantage points on the sloping ground, if such were handy, or a good ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... Rocket, "and very ill-bred. I hate people who talk about themselves, as you do, when one wants to talk about oneself, as I do. It is what I call selfishness, and selfishness is a most detestable thing, especially to any one of my temperament, for I am well known for my sympathetic nature. In fact, you should take example by me; you could not possibly have a better model. Now that you have the chance you had better avail yourself of it, for I am going back to Court almost immediately. I am a great favourite at Court; in fact, the ...
— The Happy Prince and Other Tales • Oscar Wilde
... English language. They have accepted the fact that Ireland to-day thinks in English, but they have endeavoured to give to Ireland a distinctively Irish thought, coloured by the whole racial tradition and temperament. With them has been allied a personality not less Irish, yet less obviously Irish—"A.E.," George Russell. Between them, these writers and thinkers have profoundly influenced the mind of the generation younger than themselves. It is not possible to deny that Ireland's ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... E. D., that the Filipinos are 'capable of self-government,' unless the kind which happens to suit the genius of the American people is the only kind of government on earth that is respectable, and the one panacea for all the ills of government among men without regard to their temperament or historical antecedents. The educated patriotic Filipinos can control the masses of the people in their several districts as completely as a captain ever ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... laughter interrupted him, and in the cross fire of sarcastic interrogations that began Brant saw, with relief, a chance of escape. For in the voice, manner, and, above all, the characteristic temperament of the stranger, he had recognized his old playmate and the husband of Susy,—the redoubtable Jim Hooker! There was no mistaking that gloomy audacity; that mysterious significance; that magnificent lying. But ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... of an ardent and romantic temperament, and nothing could please her better than such a proposal as this. She very readily acceded to it, and her father was very willing to intrust her to the charge of Eleanora. So the two ladies, with a proper train of barons, knights, and other attendants, set out together. They ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... great need of morally courageous men. Although Christianity is impossible without Christ, Buddhism is possible without Buddha. A variety of religions is not harmful, and we have to take note of the Christian temperament and the Buddhistic temperament. Orientals can only be appealed to by an Oriental religion. Christianity is an Oriental religion no doubt, but it has been Westernised. It must always be borne in mind that Buddhistic literature is in a special language and that it is difficult for most people ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... to be significant of temperament, but as regards beauty there is little or nothing to choose among colours. It is not the eye, but the eyelid, that is important, beautiful, eloquent, full of secrets. The eye has nothing but its colour, and all colours are fine within fine eyelids. The eyelid ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... are said to apprehend the approach of damp weather by certain presentiments in their bones. So people of a nervous temperament—like the writer—have premonitions of the approach to "the Front" by a feeling of cold feet. These are usually induced by the spectacle of large and untimely cavities in the road, but they may be accentuated, as not infrequently happened, by seeing the process of excavation ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... represented the spiritual side of the English people; and Mr. Buxton's conception appealed to him from its very audacity. This great spiritual kingdom, striding on its way, trampling down the barriers of temperament and nationality, disregarding all earthly limitations and artificial restraints, imperiously dominating the world in spite of the world's struggles and resentment—this, after all, as he thought over it, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... think of anything else. The result was, that Francesco Cenci, inheriting vicious instincts and master of an immense fortune which enabled him to purchase immunity, abandoned himself to all the evil passions of his fiery and passionate temperament. Five times during his profligate career imprisoned for abominable crimes, he only succeeded in procuring his liberation by the payment of two hundred thousand piastres, or about one million francs. It ...
— The Cenci - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Men who had viewed John Latisan in the old days when he came roaring down to town, had they been present in the Vose-Mern offices that day, would have recognized in the grandson the Latisan temperament operating in its old form and would not have been surprised. The avenger picked up Mern's desk chair. He swung it about him, smashing everything in the room which could be smashed. He flung away the fragments of the chair and rushed into the ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... view of Life may be? We want to use Professor So-and-so as a Mirror, as a Medium, as a Go-Between, as a Sensitive Plate, so that we may once more get the thrill of contact with this or that dead Spirit. He must keep his temperament, our Critic; his peculiar angle of receptivity, his capacity for personal reaction. But it is the reaction of his own natural nerves that we require, not the pallid, second-hand reaction of his tedious, ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... for some time been noticing the same phenomenon which had just attracted their notice, but he had hesitated to draw their attention to it. Now, however, he spoke, and his voice sounded grave for one of Pete's usually lively temperament. ...
— The Border Boys Across the Frontier • Fremont B. Deering
... homesteading is the solution of all poverty's problems, but I realize that temperament has much to do with success in any undertaking, and persons afraid of coyotes and work and loneliness had better let ranching alone. At the same time, any woman who can stand her own company, can see the beauty of the sunset, loves growing things, and is willing to put in as much time at ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart |
