"Fluent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, 10 The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at the last ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... is not easy to say what a panegyrist of that period intended by 'a complete knowledge of Greek,' or 'fluent Greek writing,' in a Prince. I suspect, however, that we ought not to understand by these phrases anything like a real familiarity with Greek literature, but rather such superficial knowledge as would enable a reader of Latin books to understand allusions and quotations. Poliziano, it may be remarked, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... ex-tempore in Parliament he muffed the subject, forgot his theme, and sat down in confusion. With all his incisive thought and fine command of language, Addison could not think on his feet. And as if aware of his limitations, in one of the "Spectator" essays he said, with more or less truth, "The fluent orator, ready to speak on any topic, is never profound, and when once his thought is cold it will seldom repay examination—it was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... know all yet. Lately I've been alone with him a great deal, and you know how you talk about yourselves in those circumstances. I had told him everything I had ever done and thought—most; had turned myself inside out. Then I made him talk. Up to a certain point he was fluent enough; then he shut up like a clam. I never was very curious about men; but because he was all mine, or perhaps because I didn't have anything else to think about, I made up my mind he should come to confession. He fought me off, but you know I have a way of ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... officer, gallant soldier, and loyal and kind to his men. He was a man of brilliant attainments and one of the most gifted and fluent speakers in ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... many strange incidents and feelings, and then turning for consolation in his perplexities to the enchanting vision on which he still could gaze. Nor was Miss Temple either in her usually sparkling vein; her liveliness seemed an effort; she was more constrained, she was less fluent than before. Ferdinand, indeed, rose more than once to depart; yet still he remained. He lost his cap; he looked for his cap; and then again seated himself. Again he rose, restless and disquieted, wandered about the room, looked at a picture, plucked a flower, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... the "Born Thrall," published in The Revolution, gave evidence of thought, experience, and deep feeling. The songs of the sisters have a new sweet sadness, now that Alice is singing hers on the other side of the river of life. Grace Greenwood has done good service with her fluent pen and voice through the press and on the platform. Mary L. Booth, with her rich culture and her unsurpassed practical ability, her skill as a translator of Martin's great History of France, and numberless other works, has given aid to the cause with her pen, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... as in strategy he took the advice of Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, so too in political matters he employed the talents of Galerius Trachalus.[200] Some people even thought they could recognize Trachalus' style of oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... seemed to lie deep in them like a monster coiled up under the sea. When he looked at her he seemed to lose that heavy dumbness, that inarticulate stupidity which occasionally stirred and vexed even her good disposition; his mouth might still be shut, but his eyes were fluent—they told her not only of his manhood but of her ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... worked round a deep centre, and was privy to the plan of the universe. So is the least part of nature in its bearings referred to all space. These lesser mountain ranges, as well as the Alleghanies, run from northeast to southwest, and parallel with these mountain streams are the more fluent rivers, answering to the general direction of the coast, the bank of the great ocean stream itself. Even the clouds, with their thin bars, fall into the same direction by preference, and such even is the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Mr. Davidson, which I can not entirely commend. It is fluent, to be sure, but it lacks variety. A true artist would have interspersed those finer shades and gradations of meaning which go to express the numerous and clashing emotions which must necessarily agitate your venerable ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... is first-hand. In the woods, one day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or less unsatisfactory. "Ye-es," droned Phelps: "I never could see much speckerlation in that expression the Trinity. Why, they'd a good deal ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... final consonant evaded after the Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives working and the roads passable. Without Stanislao and the convicts, I am in doubt ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... election to the Senate. His training and culture are far beyond that ordinarily implied by the possession of a college diploma. His mind has been enriched by the study of books and disciplined by controversy at the Bar and in the Senate. As a speaker he is fluent and eloquent, but perhaps too much given to severity of expression. He possesses in marked degree the dangerous power of sarcasm, and in any discussion which borders upon personal issues Mr. Ingalls ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... to aid in quickly acquiring the power of correct and fluent speaking of the German language this work has no equal."—Scientific American, Nov. 11, 1893, ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 23, June 9, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... some things, however, in this work which we could have wished somewhat different from what they are. Mr. Parton's fluent and forcible style sometimes degenerates into flippancy. We could cite many instances of felicitous expression, some, also, of bad taste, and some of hasty assertion. "Clubable" is hardly a good enough word to bear frequent repetition. "This question was a complete baffler" is too much like slang ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... admiring. The signorino's thin white hands made a delicate, fluent melody, reminding her of running water under the rippled shade of trees, and, like a high, sweet bird, the thin, penetrating notes of the singer rose, swelled, and died away, admirably true and just even in this latter ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... he in his vile but fluent French, "I beg you to dismiss your fears. Aboard this ship you shall be treated with all honour. So soon as we are in case to put to sea again, we steer a course for Tortuga to take you home to your father. And pray do not consider that I have bought you, as your brother has just said. All that I ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... armorial equipage, wherein Dozed dowagers: on unbonneted dames In open chariots, toying daintily With dark hidalgos, as they sipped the scene In languishing contentment, and between Responsive glances, showing hidden fire, With fluent breath of Spanish repartee. There lounged senoras, fat officials' wives, From their soft cushions casting cool disdain On the mestiza, who, in hired hack, Blooming in beauty of commingled blood, And robed in slippery tissue, rainbow-bright, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... believers count by millions, and include many more eminent men than her infallible psychic societies, the lady has permission to withdraw the charge, for it is obviously only the lapsus linguae of a too fluent tongue. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... remarkably well, would say haive, and shaul (for shall), when she sung her hymns. But it was not so well in reading lectures at the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was not so fluent; and on political and religious matters he tried hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspicions of his leaning to his native side in politics; and daring Bonaparte's triumph, he could not contain his enthusiasm ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... women, and one of them was dressed as a nun. Quite by accident I saw her face. It was that of a beautiful girl. I observed she kept aloof from the others. I suspected a disguise, and, when opportunity afforded, spoke to her, offered my services. She replied to my poor efforts at Spanish in fluent English. She had fled in terror from her home, some place down in Sinaloa. Rebels are active there. Her father was captured and held for ransom. When the ransom was paid the rebels killed him. The leader of these rebels ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... spoken of his favourites, let me also speak of his dislikes; Racine, whom he cannot bear; Molire, whom he does not really like; Buffon, whom he frankly detests for his too fluent prose, his ostentatious style, and his vain rhetoric. The only naturalist whom he might really have delighted in, had he possessed his works and been able to read them at leisure, is Audubon, the enthusiastic painter of the birds of America. In him he felt the presence of a mind and a temper almost ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... pleasure to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that made the journey across the desert ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... I am certain the Hermanns knew what they wanted when they bought the whole point and perched their house on the very top of the hill, where all the winds of heaven might visit it as roughly as they pleased, but where nothing could rob the outlook of its ever-changing splendor and mystery, its fluent wonder and ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of this city ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... two measures of the cheapest wine and a loaf of bread. Here they sat for some time, listening to the conversation of the peasants who frequented the wine shop. Sometimes a question was asked of the wayfarers. Gerald replied, for his companion's Spanish although fluent was not good enough to pass as that of a native. He replied to the question as to where they had received their hurts that they were survivors of the Armada, and grumbled that it was hard indeed that men who had fought in the Netherlands ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... purpose of extorting money from the passengers, which he regularly spent every night in the wine-shops of Badajoz. To those who gave him money he returned blessings, and to those who refused, curses; being equally skilled and fluent in the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... his hand. Instead of accepting the proffered assistance as she had done when they descended, Helen apparently failed to notice the hand, and the homeward journey was not pleasant to either of them. Helen did not parade her displeasure, but Geoffrey was sensible of it, and, never being a fluent speaker upon casual subjects, he was not successful in his conversational efforts. When at last they reached the villa, he shook his shoulders disgustedly as he recalled some of ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... no decorous person can read with comfort in a railway carriage. These ladies have the keenest eye for the obvious humours of Irish life, they have abundance of animal spirits, and they have that knack at fluent description embroidered with a wealth of picturesque details that is shared by hundreds of peasants in Ireland, but is very rare indeed on the printed page. And, mingling with the broad farce there is a deal of excellent comedy—for instance, in the person of old Mrs. ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... of these nations are reflected also in their methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily understood; each writer constructs ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... my old friend, the beech-tree, all along the route. His bole wore the same gray and patched appearance it does at home, and no doubt Thoreau would have found his instep even fairer; for the beech on this side of the Atlantic is a more fluent and graceful tree than the American species, resembling, in its branchings and general form, our elm, though never developing such an immense green dome as our elm when standing alone, and I saw no European tree that does. The European elm is ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... deal of fluent talk, and much dexterous handling of the cards, in a way that seemed clear enough to everybody, and that showed that everybody's guess was right as to the place of the ace, the near-sighted gentleman, who had drunk with Norman, ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... accompany him, or—stay and tend store. We accepted the latter proposition, as we were in no travelling kelter, and had no taste for performances on the tight rope. Having officiated for Captain V—— on several former occasions, we had the run of his "grocery" and postal arrangements quite fluent enough to take charge of all the trade likely to turn up that day; so the captain and his friends started, promising a return ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... leaders, Morris?" asked one of the listeners, as the speaker, a fluent, energetic young man, closed his recital of the atrocities he had witnessed. "Did they escape, or are they ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... who had seen many changes, And always changed as true as any needle; His polar star being one which rather ranges, And not the fix'd—he knew the way to wheedle: So vile he 'scaped the doom which oft avenges; And being fluent (save indeed when fee'd ill), He lied with such a fervour of intention— There was no doubt he earn'd ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... 1533 joined the Anabaptist movement under Johann Matthysz (Matthyszoon), baker of Haarlem. He had little education, but some literary faculty, and had written plays. On the 13th of January 1534 he appeared in Muenster as an apostle of Matthysz. Good-looking and fluent, he fascinated women, and won the confidence of Bernard Knipperdollinck, a revolutionary cloth merchant, who gave him his daughter in marriage. The Muenster Anabaptists took up arms on the 9th of February 1534 (see ANABAPTISTS). On the death of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... you no," Nichols was saying in a fluent, abominable, literal translation into Spanish. "Take the knife so... thumb upwards. Stab down in the soft between the neck and the shoulder-blade. You get right into the lungs with the point. I've tried it: ten times. Never stick the back. The chances are he moves, and you ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Wendell Phillips and George William Curtis, or Anna Dickinson and Phoebe W. Couzins. John Bright is without a peer among his countrymen, as are Mrs. Bessant and Miss Helen Taylor among the women. Miss Tod, from Belfast, is a good speaker. The women, as a general thing, are more fluent than the men; those of the Bright family in all its branches have deep, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... three times with unabated zest. I solaced myself by thinking that it would be useful for me to find out what I could about Strickland's state of mind. It also interested me much more. But this was not an easy thing to do, for Strickland was not a fluent talker. He seemed to express himself with difficulty, as though words were not the medium with which his mind worked; and you had to guess the intentions of his soul by hackneyed phrases, slang, and vague, unfinished gestures. But ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... mechanically) employed, while the individual is at the same time called on to exercise his powers of speech and hearing on something else, this faculty of extemporaneous speaking is cultivated, and rendered more easy and fluent. Whereas, on the contrary, the most extensive acquaintance with words, even when combined with much knowledge, has but little influence in making a ready speaker. Many of the most voluble of our species have but a very scanty vocabulary, and still less knowledge; ...
— A Practical Enquiry into the Philosophy of Education • James Gall
... honour it had been all arranged; and she called up Philip Sidney for especial thanks, and, tapping him on the shoulder, bid him repair to the banqueting-hall and discourse some sweet music on his mandoline, and converse with the French Ambassadors. For, she said, speaking herself in fluent and excellent French,— ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall
... the conversation at table happening to turn, as it often turned, upon St. Sebald's Church, a young Frenchman, who was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound. In the midst of this triumphant exposition the irritated vanity of the Frenchman could do nothing ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... theme was myself. In five minutes Walt had pumped me dry. He did it in his quiet, sympathetic way, and, with the egoism of my age, I was not averse from relating to him the adventures of my soul. That Walt was a fluent talker one need but read his memoirs by Horace Traubel. Witness his tart allusion to Swinburne's criticism of himself: "Isn't he the damnedest simulacrum?" But he was a sphinx the first time I met him. I do recall that he said Poe wrote too much in a dark cellar, and that music was his ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... Havillan, our Book would be thought to be imperfect, so terse and fluent was his Verse, of which we shall give you two Examples, the one out of Mr. John Speed his Description of Devonshire, speaking of the ...
— The Lives of the Most Famous English Poets (1687) • William Winstanley
... adopted son of Pliny the Elder. He was a voluminous correspondent. We have nine books of his letters, relating to a large number of subjects, and presenting vivid pictures of the times in which he lived. Their diction is fluent and smooth. ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... he resigned himself to a long, tedious hour. The room was hot and airless, the lawyer very prosy and unnecessarily fluent; but he seemed a straightforward, honest man, and gave them good counsel. Malcolm was soon put into possession of all the Strickland bequest, and after this it was all ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... brown or black. The pattern need by no means be elaborate. A wreath of ivy simply out-lined in sepia or india-ink, or a group of figures sketched with the same, produces a very pleasing and harmonious effect. "Prout's Brown," a sort of fluent ink of a burnt-umber tint, will be found excellent for drawing purposes. For designs, our own ST. NICHOLAS will furnish excellent examples. Scarcely a number but holds something which a clever artist can adapt ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... felt it a part of his duty to console and soothe the ruffled feelings of his zealous and fluent parishioner, and to Virginia's pride his offer of escort to Willow Bluff was ample reparation for the untoward interruption of her oratory. She delivered into his hands, with sensitive upward glance, the receptacle containing her manuscript, and set a brisk pace, at which she insured the passing ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... science, not from what it really is in itself, but from some of those miserable treatises which only caricature the subject, and of which it is rather an advantage to be ignorant. But who is so destitute of good sense as to deny, that a graceful and easy conversation in the private circle, a fluent and agreeable delivery in public speaking, a ready and natural utterance in reading, a pure and elegant style in composition, are accomplishments of a very high order? And yet of all these, the proper study of English ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in Our Fighting Services (Cassell), begins with the Battle of Hastings and ends with the Boer War there is no gainsaying the fact that his net has been widely spread. To assist him in the compilation of this immense tome the author has a fluent style and—to judge from the authorities consulted and the results of these consultations—an inexhaustible industry. The one should make his book acceptable to the amateur who reads history because he happens to love it, and the other should make it invaluable to professionals who handle books ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol 150, February 9, 1916 • Various
... arm round her, and pressed her close. Then he plunged into fluent talk about the afternoon's events, and his accepted offer of service, till Mrs Elton, resplendent in flame-coloured ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... realised by the archdeacon's speech, which went round in a circle, as if he could not find his way out of it. Lord Cosham was fluent, but a great many words went to very small substance; and no wonder, thought Ethel, when all they had to propose and second was the obvious fact that missions were very ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... 'Copious indeed, Drances, and fluent is ever thy speech at the moment war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, and the trenches ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... the road, and an extra allowance for expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. He thus describes his feelings: "It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-House, and, the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion of the mail soon laid me asleep. It is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... effectually determine during the progress of the debate just what arguments are preferable and what their arrangement should be. A debater must also have some ability as a speaker. He need not be graceful or especially fluent, though these accomplishments are of service, but he must be forceful. Not only his words, but also his manner must reveal the earnestness and enthusiasm he feels. His argument, clear, irrefutable, and to the point, should go forth in simple, burning words that enter into ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... the nakedness, some of the sheerness of contour, toward which the modern men aspire. In the most recent years there has evidenced itself a decided reaction from the vaporous and fluent contours of the musical impressionists, from the style of "Pelleas et Melisande" in particular. Men as disparate as Schoenberg and Magnard and Igor Strawinsky have been seeking, in their own fashion, the one through a sort of mathematical harshness, the second ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... glowing eyes fixed on the ground, tracing lines and circles on the pavement with the stick he held in his hand, while the excited old man, his uncle, urgently addressed Apollodorus in a vehement but fluent torrent of words. Apollodorus, however, shook his head from time to time at his speech and frequently met ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... your Miss Whitney," he said slowly. His English was not fluent "But she has not the tact of her pretty mother. She would never have shown her avoidance of Captain Miller quite so plainly as ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... sages may reason, the fluent may talk, But they ne'er can compute what we owe to the chalk. From the embryo mind of the infant of four, To the graduate, wise in collegiate lore; From the old district school-house to Harvard's proud hall, The chalk rules ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile ignoramus, and himself as ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... comes the ghost and prowling about espies the heap of yams and taro. At sight of the devastation wrought in his field he flies into a passion, and curses and swears in the feeble wheezy whisper in which ghosts always speak. In the course of his fluent imprecations he expresses a wish that the miscreants who have wasted his substance may suffer so and so at the hands of the sorcerer. That is just what the men in hiding have been waiting for. No sooner ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... and with some honour. During his course he had managed to read an amazing amount of English literature, and no man was readier or had a keener taste in such things than he. He had a pleasing personal appearance, a fluent and persuasive manner, an unblemished character. Every morning he came to his office from one of the most pleasant little cottage homes in the world; and if you had opened the little front gate, and gone up through the shrubbery ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... the captain could speak, turned to the silent Commander, addressed him in a dozen phrases of fluent and courteous Spanish, and once more ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... gathered round him in a circle, and he held forth. It would be no easy matter to describe a discourse which lasted a couple of hours, or indeed to say very precisely what it was about. It was a rambling, desultory reference to his travels and adventures in fluent and sometimes eloquent language, and not without an occasional dash of humour and drollery. He illustrated the truth of the Scriptures by examples drawn from his personal observation and the habits, expressions, and belief ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... languages was very great, and when in the south of France, rambling daily over the pretty property he possessed at Hyeres, I used to be amazed at the fluent way in which he talked with the workmen; whether it was the carpenter, the plasterer, mason, or gardener, he talked with each in the terms of their respective occupations and trades, quite unhesitatingly. Provencal talk is certainly puzzling, but he seemed as if born to it; and ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... I have seen face to face once or twice. She is very clever—very accomplished—with talents and tastes of various kinds—a musician and linguist, in most modern languages I believe—and a writer of fluent graceful melodious verses, ... you cannot say any more. At least I cannot—and though I have not seen this last poem in the 'Book of Beauty,' I have no more trust ready for it than for its predecessors, of which Mr. Landor said as much. It is the personal feeling which speaks in him, ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... no artificial, pompous display, but a strict parsimony of the poet's materials, like the rude simplicity of the age in which he lived. His poetry resembles the root just springing from the ground, rather than the full-blown flower. His muse is no "babbling gossip of the air," fluent and redundant; but, like a stammerer, or a dumb person, that has just found the use of speech, crowds many things together with eager haste, with anxious pauses, and fond repetitions to prevent mistake. His words point as an index to the objects, like the eye or finger. There were none of the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... daughter; and the former seeing how entranced we were with each other's company, like a prudent parent, left us to ourselves. My French was much purer and more grammatical than hers, hers much more fluent than mine. Yet, notwithstanding this deficiency on both sides, we understood each other perfectly, and we had not been above two hours together alone, before I told her that I loved her for her very ignorance, and she had confessed to me that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... Beth discovered a line of carriages drawn up back of the station. The drivers were mostly asleep inside them, although several stood in a group arguing in fluent Italian the grave question as to whether Signora Gani's cow had a black patch over its left shoulder, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... the village tailor, is taken in our part of the country by the hemp-dresser and the wool-carder, two professions which are unusually combined in one. He is present at all ceremonies, sad or gay, for he is very learned and a fluent talker, and on these occasions he must always figure as spokesman, in order to fulfil with exactitude certain formalities used from time immemorial. Traveling occupations, which bring a man into the midst of other families, without allowing ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... the papal bull announcing his canonization, the claim is distinctly set forth of his possession of miraculous power. He is represented as having raised a Japanese girl from the dead; as possessing the gift of tongues, that is, as being able to speak in fluent Japanese, although he had not learned the language; as having given an answer which when heard was a satisfactory reply to the most various and different questions,(148) such as, "the immortality of the soul, the motions of the heavens, the eclipses of the sun and moon, the colors of the rainbow, ...
— Japan • David Murray
... which possessed the English ministry upon learning how Massachusetts had parried the attack made upon her liberties, some immediate victim was indispensable; and as Franklin was there present, they fell upon him. A fluent and foul-mouthed young barrister, Alexander Wedderburn by name, had by corrupt influence secured the post of solicitor-general; and he made use of the occasion of Franklin's submitting the petition for the removal of Hutchinson and Oliver, to make a personal attack ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... of them had a working knowledge of English; their captain spoke it with fluent inaccuracy; and before any of them had gone aft to Kettle, who stood at the wheel, they heard the whole story of the ship being found derelict, and (very naturally) were anxious enough by some means or another to finger a share of the salvage. Even a ragged Portuguese baccalhao ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... of a Poet is a rare genius. And most happily it is so; for elevated taste and high-toned morality are not, by any means, the common heritage of man. Anacreon and Burns were genuine Poets. They uttered, in fine style, many truths; and were not merely fluent in their respective languages, but affluent. But, perhaps, like some other men of mighty parts and grand proportions, better for mankind they had never been born. A Cowper and a Byron, in their whole career of song, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of the boy's hands and ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin and Smith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally, emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy in fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And the Turkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praise from Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to all who came into contact with him, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... put it all behind him. Kenny, frantic with tenderness and resolution, could sweep him credulously back into bondage if he kept to the siege. His promises were fluent always and alluring. Only by the courage of utter separation could Brian make his longed for ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... of independence. Bolivar was alert, dauntless, brilliant, impetuous, vehemently patriotic, and yet often capricious, domineering, vain, ostentatious, and disdainful of moral considerations—a masterful man, fertile in intellect, fluent in speech and with pen, an inspiring leader and one born to command in state and army. Quite as earnest, equally courageous, and upholding in private life a higher standard of morals, San Martin was relatively calm, cautious, almost taciturn in manner, and slower ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... us to consult five minutes among ourselves. He withdrew; and the fluent agent remarked the sum was a trifle: but, trifling as it was, he had no doubt but feelings of delicacy and honor would dictate that it ought to be jointly paid, by ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... words I knew; turned, returned, and arranged them, so as to enable me to express my thoughts through their medium. I know nearly one thousand words, which is all that is absolutely necessary, although I believe there are nearly one hundred thousand in the dictionaries. I cannot hope to be very fluent, but I certainly should have no difficulty in explaining my wants and wishes; and that would be quite as much as I should ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... public duties, Hamilton was actively employed in his profession in the higher courts of the State. The late Chancellor Kent afterward recalled his "clear, elegant, and fluent style and commanding manner. He never made any argument in court without displaying his habit of thinking and resorting at once to some well-founded principle of law, and drawing his deductions logically from his premises. Law was always treated by him as a science, founded on established ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... of history. So sensitive, physically, that he had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses of the people against the wealth, the ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... to address the crowd, albeit—acting on my father's hint—in more moderate tones, and even, as I thought, somewhat tepidly. Her theme was what she called convictions of sin, of which by her own account she had wrestled with a surprising quantity; but in the rehearsal of them, though fluent, she seemed to lose heart as her ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... two days were passed he could not go down the village street without lifting his cap at least a dozen times. Bourcelles was so very friendly; no room for strangers there; a new-comer might remain a mystery, but he could not be unknown. Rogers found his halting French becoming rapidly fluent again. And every one knew so much about him—more almost ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... Every generation, every country, has its Catulle Mendes. Robert Buchanan is ours, only in the adaptation Scotch gruel has been substituted for perfumed white wine. No more delightful talker than Mendes, no more accomplished litterateur, no more fluent and translucid critic. I remember the great moonlights of the Place Pigale, when, on leaving the cafe, he would take me by the arm, and expound Hugo's or Zola's last book, thinking as he spoke of the Greek sophists. There were for contrast ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... whom the Doctor engaged as housekeeper, was the youngest daughter of an honest shoemaker, who formerly flourished at Belfield Green, where he was noted for industry, a fondness for reading, a tenacious memory, a ready wit, and a fluent tongue. In politics he was a radical, and in religion a schismatic. The little knot of Presbyterian Federalist magnates, who used to assemble at the tavern to discuss affairs of church and state over mugs of flip and tumblers of sling, regarded him with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... response. He kicked the instrument over and danced round it impotently. Littimer had never seen him in such a raging fury before. The language of the man was an outrage, filthy, revolting, profane. No yelling, drunken Hooligan could have been more fluent, more ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old Japanese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow basso. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the face. An ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... wide, which effectually put a stop to all further fishing operations on the part of Goliath and his merry men for that day, at any rate. It was all so quiet, and so tame and so stupid, no wonder Mistah Jones felt savage. When Captain Slocum's fluent profanity flickered around him, including vehemently all he might be supposed to have any respect for, he did not even LOOK as if he would like to talk back; he only looked sick ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties would issue a father's curse, an orphan's ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... parents, kind and loving souls, could read and write, and the children were happy, obedient and respectful. To be sure, it would have been very hard for the best schoolmaster of the county to parse some of Mrs. Danby's fluent sentences, or to read at a glance Mr. Danby's remarkable penmanship. But that same learned instructor would have delighted in the cleverness of the sons and daughters, had he been so fortunate as to direct their studies. True, the poor little ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... harmonizing the basic continuity of the Post's attitude, and minimizing the change in present angle or point of view. His fertile mind played about it, strengthening it, building it up, polishing and perfecting; and in time he began to write, at first slowly, but soon with fluent ease. ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... fluent for one of his color—too fluent the other man felt. Ambrose was sizing him up ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... before 1730 appears in volume two (1711) of a three-volume translation of Boileau's works. This, however, is not the same translation as the one accompanying Harte's Essay; it is noticeably less fluent and lacks (as does the French) the ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... that day, Peter and myself sat alone beneath the oak. We fell into conversation; Peter was at first melancholy, but he soon became more cheerful, fluent and entertaining. I spoke but little, but I observed that sometimes what I said surprised the good Methodist. We had been silent some time. At length, lifting up my eyes to the broad and leafy canopy of the trees, I said, having nothing better to remark, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... swords and gold lace, I maintained my innocence and heard Jack Herriott, on his opportune arrival, pour forth in weird, but fluent, Italian an account of me that must have surrounded me in the eyes of all present with a golden halo, and that firmly established me in their minds as the probable next President of the United States. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... fluent Tattle, thou hast Tongue Enough to talk an Oyster-Woman deaf: I say it cannot be. —What means the panting of my troubled Heart! Oh, my presaging Fears! shou'd what she says prove true, How wretched and how lost a thing ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... like a magnet. He had not begun to think of giving up the search. Discouragement, failure, mutiny, were to him but incidents. The silver was there, somewhere, and have it he would, if perseverance would avail. From Jamaica he sailed to Hispaniola. There his fluent persuasiveness came again into play. He met a very old man, Spaniard or Portuguese, who was said to know where the ship lay, and "by the policy of his address" wormed from him some further information about ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Matthew Adams. He invited him to his library and loaned him books. The lad's Uncle Benjamin, in England, who was very fond of composing rhymes which he called poetry, sent many of his effusions to his favorite nephew, and opened quite a brisk correspondence with him. Thus Benjamin soon became a fluent rhymester, and wrote sundry ballads which were sold in the streets and became quite popular. There was a great demand at that time for narratives of the exploits of pirates, the doom of murderers, and wild love adventures. It is said ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... come to that period of wo, let me say one word on the temper of mind which so fluent and serene a current of prosperity may be thought to have generated. Too common a course I know it is, when the stream of life flows with absolute tranquillity, and ruffled by no menace of a breeze—the azure overhead never dimmed by a passing ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... intensely Irish, it was not the gorilla-like countenance so common in the Irish peasant- priest—the priest one sees every day in the streets of Dublin. He was, perhaps, of a better class, as his features were all good. A heavy man as well as a big one, he was not so amusing and so fluent a talker out of school as his predecessor, nor, as we were delighted to discover, so exacting and tyrannical in school. On the contrary, in and out of school he was always the same, mild and placid in temper, with a gentle sort of humour, and he was also very absent-minded. He would forget all ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... whose ducal father made his money by inventing a fluent pill, or who gained his great wealth through relieving humanity by means of a lung pad, a liver pad, a kidney pad or a foot pad, fox-hunting ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... what better can prevail, Or from the fluent tongue produce the tale, Than when two friends, alone, in peaceful place Confer, and wines and cates the table grace; But most, the kind inviter's cheerful face? Thus might we sit, with social goblets crown'd, Till the whole circle of the year goes round: Not the whole circle of ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... write out. Strictly nautical terms and phrases I have sought to avoid: first, because I believed them of no great interest to the general reader; second, because, with this my first sea-trip, I have not become adept enough in their use to "swing" them with the fluent grace of your true-going, irresistible old salt; and from any other source they are, ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... of the people which his class are studying. He is aware that the pupil should experience something more than a kaleidoscopic view of isolated facts. He recognizes the folly of requiring four years of high school English for the purpose of cultivating clear, fluent, and accurate expression, only to relax the effort when the student comes into the history class. He knows that the precision, logic, and habit of definite thinking exacted by the pursuit of the scientific ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... that the one or two eye-witnesses of this scene, such as Mrs. Uniacke and Charles Langholm, who saw that it had a serious meaning, without dreaming what that meaning was, were each in hopes that no one else had seen as much as they. Sir Baldwin plunged at once into amiable and fluent conversation, and before many moments Rachel's replies were infected with an approximate assurance and ease; then Langholm turned to his juvenile companion, and put a question in the form of ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... few words on a subject on which all men are supposed to be fluent, and none agreeable?—Self. I have written much, and published more than enough to demand a longer silence than I now meditate; but, for some years to come, it is my intention to tempt no further the award of "Gods, men, nor columns." In the present composition ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... suffered from an over-fluent tongue rather than a resolute will, was determined to make himself heard. He addressed the driver again. Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... Paradise Lost by heart, and thought it probable that he could rewrite Sir Charles Grandison from memory. In his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation—for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a stretch—he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and passages quoted ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... exaggerated reputation for some little while, but had already begun to be forgotten, and in a private room up two pair of stairs, the three companions made a very elegant supper, and drank three or four bottles of champagne, talking the while upon indifferent subjects. The young man was fluent and gay, but he laughed louder than was natural in a person of polite breeding; his hands trembled violently, and his voice took sudden and surprising inflections, which seemed to be independent of his will. The dessert had been cleared away, and all three had ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... no words for that first moment, the fluent Carter. He could only hold both her hands and look ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... a prolonged repetition of precisely the same stimulus or the same set of stimuli may make responses dissatisfying to the degree of pain. Ideal activity, biologically, would be one where every impulse was just sufficiently frequently called upon to make response easy, fluent, and satisfactory. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... her lip curled, but she still kept silence. Hugo thought that her eye rested with some complacency upon the silver beads; but she did not express a tithe of the pleasure and surprise which flowed so readily from Mrs. Heron's fluent tongue. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... has long been a desideratum. This river, although in common seasons fordable, and in dry seasons scarcely fluent, is liable, after heavy falls of rain in the mountains, to rise suddenly to a great height, and cut off the communication between the public buildings on the one side, and the peopled suburbs and great road from Sydney on the other. The country beyond the Macquarie affords excellent sheep-pasturage, ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... de Leon should have been guilty of occasional lapses. He is said to have been impetuous as well as vindictive;[121] he had the dangerous gift of pulpit eloquence[122] and may have acquired the trick of saying rather more than he meant. His evidence against Luis de Leon, though fluent and clear, is not what we should expect from a man of talent, who recognized the gravity of the charges against the prisoner. His testimony, such as it is, has less intellectual substance than the testimony of Castro and Medina; it turns mainly on petty personal questions or ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... "great man," was the titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll, had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the author of Pasquin, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the "Colossos," with "its Brains of Lead, its Face of ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... secret embarrassment in the smile, a constraint in the manner, a care, an effort to be gracious in the language, a caution, a rounding of the periods, a recurrence to technical phrases of compliment and amity, a want of the free fluent language of the heart; language which, as it flows, whether from sovereign or subject, leaves a trace that the art of courtier or of monarch cannot imitate. In all attempts at such imitation, there is a want, of which vanity ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... educated people, I found that the Russian I had picked up by Kamchatkan camp-fires and in Cossack izbas on the coast of the Okhotsk Sea resembled, in many respects, the English that a Russian would acquire in a Colorado mining camp, or among the cowboys in Montana. It was fluent, but, as General Kukel said, "quaint—bizarre," and, at times, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... at temperance meetings. A few years ago, when this question was first agitated in Canada, a meeting was held in a school-house on the English line, in the township of Dummer. The lecturer, on that occasion, was an itinerant preacher of the Methodist persuasion. After descanting some time in a very fluent manner, on the evils arising from intemperance, and the great numbers who had lost their lives by violent means, "for my part," said the lecturer, "I have known nearly three hundred cases of ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... and majestic of presence, with large quadrangular face, austere, blue eyes looking authority and command, a vast forehead, and a grizzled beard. Of fluent and convincing eloquence with tongue and pen, having the power of saying much in few words, he cared much more for the substance than the graces of speech or composition. This tendency was not ill exemplified in a note of his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... whose parents were alive and at hand and in a good position, and my father's name stifled scandal. Most of the others were orphans, being cheaply educated by distant relatives or guardians, or else the sons of poor widows who were easily bamboozled by Snuffy's fluent letters, and the religious leaflets which it was his custom to enclose. (In several of these cases, he was "managing" the poor women's "affairs" for them.) One or two boys belonged to people living abroad. Indeed, the worst bully in the school was a half-caste, whose ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those in Dauber. Had Mr. Noyes written Drake without the songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the Songs, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is past," could have been written only by a poet. In Forty Singing Seamen there is displayed an imagination quite superior ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... should it be given to all the fellows I know to be in the thick of real fighting—a life which anyone should be proud to live—while to me, aged twenty, standing six feet, about forty inches round the chest, Rugby footballer, swimmer, fluent French speaker, and Balliol scholar, it is given to load up rations? Loathing this Supply work, I have already applied for a transfer to the Horse Transport Section. Oh! that I had only obeyed the dictates of my own conscience and enlisted in the H.A.C. at the start of the war, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... I was already surfeited with the angelic metropolis, and my thoughts began to turn in the direction of Manfredonia once more. At a corner of the street, however, certain fluent vociferations in English and Italian, which nothing would induce me to set down here, assailed my ears, coming up—apparently—out of the bowels of the earth. I stopped to listen, shocked to hear ribald language in a holy town like this; then, impelled by curiosity, descended a long flight ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the correlative of that in Greek clay, in Greek marble, as you walk through the British Museum. But observe it, above all, at work, checking yet reinforcing his naturally fluent and luxuriant genius, in Plato himself. His prose is a practical illustration of the value of that capacity for correction, of the effort, the intellectual astringency, which he demands of the poet also, the musician, of all true citizens of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... within the player himself that sets the vibrato current in motion. It is an inner, psychic vibration which should be reflected by the intense, rapid vibration in the fingers of the left hand on the strings in order to give fluent expression to emotion. The vibrato can not be used, naturally, on the open strings, but otherwise it represents the true means for securing warmth of expression. Of course, some decry the vibrato—but the reason is often because the vibrato is too slow. One need only listen to Ysaye, ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... the sky, then shifted to its upper end, a jagged point reaching to the hills. He had heard of it on the ranches where he had been picking fruit—"It's easy traveling till you reach the tules, but it's some pull round them." He gauged the distance round the point, and oaths, picturesque and fluent, came from him. He had sixteen dollars in the lining of his coat, and for days as he tramped and worked, he saw this hoard expended in San Francisco—a bath, clean linen, and a dinner, a dinner in a rotisserie with ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... that she would suffer in no kind of way, that we must use her school for a week or so and that any loss or damage that she incurred would of course be made up to her. She was then, of a sudden, immensely fluent, explaining that her husband—"a most excellent husband to me in every way one might say"—had been dead fifteen years now, that her two sons were both fighting for the Austrians, that she looked after the school assisted by her ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... hard, secret as a wall, wrinkled as an old banner. He was a hale, thick-set man, dressed in breeches of corduroy, and a sleeved waistcoat down to his knees of the same material. His fur cap was on the carpet beside his pack; and he had a fluent tongue in praise of his wares, as he hung his silks over Lettice's outstretched arm, or arranged the ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... I was kept waiting, then a fluent waiter appeared to recommend the most desirable dishes of the day. His eloquence was in full tide, when a man paused before the entrance of my arbor, hesitated, and went ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... things, which, when we did them, we thought remarkably good, and much better than the doings of ordinary men, we now discern, on calmly looking back, to have been extremely bad. That time, you know, my friend, when you talked in a very fluent and animated manner after dinner at a certain house, and thought you were making a great impression on the assembled guests, most of them entire strangers, you are now fully aware that you were only making a fool of yourself. And let this hint of one public manifestation of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... glad growing grass!- I climb the air with lissome mien; Unsheathing keen The vivid sheen Of springing green, I thrill the crude, exalt the crass Fine-flex'd and fluent from Earth's mass. ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... Thomas's first and firmest conviction is that he is a profound Orientalist and a fluent speaker of Hindustani. As a matter of fact, he depends largely ...
— Verses 1889-1896 • Rudyard Kipling
... upon and every whit as reckless in their horsemanship, rode Dade and Jack. If their hearts were not as light, their faces gave no sign; and their tongues flung back the good-humored jibes of their fellows in Spanish as fluent ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... ring Seen, from behind, round a conjuror Doing his pitch in the street. High shoulders, low shoulders, broad shoulders, narrow ones, Round, square, and angular, serry and shove; While from within a voice, Gravely and weightily fluent, Sounds; and then ceases; and suddenly (Look at the stress of the shoulders!) Out of a quiver of silence, Over the hiss of the spray, Comes a low cry, and the sound Of breath quick intaken through teeth Clenched in resolve. ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... the Wallencamp youth was not yet prepared for the introduction of new and advanced methods, I examined my pupils preparatory to giving them lessons and arranging them in classes, in the ordinary way. I found that they could not read, but they could write in a truly fluent and unconventional style; they could not commit prosaical facts to memory, but they could sing songs containing any number of irrelevant stanzas. They could not "cipher," but they had witty and salient ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... relieving agitation of his backward heels. I make out that it had decidedly been given to Mlle. Delavigne to represent to my first perception personal France; she was, besides not being at all pink or shy, oval and fluent and mistress somehow of the step—the step of levity that involved a whisk of her short skirts; there she was, to the life, on the page of Gavarni, attesting its reality, and there again did that page in return (I speak not ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... fourth personage to appear. She was badly dressed in black, wore a tam-o'-shanter with a huge black-headed pin thrust through it, clung to a bag, smiled with amiable patronage as she emerged, and at once, without reason, began to address Amedeo and the porters in fluent, incorrect, and too carefully pronounced Italian. Amedeo knew her—the Tabby who haunts Swiss and Italian hotels, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... sheer lack of the habit of self-expression. Nor is the Englishman deliberately hypocritical; but his tenacity, combined with his powerlessness to express his feelings, often gives him the appearance of a hypocrite. He is inarticulate, has not the clear and fluent cynicism of expansive natures wherewith to confess exactly how he stands. It is the habit of men of all nations to want to have things both ways; the Englishman is unfortunately so unable to express himself, even to himself, that he has never realized this truth, much ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... insisted that never, either in single conflict or when receiving the assault of the senatorial leaders of a whole party, had he been discomfited. His style was bold, vigorous, and aggressive; at times even defiant. He was ready, fluent, fertile in resources, familiar with national and party history, severe in denunciation, and he handled with skill nearly all the weapons of debate. His iron will and restless energy, together with great personal magnetism, made him the idol of his friends and party. His long, brilliant, and almost ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... yet prepared to part with the book. He proceeded instead, in fluent speech and not inappropriate language, to set forth, not the power of the poem—that he both took and left as a matter of course—but the beauty of those phrases, and the turns of those expressions, which particularly pleased him—nor failing to remark that, according to the strict ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... outer to cut short, And blow to chaff pretenders void of grist: Showing old tiger's claws, old crocodile's Yard-grin of eager grinders, slim to sight, Like forms in running water, oft when smiles, When pearly tears, when fluent lips delight: But never with the slayer's malice fired: As little as informs an infant's fist Clenched at the sneeze! Thou wouldst but have us be Good sons of mother soil, whereby to grow Branching on fairer skies, one stately tree; ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... country attorney very often united the functions of solicitor and counsel. As a result of this double life, the attorney acquired the peculiar intellectual defects of the barrister, and retained the heavy responsibilities of the attorney. He grew talkative and fluent, and lost his lucidity of judgment, the first necessity for the conduct of affairs. If a man of more than ordinary ability tries to do the work of two men, he is apt to find that the two men are mediocrities. ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... refuse grumpily—and that would have made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet, unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr. Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his prayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact that they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr. Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or perhaps, as people afterwards ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... conversation which is laid down as the proper thing in polite society at quadrille, during the intermissions between the figures of the dance. And, also, the long-legged, aged Roly-Poly wandered over the room, sitting down now next one girl, now another, and entertaining them all with his fluent chatter. ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... sat down Fisker made his speech, and it was fluent, fast, and florid. Without giving it word for word, which would be tedious, I could not adequately set before the reader's eye the speaker's pleasing picture of world-wide commercial love and harmony which was to be produced by ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope |
