"Capriciously" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little roadways that converge upon the market-place something was astir. It was a dim phantom of willowy outline, swaying capriciously to and fro, like a black feather tossed by the wind. Miss Wilberforce! She fluttered down a doorstep and began crooning a vulgar song about "Billy had a letter for to go on board a ship." Denis moved to the other side of the narrow path, hoping to ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... more capriciously than ever. She would be sullen and silent, or she would draw back fiercely at some harmless word or gesture, or she would look at him with her eyes narrowed in such a strange way and with such a wicked light in them that Dick ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... dogmatic statements as to the efficacy of vocal prayers. What I do say is, that all I know of God as revealed in nature and law forbids me to entertain the notion that the order he has seen fit to establish is to be capriciously altered at the request of any of his creatures. It is not irreverence, but a sense of reverence which prohibits me from believing that the Being whose presence and power are revealed in the least as in the greatest of the phenomena of nature, is open to arbitrarily interfere with ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,—then a hard freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler's ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... the brightest and subtlest substances; and so it occurred in this instance. Fair, frank, and free—generous, open, unsuspicious—he seemed the very opposite of all his race—their antagonizing principle. Capriciously indulgent, his father had allowed him ample means, neither curbing nor restraining his expenditure; acceding at one moment to every inclination, and the next irresolutely opposing it. It was impossible, therefore, for him, in such a state of things, to act decidedly, without ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and Dolly, from her seat on the sward, saw him leap from her and wing away in powerful flight. He made straight for the crest; she saw him, flitting up there, a little white confetti in the eddy of a breeze. Rising, falling, darting capriciously, he gradually slid off down the range, ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... a wonder, took the other side, defended female heirship, and finally summed up thus: "It cannot but occur that women have natural and equitable claims as well as men, and these claims are not to be capriciously or lightly superseded or infringed. When fiefs inspired military service, it is easily discerned why females could not inherit them; but the reason is at an end. As manners make laws, so manners likewise ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... narrow and arbitrary views: he refused to sanction any sort of representative government in the colony, and vested all power in a council appointed by himself.[299] Virginia was, about that time, divided somewhat capriciously into two parts: the southern portion was givens to a merchant company of London, the northern to a merchant company ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... her whom he could not name kept him from answering. And in the drift of his silence the vision capriciously failed him. He looked at Julia. He looked back at the wall. It was nothing but a funny old picture which hung there confronting them. The commonplaceness, beside it, of Julia's long-drawn expression made him snicker, until, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... all events, it was never more seen by his castaway companions; who, dropping the oars in sorrowful despair, allowed the boat to drift away from the fatal spot—in whatever direction the soft-sighing breeze might capriciously carry it. ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... Lightning struck capriciously at those on whom this new society might frown, on those who as lately as last year had ridden the crest of the wave. For example, it spared Sally Warner, with her spotted veils drawn close around her ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... these physical characteristics forcibly illustrate the moral and intellectual genius of the man. The impulsiveness which has been ascribed to him is a wrong expression, for it is usually interpreted to mean the action of sudden motives waywardly, capriciously, or at least intermittingly working; whereas the character which Shelley so constantly displayed was an overbearing strength of conviction and feeling, a species of audacious, but chivalrous readiness to act upon conviction ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... stifled laugh; but I hastily made an imperious sign which abashed her and inspired respect for her neighbor. She sat down beside me. The old man did not choose to leave the charming creature, to whom he clung capriciously with the silent and apparently causeless obstinacy to which very old persons are subject, and which makes them resemble children. In order to sit down beside the young lady he needed a folding-chair. His slightest ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... the other Horatian metres, if a more difficult, is a less important one. The most pressing case is that of the metre known as the second Asclepiad, the "Sic te diva potens Cypri." With this, I fear, I shall be thought to have dealt rather capriciously, having rendered it by four different measures, three of them, however, varieties of the same general type. It so happens that the first Ode which I translated was the celebrated Amoebean Poem, the dialogue between Horace and Lydia. I had had at that time ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... others, engaged my most serious reflection. But for an accident, the powers of a truly superior mind would have been lost to humanity! Vyora was but the type of numbers, evidencing how capriciously wealth and honours were ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... students of the language must always find interest in the storehouse of ancient or invented language to be found in Spenser, this mixture of what is obsolete or capriciously new is a bar, and not an unreasonable one, to a frank welcome at first acquaintance. Fuller remarks with some slyness, that "the many Chaucerisms used (for I will not say, affected) by him, are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes, ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... it is, if I may only be allowed to know that it will not be capriciously withdrawn." The archdeacon filled his glass unconsciously, and sipped his wine, while he thought what further he might say. Perhaps it might be better that he should say nothing further at the present moment. The ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... that words can do even less than painting could to bring this window-scene at Promontogno before another eye. The casement just frames it. In the foreground are meadow slopes, thinly, capriciously planted with chestnut trees and walnuts, each standing with its shadow cast upon the sward. A little farther falls the torrent, foaming down between black jaws of rain-stained granite, with the wooden buildings of a rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... This over, his countenance capriciously put on a morose ogreness. To kindly questions he gave no kindly answers. Unhandsome notions were thrown out about "free Ameriky," as he sarcastically called his country. These seemed to disturb and pain the herb-doctor, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the governor, a man clothed in black and masked by a vizor of polished steel, soldered to a helmet of the same nature, which altogether enveloped the whole of his head. The fire of the heavens cast red reflections on the polished surface, and these reflections, flying off capriciously, seemed to be angry looks launched by the unfortunate, instead of imprecations. In the middle of the gallery, the prisoner stopped for a moment, to contemplate the infinite horizon, to respire the sulphurous perfumes of the tempest, ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... women, would be the promoters of good through the generations. The people you would benefit are treated with that insolent arrogance which only a cheap man in office can assume. Causes you have labored to establish, and which no one denies are benefits, are capriciously overthrown. And there is one remedy and one only: for you to cast your vote—for you to have your say as you sit in your city council, on your county board, or in your state legislature and ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... it clearly arose in conquest; and to speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common purse in trust; but the men who vote the supplies are also those who receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They order these things better ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... feeling, is indeed so beautiful in all its ways—so delicately strong in the spring of its leafage, so modestly wonderful in the formation of its fruit, and so pure in choice of its haunts, not capriciously or unfamiliarly, but growing in luxuriance through all the healthiest and sweetest seclusion of mountain territory throughout Europe,—that I think I may without any sharp remonstrance be permitted to express for this once only, personal feeling in my nomenclature, calling it in Latin ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... and we hate capriciously, sacrificing nothing either to our animosity or to our affection, a certain secret coldness possessing our souls, even while a fire ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... has rambled at its sweet will over the vast tract of rubble that formed its delta in the diluvial age, changing its course capriciously, and always, wherever it went, covering up the pebble bed with a deposit of fertile soil. Other streams helped in the good work—the Herault, rich with red mud, the Ley, that flows past Montpellier, and the Vidourle from Lunel: consequently a very large portion of the rubble bed is ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... shadow. The sun's light seemed to elude us. It ran along the ravine through which we toiled; dipped down to touch the topmost pines above our heads; rested in golden calm upon the Schiahorn at our back; capriciously played here and there across the Weisshorn on our left, and made the precipices of the Schwartzhorn glitter on our right. But athwart our path it never fell until we reached the very summit of the pass. Then we passed quietly into ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... to be flattering, they were suddenly obscured in darkness and despair. But, if I had not supposed myself marked in an extraordinary manner as the child of fortune, to whose smiles and frowns I seemed to be capriciously subjected, I know not what should have induced me to have written my history; or rather the history of my youth; for of what is yet reserved for ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... If the emperor had capriciously decreed the death of the most eminent and virtuous citizen of the republic, the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation, by the ministers of open violence or of specious injustice. The caution, the delay, the difficulty with which he proceeded in ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... thousand and second it will be transfigured, and stand forth in a certain splendour of reality from the dull circle of surroundings; so that we see it "with a child's first pleasure," as Wordsworth saw the daffodils by the lake side. And if this falls out capriciously with the healthy, how much more so with the invalid. Some day he will find his first violet, and be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so touchingly sweet. Or perhaps he may ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Alonzo; my reputation depends on my adherence to my first determination; justice to yourself and to Beauman also demand it. After what has passed, I should be considered as acting capriciously and inconsistently, should I depart from it. Beauman will be ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... differed even more widely than they do with us. The average Roman, moreover, was a lover of variety in respect of his habitation. We find in a somewhat later epigrammatist that one grandee keeps up four town houses in Rome itself, and moves capriciously from one to the other, so that you never know where you will find him. At different seasons or in different moods he might prefer this or that situation or aspect. As for country seats of various degrees of magnificence, a man might—like ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... tradesman, had got such a haunt about the Courts of Justice, and such a jargon of law words, that he concluded himself as able a lawyer as any that pleaded at the bar or sat on the bench. He was overheard one day talking to himself after this manner: "How capriciously does fate or chance dispose of mankind. How seldom is that business allotted to a man for which he is fitted by Nature. It is plain I was intended for a man of law. How did my guardians mistake my genius in placing ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... of the universe. I adopt, unreservedly, the doctrine that "nothing is that errs from law." The phenomena which we call supernatural and those which we call natural, I view as alike the expression of the Divine Will: a Will which acts not capriciously, nor, as the phrase is, arbitrarily, but by law, "attingens a fine usque ad finem, fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia." And so the theologians identify the Divine Will with the Divine Reason. Thus St. Augustine, "Lex aeterna est ratio divina vel voluntas Dei,"[48] and St. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... all its aggravations. Warburton, whose heart was warm with his legacy, and tender by the recent separation," apologised for Pope. The irregular conduct which Bolingbroke stigmatised as a breach of trust, was attributed to a desire of perpetuating the work of his friend, who might have capriciously destroyed it. Our poet could have no selfish motive; he could not gratify his vanity by publishing the work as his own, nor his avarice by its sale, which could never have taken place till the death of its author; a circumstance not likely to ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... with its own. But the power of pure white light to exhibit local color is strangely variable. The morning light of about nine or ten is usually very pure; but the difference of its effect on different days, independently of mere brilliancy, is as inconceivable as inexplicable. Every one knows how capriciously the colors of a fine opal vary from day to day, and how rare the lights are which bring them fully out. Now the expression of the strange, penetrating, deep, neutral light, which, while it alters no color, brings every color up ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... descendant of the northern dwarfs, was supposed to be seen there frequently, especially after the autumnal equinox, when the fogs were thick, and objects not easily distinguished. The Scottish fairies, too, a whimsical, irritable, and mischievous tribe, who, though at times capriciously benevolent, were more frequently adverse to mortals, were also supposed to have formed a residence in a particularly wild recess of the glen, of which the real name was, in allusion to that circumstance, Corrie nan Shian, which, in corrupted Celtic, signifies the Hollow of ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... prevails. A new Kaverine Eugene mine, Dreading the world's remarks malign, Was that which we are wont to call A fop, in dress pedantical. Three mortal hours per diem he Would loiter by the looking-glass, And from his dressing-room would pass Like Venus when, capriciously, The goddess would a masquerade ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... commonest sense of honour required that something should be done. Ormond, who had been made a duke, was at once reinstated in his own lands, with a handsome additional slice as a recompense for his services. A certain number of other great proprietors and lords of the Pale, a list of whom was rather capriciously made out, were also immediately reinstated. For the rest, more tardy and less satisfactory ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... that he should pay them the wages that were due to them, and also for the time they were unemployed. "We have no share in the cake," they said, "so you must take the risk too!" They made the one employer responsible for the other! And capriciously refused good work at a time when thousands were unemployed! Public opinion almost lost its head, and even their own press held aloof from them; but they obstinately kept to their determination, and joined the crowd of unemployed ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... goes, comes, stops, seems to meditate, starts on its course again, shoots like an arrow from one end of the vessel to the other, whirls around, slips away, dodges, rears, bangs, crashes, kills, exterminates. It is a battering ram capriciously assaulting a wall. Add to this the fact that the ram is of ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... good to me. They not only forgive me for not taking any part in their conversation, but also for capriciously interrupting it. In a quiet way they seem even to derive hearty pleasure from my joy. Especially Juliana. I tell her very little about you, but she has a good intuition and surmises the rest. Certainly there is nothing more amiable than pure, unselfish delight ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to a factitious, expression. If we get the impression from a work of art that no part could be otherwise—not a single line or note or stroke of the brush—then we have the same sort of feeling towards it that we have towards the living thing that was not made by hands capriciously, but grew in its inevitable way in accordance with the laws of its own nature. Of course, works of art are products of thought, of plan, and conscious purpose; they are seldom composed all at one flash, but grow tentatively into their final form; nevertheless, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... all by himself—well, what God-fearing Christian, male or female, would be found to live with him—came and went mysteriously and capriciously, always full of money, and at least equally full of drink! What he did with himself nobody knew, but evil legends gathered about him. Terrified wayfarers, passing the cottage by night, took oath that they had heard more than ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... that, so far as you know, your husband capriciously struck you out of his will, without assignable reason or motive for doing so, and without other obvious explanation of his conduct than that he acted in this matter entirely under the influence of Mrs. Lecount, I will immediately take Counsel's opinion touching the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... perhaps be amused by the following strange conceits. Poeta, who was in love with Historia, capriciously falls in love with Astronomia, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... indecision, or regretted decisions, is she thus exposed. Friends may induce the receipt of attentions, where her heart cannot follow the assent of her lips. Perhaps her prospects have but assumed some certainty, when the promised hand is capriciously withdrawn. I have read the record of one, who, in the agony of a grief thus awakened, pursued the object of her regard into scenes of trouble, released him from prison, by her generous gifts, and attended him, when driven, by his guilty courses, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... this cause. In one instance, the subject suffered thus for eleven years, and then became a mother, and has ever asserted that her periodic suffering was far more intense than the pain experienced during her confinement. These neuralgic pains fly along the tracks of nerves to different organs, and capriciously dart from point to point with marvelous celerity, producing nausea, headache, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... own compositions very capriciously, yet he adhered, on the whole, strictly to the beat and only at times, but seldom, accelerated the tempo a trifle. Occasionally he would retard the tempo in a crescendo, which produced a very beautiful and striking effect. ...
— Beethoven: the Man and the Artist - As Revealed in his own Words • Ludwig van Beethoven
... had been very pale and thin when he reached Pretoria, but before a month was over she had become, comparatively speaking, stout, which was an enormous gain to her appearance. Her pale face, too, gathered a faint tinge of colour that came and went capriciously, like star-light on the water, and her beautiful eyes grew deeper and more ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... the limits of the lawn, two paths opened before him. One led into a quaintly pretty inclosure, cultivated on the plan of the old gardens at Versailles, and called the French Garden. The other path led to a grassy walk, winding its way capriciously through a thick shrubbery. Careless in what direction he turned his steps, Linley entered the shrubbery, because it happened ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... consolation lacking. If the main themes, mindful of their former pre-eminence, seemed inclined to widen the bed of their stream, they were appeased and forced back into their original channel by artistic and capriciously alternating means. Once all three themes flowed along together, gaining strength apparently through their union, rose to a wonderful fugue, and seemed to be just on the point of gaining the victory when the whole ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... father and his father's wealth on all within their influence, he conceived the idea of his first deception, it was meant to be harmless, it was to last but a few hours or days, it was to involve in it only the girl so capriciously forced upon him and upon whom he was so capriciously forced, and it was honestly meant well towards her. For, if he had found her unhappy in the prospect of that marriage (through her heart inclining to ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Jocelyn's passionate kisses—she must hide all that joy!—it had already become almost a guilty secret. He was the first man that had ever kissed her since her "Dad" died,—the first that had ever kissed her as a lover. Her mind flew suddenly and capriciously back to Briar Farm—to Robin Clifford who had longed to kiss her, and yet had refused to do so unless she could have loved him. She had never loved him—no!—and yet the thought of him just now gave her a ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... there is a system of partnership, with limited responsibility, known by the name of 'Partnership in Commandite.' Even with us, limited responsibility is by no means unknown. It is, however, granted capriciously and unsystematically, without those checks and regulations which, if there were a general system, would be adopted to make it safe and effective. 'I wish,' said Mr Duncan, a solicitor, when examined before the Select Committee on the Law of Partnership, 'to draw the attention of the committee ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 - Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 • Various
... its walls, nothing of the nuns, not so much as their brown habit; though he had heard only the echoes of their chanted liturgies,—he had gathered from those walls and from these chants faint indications that seemed to justify his fragile hope. Slight as the auguries thus capriciously awakened might be, no human passion was ever more violently roused than the curiosity of this French general. To the heart there are no insignificant events; it magnifies all things; it puts in the same balance the fall of an empire and the fall of a woman's glove,—and oftentimes the glove ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... voice of God, as Bacon has it, revealed in things; and which therefore, just because it stands in solemn awe of such paltry facts as the Scolopax feather in a snipe's pinion, or the jagged leaves which appear capriciously in certain honeysuckles, believes that there is likely to be some deep and wide secret underlying them, which is worth years of thought to solve. That is reverence; a reverence which is growing, thank God, more and more common; which will produce, as ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... presenting a theme may be called free when the understanding, while determining the connection of ideas, does so with so little prominence that the imagination appears to act quite capriciously in the matter, and to follow only the accident of time. The presentation of a subject becomes sensuous when it conceals the general in the particular, and when the fancy gives the living image (the whole representation), where attention is merely concerned with the conception (the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The physicians of Constantinople were zealous and skilful, but their art was baffled by the various symptoms and pertinacious vehemence of the disease; the same remedies were productive of contrary effects and the event capriciously disappointed their prognostics of death or recovery. The order of funerals and the right of sepulchres were confounded; those who were left without friends or servants lay unburied in the streets, or in their desolate houses; and a magistrate was authorized to collect the ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... making verses and wrote excellent well; so that El Mutawekkil fell passionately in love with her and could not endure from her a single hour. When she saw this, she presumed upon his favour to use him haughtily and capriciously, so that he waxed exceeding wroth with her and forsook her, forbidding the people of the palace to speak ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... he paid no attention to what I said. He had unlocked a drawer in the bureau, and taken out a map that I had never seen before. I looked over his shoulder as he spread it out in the light of his reading-lamp. And it was a map of London capriciously sprinkled with wheels and asterisks of red ink; there was a finished wheel in Bond Street, another in Half-Moon Street, one on the site of Thornaby House, Park Lane, and others as remote as St. John's Wood and Peter Street, Campden Hill; the asterisks ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... fain have prolonged the interview; but she capriciously shook the reins, and with a silvery laugh rode through the gateway and into the city. In a few minutes she dismounted at her own home, and giving her horse in charge of a groom, ran lightly up the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... at that time have been for Charles Holland had she acted capriciously towards him, and convinced him that his true heart's devotion had been cast at the feet of one unworthy of so really noble a gift. Pride would then have enabled him, no doubt, successfully to resist the blow. A feeling of honest and proper indignation ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... that it may be considered, how many ways ministers and professors, in this time of tentation and tribulation, have been guilty of breach of these holy covenants; particularly by consenting unto, subscribing, swearing, and taking any of the new multiplied, mischievously contrived, capriciously conceived, and tyrannically imposed oaths, tests, or bonds, in matters of religion, since the overturning of the covenanted reformation and establishment of prelacy; and by persuading people to take them, and ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... guidance, walked round Christ Church meadows, part of our way lying along the banks of the Cherwell, which unites with the Isis to form the Thames, I believe. The Cherwell is a narrow and remarkably sluggish stream; but is deep in spots, and capriciously so,—so that a person may easily step from knee-deep to fifteen feet in depth. A gentleman present used a queer expression in reference to the drowning of two college men; he said "it was an awkward affair." I think this is equal to Longfellow's story of the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... appeased for the time, but not their thirst, which increased after eating these naturally-spiced molluscs. They had then to find fresh water, and it was not likely that it would be wanting in such a capriciously uneven region. Pencroft and Herbert, after having taken the precaution of collecting an ample supply of lithodomes, with which they filled their pockets and handkerchiefs, regained the ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... what endless other troubles, monsieur! her teeth fell out; she became deaf, then dumb; and then, after six months of absolute dumbness, utter deafness, speech and hearing have returned to her! She recovered, just as capriciously as she had lost, the use of her hands. But her feet have continued in the same hapless condition for the last seven years. She has shown marked and well-characterized symptoms of hydrophobia. Not only does the sight of water, the ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... Ashmolean Museum. This new edition, therefore, had every claim to public notice. When it appeared, it was soon discovered to be a corrupt and garbled performance; and that the genuine text of Wood, as well in his correctness of the old, as in his compositions of the new, lives, had been most capriciously copied. Dr. Tanner, to defend himself, declared that Tonson "would never let him see one sheet as they printed it." This was sufficiently infamous for the bookseller; but the editor ought surely to have abandoned a publication ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... in the world can be compared—the celebrated Mammoth caves of Kentucky. This excavation was composed of several hundred divisions of all sizes and shapes. It might be called a hive with numberless ranges of cells, capriciously arranged, but a hive on a vast scale, and which, instead of bees, might have lodged all the ichthyosauri, megatheriums, and pterodactyles of the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... he thought he might as well let him have it at once, as keep him waiting any longer for it. This story the Doctor related with great glee, and it furnishes a very good sample of what the Southerners are fond of exhibiting, the degree of licence to which they capriciously permit their favourite slaves occasionally to carry their familiarity. They seem to consider it as an undeniable proof of the general kindness with which their dependents are treated. It is as good a proof of it as the maudlin tenderness of a fine lady to her lap-dog is of her humane ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... only indigestion?... Say it's only indigestion, say so, Mary! Say..." And the little princess began to cry capriciously like a suffering child and to wring her little hands even with some affectation. Princess Mary ran out of the room ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... conveyed through the post, and claiming their answer through the advertising channel of a newspaper. Here was the certainty of alarming her, coupled with the certainty of safety to himself! Little did Mrs. Glenarm dream, when she capriciously stopped a servant going by with some glasses of lemonade, that the wretched old creature who offered the tray contemplated corresponding with her before the week was out, in the double character of her "Well-Wisher" and her ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... thoroughfare. The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river, and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a natural boundary of the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro', a group of cottages built by city people ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... fond of giving students the Josef Wieniawski Valse, for brilliancy. "There are many fine effects which can be made in this piece; one can take liberties with it—the more imagination you have the better it will go. I might call it a stylish piece; take the Prelude as capriciously as you like; put all the effect you can into it. The Valse proper begins in a very pompous style, with right hand very staccato; all is exceedingly coquettish. On the fifth page you see it is marked amoroso, but after eight ...
— Piano Mastery - Talks with Master Pianists and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... and still shorter. Lord Chelford would have written at once to remonstrate with Mark on the unseemliness of putting off his marriage so capriciously, or, at all events, so mysteriously—Miss Brandon not being considered, nor her friends consulted. But Mark had a decided objection to many letters: he had no fancy to be worried, when he had made up his mind, by prosy remonstrances; and he shut out the whole tribe of letter-writers ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... place in the same manner by some express necessity, but they are also adapted to the service of everything, and their daily and nightly changes have never injured anything in any particular from being altered capriciously." And all these things are a token that the nature of the world has been arranged by no ordinary wisdom. In the fifth division they bring forward that sort of statement, which either adduces that sort of fact alone which is compelled ...
— The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero, Volume 4 • Cicero
... Bayou des Acadiens as his thatched hut, which day by day sat so silent between the edges of the dark forest and the darker stream, looking out beyond the farther bank, and far over the green waste of rushes with its swarms of blackbirds sweeping capriciously now this way and now that, and the phantom cloud-shadows passing slowly across from one far line of cypress wood to another. But since that night when the hut's solitary occupant could not sleep for the winds and for thought ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... breast, and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: "The gentleman we have just ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... his grandeur and his good looks, and assumes an appearance of squalor and misery. Like Cinderella, whose male counterpart he is, he at times arises from his low estate, becomes again a brilliant prince, but always capriciously eludes those who wish to retain him in that shape. At last he is always detected, and then he has to remain constant to his true and magnificent form. His temporary eclipse is somewhat similar to that of the hero of a husk-myth; but no special power is attached to the wrappings under ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... what other men have adjudged music to be, and by what their practice has made it seem. He comes to his art without prejudice or preconception of any kind, it appears. He plays with its elements as capriciously as the child plays with paper and crayons. He amuses himself with each instrument of the band careless of its customary uses. There are times when Strawinsky comes into the solemn conclave of musicians like a gamin with trumpet and drum. He disports himself with the infinitely ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... chez Ladvocat, 1822.—This was revised by Chamisso in manuscript, who added a preface to it; but the translation was afterwards capriciously altered by ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... our lives so strangely and capriciously, that we are ever doing things, which in after moments surprise ourselves those unplanned, unplotted, spontaneous deeds of ours that spring from the natural source of action, directly as it is influenced ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... had echoed in simple amazement. Marry him—what was all this sudden change in the household when a man could no sooner appear than some girl began to talk of marriage? Alix had always rather fancied the idea that all girls had an opportunity of capriciously choosing from a dozen eligible swains, but Cherry had quickly anchored herself to the first strange man that appeared, and here was Anne dimpling and looking demure over a small, neat youth just out of law school. Certainly the little person of Justin Little was a strange harbour for all Anne's vague ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... outside writers, were extraordinarily inconsiderate in their relationships with him. They would hold up a manuscript for a long time and then arbitrarily return it; they would return a manuscript in a dirty state, even scribbled over, because they had capriciously changed their minds about it, and he would waste time and money in having it re-typed; they even mislaid manuscripts and offered neither compensation nor apology for so doing.... In a very short while, John discovered that the more high-minded were the principles professed by a newspaper, the ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... And prospects were held out to him, quasi-offers made, of a really magnificent nature,—undeniable, though obscure. Herr Ranke has been among the Archives again; and comes out with fractional snatches of a very strange "Paper from England;" capriciously hiding all details about it, all intelligible explanation: so that you in vain ask, "Where, When, How, By whom?"—and can only guess to yourself that Carteret was somehow at the bottom of the thing; AUT CARTERETUS AUT DIABOLUS. "What ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... the pleasant, significant details of the farm, the threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands beside the woman baking bread at the oven. With these fancies are connected certain simple rites; the half-understood local observance, and the half- believed local legend, reacting capriciously on each other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a morsel of meat, at the cross- roads, to take on her journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries them away, as she wanders through the country. The incidents of their yearly labour become to [105] them acts of worship; they ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... well-picked one, and Ellen could not light upon many books that would do her mischief. For those, Alice's wish was enough she never opened them. Furthermore, Alice insisted that when Ellen had once fairly begun a book she should go through with it not capriciously leave it for another, nor have half a dozen about at a time. But when Ellen had read it once she commonly wanted to go over it again, and seldom laid it aside until she had sucked the ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... to which these are prefixed, are not many of them employed separately in English. The final letter of the prefix Ad, Con, Ex, In, Ob, or Sub, is often changed before certain consonants; not capriciously, but with uniformity, to adapt or assimilate it to the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... important matters. It is not from the opinion he wished to give of himself, nor from what he allowed to escape his lips, that I could have drawn this conclusion; for, in conversing with me on politics or religion, and passing capriciously over this latter subject, sometimes laughing and making strings of jests, he would say, for instance, 'the more I think the more I doubt—I am a thorough skeptic;' but I find these words contradicted in all his ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... one, Whose harshest idea Will to melody run, Say, is it thy will, On the breezes to toss, Or, capriciously still, Like the lone albatross, Incumbent on night, As she on the air, To keep watch with delight ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the fragility of things bordering upon the supernal—of rare exotics, of sunset and moonbeam effects. No, he had been under no spell of illusion as to her beauty. It was a reality—the more fascinating because it waxed and waned not with regularity of period but capriciously. ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... again she saw dark shadows pass capriciously over the pond. The shadows grew larger without apparent cause, covering the pond. She could not understand this, for the sun, which had risen above the horizon, was shining in the sky without a cloud. How did ...
— Nobody's Girl - (En Famille) • Hector Malot
... "fleeted"—by the memory. Pictures (one of my chiefest pleasures), the theatre, any great sight, sound, or event, being a pleasure after they (and the headache!) have passed away. The "passing pleasures" of life are just those which this world gives very capriciously, but cannot take away! They are possessions as real as ... marqueterie chairs! Of which—more anon,—when you return to ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... certain large glass vases, ornamented by the polite art of potichomanie, have long appealed to my fancy, wherein they capriciously allied themselves to the history of aging single women in lonely New England village houses,—pathetic sisters lingering upon the neutral ground between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet unrisen prospects of consumption. ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... capriciously upon the bauble of the fool, which he still carried, though now it hung downward from his saddle, foolishly enough. "A most merry fool," said the Lord of Content to himself. "I was wise to insist upon his accompanying this wayward ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... if necessary not to be yet in full possession of his faculties, and meanwhile listening to find out what was going on. Yet he could not overcome his sense of repugnance. After sipping a dozen spoonfuls of tea, he suddenly released his head, pushed the spoon away capriciously, and sank back on the pillow. There were actually real pillows under his head now, down pillows in clean cases, he observed that, too, ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... and he kept constantly stopping his brothers to ask the why and the wherefore of everything: why the bees dived into the fragrant flower-cups? why the swallows skimmed along the rivers? why the butterflies zigzagged capriciously along the fields? To all these questions Peter only answered with a burst of stupid laughter; while the surly Paul shrugged his shoulders, and crossly bade the little Thumbling hold his tongue, telling him he was ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... had just caught the first sunbeams; the balconies were filled with plants, whose bright blossoms and fresh contrasted pleasantly with the ancient stone-work of the heavy facade; on a myrtle spray, a bird, capriciously deserting the greenwood for the city, trimmed his feathers and carolled a lively note; every thing about the dwelling seemed so gay and cheerful, that Herrera involuntarily checked his horse, and felt ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... everything which related to no person but myself; shocked at seeing a man younger than I was wish, at all events, to govern me like a child; disgusted with his facility in promising, and his negligence in performing; weary of so many appointments given by himself, and capriciously broken, while new ones were again given only to be again broken; displeased at uselessly waiting for him three or four times a month on the days he had assigned, and in dining alone at night after having gone to Saint Denis to meet him, and waited the whole ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... the piece to a lively finish, rose capriciously, took up the flowers she had laid on the spinet earlier in the evening, put them in her corsage, and made to readjust the bracelet on her right arm. In this attempt, she accidentally dropped the bracelet to ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... knows? But through the sweetness of her nature which spoke in voice and expression, through her loveliness and her womanliness, there shone a light from within. Like the gleam from the lamp that lives in an opal, this mind-brightness of Maxine's pierced the clouds of her beauty capriciously, now half-veiled, now shining forth. It was the light of that flame which men call originality. Maxine saw the world by the light of her own lamp. Adams, though he had seen far more of the world than she, had seen it by the light ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... discover how much more is to be hoped from frequency and perseverance, than from violent efforts and sudden desires; efforts which are soon remitted when they encounter difficulty, and desires, which, if they are indulged too often, will shake off the authority of reason, and range capriciously from one ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... pre-Glacial Europe, just at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... thin scintillating ray of light which shifted capriciously from place to place. "It is the blade of a sword!" he said. "More—it is the blade of the enchanted sword I sold ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... repelled, a little piqued; and a little relieved when the man on her other side spoke to her, and she recognized Mr. Reginald Farwell, the architect. The table capriciously swung that way. She did not feel prepared to talk to Mr. Chiltern. And before entering upon her explorations she was in need of a guide. She could have found none more charming, none more impersonal, none more subtly aware of her wants (which had once been ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... insist further on the necessity of a compromise between the executive power and the people, it seems to me, sir, that, in doubting my patriotism, you reason very capriciously, and that your judgments are exceedingly rash. You, sir, ostensibly defending government and property, are allowed to be a republican, reformer, phalansterian, any thing you wish; I, on the contrary, demanding ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... caprice: but if they change from caprice in important matters and after many pledges given, they will change from caprice again: they will not remain for twenty-five or thirty years without changing a jot of their capriciously formed opinions. We are therefore warranted in assuming that St. Paul's conversion to Christianity was not dictated by caprice: it was not dictated by self-interest: it must therefore have sprung from the weight of certain ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... heard in a woman's charming voice. It seemed as if not only the strings of the violin made music, but its bridge, its pegs, and its sounding board. It was astonishing! The piece had been a most difficult one; but it seemed like play-as if the bow were but wandering capriciously over the strings. Such was the appearance of facility, that everyone might have supposed he could do it. The violin seemed to sound of itself, the bow to play of itself. These two seemed to do it all. One forgot the master who guided ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... to the beach, looking anxiously over the lonely sea. The veterans who were toasting themselves in the sun near the overturned boats, on scanning the broad horizon, would finally discern an almost imperceptible point, a grain of sand dancing capriciously on ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez |
