"Characteristic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... quantity—the degree of emotion. Doubtless, it is undeniable that we moderns have far more sensibility to the phenomena and visual glories of this world which we inhabit. And it is possible that, reflecting on the singularity of this characteristic badge worn by modern civilization, he may go so far as to suspect that Christianity has had something to do with it. But, on seeking to complete the chain which connects them, he finds himself quite unable to ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... channel. I was under the impression, as were my officers, that it was the island of Bonacca, between which and the main a book of sailing directions we had on board told us there was a passage; but as we neared it the characteristic features which we discovered convinced us that we were mistaken, and that it was the Hogsties. Now we had been assured at Omoa that between it and the main there was no passage. We did not make this discovery, however, before we had ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... went in search of a passage over the range. We ascended several hills in order to obtain general views, and found that the level country, over which we had travelled during the last two days, was of less extent than I had anticipated. To the north-east by east, ranges rise with the characteristic outlines of the basalt and phonolite,—in peaks and long stretched flat-topped hills, with undulations openly timbered extending at their base. One valley descended to the north-north-east; another to the northward. The principal range has a direction ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... elegant Caryatides. These Pavilions are lingering reminiscences of the medieval towers. You will find them in the corners and centers of other blocks in the Louvre. They form a peculiarly French Renaissance characteristic. The Palace is here growing out of the Castle. The other three sides of the square are, on the whole, more ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... worthily rehearsed in one of the noblest collects of the Prayer-Book, and is destined, no doubt, to fill a more and more important place in the Christianity of the future; but almost as [181] signal as is the essentialness of this characteristic idea in St. Paul's teaching, is the completeness with which the worshippers of St. Paul's words, as an absolute final expression of saving truth, have lost it, and have substituted for the apostle's living and near conception of a resurrection now, their mechanical and remote ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... the rocks, we reached our horse and mule, and started off again, passing over dry weedy hills. One low tree, very characteristic of the dry savannahs, I have only incidentally mentioned before. It is a species of acacia, belonging to the section Gummiferae, with bi-pinnate leaves, growing to a height of fifteen or twenty feet. The branches and trunk ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... fortunate of the French provinces. [Footnote: Holland and Lombardy were the richest countries in Europe. Tuscany was especially well governed just then. A. Young, i. 480. Serfdom still existed in some remote French provinces, especially in the Jura mountains. Its principal characteristic was the escheating to the lord of the property of all serfs dying childless.] And in France prosperity was growing. The peasant's taxes were constantly getting heavier, but his means of bearing them increased faster yet. The rising tide of material prosperity, the great change of ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Burt, M.P., and Mr. H. Broadhurst—held office as Under-Secretaries in the Liberal Government of 1892-5; but Mr. John Burns is the first trade unionist to sit in the Cabinet. He, too, might have been an Under-Secretary in the days of that short-lived Ministry, but decided, with characteristic vigour, that if he was fit to be an Under-Secretary he was fit for the Cabinet. At the close of 1905 the opportunity came, and the offer of Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman to preside over the Local Government Board was promptly accepted. The workman ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... mental lesion; that is how Maurice Spronck classifies the sensation in writing about the verbal sensitivity of the Goncourts and Flaubert. The latter, you may remember, said that Salammbo was purple to him, and L'Education Sentimentale gray. Carthage and Paris—a characteristic fancy! But why is it that these scientific gentlemen who account for genius by eye-strain do not reprove the poets for their sensibility to the sound of words, the shape and cadences of the phrase? It appears that only prose-men ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... perfectly unassuming. His head was not so remarkable for great size as for its fine symmetry, and the organs of the moral and intellectual portions of it were in a rare degree harmoniously blended. It was the characteristic head of a curious, indefatigable, conscientious inquirer into the arcana of physical things—one who was not given to indulge in unprofitable, visionary speculations. His visit to De Ville being strictly private, there was no opportunity afforded me of ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, February 1887 - Volume 1, Number 1 • Various
... did a characteristic thing. Folding his arms in front of him he grasped his own elbows and shook himself fiercely. The effort of will and body banished the shapes and illusions, and he went ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of six feet; and his frame was strongly knit, and compactly built. His right leg was shrunk from his boyhood, and required support by a staff. Mr. Cunningham describes the personal habits of Sir Walter with his usual characteristic force: "his arms were strong and sinewy; his looks stately and commanding; and his face, as he related a heroic story, flushed up as a crystal cup when one fills it with wine. His eyes were deep seated under his somewhat shaggy ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... "Old Snip." So celebrated did the qualities of this horse become that the "Snip breed" was not only spoken of with regard to the horses, but of the owners as well, and Hazards who did not possess the distinguishing race-characteristic of self-will were said not to be "true Snips." Old Snip was said to have been imported from Tripoli; others assert (and it is generally believed) that he was a wild horse running at large in the tract ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... provisions or forage would be supplied; that the correspondents must give their word of honour to divulge nothing until a certain time: to all of which we set our hands and seals, and then departed from the office somewhat impressed. It is characteristic of our Intelligence Department that on leaving the office I was greeted by a Kimberley resident with the remark—"Well, I hear that Mahon is going to make a dash for Mafeking on Friday via ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... plump figure was covered with furs, and a handsome shawl trailed from her arm; but it was characteristic of Mrs. Macdougal to profess the sweetest solicitude for other people, whilst appropriating for her own use and pleasure all the comfortable, pleasant, and pretty things. She was not more than thirty-three, and looked like a gipsy spoiled by refinements. Her social schooling had been confined to ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... out of the girl's eyes. Her lovely, vivid face glowed with characteristic enthusiasm. It might be said of Rosemary that no future was ever else than rosy ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... wife (Mrs. Nairne) who locked up her apprentice girl, and starved her to death; but did ever any body think of abolishing haberdashery on this account? He was persuaded the Negros in the West Indies were cheerful and happy. They were fond of ornaments; but it was not the characteristic of miserable persons to show a taste for finery. Such a taste, on the contrary, implied a cheerful and contented mind. He was sorry to differ from his friend Mr. Wilberforce, but he must oppose ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... After perusing this characteristic production, Hycy paused for a little, and felt it very probable that there might be some reasonable grounds for its production, although he could scarcely understand upon what motive these fellows should proceed to practice treachery towards ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... uniform coat is required. The glass is left to dry long enough for the shellac to get nearly hard and to allow most of the alcohol to evaporate. It is then heated before a fire, or even over a Bunsen, till the shellac softens and begins to yield its fragrant characteristic smell. ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... up in a paper, from under the seat, and presented it to Ken with a flourish and a shuffle that were altogether characteristic. Supper was waiting at Applegate Farm, Ken knew, but the pie—which was a cherry one, drippy and delectable—was not to be resisted, after long hours on the water. He bit into it heartily as he left Asquam and ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... and even welcome, but she was not shrewd enough to be sensible. She appeared to have developed only the capacity to talk, to pry, and to worry people. She was unable to rest or to permit others to rest, yet her aversion to any useful form of activity was her chief characteristic. Wherever she went she took the ground that she was "company," and with a shawl hanging over her sharp, angular shoulders, she would seize upon the most comfortable rocking chair in the house, and mouse for bits of news about ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... at the Broadway Tabernacle last winter, and which was so heartily laughed at by the press and the town for a day or two after. It is gratifying to remark that women themselves have been the prominent satirists of the characteristic absurdities put forth on the occasion alluded to. But to our fair correspondent: 'APPEAR, bright Spirits of the ancient Nine! (for you were women, and can well appreciate my appeal) arrayed in all the panoply ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... himself had said he must send people to Weatherbee when they wanted to see his best work. It was plain his subject had dominated him. He had achieved with the freedom of pose the suggestion of decision and power that had been characteristic of David Weatherbee. Quick intelligence spoke in the face, yet the eyes held their expression of seeing a far horizon. To Hollis, coming suddenly, as he did, upon the bronze figure in the Wenatchee sunshine, it ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... he gave my arm a squeeze—for Tommy possessed that characteristic making for a community of mind and spirit that did not wait for explanations. "I know it," he repeated, "but you look a whole lot better—really like your old self! Now, what's the trouble? If you're worrying about the ruins ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... landmarks, the poise of her head, the fragile slope of her shoulders, the softly lustrous pallor of her face. Even her attitude, perched over him there and leaning a little towards him, was a thing individual and characteristic. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... inventing things that are of practical use, as when at 21 he invented his automatic repeater which did so much for telegraphy. And Edison is another spare eater. What he ate at the three meals of the day on which he wrote the following letter, is characteristic of the small amount he eats every day in ...
— How to Eat - A Cure for "Nerves" • Thomas Clark Hinkle
... my son," said the author of my being, with characteristic pomposity, which age had not withered, "there is sufficient for but two. I am not, I hope, insensible to the ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... features which we encountered; it astounded me to note how much she knew about things which she had never before seen. One afternoon we drove down from surrounding heights to Florence, which lay in a golden haze characteristic of Italian Junes in this latitude. Powers, the sculptor, had promised to engage lodgings for us, but he had not expected us so soon, and meanwhile we put up at a hotel near by, and walked out a little in the long evening, admiring the broad, flagstone pavements and all the ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the alcohols exhibit a gradation with the increase of molecular weight. The lower members are colourless mobile liquids, readily soluble in water and exhibiting a characteristic odour and taste. The solubility decreases as the carbon content rises. The normal alcohols containing 1 to 16 carbon atoms are liquids at the ordinary temperatures; the higher members are crystalline, odourless and tasteless solids, closely resembling the fats in appearance. The boiling ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of a bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine is a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination that is fittingly characteristic of the ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... denied the suffering, and she accepted his teaching; she followed him in denying disease and then matter, and kept on with her theory of negation and denial until she evolved her present theory. It was a natural reaction from all conceivable pains characteristic of hysteria, to no pain; from all conceivable diseases which different physicians had opined, to no disease; from the infirmity of body with its inhibitory discomfitures, to no body. The history of the founder ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... droop at the corner of his mouth as he spoke, which might have been thought characteristic of him. He was an odd-looking boy, not ill-made, though very thin and not tall. His pallor was clear and even, as though constitutional; the features were delicate, almost childlike, but they were very slightly distorted, ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... drink at lunch to the prosperity and continued happiness of the United States of America. In the afternoon we took to the boat again, and were rowed up the river to the residence of Mr. Edgar Flower, where we found another characteristic English family, with its nine children, one of whom was the typical English boy, most pleasing and attractive in look, voice, ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... masturbator is recognized by a marked facial expression, by a characteristic mannerism, and by a peculiar ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... space were available here, his letters would supply many proofs of his interest in Mr. George Moore's admirable projects; but I can only make exception for his characteristic allusion to an incident that tickled his fancy very much at the time. "I hope" (20th of Aug. 1863) "you have been as much amused as I am by the account of the Bishop of Carlisle at (my very particular friend's) Mr. George Moore's schools? It strikes me as the funniest piece ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... cleared from the tops, but, to a great extent, still clothes their flanks and the intervening gorges. I have been particular in describing these spurs, because it is impossible to survey them without ascribing their comparative uniformity of level to the action of water. Similar ones are characteristic features of the valleys of Sikkim between 2000 and 8000 feet, and are rendered conspicuous by being always sites for villages and cultivation: the soil is a vegetable mould, over a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... geographical position of the Waldensian valleys, the next most frequent questions which arise are: Who are the Waldenses? how long have they been in the valleys of Piedmont? what circumstances led to their taking up their abode there? and what has given to their history that peculiar characteristic which makes every detail both of their past and present so intensely interesting to all the lovers of piety and patriotism wherever the story of their high-souled courage or their long-enduring faith has reached? It is to answer these questions, ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold
... tenacious out by the roots, with a rude machine made on the principle of that instrument by the aid of which the dentist revenges you on an offending tooth. The country looks tame, at first, without these characteristic ornaments, so suggestive of human occupancy. The ground is excellently fertile where stumps have been, and association makes us rather distrustful of its goodness where nothing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... stroke of trade at every turn, that acknowledged necessity of being smart, which we must own is quite as general as the nobler propensity. I believe that both phases of commercial activity may be attributed to the same characteristic. Men in trade in America are not more covetous than tradesmen in England, nor probably are they more generous or philanthropical. But that which they do, they are more anxious to do thoroughly and ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... of government of these states or nations are numerous, and though the conceptions of people as to the purposes and functions of the state vary greatly, we find that one characteristic of a state has always prevailed among all the states and nations of the world—the existence of an armed military force, placed under the control of its government; the purpose of this armed force being to enable the government not only to carry on its administration of internal matters, but also ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... covered its second and third quarters; Occam himself, though his main exertions lie beyond us, was probably born before Aquinas died; while John Duns Scotus hardly outlived the century's close by a decade. Raymond Lully (one of the most characteristic figures of Scholasticism and of the mediaeval period, with his "Great Art" of automatic philosophy), who died in 1315, was born as early as 1235. Peter the Spaniard, Pope and author of the Summulae Logicales, the grammar of formal logic for ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... The fundamental abnormal characteristic of that great group of nerve-patients who throng the doctor's office is sensitiveness, suggestibility, and lack of self-control. Sensitiveness is nothing more or less than a refined form of selfishness, while lack of self-control is merely the combined end-product of heredity and childhood ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... writers, and an anecdote preserved by Aulus Gellius in his Noctes Atticae I. 10. 4, wherein a young man is warned by Caesar to avoid unusual and far-fetched language "like a rock," is supposed to be very characteristic of his general attitude in matters of literary taste. The 'Anticatones' were a couple of political pamphlets ridiculing Cato, the idol of the republicans. This was small business for Caesar, but Cato had taken rather a mean advantage by his dramatic suicide at Utica, and deprived Caesar of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... her knees, dropped her chin between her hands and regarded him impudently. She had a characteristic trick of looking up with her face downcast that never ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... men were pagan Indians, whom I had met before, and had talked with about becoming Christians; but all I could get from them was the characteristic Indian shrug of the shoulders, and the words, "As our fathers lived, so will we." Our dinner was the last of a bear we had shot a few days before. While it was cooking the storm which we feared ...
— By Canoe and Dog-Train • Egerton Ryerson Young
... though with fine lace cuffs and cravat, all, like the shoes and silk stockings, worn with his peculiar daintiness, and, as was usual when full-bottomed wigs were the rule in grande tenue, its place supplied by a silken cap. This was olive green with a crimson tassel, which had assumed exactly the characteristic one-sided Riquet-with-a-tuft aspect. For the rest, these years seemed to have made the slight form slighter and more wiry, and the face keener, more sallow, ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rode one day near the sea-shore I heard voices among the rocks, and sending the guide ahead with the horses, I walked over to the shore with the lady and children who were my companions. There we saw a sight characteristic of these islands. Three women decently clothed in a garment which covered them from head to foot, and a man with only a breech-clout on, were dashing into the surf, picking up sea-moss, and a little univalve shell, a limpet, which they flung into small baskets which hung from ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... Korava, Kurru, a dialect of Tamil, and Kudagu. In the Nerbudda valley the farmservant who pours the seed through the tube of the sowing-plough is known as Oraya; this word is probably derived from the verb urna to pour, and means 'one who pours.' Since the principal characteristic of the Oraons among the Hindus is their universal employment as farmservants and labourers, it may be suggested that the name is derived from this term. Of the other names by which they are known to outsiders Dhangar ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... was brought about is sufficiently characteristic of the country. I had inherited a taste for geology; and as the north of Ireland affords a fine field for the exercise of the hammer, I soon made myself acquainted with the Giant's Causeway, and the other wonders of that singular district. While engaged in these pursuits, I fell ...
— The Lieutenant and Commander - Being Autobigraphical Sketches of His Own Career, from - Fragments of Voyages and Travels • Basil Hall
... [17] How characteristic of Bunyan is this sentence, 'the rich voyage.' God environing us about with his presence in time, and eternal felicity in the desired haven: 'the lumpish heart' at times apparently indifferent to the glorious harvest: 'a pair of spurs' to prick us on in the course. The word voyage ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... have finished my work: I shall write no more sermons; and that nothing may be wasted that is useful in the work of God, let these pens be given to a younger man, who is still able to write sermons.' This incident is characteristic of the man, and will illustrate his simple uprightness, and his concern for the work of God. He is now very infirm, but strong in faith; he is calmly waiting to ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... It was characteristic of the man that the invasion was bounded for him by Nazri and Bardur. He had no ears for ultimate issues and the ruin of an empire. Another's fancy would have been busy on the future; Lewis saw only that pass at Nazri and the telegraph-hut beyond. He ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... ugly eyebrows. Her nose, her lower lip and the flesh of her neck hung loosely; in her there was already completed the fatal maturity which was beginning to appear in her daughters. All three possessed the yellowish pallor characteristic of Oriental races. Their thick lips, faintly blue, revealed something of the African element grafted ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... rapidity to the rank of second most technologically powerful economy in the world after the US and the third-largest economy in the world after the US and China, measured on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. One notable characteristic of the economy is how manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors work together in closely-knit groups called keiretsu. A second basic feature has been the guarantee of lifetime employment for a substantial portion of the urban labor force. Both features are now eroding. Japan's industrial ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... of the Spanish race on Indian Bar, many of whom are highly educated gentlemen, are disposed to bear an ill opinion of our whole nation on account of the rough men here. They think that it is a great characteristic of Columbia's children to be ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... confined air appears. There is also an indescribable odour. The smell of men and animals, of dusty goods, of rank tobacco, of rotting refuse, strong spices, fresh, juicy fruit—all mixed together into a peculiar odour which is characteristic of all Oriental bazaars. ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... true anticipation expressed in this letter—the last but one I was ever to receive from my friend. Before we accompany him to the closing scene of all his toils, I shall here, as briefly as possible, give a selection from the many characteristic anecdotes told of him, while at Cephalonia, where (to use the words of Colonel Stanhope, in a letter from thence to the Greek committee,) he was "beloved by Cephalonians, by English, and by Greeks;" and where, approached as he was familiarly by persons of all classes ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... In place of many petty railroads, there were a few trunk lines. In place of a hundred producers and refiners of petroleum, there was the one Standard Oil Company. These are but a few of many; for the rapid growth of corporations was a characteristic of ...
— A School History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... sudden changes characteristic of the Chicago climate had taken place. The wintry chill had left the air before the advance of a soft, warm breeze that blew out of the west. It might have been early spring instead of ...
— The Sheridan Road Mystery • Paul Thorne
... lips, and at last a voice came to her speaking the name of her father. His voice answered some of her questions correctly, but could not utter the pet name which her father used to call her. This breakdown of the individuality of the phantom voices is very characteristic. This ended the sitting. The voices had not been as strong as we had hoped for, but as we threw on the light we found a number of messages written upon the sheets of paper which Fowler had put in ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... Milton's inspiration had taken a new and characteristic shape. All this, he reflected, had happened since the surveyors came—since they had weakly displayed such a shameless and unmanly interest in his sisters! It could have but one meaning. He hung around the sitting-room and ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... did not at once reply. He was standing in one of his characteristic attitudes, his hands clasped behind him, his head a little thrust forward, watching with every appearance of courteous interest the roomful of guests, stationary just now, listening to the performance of a famous violinist. It ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Una had thrown a shadow over these last days at Rome, and it was in any case necessary to take her away. In a characteristic ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... and the astonishment; for, to put it briefly, his biographers in that case were as good at predicting and inventing as himself. And why not? Do we not know that the story of the woman taken in adultery, which is finely told, and has all along been thought to contain some of Christ's most characteristic teaching, does not exist in the earlier manuscripts? It was invented by an unknown writer. And if one unknown writer could (and did) invent this story, other unknown writers may have invented every part of the ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... Bright's bright eye. Next item on the programme. Paying the piper. Pills, pounded bread, worth a guinea a box. Stave it off awhile. Sings too: Down among the dead men. Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to the. Not making much hand of it. Best value in. Characteristic of him. Power. Particular about his drink. Flaw in the glass, fresh Vartry water. Fecking matches from counters to save. Then squander a sovereign in dribs and drabs. And when he's wanted not a farthing. Screwed refusing to pay ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Yellowstone rivers, of high bearing and unquestionable courage, yet invariably gentle and courteous in everyday life. This last trait, together with a singularly musical and agreeable voice, has always been characteristic of the man. ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... the deck between two rows of emaciated Frenchmen, who had drawn themselves up to review us. We then passed on to that part of the ship which was occupied by the Americans, who testified their curiosity at knowing all about us; and sticking to their national characteristic, put more questions to us in ten minutes, than we could well answer in as many hours. We passed the evening and the first part of the night in mutual communications; and we went to rest with more pleasure than for many ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... "Something characteristic," eh? Humph! I reckon you mean by that Something that happened in our way, Here at the crossin' of Big Pine Flat. Times aren't now as they used to be, When gold was flush and the boys were frisky, And a man would pull out his battery For ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... for me," said Michael sunnily, with a characteristic sweep of his hand that seemed to include himself, his garments and his mental outfit. He turned upon her his blazing smile that spoke more eloquently than ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... possible neatness and security. Again we pricked on, and crossing the Gravone at the Ponte d'Usciano, the road began to ascend, carrying us for some miles over a rugged spur of the mountains. Here we found ourselves again among the shrubbery which forms so characteristic a feature in the landscape of these islands. Having passed the ruins of a house, the inmates of which, even to the infant in the cradle, had been butchered in one of the feuds so common in Corsica, we halted at a roadside albergo, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... were shapely hands; hands that men obey at a sign, and women love to kiss. Lucien was slender and of middle height. From a glance at his feet, he might have been taken for a girl in disguise, and this so much the more easily from the feminine contour of the hips, a characteristic of keen-witted, not to say, astute, men. This is a trait which seldom misleads, and in Lucien it was a true indication of character; for when he analyzed the society of to-day, his restless mind was apt to take its stand on the lower ground of those diplomatists who hold that success justifies ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... for an enlarged sphere and greater rights for woman was to a considerable extent merely negative. The aim was to remove barriers and to open the way. It is characteristic of the earlier days of agitation for the removal of wrongs affecting any class, that the questions involved appear to be simple, and easily repeated formulas ample to secure desired rights. Further agitation, however, and more mature reflection ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... brings him humanly somewhat nearer to our hearts. His good-nature, his bonhomie, acts even on children, and they perhaps understand his greatness better than do the grown people. And here I will tell a little story about a beggar which will show the characteristic contrast between the glory of Lafayette and that of Napoleon. I was lately standing at a street corner before the Pantheon, and as usual lost in thought in contemplating that beautiful building, when a little Auvergnat came begging for a sou, and I gave him half-a-franc to be rid of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... for himself, wrote many astrological works, which seem to have been very successful. He was known and visited by all the great men of the day, and probably had brains enough only to prophesy when he knew. His description of his political creed is beautifully characteristic of the man: "I was more Cavalier than Round-head, and so taken notice of; but afterwards I engaged body and soul in the cause of the Parliament, but still with much affection to his Majesty's person and unto Monarchy, which I ever loved and approved beyond any government whatsoever." ...
— The Love Letters of Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple, 1652-54 • Edward Abbott Parry
... sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... for the recitations of rhapsodists and the performances of citharaedists, before the theatre was in existence. In its general form and arrangements the odeum was very similar to the theatre. There were, however, some characteristic differences. The odeum was much smaller than the theatre, and it was roofed over. The ancient and original Odeum of Athens in the Agora was probably erected in the time of Hipparchus, who, according to Plato, first introduced at Athens ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... his generals are filled with the kindly courtesy, the direct argument, and the dry humor which are so characteristic of the man. To Grant, who had telegraphed, "If the thing is pressed, I think that Lee will surrender," Lincoln replied, "Let the thing ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... some rudiments of learning from the family priest; he was sent to a school at Twyford, where he is said to have got into trouble for writing a lampoon upon his master; he went for a short time to another in London, where he gave a more creditable if less characteristic proof of his poetical precocity. Like other lads of genius, he put together a kind of play—a combination, it seems, of the speeches in Ogilby's Iliad—and got it acted by his schoolfellows. These brief snatches of schooling, ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... opponents—and they were many and unscrupulous—was able to damage Messer Giovanni's reputation and power. He could, had he wished it, have proclaimed himself sole ruler of Florence and her territory; but self-control and prudence—which were so characteristic of the men of his family—never forsook him. He died universally regretted in 1429, and was buried in the church of San Lorenzo, which he, along with the Martelli, had restored and endowed. Giovanni di Averardo de' Medici was looked upon as the first banker in Italy, the controller ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... was held to typify female nature, so too were the leaves of that plant emblematical of the receptive sex. The thyrsus, the distinctive object borne by the worshippers of Bacchus, was a phallic or male symbol, the characteristic portion of which was wreathed and buried in Ivy leaves; signifying the union of the sexes. It is curious to observe that this regarding the Ivy as characteristic of the feminine principle, found its way among the Druids, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... introduce Mrs. Mavis and Miss Grace Mavis, to represent that Mrs. Allen had recommended them—nay, had urged them—just to come that way, informally and without fear; Mrs. Allen who had been prevented only by the pressure of occupations so characteristic of her (especially when up from Mattapoisett for a few hours' desperate shopping) from herself calling in the course of the day to explain who they were and what was the favour they had to ask of her benevolent friend. Good-natured women understand each other even when so divided as ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... angry with Wharton. Then she reddened and threw back her dark head with the passionate gesture Hallin had already noticed as characteristic. ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the explosion had scorched, and even sniffed the shirt cuff as if seeking to understand the affair better. He evidently recognised the effects of one of those new explosives which he himself had studied, almost created. In the present case, however, he must have been puzzled, for there were characteristic signs and traces the significance of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... what it micht mean a deal mair,' replied McIntosh, with characteristic Scotch caution, as he followed Madame into the house; 'it's no a verra bad sign, onyhow; I winna say but what we micht be near ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... was the manifestation of his ignorance; anything is possible where love is concerned! It was characteristic of the man that in his mind he had abandoned, for the present at all events, his own pain. He still loved Stephen with all the strength of his nature, but for him the selfish side ceased to exist. He was trying ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... helpless thing that needs them, I can not say, for she never told. Not even to Miss Hilary, who at last was permitted to come and pay a formal visit; nor to Tom Cliffe, whom she now saw very rarely, for her mistress, with characteristic selfishness, would hardly let her out of her sight for ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... replied, in her quick, characteristic manner, "the Great Mystery does not will us to find things too easily. In that case everybody would be a medicine-giver, and Ohiyesa must learn that there are many secrets which the Great Mystery will disclose only to the most worthy. Only those who seek him fasting and in solitude ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... that we have here a carefully-elaborated portrait of an Egyptian hero who flourished many centuries before our era. The features have all the prominent parts noticed by writers on Egyptian sculpture as characteristic of the Egyptian style. Here are the wonderfully high and prominent ears (which must have been invaluable peculiarities to Egyptian wits), the thick Ethiopian lips, the coarse nose, and the full eyes, all carefully and skilfully ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... faction that makes them truly dreadful. That faction is the evil spirit that possesses the body of France,—that informs it as a soul,—that stamps upon its ambition, and upon all its pursuits, a characteristic mark, which strongly distinguishes them from the same general passions and the same general views in other men and in other communities. It is that spirit which inspires into them a new, a pernicious, a desolating activity. Constituted as France ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Roy wanted to laugh. It sounded so ridiculous. And yet it was quite characteristic of this singular old man. But young Pell mopped his face vigorously with his handkerchief to hide his mirth and then said, rising ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... of the love of visible beauty which is a characteristic feature of the life of this school. It is in the drawing lesson that this love of beauty has in the main evolved itself. Other influences have no doubt been at work. Nature-study and literature, for example, have, as taught in this school, done much to foster the children's latent love of beauty; ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... ago?" Burns demanded. "Surely dignity's no characteristic of mine. If Anne Linton can call me 'Red Head' ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... could not change the colourless role which she assigned him. So he became silent, speaking only when some remark was obviously intended for him, and watched her face and expression. He had always told himself that her dominant characteristic was strength, power of will, endurance; but now as he looked he saw once or twice a sudden droop, faint but discernible, as if for a flitting moment she grew too weak for her burden. Prescott felt a great access of pity and tenderness. She was in a ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Their superior tactic is to surprise the enemy, especially in the night, when the Genii help them, and hack him to pieces. The spear is used mostly to wound and disable the camel. Their manner of disposing of the booty, is characteristic. "What are we to do with these women and children?" they asked me, "when we have exterminated the Shânbah men." Without waiting for a reply they said:—"Oh, we'll send them to the Turks and sell them." They have the example of the Turks themselves, who, on the destruction of ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... The more characteristic America became, the less she had to do with the plastic arts. The emigrant-train carried many a Bible and Dictionary packed in beside the guns and axes. It carried the Elizabethan writers, AEsop's Fables, Blackstone's Commentaries, the revised ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... he's thirsty anyhow? And artists are so often thirsty. Charles is often thirsty. He says it is a characteristic feature of the ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... had been doing characteristic work. With three gunboats he attacked a force three times as numerous as his own. Impetuously boarding the first craft, after a discharge from his long boat, he engaged the numerous crew in a furious hand-to-hand struggle, in which all were made prisoners ...
— Dewey and Other Naval Commanders • Edward S. Ellis
... Ohio, while I have been engaged in penning these remarks. The discovery of this curious structure, which is coiled for the distance of a quarter of a mile around a hill, transfers to our soil a striking and characteristic portion of oriental mythology. Scarcely a season passes, indeed, which does not add, by the extension of our settlements, or the direct agency of exploration, to the number of monumental evidences of ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... was characteristic of him that often when he himself was most personally affected, the situation became an object of reflection. What a strange pathos there was in this recognition of superiority and in the inability to rise to it and appropriate ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... cruel persecutions practised upon the poor Protestants by the emperors, in spite of the repeated obligations they have had to those powers who profess the doctrines of Calvin and Luther; but gratitude is no part of the characteristic ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... steps, and the visitors had seated themselves on various lame chairs, Reshid stood apart in the shadow, examining his aristocratically small hands with great attention. Almayer, surprised by the great solemnity of his visitors, perched himself on the corner of the table with a characteristic want of dignity quickly noted by the Arabs with grave disapproval. But Abdulla spoke now, looking straight past Almayer at the red curtain hanging in the doorway, where a slight tremor disclosed the presence of women on the other side. He began by neatly complimenting Almayer upon the long years ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... cervical, axillary, inguinal, &c., to the surgeon. He who would combine both modes of a relationary practice, such as that of medicine and surgery, should be well acquainted with the form and structures characteristic of all regions of the human body; and it may be doubted whether he who pursues either mode of practice, wholly exclusive of the other, can do so with honest purpose and large range of understanding, if he be not equally well acquainted with the subject ...
— Surgical Anatomy • Joseph Maclise
... public, "nor gold nor jewels rare." Here was an evident hallucination that the writer was to become the recipient of an enormous secret subscription. Indeed, the earnest desire NOT to be given gold was a recurrent characteristic of the poetic temperament. The repugnance to accept even a handful of gold was generally accompanied by a desire for a draught of pure water or a ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... for Mary's sake, who had been all the morning in so terrible a state of agitation that it seemed as if she must have news for better or worse, or die of suspense. My father was not away longer than necessary. He returned as he had gone, wearing a cheerful, incisive look very characteristic of him, and ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... irrevocably judged to death) is never to pass a day without drawing some animal from the life, allowing themselves the fewest possible lines and colours to do it with, but resolving that whatever is characteristic of the animal shall in some way or other be shown. [Footnote: Plate 75 in Vol. V. of Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt" will give the student an idea of how to set to work.] I repeat, it cannot yet be judged what results might be obtained ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... side walls, and the combination of their slender shafts with those of the twin lancet windows, here for the first time introduced into the building, is very happy. Slender shafts of marble are employed in profusion by William of Sens, and Gervase expressly includes them in his list of characteristic novelties. But here we find them either detached from the piers, or combined with them in such a manner as to give a much greater lightness and elegance of effect than in the work of the previous architect. This lightness of style is carried ...
— The Cathedral Church of Canterbury [2nd ed.]. • Hartley Withers
... one-story houses with ugly plaster facades and no roofs—at least to be seen—each differing a bit from its neighbor in height, like a badly drawn up company of soldiers. The blazing sun and thick dust characteristic of all the high central plateau are here in full force. Like most Spanish things—conquests, history, buildings—it looked more striking at a distance than when examined ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... of this period of his life, contained in his autobiography, is highly characteristic. It is ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... Leigh, that they were careful not to increase in number, and that they sold their female children. At a later period, it is said, that to suckle puppies they abandoned their offspring. Such facts are not incredible, when they relate to individuals, but are scarcely characteristic of a race: all nations have perpetrated infanticide, from necessity, or pride, or barbarism. Infant life is little valued among savages, and female children least: they run the gauntlet of a thousand perils. Fewer were born than among ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... remarking[32] that Ritschl's condemnation of an alleged defect in the Cas[33] implies much too favorable an estimate of Plautus' artistic worth, as the defects cited are represented as something isolated and remarkable, whereas they are characteristic of Plautine comedy. Langen still displays clear-headed judgment when he says of the Miles[34]: "Wenn die Farben so stark aufgetragen werden, hort jede Feinhet der Charakterzeichnung auf und bereinem Dichter, ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... impossibility of withstanding this yellow flood except those who have been overwhelmed by it. We humanitarians of a later day gaze with gentle sympathy upon the spectacle of a noble and primeval race like the Iroquois tribe of Indians dying before the advance of our Anglo-Saxon civilization, but with characteristic Anglo-Saxon inconsistency and stupidity we are quite loth to feel sorry for ourselves, doomed to death before the advance of a Mongolian civilization unless we put a stop ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... only natural that, now he had decided to forsake it, the monotonous humdrum fisher's life became almost unbearably irksome to him. Old Bill Maskell was not slow to observe this, and with the unselfishness which was so eminently characteristic of him, though he loved the lad as his own soul, he decided to shorten for him as far as possible the weary time of waiting, and send him ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... of food control in this country has passed and the great new experiment in democratic administration of the nation's food is succeeding. The method of well-directed voluntary co-operation, much more characteristic of our food control than of any other country's, can be judged by its results to date. We have sent abroad six times the wheat that we had believed was in the country for export. We have exported vastly increased shipments ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... described the Indians themselves; their first characteristic was the deep religious nature which swayed their whole life. They prayed oftener and more fervently than Christians, worshipping everything that was unknown and mysterious; of which the saddest thing was that the Indian's gods were ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... travellers a place must be assigned to Lady Morgan (born 1777), the novelist, who in her books of travel exhibits most of the qualities which lend a characteristic zest to her fictions. She and her husband, Sir Charles Morgan, visited France in 1815, and compounded a book upon it, which, as France had been for so many years shut against English tourists, produced ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... some of the characteristic attributes or traits which a masterful and inspiring teacher should possess? In the first place he should be physically sound. It may seem like a lack of charity to say, and yet it is true, that any serious physical defect should militate against, if not bar, ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... every part of nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by other spirits." At this ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... them. Nor is it material that they differ in the mode, since they all agree in the kind. Calvus is close and nervous; Asinius more open and harmonious; Caesar is distinguished [b] by the splendour of his diction; Caelius by a caustic severity; and gravity is the characteristic of Brutus. Cicero is more luxuriant in amplification, and he has strength and vehemence. They all, however, agree in this: their eloquence is manly, sound, and vigorous. Examine their works, and you will see the energy of congenial minds, a family-likeness ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... that, to the various points of doubtful orthodoxy which scholars have noted as characteristic of the Grail romances, Borron's ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... vital point in the coming conflict would be the control of the sea. Accordingly he urged upon the Athenians the necessity of building a powerful fleet. In this policy he was aided by one of those futile wars so characteristic of Greek history, a war between Athens and the island of AEgina. In order to overcome the AEginetans, who had a large fleet, the Athenians were compelled to build a larger one, and by the time this purpose was accomplished rumors came that the Persian king was getting ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... introduced in Shadwell's play, the Lancashire Witches, 1682, as a persona dramatis, along with Mother Dickinson and Mother Hargrave, two of the witches convicted in 1633, but without any regard to the characteristic circumstances under which she appears in the present narrative. The following invocation, which is put into her mouth, is rather a favourable specimen of that play, certainly not one of the worst of Shadwell's, in which there are ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... speculations as the appearance of the house doors. The various expressions of the human countenance afford a beautiful and interesting study; but there is something in the physiognomy of street-door knockers, almost as characteristic, and nearly as infallible. Whenever we visit a man for the first time, we contemplate the features of his knocker with the greatest curiosity, for we well know, that between the man and his knocker, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... His characteristic outspokenness—a style of thing to which Egyptian officials were not accustomed—somewhat alarmed a few of his friends, and on one occasion he was urged not to make an enemy of Nubar Pasha, who was a very powerful ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... talked together for a little while upstairs, that this caprice about the wind was a fiction and that he used the pretence to account for any disappointment he could not conceal, rather than he would blame the real cause of it or disparage or depreciate any one. We thought this very characteristic of his eccentric gentleness and of the difference between him and those petulant people who make the weather and the winds (particularly that unlucky wind which he had chosen for such a different purpose) the stalking-horses of their splenetic and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... on to High Halden, which stands upon a ridge out of the Weald, a very characteristic and beautiful place, with a most interesting church dedicated to Our Lady. Indeed I do not know where one could match the strange wooden tower and belfry and the noble fourteenth century porch, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... marriage at first; she said Fulbert would betray the secret to save her, and besides, she did not wish to drag down a lover who was so gifted, so honored by the world, and who had such a splendid career before him. It was noble, self-sacrificing love, and characteristic of the pure-souled Heloise, but it was not ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... odious to the lowest class by his Act for laying an excise upon gin, a mob assailed him in the middle of the fields, threw him to the ground, kicked him over and over, and savagely trampled upon him. It was a marvel that he escaped with his life; but with characteristic good humor, he soon made a joke of his ill-usage, saying that until the mob made him their football he had never been master of all the rolls. Soon after this outbreak of popular violence, the inhabitants enclosed the middle ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... very superior to hastily compiled biographies. Each memoir contains the life and labours of its subject, in the smallest space consistent with perspicuity; the dryness of names, dates, and plain facts being admirably relieved by characteristic anecdotes of the party, and a brief but judicious summary of character by the editor. In the latter consists the original value of the work. The reader need not, however, take this summary "for granted:" he is in possession of the main facts from which the editor has drawn his estimate, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various
... were characteristic of him. He left the entire control of the ranch to this girl of two-and-twenty, relying implicitly upon her judgment in all things. It was a strange thing to do, for he was still a vigorous man. To look at him was to make oneself wonder at the reason. But the girl ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... and the cultivated saint was carried on by his son Feva: but his "deadly and noxious wife" Gisa, who appears to have been a fierce Arian, always, says his biographer, kept him back from clemency. One story of Gisa's misdeeds is so characteristic both of the manners of the time and of the style in which the original biography is written, that I shall take leave to ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... to mouth of Weser. Anchored for night under Hohenhrn Sand. 14th Sept.—Nil. 15th Sept.—Under way at 4 a.m. Wind East moderate. Course W. by S.: four miles; N.E. by N. fifteen miles Norderpiep 9.30. Eider River 11.30.' This recital of naked facts was quite characteristic when 'passages' were concerned, and any curiosity I had felt about his reticence on the previous night would have been rather allayed than stimulated had I not noticed that a page had been torn out of the book just at this point. The frayed ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... relaxation. As they admitted no image of any thing in heaven or in earth, they consequently rejected the use of all those arts called imitative, and which supply so large a portion of the more refined enjoyment characteristic of civilized nations. In like manner, they seem to have viewed in the light of sacrilege every attempt to bring down the sublime language in which they praised Jehovah and recorded his mighty works, to the more common and less hallowed purposes ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... of this tendency, the most striking and characteristic feature of the nineteenth century, there still are those who believe and teach that obstruction is the creator of wealth; that the peoples can be made great and free by the erection of artificial barriers to the beneficent action of commerce, and the unrestricted intercourse of men and nations ...
— Opening Ceremonies of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, May 24, 1883 • William C. Kingsley
... have been? It was characteristic of Alice Severn that when she had to choose between her husband and her daughter she had chosen Anne. It was characteristic of John that when he had to choose between his wife and his Government, he had not chosen Alice. He must have had adventures out in India, conducted ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... artistic decoration I have neither the inclination nor the necessary qualification. The crisp and ornate style, the quaint expression, the chiselled word, the new-coined phrase, in which modern English poetry is rich, would scarcely suit the translation of an old Epic whose predominating characteristic is its simple and easy flow of narrative. Indeed, the Maha-bharata would lose that unadorned simplicity which is its first and foremost feature if the translator ventured to decorate it with the art of the modern ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot.. such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... temper, the affectionate and sympathetic manner of his new teacher made a great impression on the pupil, though the progress in intellectual acquirement was as unsatisfactory in one case as in the other. It is characteristic of that subtle impressionableness to physical comeliness, which in ordinary natures is rapidly effaced by press of more urgent considerations, but which Rousseau's strongly sensuous quality retained, that he should have remembered, and thought worth mentioning years afterwards, that the first of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the highest phase of human development at this stage, because it is spontaneous expression of what is within produced by an inner necessity and impulse. Play is the most characteristic, most spiritual manifestation of man at this stage, and, at the same time, is typical of human life as ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... decomposed crust of broken, snowy ice, so permeated with air that it has a dead-white color, like pounded ice or glass. Those who see the glacier in this state miss the blue tint so often described as characteristic of its appearance in its lower portion, and as giving such a peculiar beauty to its caverns and vaults. But let them come again after a summer storm has swept away this loose sheet of broken, snowy ice above, and before the same process ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... King on this subject, in which he stated it as his belief that the Austrian plan was to get Charles Albert accidentally killed, or to plunge him in vice, or to make him contract a discreditable marriage. This was why they had invited him to their camp. He adds the characteristic remark that their nephew would be in no less danger at the headquarters of the Duke of Wellington 'a cause de la religion.' Have him home and have him married, is his advice. 'We are well treated, because there is the expectation of soon devouring our remains by extinguishing ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... grandfather of Hengist and Horsa is made out very clearly, but there seem insuperable difficulties in proving Hengist and Horsa themselves. This strikes me as a characteristic of the author's[12] profession. He has to deal with parents actual and possible, but the offspring are seen evanescently, often loom in the distance, and sometimes can't be got to exist even when most desired.—Yours ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the head of a force of four battalions of infantry, twenty guns, and four squadrons of horse. Thomas made instant preparations to meet the invasion, when it was suddenly rolled away in a manner which presents one of the characteristic dissolving ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... or two instances only, it would be idle to lay much stress upon it; but when we find the same truth holding good of several successive reigns, it is not too much to attribute it to that wide diffusion of Christian morals, which we have pointed out as the characteristic of the two preceding centuries. The kings of this age owed their best protection to the purer ethics which overflowed from Armagh and Bangor and Lismore; and if we find hereafter the regicide habits of former times partially revived, it will only be after the new Paganism—the ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... been paralyzed by a defection which left him almost without an army, and would have taken the course of sending envoys to the rebels to attempt to make terms and by concessions to patch up a treaty, Cesare, with characteristic courage, assurance, and promptitude of action, flung out officers on every side ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... pearl-grey frock, and a garden-hat, beneath which one could see that her hair was dark. Young women's backs, however, in this world, to the undiscerning eyes of men, are apt to present no immediately recognizable characteristic features; and so if it had n't been for Ronsard, I don't know what ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... his career by a series of concerts in the United States. A New York agent, with the characteristic enterprise of New York agents, had tracked Diaz even into the forest and offered him two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for forty concerts on the condition that he played at no concert before he played in New York. And in order to reach New York in time ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... had passed, they quietly left the gloomy cemetery and made their way quickly back through the straggling moonlight to Rosendo's house. Dona Maria, with characteristic quietude, was preparing for the duties of the approaching day. Carmen lay asleep. Jose went to her bedside and bent over her, wondering. What were the events of the past few days in her sight? How did she interpret them? Was her faith still unshaken? ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... relations or friends seemed interested, so I availed myself of the kind offer of guidance given me by a fellow artist, an amateur painter, but a professional cutter of clothes. I expected something rather picturesque, possibly rather squalid, but found it intensely interesting and characteristic and very clean, a cross-between a little French theatre, say in Monte Parnasse, and one of the lesser London theatres. The acting was French in style and expressive, and full of humour and frankness, and there was a quaint decorative style in all the tableaux and in the actors' movements ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... concern at what had happened, laughing and giving himself abundance of airs, such as by no means became a man in his condition. On his commitment to Newgate, he seemed not to abate the least of that vivacity which was natural to his temper, and as he had too much mistaken vice for the characteristic of a fine gentleman, so nothing appeared to him so great a testimony of gallantry and courage as behaving intrepidly while death was so near its approach. He therefore entertained all who conversed with him in the prison, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... the matter of the "signs" of Christ's coming we need to pay particular attention to and distinguish between those signs which have been characteristic of and peculiar to many generations, and have, consequently, been repeated; and those which are to characterize specifically the near approach of the coming of Christ. Christians are not altogether in the dark concerning these facts: Luke 21:29-33—"So likewise ye, when ye see ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... sea. Such of these men, presumably fairly typical of all, as testified in this court, were impressive not only because of inherent bravery, but because of intelligence and clear-headedness, and they possessed that remarkable gift of simplicity so characteristic of truly fearless men who cannot quite understand why an ado is made of acts which seem to them merely the ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... unreal splendours were only Neeland's rejected Academy pictures and studies; a few cheap Japanese hangings, cheaper Nippon porcelains, and several shaky, broken-down antiques picked up for a song here and there. All the trash and truck and dust and junk characteristic of the conventional artist's habitation ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... believe, a granddaughter of the celebrated Jean Gordon, and was said to have much resembled her in appearance. The following account of her is extracted from the letter of a friend, who for many years enjoyed frequent and favourable opportunities of observing the characteristic peculiarities of the Yetholm tribes.—'Madge Gordon was descended from the Faas by the mother's side, and was married to a Young. She was a remarkable personage of a very commanding presence, and high stature, being nearly six feet high. She ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... grayer than ever. His outing in the woods (if he had been here ever since school broke up) had done him little good, for he was wrinkled and troubled looking. His thin lips actually trembled as he greeted the three girls in characteristic manner. His eyes, however, were as bright as ever—like steel points. He looked this way when the boys had been a trial to him in Latin class and he was about to say something ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... laughed at all his blunt speeches, and enjoyed his rude wit, and opposed him, and argued with him to his heart's content, until they became the best friends in the world. Their first meeting was so characteristic, that ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... of the scaffold, this was very imprudent of him. It was characteristic of the man—of that impulsiveness which existed in him side by side with his sagacity, with his coolness in intrigue, with his unmerciful and revengeful temper. By my own feelings I understood what an imprudence it was. But he was ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Grau Period Death of Maurice Grau His Managerial Career An Interregnum at the Metropolitan Opera House Filled by Damrosch and Ellis Death of Anton Seidl His Funeral Characteristic Traits "La Bohme" 1898-1899 "Ero ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the blue skin, the shrivelled fingers, the cold tongue, the change in voice, and the suppression of urine, considered in some of the descriptions to be found in the pamphlet issued by the Board of Health, as so characteristic of the "Indian" cholera; and this, too, under a "constitution of the atmosphere" so remarkably disposed to favour the production of cholera of one kind or other, that Dr. Gooch, were he alive, or any close reasoner like him, must be satisfied, that were this remarkable form ...
— Letters on the Cholera Morbus. • James Gillkrest |
