"Verve" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... foundation for a splendid reputation. She toured in England, Germany, Austria and America with great success. In the Grove Dictionary, her playing is described in the following manner: "It is marked by an amount of verve and animation that are most rare with the younger English pianists. She has a great command of tone gradation, admirable technical finish, genuine musical taste and considerable individuality of style." In 1903 Miss Goodson married Mr. Arthur Hinton, one of the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... Siecle. The colophon conceals or omits the name of the scribe, but records the dates of incept Kanun IId. (the Syrian winter month January) A.D. 1772; and of conclusion Naysan (April) of the same year. It has head-lines disposed recto and verve, e.g., ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... manners were so suppressed, her hair done so differently, and what a difference hair made! In fact, it was in her private life that she felt herself more truly the actress. On the boards her real secret self seemed to flash forth, full of verve, dash, roguery, devilry. Should she take to a wig, or to character songs in appropriate costumes? No, she would run the risk. It gave more spice to life. Every evening now was an adventure, nay three adventures, and when she snuggled herself ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... in taunting undertones, "Let him be, fine fellow that he is! Suffer him to pass on, for he and he only shall get the cage and the Speaking-Bird." The Prince feared naught but advanced hot foot with his wonted verve and spirit; presently, however, when the Voices kept approaching nearer and nearer to him and increased in number on every side, he was sore perplexed. His legs began to tremble, he staggered and in fine overcome by fear he clean forgot the warning ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Tale of Two Cities, since it was here that Mr. Lorry made the startling revelation to Miss Manette that her father had been "Recalled to Life". The vignette of eighteenth-century Dover is executed with true Dickensian verve: ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... applications of the principles they both professed, he, on the contrary, presented the Benthamic doctrines in the most startling form of which they were susceptible, exaggerating everything in them which tended to consequences offensive to anyone's preconceived feelings. All which, he defended with such verve and vivacity, and carried off by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off victor, or divided the honours of the field. It is my belief that much of the notion popularly entertained of the tenets and sentiments of what are called Benthamites or Utilitarians ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... all right, Mr. Hadley. I have talked to my extra actors, and they promise to put more verve ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front - Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films • Victor Appleton
... the classic verve of his prose and verse, and undoubtedly assisted in maintaining Punch's literary standard. His work for the paper went on increasing—from six columns in Vol. VII., to forty-two in Vol. XIII.—and soon ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... mind, but several; he becomes not one poet, but many; for each actor in his drama has a share, and an important share, in the lyrical estro to which he gives birth. This it is which has imparted any verve, variety, or dramatic character they possess, to the ballads contained in this production. Turpin I look upon as the real songster of "Black Bess;" to Jerry Juniper I am unquestionably indebted for a flash melody which, without his hint, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... with hair of that blue—black sheen so rarely observed, with violet eyes and a poise and grace that made her much observed, Viola Carwell was at the height of her beauty. In a sense she had the gentle grace of her mother and with that the verve and sprightliness of her father mingled perfectly. It was no wonder that Captain Poland and Harry Bartlett and many others, for that matter, were ...
— The Golf Course Mystery • Chester K. Steele
... shaken out her hair and piled it high on her head in satiny twists and loops, with a pompadour such as Miss Ponsonby could never have thought about. It suited her tremendously and seemed to alter the whole character of her face, giving verve and piquancy to her delicate little features. The excitement had flushed her cheeks into positive pinkness and her eyes were starry. The roses were pinned on her shoulder. Miss Ponsonby, as she stood there, was a pretty woman, with fifteen apparent ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... not a few other French words which like 'prestige' are at this moment hovering on the verge of English, hardly knowing whether they shall become such, or no. Such are 'ennui', 'exploitation', 'verve', 'persiflage', 'badinage', 'chicane', 'finesse', and others; all of them often employed by us,—and it is out of such frequent employment that adoption proceeds,—because expressing shades of meaning not expressed by any words of our own{67}. Some of these, we may confidently ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... d'Aumale did not speak French very fluently; but as soon as she began to speak Italian, the Italian of Naples, she thrilled like a fish that falls back into the water, and gesticulated with Neapolitan verve. "Put your hands in your pockets," the Duke d'Aumale would say to her. "I shall have to have your hands tied. Why do you ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... RIFACCIMENTO of some inferior work; but there are some damned fine lines. As for the purely satiric ill-minded ABELARD AND HELOISE, another TROILUS, QUOI! it is not pleasant, truly, but what strength, what verve, what knowledge of life, and the Canon! What a finished, humorous, rich picture is the Canon! Ah, there was nobody like Shakespeare. But what I like is the David and Absalom business. Absalom is so well felt - you ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the series are the best. Signorelli has in them given the rein to his love of martial scenes, and painted them with great animation and verve. In No. VII. we have the scene "How S. Benedict discovers the deceit of Totila," and unmasks the shield-bearer, who, disguised as the King of the Goths, comes to prove the knowledge of the saint. In the background, a plain covered with camps and soldiers, Totila ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... have imagined the possibility of its production. It stands outside other things—a mixture of mad mirth and gravity, of folly and reason, of childishness and grandeur, of the commonplace and the out-of-the-way, of popular verve and polished humanism, of mother-wit and learning, of baseness and nobility, of personalities and broad generalization, of the comic and the serious, of the impossible and the familiar. Throughout the whole there is such a force ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... their partners, lifted locked arms over their partners' heads, and thus interwoven, the circle balanced before breaking up. Other times, other dances—ours is now the day of the trot and the tango. But they lack the life, the verve of the old dances, the old tunes. To this day when I hear them, my feet patter in spite of me. You could not dance to them steadily, with soft airs blowing all about, leaves flittering in sunshine, and water rippling near, without getting ...
— Dishes & Beverages of the Old South • Martha McCulloch Williams
... moments was to behold pure sunshine; to hear her voice was to listen to the very essence of laughter and happiness. She had a marvelous power of telling stories, and when she was happy she told them with such verve that all people within earshot hung on her words. Then she could improvise, and dance, and take off almost any character; in short, she was the life of every party who admitted her within ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... a pirate!" sobbed JACK, "And your colours are black!" But he heard—as he struggled to speak— The conductor observe, With remarkable verve, That he didn't want none ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 30, 1892 • Various
... them, but with no great enthusiasm. Suddenly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Holland had gained political independence, Dutch art struck off by itself, became original, became famous. It pictured native life with verve, skill, keenness of insight, and fine pictorial view. Limited it was; it never soared like Italian art, never became universal or world-embracing. It was distinct, individual, national, something that spoke for ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... obtain the popularity of the Mysteries of Udolpho and the Shagreen Skin, the Arabian Nights, and Monsieur de Balzac. I have somewhere read that God created Adam, the nomenclator, saying to him: You are the story-teller. And what a story-teller! What verve and wit! What indefatigable perseverance in painting everything, daring everything, branding everything! How the world is dissected by this man! What an annalist! ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... besotted "lecture pieuse," drawled by a sleepy pupil, some tragedy made grand by grand reading, ardent by fiery action—some drama, whereof, for my part, I rarely studied the intrinsic merit; for M. Emanuel made it a vessel for an outpouring, and filled it with his native verve and passion like a cup with a vital brewage. Or else he would flash through our conventual darkness a reflex of a brighter world, show us a glimpse of the current literature of the day, read us passages from some enchanting tale, or the last ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... has been approached, nor has the opera, so far as my information goes, ever been given with the same Gilbertian verve and swing. The subsequent performance of "The Mikado" by the authorized company, seen throughout the United States, seemed by comparison "like ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... she answered, with her old verve, "get out o' the house, man, and leave me to my work while you ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... with much verve and vigor. It was a pleasant morning: the windows were open; the schoolrooms were all well ventilated; the teachers, the best of their kind, were stimulating in their lectures and in their conversation. ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... at bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing on paper." Sculpture, drawing, all the arts save music are imitative; so was the dance from which they sprang. But imitation is not all, or even first. "The dance may be mimetic; but the beauty and verve of the performance, not closeness of the imitation impresses; and tame additions of truth will encumber and not convince. The dance must control the pantomime." Art, that is, gradually ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... Nor could they satisfactorily answer the question. He raved: "You let her go. Ha! what creatures you are—hein? But you find not anozer in fifty years, I say; and here you stop, and forty hours pass by, and not a sing in motion. What blood you have! It is water—not blood. Such a voice, a verve, a style, an eye, a devil, zat girl! and all drawn up and out before ze time by a man: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which to pour a highly seasoned brew of fun; that to this end his actors went before the public, potentially speaking slap-stick in hand, equipped by nature with liveliness of grimace and gesture and prepared to act with verve, unction and an abandon of dash and vigor that would produce a riot of merriment; that his dramatic machinery is hopelessly crippled and that his evident intentions and effects are hopelessly lost unless interpreted in this spirit: then we relegate Plautine ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... be described by those who feared the razor-edge as petulant instead of peevish, and cendree instead of sandy, passed the tedious moments of waiting in a running commentary upon the idiosyncrasies and oddities of the people and refreshments of the past hours, with a verve which she fondly believed to be a combination of sarcasm and cynicism, but which, in reality, was the kernel of the nut of spitefulness, hanging from the withering bough of the ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... of his ballet girls, washerwomen, and grisettes than is Zuloaga in his delineations of peasants, dwarfs, dogs, courtesans, scamps, zealots, pilgrims, beggars, drunkards, and working girls. What verve, what grip, what bowels of humanity has this Spaniard! A man, not a professor of academic methods. He has no school, and he is a school in himself. That the more serene, poetic aspects and readings of life have escaped him is merely to ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... is rather tame, though its literary merit is considerable. He had a fair measure of constructive skill, but very little of poetic impulse or of dramatic verve. His best scenes interest us more for their good sense than for any more stirring qualities. His nearest approach to a strong character is the paterfamilias himself, who is certainly much less "woolly and mawkish"[52] than his pendant in Diderot. Next ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... Cockaigne has been crowning A Poet whose garland endures;— It was you that first told me of Browning,— That stupid old Browning of yours! His vogue and his verve are alarming, I'm anxious to give him his due; But, Fred, he's not nearly so ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... Was it he who was dreaming now, or was the event of the night a mere farce of his own imagining? Mr. Brotherson was whistling in his room, gaily and with ever increasing verve, and the tune which filled the whole floor with music was the same grand finale from William Tell which had seemed to work such magic in the night. As Sweetwater caught the mellow but indifferent notes ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... pronounced Dauriat. "Upon my word and honor (I don't tell you that as a publisher, mind), your sonnets are magnificent; no sign of effort about them, as is natural when a man writes with inspiration and verve. You know your craft, in fact, one of the good points of the new school. Your volume of Marguerites is a fine book, but there is no business in it, and it is not worth my while to meddle with anything but a very big affair. In conscience, I won't take your ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... good tale of early Bible times, told with a verve and vigour that keeps the interest ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... he had felt and seen, and he could not give any verve to the peroration of his sermon. He could not even change it. It had been effective when he had preached it previously. But now he parroted with unconscious irony the phrases he had once so admired. He came to ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... Chang Chu piloted a landing craft with the same verve that she seemed to be able to handle any other responsibility. As he sat in the seat next to her, Ronny Bronston took in her practiced flicking of the controls from the side of his eyes. He wondered vaguely at the efficiency of such Section G officials as Metaxa and ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... original poems was La Saisiaz and the Two Poets of Croisic. The Croisic Poets are agreeable studies, written with verve and lucidity, of two fantastic events which lifted these commonplace poets suddenly into fame. They do well to amuse an idle hour. The end of both is interesting. That of the first, which begins with stanza lix., discusses the ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... having kept her secret when in the army. "But I told it to the ground," she added; "I dug a hole that would hold a gallon and whispered it there." Phebe kept her faculties to the last, and to the last sold her apples to the Quality by the sea, returned repartees with extraordinary verve and contempt for false delicacy, and knew as much of the quality of Brighton liquor as if she were a soldier ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... them—very different from the pale-faced Meeus—this was a man they felt who would lead them to more unspeakable butchery than Meeus had ever done. Therefore they shouted, piled their arms in the office and returned to the rebuilding of their huts with verve. ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... phrases were conventional and pietistic. I used to feel that he jarred a good deal on Father Payne, but much was forgiven him because of his musical talents, which were really remarkable. His organ-playing, with its verve, its delicacy, and its quiet mastery, was delicious to hear, he was engaged in writing music mainly, and had a piano all to himself in a little remote room beyond the dining-room, which looked out to the stable-yard and had ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is not correctness of grammar nor elegance of enunciation that charms us; it is spirit, VERVE, the sudden turn of humour, the keen, pungent taste of life. For this reason a touch of dialect, a flavour of brogue, is delightful. Any dialect is classic that has conveyed beautiful thoughts. Who that ever talked with the poet Tennyson, when he let himself go, ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... are four stories of power and dash in this volume: "The Last Straw," "The Surrender of Lapwing," "The Penance of Hedwig," and "Garret Owen's Little Countess." Each one of these tells a tale full of verve and thrill, each one has a heroine of ...
— The Bright Face of Danger • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Austrians were killed, wounded, or taken prisoners, whilst 80 guns and about two hundred baggage waggons fell as spoils to the French. In this brilliant victory Decaen's skill and valour, rapidity and verve, had been of inestimable value, as ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... With a rattling verve, and a dime on each wrist, which Professor Cecilia had placed there to effect a divorce between finger and arm movement, Irene attacked her scales and exercises. She loathed five-finger exercises. So did the talented but lazy Sissy, who knew well from experience what torture would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... she had always mistrusted the little stories, and now people who knew agreed with her. How could Rickie, or any one, make a living by pretending that Greek gods were alive, or that young ladies could vanish into trees? A sparkling society tale, full of verve and pathos, would have been another thing, and the editor might have been ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... we puts a little verve into this thing!' he roars; an' pullin' his guns he begins shakin' the loads out of 'em like ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... metaphysics, law, political economy, music, fencing, and amateur theatricals. Thirty years later his fellow—students recalled with delight the fits of laughter into which they had been sent by Prince Albert's mimicry. The verve with which his Serene Highness reproduced the tones and gestures of one of the professors who used to point to a picture of a row of houses in Venice with the remark, "That is the Ponte-Realte," and of another who fell down in a race and was obliged to look for his spectacles, ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... by Willie, Oscar's elder brother, whom I had met in Fleet Street. Willie was then a tall, well-made fellow of thirty or thereabouts with an expressive taking face, lit up with a pair of deep blue laughing eyes. He had any amount of physical vivacity, and told a good story with immense verve, without for a moment getting above the commonplace: to him the Corinthian journalism of The Daily Telegraph was literature. Still he had the surface good nature and good humour of healthy youth and was generally liked. ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 1 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... delightful! And everybody's so energetic! You move with a spring and verve; and I don't hear any grumbling, though there seems to be so ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... out firmly amid the turmoil of Jabez's environment—and that was his idealistic and almost fanatical admiration of the exploits of Buffalo Bill as depicted on the screen and retailed in small paper-bound books. Indeed so struck was he by the verve and virility of this astounding man that he took to attiring his lower limbs—which seldom showed above the counter—in the breeches, leggings, belt and pistol so well known to all lovers of the limitless prairie. The infinite pathos of Jabez Puffwater's ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... then turn on "The Day of Retribution," Shades of avengers in the world below Prodding my man with verve and resolution, And broiling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 24, 1914 • Various
... evenings spent at the theaters and ended at Tortoni's with this truest of "boulevardiers," who knew every one and everything, and whose inexhaustible fund of anecdote was enlivened by a spontaneous easy wit and verve that made ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... characters that "he is endowed with the same talent for imitating people which Chopin, the pianist, possesses in so high a degree; he represents a personage instantly and with astounding truth." Liszt remarks that Chopin displayed in pantomime an inexhaustible verve drolatique, and often amused himself with reproducing in comical improvisations the musical formulas and peculiar ways of certain virtuosos, whose faces and gestures he at the same time imitated in the most striking manner. These statements are corroborated by the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... a man of tallish figure and rather slender; with a countenance thin and flushed a sensitive pink, out of which his eyes shone, keen, alert, humorous, and a trace wistful behind his glasses. His years were indeterminate; with the aspect of fifty, the spirit and the verve of thirty assorted oddly. But his hands were old, delicate, fine and fragile; and the lips beneath the drooping white mustache at times trembled, almost imperceptibly, with the generous sentiments that come ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... like a would-be singer, a song written by a would-be poet, and set by a would-be musician. Verve was there none in the whole ephemeral embodiment. When it died a natural death, if that be possible where never had been any life, Vavasor said, "Thank you, Raymount." But Hester, who had been standing with her teeth clenched under the fiery rain of discords, wrong notes, and dislocated rhythm, ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the Gymnase was constantly being renewed. Scribe, whose verve was inexhaustible, wrote for this theatre alone nearly one hundred and fifty pieces. It is true that he had collaborators,—Germain Delavigne, Dupin, Melesville, Brazier, Varner, Carmouche, Bayard, etc. It was to them that he wrote, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... had not died out; every day it expected to be regaled with news of his escape; and, it is true, he had gained a considerable amount of public sympathy by reason of his verve, his gayety, his diversity, his inventive genius and the mystery of his life. Arsene Lupin must escape. It was his inevitable fate. The public expected it, and was surprised that the event had been delayed so long. Every morning the Prefect of ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... visible in all their distinctness from the beginning, as all those who have read the introductory chapters will readily admit. And the same lines were to be followed with an undeviating fixity of artistic purpose and with unfailing verve and spirit to the last. 'The Prodigious Adventures of Tartarin,' 'Tartarin on the Alps,' and 'Port-Tarascon,' form a trilogy; and I know of no other example in modern French literature of so long and so well sustained a joke. How ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... preferred one story, and some another. On the whole, one is strongly inclined to judge that few modern readers will equal Goethe's unsparing appetite. The reader sighs in thinking of the brilliant and unflagging wit, the verve, the wicked graces of Candide, and we long for the ease and simplicity and light stroke of the Sentimental Journey. Diderot has the German heaviness. Perhaps this is because he had too much conscience, and laboured too deeply under the burdensome problems of the world. He could not emancipate ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... oppressed even by a persuasion—of which she could not rid herself—that it held matters of no common moment closely affecting her father, she went out of the house, down the sheltered drive, and through the entrance gates. Here, as she turned inland, the verve of the clear autumn morning rushed on her, along with a wild flurry of falling leaves dancing to the breath of ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... show the sculptor as supreme. Why should not we encourage individual young sculptors more? Give them portions of your work in which they can put all the fervor and enthusiasm of young manhood. Their powers may not be ripe, but they possess a verve and intensity that may have forever fled when in later years the imagination is less enthusiastic and the pulses slower. I am sure there are many young sculptors now wanting commissions who have been trained ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 799, April 25, 1891 • Various
... the walls. The rooster was faithfully depicted a la Rembrandt at half-length in the stirring guise of a fencer, foil in hand, and wearing enormous gloves. The execution of this masterpiece left something to be desired; but the whole betokened a certain spirit and verve, on the part of the sitter, which I found difficulty in attributing ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... was a rollicking ballad he trolled out with verve and spirit; but still, though none of the guests now showed it openly, the anxious suspense did not abate, and by and by Miss Allonby smiled at the lad beside ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... Still one may admire the very spirited girl archers surmounting the two columns, even if they are apparently launching arrows at their sister sprites below, instead of into jets of water as was intended. The figures at the bases of the columns, while lacking the grace and the joyous verve of those above, still are very decorative. All are the ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... the spirit of Spanish music. He has a book of Spanish dances and two Spanish albums full of music of most varying mood, yet every mood characteristic of Spain and its people, now gay, now languorous, now dashing, now subdued, now softly whispering, now full of verve and passion, like the "Bolero," the fifth of the "Spanish Dances," Op. 12, with its sharply accentuated rhythm and dashing melody, which toward the end fairly swirls ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... straightway convulsed with laughter at this mimicry, which seems, to say the least, in highly questionable taste. When Nell Gwynne appeared and burlesqued the biter, Charles II, who was present at the first performance of The Conquest of Granada, well nigh died of merriment, and her verve in delivering Dryden's witty lines wholly completed her conquest of the King. Nell Gwynne did not appear on the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... her youth in a shy heightening of color. Under the protection of the cheerful, slowly moving crowd she felt at liberty to drop for a minute the subdued air of his daughter's paid companion, and in her replies to what he said she spoke with some of her old gayety of verve. It was an unfortunate moment in which to yield to this temptation, for it was, perhaps, the only occasion since her coming to New York on which ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... entering the hotel. The Prince was a little, inoffensive-looking man, the lady an evident countrywoman of my own, and the child—was, yet was NOT, Sarah! There was the face, the outline, the figure—but the life, the verve, the audacity, was wanting! I ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... displeasure for a more convenient season; but as soon as they are alone, the miserable man has to pass under the harrow, as only husbands with wives of a chastising spirit can pass under it, and his life is made a burden to him because of that unlucky anecdote told with such verve a few hours ago, and received with such shouts of pleasant laughter. Perhaps the anecdote was just a trifle doubtful; granted; but what does the wife take by her remonstrance? Most probably a quarrel; possibly a good-natured peccavi for the sake of being ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... had ten long lengths on them Before their ship began to swerve. The rabid screw was frothing at her stern; But I could feel the verve Of our blithe timbers tremble; every nerve Of our good race-horse ship For open water seemed ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... tune of the piece was a march used with Meyerbeerian effectiveness to bring down the curtain. The stout verve of this "El Capitan" march gave it a large vogue outside the opera. Hopper next produced "The Charlatan," a work bordering upon opera comique in its first version. Both of these works scored even larger success ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... sharply limited and largely superficial. There is little attempt at getting down to the roots of things. There is absolutely no tendency or thesis. The story is told for the sake of the story, and its chief redeeming quality lies in the grace and charm and verve with which it is told. These were qualities that immediately won the public's favor when "Anatol" first appeared. And to some extent it must be counted unfortunate that the impression made by those qualities was so deep and so lasting. ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... Imagination. — N. imagination; originality; invention; fancy; inspiration; verve. warm imagination, heated imagination, excited imagination, sanguine imagination, ardent imagination, fiery imagination, boiling imagination, wild imagination, bold imagination, daring imagination, playful ...
— Roget's Thesaurus |
