"Austere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... call should instantly bring all who love me most,— For ne'er were seen such arch delights from Greek or Roman host; Nor at the free, control-less jousts, where, spite of cynic vaunts, Austere but lenient Seneca no ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... to by all. They felt the force of something in him which made him their superior. Heaven was wonderfully near him. He was not old-fashioned; he was always a boy, unconscious of anything unusual in himself; not solemn nor impressive nor austere in manner. All that he did, he did with perfect naturalness; for to him the ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... the laughs. Mr Goble's idea of a musical piece was something embracing trained seals, acrobats, and two or three teams of skilled buck-and-wing dancers, with nothing on the stage, from a tree to a lamp-shade, which could not suddenly turn into a chorus-girl. The austere legitimateness of "The Rose of America" gave him a pain in the neck. He loathed plot, and "The Rose of America" ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... of Michelangelo's austere temperament, intensely masculine in his predilections, the beauty of womanhood was not fully revealed. His sibyls can scarcely be counted as women; they belong to a world of their own, neither human nor ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... never great personal popularity. His presence was majestic, but forbidding. His manners were agreeable, and sometimes fascinating to his friends, when he was in a genial mood; but he was often reserved or even austere to strangers, and terrible to his enemies. His style of thought was mathematical, his language expressive, but never popular. He wrote as a man would dictate an essay which was to appear as a posthumous ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... To guard each planted seed and seedling. Then he was a god, to the red man's dreaming; Then the chiefs brought treasures grotesque and fair,— Magical trinkets and pipes and guns, Beads and furs from their medicine-lair,— Stuck holy feathers in his hair, Hailed him with austere delight. The orchard god was their ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... as if horrified by the austere reception of his cordial advances. 'Wha's gaumlin'? We mauna play, billies, till he's gane. An unco pernicketty auld carl, thon ane,' he remarked, sotto voce. 'But there's naething in the Company's by-laws ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... time; with its arduous study, and its growing fame, and Guy, with the delicious task of educating his supple intellect to my ideas, and penetrating his nature with my personality. Only the loftiness of my ideal saved it from making womanish shipwreck on this episode in its austere voyage ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... title stands at the head of this chapter. Of Ultra-crepidarius, which was "printed for John Hunt" in 1823, it is believed that not half a dozen copies are in existence, and it has never been reprinted. It is a rarity, then, to which the most austere despisers of first editions may ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... Well, in my case the time for make-believe is over. I am too near the end. The simple and austere soul of things seems ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... branch of the Saskatchewan River, revered for his gifts, feared for his power, and always approached with something of reluctance by the Indians, who firmly believed the spirit of the gods to dwell within him. He was an austere and taciturn man, difficult of access, and as vain and ambitious as he was haughty and contemptuous. Those who professed to have witnessed the scene told of a trial of power between this man—the Black Snake, as he was called—and a renowned medicine-man ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... pressed this desert clothed in its virgin wildness. Perhaps Marcos Arellanos and Cuchillo were the only white men who had ever wandered to this remote place. A vague sentiment of awe caused the hunters involuntarily to lower their voices before the supernatural charm of this austere landscape. Those hills, enveloped in mist—even when the plains shone with the blazing rays of the sun—seemed to hide some impenetrable mystery. It might be fancied that the invisible guardians of the treasures, the lords of the mountains according to Indian ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... admiration for Frederick the Great and Napoleon, those ruffians of genius who wrought so much evil in the world. Paul, however, adored men of action, and he forgot the crimes and moral defects of Napoleon and Frederick in contemplating the splendour of their achievements. Austere though his own morals were, he nevertheless held that a man capable of great service to the State ought not to be debarred from performing it by his religious opinions or the lack of them, or by the nature of his private life. ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... manifestations by means of the idealizing aptitudes; it is the field of sexual psychology in which that faculty of crystallization, on which Stendhal loved to dwell, achieves its most brilliant results. In the solitary passage in which we seem to see a smile on the face of the austere poet of the De Rerum Natura, Lucretius tells us how every lover, however he may be amused by the amorous extravagances of other men, is himself blinded by passion: if his mistress is black she is a fascinating brunette, if she squints she is the rival ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... I turned with amazement, I saw that the other occupants walking like figures in some ancient ceremony, were moving slowly toward the far end of the room. One by one, as they filed past, they raised their calm, passionless faces to mine, immensely vital, proud, austere, and then, without further word or gesture, they opened the door I had lost and disappeared through it one by one into the darkness of the night beyond. And as they went it seemed that the mist swallowed them up and a gust of wind caught them away, and the light also went with them, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... from his recollection. The book was finished in five weeks, and in hot haste, and for months again I was left wondering what the outcome of it all was to be—whether Wraxall was reading my story, or whether—oh, horror!—some other reader less kindly disposed, and more austere and critical, and hard to please, had been told off to sit in judgment upon my ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the Shaws of Rothiemurchus, in Scotland, and the ruins of their castle may still be seen on the island of Loch-an-Eilan, in the northern Highlands. It was never the picturesque castle of song and story, this home of the fighting Shaws, but an austere fortress, probably built in Roman times; and even to-day the crumbling walls which alone are left of it show traces of the relentless assaults upon them. Of these the last and the most successful were made in the seventeenth ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... always exaggerates, but she deludes herself if she expects to maintain to the end, sentiments so severe and so delicate. Fix this fact well in your mind, Marquis, that these female metaphysicians are not different in their nature from other women. Their exterior is more imposing, their morals more austere, but inquire into their acts, and you will discover that their heart affairs always finish the same as those of women less refined. They are a species of the "overnice," forming a class of their own, as I told Queen Christine of Sweden, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... went on, the beloved image of the Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of her adopted daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere and gracious colouring; and each new day supplied some fresher garland of old imperishable memories to grace it with;—that Shape with the grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded—faded! She would not own it even to herself, but the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... mustn't talk so—you mustn't!" The seconds ticked away. Save for the quick catch of suppressed sobs, not a sound was heard in the mean, austere little room; not an echo penetrated ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... My mother died long ago, and her unmarried sisters took care of me. They lived very simply in a small secluded country house: two old-fashioned Evangelicals, gentle but austere, studying small economies, giving all they could away. In winter we embroidered for missionary bazaars; in summer we spent the days in a quiet, walled garden. It was all very peaceful, but I grew restless; and when I heard that my father's ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... one hand is man selfish, greedy, earth-bound, false and sordid in his aims. On the other, at repeated intervals, in great and solemn hours, comes this austere appeal for all he has to give—and he promptly gives it, joyously, willingly, without thought of reward, and derives a greater satisfaction from that self-giving than from all other kinds of gain together. ...
— No. 4, Intersession: A Sermon Preached by the Rev. B. N. Michelson, - B.A. • B. N. Michelson
... classick ground. His son, who is of the same name, and a man eminent for talents and learning, is now, with universal approbation, Solicitor-General of Scotland. BOSWELL. Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 94) describes Blair 'as so austere and void of urbanity as to make him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the world together. Every springtime she, as spectator, would watch him directing Wagnerian choruses in the "Mystic Abyss" at Bayreuth. Winters it was he who went into ecstasies under her tremendous "Hojotoho!"—the fierce cry of a Valkyrie afraid of the austere father Wotan; or at sight of her awakening among the flames for the spirited Siegfried, the hero who feared nothing in the world, but trembled at the first glance ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York city. ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... required to hold an annual term or sitting in each county of the state, two of the judges officiating. In every court-room in Ohio where Judge Sherman presided he made friends. His official robes were worn by him as the customary habiliments of the man. He was never distant, haughty, morose, austere, or overbearing on the bench. It was not in his nature to be so anywhere, and it was therefore always a personal pleasure to practice in his courts. The younger members of the profession idolized him in every part of the state; for them and their early efforts ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... against these ideas. "Austere," he whispered. "The ennobling tests of war." A trooner rode up alongside, and offered him a drink ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... the most Jansenistic in the world, appears a young man of twenty-eight who has scrupulously guarded his robe of innocence and is as truly virginal as the heath-cock which gourmands enjoy. Do you not see that the most austere of virtuous women would merely pay him a sarcastic compliment on his courage; the magistrate, the strictest that ever mounted a bench, would shake his head and smile, and all the ladies would hide themselves, so that he might not hear their laughter? When ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... prided himself upon his own popularity and social position; he made a virtue of his necessity for earning money and, in good natured, lordly fashion, blazed a trail for his uncle's protege with a laugh of indifference at his own defeat with his austere relative. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... manner, as though he had just found them out in some dark transgression. It was possibly a habit due to a lifelong experience of the faults and the failings of human nature, and it was one which stood Binks in good stead, giving him an austere and awe-inspiring appearance. Especially on Sundays did this detective air prove helpful, when he did duty as parish clerk in the quaint, old-time church on the shore, where it served to keep the small fisher-folk ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... forest put on a beauty, austere, yet fantastic, bizarre. Above it hung a pale blue sky; within it, a perpetual, pale blue haze, through which blazed the scarlet and gold of the trees—great bonfires which did not warm, flaming pyres which were never consumed. Morning and evening a shroud of chill, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... him into the Boss's presence. It was not a sumptuous throne-room; an austere chamber rather, one might without exaggeration say a roomy cell, with puritanic chairs and khaki-colored regiments of letter files. There were two concessions to a softer scheme of life,—a lounge and a bowl of red chrysanthemums, both with associations. On the lounge, which parenthetically ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... of accomplishing what they regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently renounced ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sir," she began calling to him soundlessly, and broke off abruptly and stood there at the window for a time, motionless and thoughtful. She was a tall girl, of a broad-shouldered, athletic type, a college girl by the sign of the austere cut of her gown, but a western girl by the sign of the flying ends of the scarf about her throat, the unafraid looseness of her bright hair. Her face, lit by her amber eyes and crowned by those loose masses of hair, had a rare, dusky-gold beauty. Despite her hair she was dark-skinned, ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... upon poor me, I suppose," says Lady Rylton with a difficult smile. She looks at Tita. Evidently she expects Tita to sink into the ground beneath that austere regard, ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... Bari, of mean birth, had risen by the virtues of a monk. He was studious, austere, humble, a diligent reader of the Bible, master of the canon law, rigid in his fasts; he wore haircloth next his skin. His time was divided between study, prayer, and business, for which he had great aptitude. From the poor bishopric of Acherontia he had been promoted to the archbishopric ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a youth who stood with one older and of austere garb. By the vestments of this older man I knew he was of those who teach people in spiritual things. To him the young man had come in anguish of heart. Then the older man of priestly garb taught the young man in the teachings that had ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... Times" a Capuchin monk, wandering apart from the dancers in consonance with the austere proclaiming of his garb, was studying the frivolous gamboling of a school of fountain gold-fish in the conservatory. He looked up, scowling, to take a note ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... striking their roots each year more deeply into the soil of America, became more and more self-supporting states in everything save name and political allegiance; while New France, which with its austere climate would have developed more slowly in any case, remained dependent on the ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... than at Oxford, where he was supposed to be living. Mrs. Lettsome and her brother were frequent guests; and coach-loads of fine people came over from the court almost every day. Indeed, it was only Fareham's character—austere as Clarendon's or Southampton's—which kept the finest of all company at a distance. Lady Castlemaine had called at Chilton in her coach-and-four early in July; and her visit had not been returned—a slight ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... al-Zaman, "Be it so," and returning to his caravanserai, took a jewel worth five hundred gold pieces and went with it to the jewel-bazar. There he enquired for the shop of Master Obayd, Shaykh of the Jewellers, and they directed him thereto. So he went thither and saw the Shaykh, a man of austere aspect and robed in sumptuous raiment with four journeymen under his hand. He addressed him with "Peace be upon you!" and the jeweller returned his greeting and welcoming him, made him sit down. Then he brought out the jewel and said, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... and asking the jury to scorn all idea of his client having any desire to free himself of his wife so as to marry his pretty governess, or cousin, or whomever it was suggested he most particularly admired. Russell had arrived at quoting Scripture,—he was at his best, austere, eloquent, persuasive, an orator, a gentleman, a great advocate, and as ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... allowed their indignation at his apparent calumnies against Ralegh to be perceptible. The result was a growing impression that the proceedings against Ralegh would have to be abandoned. Lord Grey, an austere Protestant, and Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic, already, it was rumoured, had denied that he had been a conspirator. They had affirmed they would have given up their project upon any suspicion that he was mixed up with it. Now Cobham also ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... their sacrificial rites and their repentance, with a wealth of detail that left nothing to be desired. Doctor Jack was suddenly afflicted with a very bad cough, but he kept his back to them and used his handkerchief a great deal. Even Allison was amused by their austere young faces and the earnest devotion with which ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... too, we find the same theory at work. Parents who were severely punished as children do not punish their children at all; and the most austere of parents are those who, when children, were "spoiled." Almost regardless of the natures of their children, parents deal with them, so far as discipline is concerned, as they themselves were not ...
— The American Child • Elizabeth McCracken
... "immemorial antiquity" in that baleful region of wild-eyed buffaloes and birds of prey—temples to death in the midst of his undisputed domains! We had fully adopted Forsyth's sentiment, and held Paestum to be probably the most impressive monument on earth; but here at Segeste a nature less austere, and more RIANTE in its wildness, lent a quite different charm to a scene which could scarcely be represented by art, and for which a reader could certainly not be prepared by description. We gave an antiquarian's devoutest worship to this venerable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... English garden. She could blanch to the whiteness of alabaster. Her eyes were forget-me-nots after rain. Her mouth was made for pretty slang and kisses. Neither her features nor her most often photographed expression showed the tiniest scrap of what the austere of her sex used to call character. When the world smiled on her she laughed: when it frowned, she cried. When she met Septimus Dix, she flew to him as a child does to a new toy, and spent gorgeous hours in pulling him to pieces to see how ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... market, and, it was to be supposed, had brought home, beside the chops and the soup-piece, all the information the village afforded. She had now, after putting away her austere little bonnet and cape, brought a china basin, and a mystic assortment of white cloths, and was polishing the window-panes, which did not need polishing. From time to time she glanced at her mistress, who sat bolt upright in her chair, engaged on a severe-looking piece of knitting. Mrs. ...
— Mrs. Tree • Laura E. Richards
... steps to welcome the strangers. His austere, sallow face endeavored to assume a smile. The high officials in his train bowed down nearly to the ground, allowing their arms to hang loosely at their sides. The Persians, crossing their hands on ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Barbadoes; and indeed the black element dominates to such an extent that upon the streets white faces look strange by contrast. When a white face does appear, it is usually under the shadow of an Indian helmet, and heavily bearded, and austere: the physiognomy of one used to command. Against the fantastic ethnic background of a11 this colonial life, this strong, bearded English visage takes something of heroic relief;—one feels, in a totally novel way, the dignity ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... character, but the love which he believed and the love which he exercised were neither of them facile feebleness, but strong and radiant with an awful purity. None of the New Testament writers proclaims a more austere morality than does John. And just because he loved the Love and the Light, he hated and loathed the darkness. He can thunder and lighten when needful, and he shows us that the true divine love in a man recoils from its ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... comedies, he put all the best of his knowledge of human nature, his keen sympathy with his kind, his fine common-sense and his genial humour. The same qualities, tempered by a certain grace and tenderness, also enter into the best of his poems. Avoiding the epigram of Pope and the austere couplet of Johnson, he yet borrowed something from each, which he combined with a delicacy and an amenity that he had learned from neither. He himself, in all probability, would have rested his fame on his three chief metrical efforts, 'The Traveller', ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... a GDP three-fourths that of the four leading West European economies. Its center-right government has staked much on gaining admission to the first group of countries to implement the European single currency by developing an austere 1997 budget - including a wage freeze for public-sector employees - in hopes of meeting the Maastricht monetary convergence criteria. The government slashed spending by $1.6 billion in mid-1996 to ensure that Spain's deficit did not exceed its target ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... tolerant mood. His sorrow had softened his intolerant and emphatic temper. His experience of the cruel indifference of the elegant made him more conscious of the worth of these honest folk, graceless and devilish tiresome, who had yet an austere conception of life, and because they lived joylessly, seemed to him to live without weakness. Having decided that they were excellent, and that he ought to like them, like the German that he was, he tried to persuade himself that he did in fact like ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and being "wanted," as the phrase is, by the police of Louis Philippe, had hidden herself in a small but loyal house at Nantes, where, at the end of five months of seclusion, she was betrayed, for gold, to the austere M. Guizot by one of her servants, an Alsatian Jew named Deutz. For many hours before her capture she had been compressed into an interstice behind a fireplace, and by the time she was drawn forth into the light she had been ominously scorched. The man who showed me the castle indicated also ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... complaisance is confined within the limits of justice. I would not only consult the interest of the people, but I would cheerfully gratify their humours. We are all a sort of children that must be soothed and managed. I think I am not austere or formal in my nature. I would bear, I would even myself play my part in any innocent buffooneries to divert them. But I never will act the tyrant for their amusement. If they will mix malice in their sports, I shall never consent to throw them any living, sentient creature whatsoever—no, ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... train stopped at noon, Naval occupation of the North proclaimed itself. A Master-at-Arms, austere of visage and stentorian voiced, fell upon the weary voyagers like a collie rallying a flock of sheep. A Lieutenant-Commander of the Reserve, in a tattered monkey-jacket, was superintending the unstowing of bags and hammocks by a party of ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... conducted himself with a uniform repugnance to nature. Affable on a few occasions, but in general averse to society, he indulged, from his earliest years, a moroseness of disposition, which counterfeited the appearance of austere virtue; and in the decline of life, when it is common to reform from juvenile indiscretions, he launched forth into excesses, of a kind the most unnatural and most detestable. Considering the vicious passions which had ever brooded in his heart, it may seem surprising that he ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... come back to my Eternal City; Her fogs once more my countenance shall dim; I will enliven your austere committee With gossip gleaned among ...
— Twenty • Stella Benson
... My grandmother, always so austere and upright looking in her black clothes, a type of a Huguenot woman, had been fearful for her own safety during the Restoration, and although she never spoke of it, we felt that she must have very depressing ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... world. He eat with Pharisees, when they invited him he refused not, but he was more bold with publicans and sinners, to converse with them, as being their greatest friend. He was uncivil to none, would deter none through a rigid austere conversation, and indeed, to testify the truth of his human nature, he came so low as to partake of all human infirmities without sin, and to be subject to such extraordinary afflictions and crosses, as to the eyes of the world did quite extinguish his divine glory, and bury ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... pounds.' And he said unto him also, 'Be thou also over five cities.' And another came, saying, 'Lord, behold, here is thy pound, which I kept laid up in a napkin: for I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that which thou layedst not down, and reapest that which thou didst not sow.' He saith unto him, 'Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant. Thou knewest that I am an austere man, taking up that which I laid not down, and reaping ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong
... mood to the fresh, merry sociability which his comrades knew and loved in him. Presently the Spanish captain, Don Fadrique Mendez, approached him; he was a youth like the other, and was equally skilled in martial exercises, but he was generally as austere and thoughtful as Heimbert was cheerful and gentle. "Pardon, Senor," began the solemn Spaniard, "if I disturb you in your meditations. But as I have had the honor of often seeing you as a courageous warrior and faithful brother in amrs in many a hot encounter, I would gladly solicit you above ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... parish clerk, without whose joint ministration on the occasion neither Janet nor myself would have believed the marriage ceremony had been properly solemnised, both my sister and myself standing in much awe of the learned divine and his inseparable "double," and holding to the creed that the austere pair represented the very quintessence ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... reject poems which are void of instruction; the knights neglect austere poems: he who mixes the useful with the sweet wins the approval of all by delighting and at the same time admonishing the reader. This book makes money for the book-sellers, and passes over the sea, and prolongs the reputation of ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... men associated with Waterman prove that he was ranked among the chief citizens of the town. The austere manners of the age, among communities like that established here; the exclusion, at that time, by inexorable laws, of many forms of amusement; and the general sombre aspect of society, kept down the natural exhilaration of life to such a degree, that, when the ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor, Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished races, And winds austere ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... strangely ordered home in Milan, with his callous, tyrannical father, his quick-tempered mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but the home was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or provocations to loose manners or ill doing existed therein. ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... and sob beside me — you, upon whose golden head Many rains of many sorrows have from day to day been shed; Who, because your love was noble, faced with me the lot austere Ever pressing with its hardship on the man of letters here — Let me feel that you are near me, lay your hand within mine own; You are all I have to live for, now that we are left alone. Three there were, but one has vanished. Sins of mine have made you weep; But forgive your ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... present employers should address them in a more respectful manner than formerly. This the whites refuse to accede to, but persist in still treating them as niggers, giving them orders in the same austere manner as of old. In one day's travel I passed by different places where five colored men had been murdered during the five days just passed, and as many wounded. In one place it appears that one man was taken out of bed and killed because, as the neighbors say, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... into the bedroom and stood looking down upon the austere old face against the pillow. It was a flushed old face now, and the eyelids twitched as if there were pain somewhere in the body. Her breathing, too, was more rapid and heavy than when I had left her, or ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... am not very fond of that austere kind of love which is satisfied with looks only; nor do I possess feelings lofty enough to endure ill-treatment with constancy. In one word, when I really love, I wish to ...
— The Love-Tiff • Moliere
... your hair for the marriage knot," Yunsan warned me one day, with the ghost of a twinkle in his austere eyes, more nearly facetious and human than I ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... that a person, by performing austere penances, scorches the three worlds. It is in consequence of this effect of penances that the superior deities were always compelled by the Asuras and Danavas to grant them whatever ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... enhancing the market value of brides. Indifference to masculine chastity continued much longer still. The ancient civilized nations had advanced far enough to value purity in wives and maidens, but it hardly occurred to them that it was man's duty to cultivate the same virtue. Even so austere and eminent a moral philosopher as Cicero declared that one would have to be very severe indeed to ask young men to refrain from illicit relations. The mediaeval church fathers endeavored for centuries to enforce the doctrine that men should be ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... unruffled existence, frequently undergo such a metamorphosis, due to the corroding effects of time, that at eighty one has either forgotten them or regards them as something to be secretly ashamed of. Thus it was with Nan's grandfather. His pride and dignity were as austere as ever, but his withered heart yearned for the love and companionship of one of his own blood; now that Caleb Brent was dead, the ancient martinet forgot the offense which this simple sailor had committed against the pride of a long line of distinguished gentlemen, members of the honorable ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... opening on the court, and a hard, narrow pallet against the wall. There was also a little table, with books, sacred pictures, and a bunch of lilacs in water. The walls were whitewashed, and the floor cleanly swept. The chamber was austere, certainly, but in no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... admired. Margaret Godolphin was one of the Queen's Maids of Honour at the Court of Charles II., and was distinguished for the delicate purity of her nature, as well as for her high intellectual attainments. Some of the extracts Evelyn gives from her Diary seem to show an austere, formal, almost ascetic spirit; but it was inevitable that a nature so refined as hers should have turned in horror from such ideals of life as were presented by men like Buckingham and Rochester, like Etheridge, Killigrew, and Sedley, like the King himself, to whom she could scarcely ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... room to be chosen. Perhaps the idyllic attractions did not balance the drawback of living in the thoroughfare of the house. Nor could one fail to sympathise with those who preferred the garret, a poor thing but their own, in which two studious souls could hob-nob, or even the austere whitewash, narrow skylight, and niggard dimensions of some monastic cell, which held just the one student, his table, and his books. The editor of the School Magazine, writing a month after our arrival, finds it "a queer new feeling to do the old work in a strange place, to miss ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... lo, at the rim of the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour, and as if hovering in the air; looking towards him with severe countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of austere anger. At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another Knight, Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, whose stature was less gigantic; casting vengeful looks at him. This he seeing with his eyes, remembered that old crime brings new shame. And now wholly desperate, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... and therefore made Mistress Philosophy very often borrow the masking raiment of poesy. For even those hard-hearted evil men, who think virtue a school name, and know no other good but indulgere genio, and therefore despise the austere admonitions of the philosopher, and feel not the inward reason they stand upon, yet will be content to be delighted: which is all the good fellow poet seemeth to promise: and so steal to see the form of goodness (which seen they cannot but love) ere themselves be aware, as if they took a medicine ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... discerned From others in the pavement,—whereupon He used to bring his quiet chair out, turned To Brunelleschi's church, and pour alone The lava of his spirit when it burned: It is not cold to-day. O passionate Poor Dante who, a banished Florentine, Didst sit austere at banquets of the great And muse upon this far-off stone of thine And think how oft some passer used to wait A moment, in the golden day's decline, With "Good night, dearest Dante!"—well, good night! I muse now, Dante, and think verily, Though chapelled in the byeway out of sight, Ravenna's ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... the monkish lords, and others, as shown in the Journal of Eudes Rigault, lately published, make one shudder. It is a repulsive picture of profligacy at once savage and uncontrolled. The monkish lords especially assail the nunneries. The austere Rigault, Archbishop of Rouen, confessor of the holy king, conducts a personal inquiry into the state of Normandy. Every evening he comes to a monastery. In all of them he finds the monks leading the life of great feudal lords, wearing arms, getting drunk, fighting duels, keen ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... story, and began to fire brisk discharges at their assailants, who, approaching gradually, ranged in a semicircle, made vigorous reply. The sixty Italian soldiers were commanded by two non-commissioned officers and a captain, a tall, dry, austere old man, with white hair and mustache; and with them there was a Sardinian drummer-boy, a lad of a little over fourteen, who did not look twelve, small, with an olive-brown complexion, and two small, deep, sparkling eyes. The captain directed the defence from a room ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... criticism which antiquity has bequeathed to us. The idea which it works out is that Demosthenes has perfected Greek prose by fusing in a glorious harmony the elements which had hitherto belonged to separate types. The austere dignity of Antiphon, the plain elegance of Lysias, the smooth and balanced finish of that middle or normal character which is represented by Isocrates, have come together in Demosthenes. Nor is this all. In each species he excels the specialists. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... purity of the Christian religion, the sanctity of its moral precepts, and the innocent as well as austere lives of the greater number of those who during the first ages embraced the faith of the gospel, we should naturally suppose, that so benevolent a doctrine would have been received with due reverence, even by the unbelieving world; that the learned and the polite, however they ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... listened, shocked and carried away. He was fascinated when she, coquetishly stressing that she unfortunately could maintain only professional relationships with men, as though unintentionally revealed a well shaped but austere leg, that was encased in an ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... economy suffers from weak domestic and foreign demand, austere government budgets, and serious internal armed conflict, but seems poised for recovery. Other economic problems facing President URIBE range from reforming the pension system to reducing high unemployment. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... of their works, as there was in the frame and constitution of their minds. The lenient and liberal views of the erudite and accomplished master of the school of Alexandria, stand out in prominent and broad contrast with the harsh and austere doctrines ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... dressed in dark blue, with a straw hat. He stood with his hands behind his back, his knees a little bent, and a sort of wise, half- sad, half-humorous smile upon his aquiline high-cheek-boned features. I took him for an old Scot; a canny, austere man—a man, too, who had known sorrow, and profited thereby; and I drew near to him. But as he turned his head deliberately round to me, I beheld to my astonishment the unmistakable features of a Chinese. He and I looked each other full in the face, without a word; and I fancied that we understood ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... of this my household, martial maid Whom ordered ranks and discipline austere Have shaped (I gather) for a braver trade, So that respect, not all unmixed with fear, Informs my breast as I await you here, Your title, with its stern Caesarian touch, Does, to be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... greatest difficulty in raising a thousand pounds, and positively refuses in his present difficulties to add above five hundred a year to my former allowance. No father who had thoroughly done his duty by his son, could speak in a more fixed and austere manner. And yet he knows that every shilling will be mine as soon as he goes." The servant who was waiting upon them had been in and out of the room while this was said, and must have heard much of it. But to that Augustus ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... against ambiguity, a thorough training in politics or metaphysics may be useful. Logic seems to me to serve, in some measure, both these purposes. The conduct of business, or experience, a sufficient time being granted, is indeed the best teacher, but also the most austere and expensive. In the seventeenth century some of the greatest philosophers wrote de intellectus emendatione; and if their successors have given over this very practical inquiry, the cause of its abandonment is not success and satiety but despair. Perhaps the right ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... true," said the Poodle, with austere dignity, "that I am small; but, sir, I beg to observe that ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... to lay its hand on Olive; the spell of the past was already losing power; the sense that it had all been a dream grew stronger every minute. In a few hours she would re-enter the little house close under the shadow of that old Wren church, which reminded her somehow of childhood, and her austere father with his chiselled face. The meeting with her husband! How go through that! And to-night! But she did not care to contemplate to-night. And all those to-morrows wherein there was nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... turned to look back. The untracked, unstained snow swept in undulating breadth to the deep shadow of the great building, which rose against the sky as cold, as seamless, as if it were cut from solid ice. The yellow flare of lamps about its base only added to its austere majesty. It was at its best, and Ida and Bradley looked up at it in silence, hearing the jingle of bells, the soft voices of the negro drivers, the laughter of children coasting on the mall, and the ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... ideal this kingdom was to be a blessing to the world, and to abolish all violence and oppression; the kingdom of God was to be a kingdom of universal peace and joy, a kingdom of righteousness based on social justice. It was because of this widespread expectation that the austere preacher, John the Baptist, obtained his hearing in the wilderness of Judea. All John had to preach about was the kingdom of God, which he declared to be near at hand. He believed that he had been sent to herald the coming of the Messiah, and from his words we ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... across the shining spaces of the hall and into the morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and, with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically, she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that the famous altar-piece had ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... which cannot be overthrown. As Spinoza was called by Novalis "a God-intoxicated man," so Comte was described by Mill as "morality-intoxicated," for in the purity and elevation of his ethical conceptions he comes nearest of all to the austere standard set up ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... with an austere face, standing beside Marjorie, started to light a cigarette. His hands trembled violently and the match flickered and ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... her voice stuck in her throat, but her eyes ought to have been enough. They were big and shining eyes, and when she made them appealing they had been known to work wonders with father and mother and other grown-ups, even with the austere Professor Sutton. But this burly figure in the baggy blue uniform had a face more like a wooden Indian than a human grown-up—and an old, dyspeptic wooden Indian at that. Missy's eyes were to avail her nothing ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... was not surprised at Mrs. Copley disliking the child, for she—a thin, sharp-vis-aged and austere lady of forty years of age—was childless, and older than her cheerful, kind-hearted husband by twelve years. The natives bore her no love, and had given her the contemptuous nickname of Le Matua moa e ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... saw I strayed a trifle away from the law, And didn't think every one left in the lurch Who happened to go to a different church; But, still, in the main, her creed is mine, And I don't want anything more divine.' Yet his mother's mother was more austere; She taught her children a creed of fear, And she called them 'black sheep' when, with a shock, She saw them straying away from the flock, Just far enough To get around places they thought too rough, Like ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of the Queen was a most unhappy one, and appeared to have entirely disgusted her with the world, as on becoming a widow she passed two years of seclusion and mourning at Chenonceaux, whence she removed to the chateau of Moulins, where she devoted herself to the most austere duties of religion. In her will, by which she bequeathed nearly the whole of her property to the Church and to charitable purposes, she left a large sum for the erection of a Capuchin convent at Bourges, where she desired that ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... of knighthood, which binds me to protect the weak, relieve the oppressed, and punish the bad, I promise you I'll take effectual care, that you shall have ample satisfaction to the utmost of your wishes."—"Sir Knight," answered the innkeeper, with an austere gravity, "I shall not need your assistance to revenge any wrong that may be offered to my person; for I would have you to understand that I am able to do myself justice whenever any man presumes to do me wrong; therefore all the satisfaction I desire ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... her elders;—the cruel necessity of straining her pretty eyes, for many long hours at a time, over grimy desks in gloomy school-rooms, though birds might twitter and bright winds flutter in the trees without;—the austere constrains and heavy drowsiness of warm churches, filled with the droning echoes of a voice preaching incomprehensible things;—the progressively augmenting weariness of lessons in deportment, in dancing, in music, in the impossible art of keeping her dresses unruffled and unsoiled. Perhaps ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... and to have pronounced final decision on the relative value of the poems. As compared with their Greek models, these Roman poets evince throughout a want of freedom, sometimes a schoolboy dependence; most of their products must have been simply the austere fruits of a school poetry still occupied in learning and by no means yet dismissed as mature. Inasmuch as in language and in measure they adhered to the Greek patterns far more closely than ever the national Latin poetry had done, a greater correctness and consistency in language ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the austere virgin, and the warmth with which she repelled this accusation, caused us all so much amusement, that in another moment or two we were in the full swing again of our ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... least of two evils, and ever to commit great faults in order to avoid others still greater. You will see.... on one side, the heathen mythology, that debased the spirit, in its efforts to deify the flesh; on the other, the austere Christian principle, that debased the flesh too much, in order to raise the worship of the spirit. You will see, afterwards, how the religion of Christ embodies itself in a church, and raises itself a generous democratic power ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... perhaps, and the intensity of the struggle against despotism made men narrow and hard. In the triumph of Puritanism under Cromwell severe laws were passed, many simple pleasures were forbidden, and an austere standard of living was forced upon an unwilling people. So the criticism is made that the wild outbreak of immorality which followed the restoration of Charles was partly due to the unnatural restrictions of the Puritan era. The criticism is just; but we must not forget the ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... ages the same spirit may be clearly traced. Bossuet was certainly no hypocrite or sycophant, but a man of austere virtue and undoubted courage. He did not hesitate to rebuke the gross profligacy of the life of Louis XIV., and although neither he nor any of the other Catholic divines of his age seriously protested against the wars of pure egotism and ostentation ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... "old-fashioned," as the word is of children—quaint or wizened or offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had paid the penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in his family. This comparison didn't make him vain, but it could make him melancholy and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn on and partly checked, as for a scruple, by the charm of attempting to sound the little cool shallows that were so quickly growing deeper. When he tried to figure ...
— The Pupil • Henry James
... fashion. Now they are for the most part as carelessly dressed as a busy business man or a clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"—with the air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She has very high-heeled boots; ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... fixed air, have been tried in the scurvy with little success, I would answer, that I doubt that in those trials they have never been sufficiently diluted; for it is easy to conceive, that in the small quantity of water the elixir of vitriol, for instance, is commonly given, that austere acid can scarce get beyond the first passages; considering the delicate sensibility of the mouths of the lacteals, which must force them to shut and exclude so pungent a liquor. It were therefore a proper experiment to be made, in a deficiency of malt, or when that grain ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... all for the first time as he paddled hard in the bows of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty. His heart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs drank in the cool and perfumed wind. Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, Defago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life, ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... their apparently disinterested conduct, they soon collected a numerous set of followers, half Christians and half Pagans. Unluckily for the cause of Christianity, a different sect of the same religion, but with principles more austere and of course less tolerant of others that deviated from their own, speedily followed the Jesuits into the East. The Dominicans, meeting with some of the half-christianized converts, soon gave them to understand that nothing less than eternal damnation would be the lot of all such as did not ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... and, as the marshal rose and saluted, Fergus knew that it was the king. He had never had the king described to him, and had depicted to himself a stiff and somewhat austere figure; but the newcomer was somewhat below middle height, with a kindly face, and the air rather of a sober citizen than of a military martinet. The remarkable feature of his face were his eyes, which were very large and ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... bounded across the floor and wrung the outstretched hand, his face radiant with delight. By the fire Ruth cried softly and the Colonel gently patted her dark head, his eyes full of tenderness. Then taking refuge from the sharp pain of his emotion in austere command: ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... austere republican, the scoffing infidel, Jean Debry fell upon his knees! Lifting up his arms toward heaven, his eyes filled with tears, he exclaimed: "Divine Providence, if I have hitherto refused to acknowledge thy benefits, oh, forgive me!" [Footnote: He exclaimed: ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... entirely satisfactory afternoon at Langeais, where we beheld a veritable fortress of ancient times. At a first glance we were as much interested in the little gray town of Langeais, which is charmingly situated on the right bank of the Loire, as in the chateau itself, whose facade is gloomy and austere, a true mediaeval fortress, "with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis still in working order," as Walter expresses it. As we stood on the stone steps at the entrance between the great frowning towers waiting for the portcullis to be raised, we felt as if we might be in a Scott or Dumas novel, especially ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... to the heavenly shore, realises, I will not say all, but some at least of the strange impressiveness of Bunyan's words. It is no easy nor pleasant thing to speak in one's lifetime with Good-Conscience; he is an austere, unearthly friend, whom maybe Torquemada knew; and the folds of his raiment are not merely claustral, but have something of the horror of the pall. Be not afraid, however; with the hand of that appearance Mr. Honest ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wore an aspect of the most profound gravity— the reflection, as it were, of the sombre countenance of the austere and relentless Grand Master. The lower part of the hall was filled with guards and others whom curiosity had drawn together to witness the ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten |
