"Spontaneity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... author is metamorphosed into a victualler. Many persons shake their heads at this transformation. To me the profession of my father is an object of affection; I owe it an assured livelihood. Who knows but that the author in me also owes it much of the spontaneity and joy ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... of Collegiate Alumnae) have seriously discussed the question whether the college course in literature made them nearer or farther from creating literature themselves. The Editor of Harper's Monthly has recorded that "the spontaneity and freedom of subjective construction" in certain American authors was only made possible, probably, by their having escaped an early academic training. The Century Magazine has been so struck with the fact that hardly a single writer of original power before the public has been a regular college ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... when he saw the two women and only a close observer would have noticed that his greeting lacked its customary spontaneity and heartiness. He at once made himself particularly agreeable to Fanny; but, while he chatted and laughed with his sister-in-law, anyone could see that he studiously avoided addressing his wife directly or even meeting her eye. To one who knew him well, his manner would ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... her usual spontaneity. And she felt, if she did not explain, the wideness of her eyes. Her father did not look as if anything worried him. It was a way of his, however, not to show stress or worry. Lenore ate in silence until Rose left the dining-room, and then she ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is for these reasons that Jonson is even better in the epigram and in occasional verse where rhetorical finish and pointed wit less interfere with the spontaneity and emotion which we usually associate with lyrical poetry. There are no such epitaphs as Ben Jonson's, witness the charming ones on his own children, on Salathiel Pavy, the child-actor, and many more; and this even though the rigid ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... in ourselves that saddens, and may depress, and our joy in Him must always be shaded by penitent sorrow for ourselves. But that necessary element of sadness in the Christian life is not the cause why so many Christian lives have little of the buoyancy and hope and spontaneity which should mark them. The reason rather lies in the lack of true union with Christ, and habitual keeping of ourselves 'in the love ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... I believe they will not make me swerve from equity. I shall exact neither service nor affection from my spouse. The value of these, and, indeed, not only the value, but the very existence, of the latter depends upon its spontaneity. A promise to love tends rather to ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... Spontaneity must be the soul of such a movement. "It was my strong conviction that the development of such a social movement should come from the people themselves, not that a ready-made program or plan should be given them, but that they should develop their own." One ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... his earlier and purely secular work there is something, though less of this inequality, and its cause is not at all dubious. No poet, certainly no poet of merit, seems to have written with such absolute spontaneity and want of premeditation as Wither. The metre which was his favourite, and which he used with most success—the trochaic dimeter catalectic of seven syllables—lends itself almost as readily as the octosyllable to this frequently fatal fluency; ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... of New England where bygone romance finds a modern parallel. One of the prettiest, sweetest, and quaintest of old-fashioned love stories * * * A rare book, exquisite in spirit and conception, full of delicate fancy, of tenderness, of delightful humor and spontaneity. A dainty volume, especially suitable for ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... promise of correspondence had hitherto waited for fulfilment. It seemed natural to Marian that the younger of the two girls should write; Maud was attractive and agreeable, and probably clever, but Dora had more spontaneity in friendship. ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... compels the frequent, "I didn't think, or I would not have done it!" The impulsive person may undoubtedly have credited up to him many kind words and noble deeds. In addition, he usually carries with him an air of spontaneity and whole-heartedness which goes far to atone for his faults. The fact remains, however, that he is too little the master of his acts, that he is guided too largely by external circumstances or inward caprice. He ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it. Not all the histrionic capacity of woman can attach any appearance of gusto and spontaneity toit. ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... antitheses, and all the mechanical devices of the school were placed in abeyance. There was a general return to Nature, to simplicity, to straightforwardness—not without imagination, however. Wordsworth, besides insisting, in a famous passage, the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, on the spontaneity of good poetry, recorded his tribute to the Reliques: 'I do not think that there is an able writer in verse of the present day who would not be proud to acknowledge his obligation to the Reliques.' While failing often to catch the gusto of ancient poetry—witness ...
— Ballads of Romance and Chivalry - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - First Series • Frank Sidgwick
... many inflections as we like. The mechanistic philosophy is to be taken or left: it must be left if the least grain of dust, by straying from the path foreseen by mechanics, should show the slightest trace of spontaneity. The doctrine of final causes, on the contrary, will never be definitively refuted. If one form of it be put aside, it will take another. Its principle, which is essentially psychological, is very flexible. It is so extensible, and thereby so comprehensive, that one accepts ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... to dwell upon this exquisite flower of genius in detail. Every one who knows Browning at all knows "Pippa Passes." Its lyrics have been unsurpassed, for birdlike spontaneity and a rare high music, by any other Victorian poet: its poetic insight is such as no other poet than the author of "The Ring and the Book" and "The Inn Album" can equal. Its technique, moreover, is superb. From the outset of the tremendous ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... dreadful and irrefragable, as if she stripped herself and showed a body scarred and burning. With all the forces of her nature she threw herself on Karen's pity, tearing from herself, with a humility far above pride and shame, the glamour that had held Karen's heart to hers. Deep instinct guided her spontaneity. Her glamour, now, must consist in having none; her nobility must consist in abasement, ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... odd if the theory which makes progress depend on modification forbade us to attempt to modify. When it is said that the various successive changes in thought and institution present and consummate themselves spontaneously, no one means by spontaneity that they come to pass independently of human effort and volition. On the contrary, this energy of the members of the society is one of the spontaneous elements. It is quite as indispensable as any other of them, if indeed it be not more so. Progress depends upon ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... not, he will agree with me that the fourth impromptu (in C sharp minor), Op. 66, is the most valuable of the compositions published by Fontana; indeed, it has become one of the favourites of the pianoforte-playing world. Spontaneity of emotional expression and effective treatment of the pianoforte distinguish the Fantaisie-Impromptu. In the first section we have the restless, surging, gushing semiquavers, carrying along with them ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... Laurier in Ottawa and was still passionately devoted—as he remains—to Sir William Mulock, his political godfather. Nobody has ever criticized him for his ardent discipleship to the two older Canadians. There is an old-fashioned spontaneity about this mutual regard much above the common commercial admiration of one man for another in business. Many have blamed King for his attachment to Rockefeller, and have used that connection to his detriment ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... he was not attempting to deceive her this time. But he could say no more. Many a strong man would in that moment have sobbed aloud and shed tears, but Giovanni was not as other men. Under great emotion all expression was hard for him, and the spontaneity of tears would have ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... but yet only an illustration of one of the ordinary phases of human nature after all, as father would have said, I thought, this reflection passing through my mind with that instantaneous spontaneity with which such fancies do occur to one, as Rooney placed me in my assigned position. Then, recalling my mind to the present, I noticed that Matthews, my whilom fellow apprentice and lately promoted third mate, sinking the dignity of his new rank, had come forward to act as ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... made in natural knowledge has tended to extend and rivet in their minds the conception of a definite order of the universe—which is embodied in what are called, by an unhappy metaphor, the laws of Nature—and to narrow the range and loosen the force of men's belief in spontaneity, or in changes other than such as arise out of that definite ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... emphatically declared that they did not believe that any such thing had happened. And when further asked for their opinion as to what had happened, they simply answered that they did not know what to think. But to Harry it seemed that there was a certain lack of spontaneity in this reply, which caused him to doubt whether the speakers were quite ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... — N. will, volition, conation^, velleity; liberum arbitrium [Lat.]; will and pleasure, free will; freedom &c 748; discretion; option &c (choice) 609; voluntariness^; spontaneity, spontaneousness; originality. pleasure, wish, mind; desire; frame of mind &c (inclination) 602; intention &c 620; predetermination &c 611; selfcontrol &c; determination &c (resolution) 604; force of will. V. will, list; see fit, think ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... reached, are a demonstration that in the sphere of aesthetics science does not produce the greatest artists—that something other than intelligent interest and technical accomplishment are requisite to that end, and that system is fatal to spontaneity. M. Eugene Veron is the mouthpiece of his countrymen in asserting absolute beauty to be an abstraction, but the practice of the mass of French painters is, by comparison with that of the great Italians ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... thoughts on both sides to make intercourse easy or agreeable. All they could achieve was to be sorry for each other, in a measure to respect each other, and to make up by an enforced, slightly perfunctory, good will for what they lacked in the way of spontaneity. ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... instinct for society-making among children and youth lies one of the greatest opportunities for the prevention of crime and immorality the world has ever known. To turn to good ends this spontaneity of action, to divert into channels of usefulness these currents of child-activity, will be to add immensely to the equipment of mankind in the struggle with vice. A certain bishop of the early Christian Church is credited with having declared that, if ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... did the dramatic happen. At that moment a thin voice in the gallery exclaimed, "Hurrah for Blaine!" Instantly the audience was on fire. The burst of applause brought out by Smith's opening reference to the "never vanquished hero of Appomattox" had been disappointing because it lacked spontaneity and enthusiasm, but the sound of the magic word "Blaine," like a spark flying to powder, threw the galleries into a flame of cheering which was obstinate in dying out. Conkling, in closing the debate on the resolution, showed his customary audacity by hurling bitter sarcasm ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... though she had learned the conscious exercise of intuitive attributes and now used her effects with the discrimination of an artist skilled in values. To a dispassionate critic (as Glennard now rated himself) the art may at times have been a little too obvious. Her attempts at lightness lacked spontaneity, and she sometimes rasped him by laughing like Julia Armiger; but he had enough imagination to perceive that, in respect of the wife's social arts, a husband necessarily sees the wrong side of ...
— The Touchstone • Edith Wharton
... to discredit church-membership as placing us at the mercy of emotional suggestion, reducing spontaneity to custom, and lessening the energy and responsibility of the individual soul towards God. On the contrary, right group suggestion reinforces, stimulates, does not stultify such individual action. If the prayerful attitude of my fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely it ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... are notoriously varied and on principle subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think, however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has become its substratum. Religion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... planes with the dashing, fearless, showy mood of the other. Intellectually they were not equals either. Pauline's mind was almost purely receptive and her range of inquiry limited indeed. Zulma's mind was buoyant with spontaneity, and there was a quality of aggressive origination in it which scattered all conventionalities as splinters before it. Pauline was likely to lean upon Zulma, listen with admiration to her brilliant talk, ask her ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... distributed over the days of the week for use in due rotation. Such schemes, however, if drawn up and used, should be revised from time to time, and not suffered to become a mechanical burden or a legal bondage. There should be freedom and spontaneity in a Christian's prayers. It is well to have rules, and to try not to be prevented by mere slackness from keeping them. But it is important to see to it that the self-imposed rule is so framed as to prove genuinely ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... and tore it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... irritated him bitterly. 'It is the mind,' she said, 'and that is death.' She raised her eyes slowly to him: 'Isn't the mind—' she said, with the convulsed movement of her body, 'isn't it our death? Doesn't it destroy all our spontaneity, all our instincts? Are not the young people growing up today, really dead before they ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... independence and freedom. The prophet, rising above the legal standpoint and outward ceremonial, puts the essence of true worship in morality,[47] but recognizes also along with the deepest feeling of dependence upon God, in the independence[48] and spontaneity of the religious and moral life, the irresistible power of the divine spirit, by which the Most High, though apart from the world and throned in heaven, puts himself into the closest and most intimate communion with the true worshiper. Thus the gulf which divided Jahveh, as a God afar off, ...
— A Comparative View of Religions • Johannes Henricus Scholten
... in De Quincey's words, "moves in headlong sympathy and concurrence with spontaneous power." This is his definition, mark you; I lay no claim to it: "Genius works under a rapture of necessity and spontaneity." I do love that expression, "headlong sympathy"; it so well ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... little home. Or perhaps it had merely precipitated the wreck. Sooner or later, he told himself, she was bound to have wearied of the dullness of her lot. At any rate, dating from shortly after that disturbing night, a lack of ease and spontaneity seemed to creep into their relations. A blight ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... our nature.... The pages are perpetually brightened by quaintly humorous touches. Often in describing some character or something that is commonplace enough, a droll fancy seems to strike the author, and forthwith he gives us the benefit of it. Consequently there is a spontaneity in his pen which is extremely fascinating.... We can only say generally that Mr. Murray's plot is sufficiently original and worked up with enough of skill to satisfy any but the most exacting readers. We found ourselves getting duly excited before ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... His wife, I suppose. They never had anything in common but the kiddies. That means no more hunts at Blackburn Heath unless someone careless like Philip absorbs the estate. Mrs. Philip was a Pennsylvania girl. N'est ce pas? That accounts for her effulgent spontaneity. Isn't it a shame for me to wax bombastic over a girl who, if she were just a little brighter, might be called half witted. She's the girl with the massive mother, who suffers from dislocated adjectives. They say when she was married her prayer book was missing, ...
— Letters of a Dakota Divorcee • Jane Burr
... whole expression of the girl's face changed. All the animation seemed to leave her manner. For a moment she clung instinctively to her companion. Afterwards she looked at him no more. She came to Saton at once, and held out her hand without any show of reluctance, yet wholly without spontaneity. It was as though she was ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... writings of both we recognize a straight-forwardness of expression equal to that of Wither, and a quaint simplicity of thought and form like that of Herrick; while the very charm of some of the best lines is their spontaneity. The men have just enough mysticism to afford them homeliest figures for ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... call Strauss an intermediate type. So rapidly doth music speed down the grooves of time. From Vienna comes Schoenberg; in Vienna lives and composes the youthful Erich Korngold, whose earlier music seems to well as if from some mountain spring, although with all its spontaneity it has no affinity with Mozart. It is distinctively "modern," employing the resources of the "new" harmonic displacements and the multicoloured modern orchestral apparatus. Korngold is so receptive that ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... possess the interest and spontaneity of the oral recitation. There is no opportunity for the teacher to supplement with points brought in. Misconceptions are not cleared up in the minds of the pupils, at least during that recitation period, unless ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... carriage,—in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... my books you will know what I mean. The chief charm of literature, old or new, lies in its high quality of surprise, unexpectedness, spontaneity: high spirits applied to life. We can fairly hear some of the old chaps you and I know laughing down through the centuries. How we love 'em! They laughed ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... he was offered the Tammany nomination as mayor of New York, and the secretaryship of the navy by Van Buren. And when three years later he was given a still more important post, it was only the evident spontaneity of the choice, and the feeling that in taking the office he should be representing country rather than party, which led him ...
— Washington Irving • Henry W. Boynton
... rascal," said his aunt, smiling with very little spontaneity. "You have insulted us, you great atheist! but we forgive you. I am well aware that my daughter and myself are two rustics who are incapable of soaring to the regions of mathematics where you dwell, but for all that it is ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... the generous manifestation of your sympathy I am honoured with in Mobile, is again a highly valuable benefit to my cause, because it has such a character of spontaneity, that, here at least, no misrepresentation can charge me with having even endeavoured to elicit that high-minded manifestation from the metropolis of the ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... consulted this scenario before they made an entrance, and then in the acting of the scene spoke whatever words occurred to them. Harlequin made love to Columbine and quarreled with Pantaloon in new lines every night; and the drama gained both spontaneity and freshness from the fact that it was created anew at each performance. Undoubtedly, if an actor scored with a clever line, he would remember it for use in a subsequent presentation; and in this way the dialogue of a comedy must have gradually become ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... you, brother," replied Frantz through his clenched teeth; and an angry flush rose to his brow at the idea that any one could have suspected the open-heartedness, the loyalty, that were displayed before him in all their artless spontaneity. Luckily he, the judge, had arrived; and he proposed to restore ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... you shall walk safely; and the path will carry you right into 'His presence where there is fulness of joy.' No great, noble, right, blessed life is lived without rigid self-control, self-denial, and self-crucifixion. Do not fancy that that means the absence of joy and spontaneity. 'I will walk at liberty for I keep Thy precepts.' Hedges are blessings when, on the other side, there are bottomless swamps of poisonous miasma, into which if a man ventures he will either drown or be plague-stricken. The narrow way that leads to life is the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... mixture of all three. Ordinarily there was a suspicion of hardness in her face but there was also upon occasions a kind of winsomeness, an unexpected peeping out of a personality which was like the wraith of the child which she once had been—a suggestion of girlish charm and spontaneity utterly unlike ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... may be classified as fanciful, realistic, and idealistic according to the character of the material used. Fanciful productive imagery is characterized by its spontaneity, its disregard of the probable and possible, its vividness of detail. It is its own reward, and does not look to any result beyond itself. Little children's imaginations are of this type—it is their play world of make-believe. The incongruity and absurdity of ...
— How to Teach • George Drayton Strayer and Naomi Norsworthy
... too careful as it is. The advice I should give to most teachers would be in the words of one who is herself an admirable teacher. Prepare yourself in the subject so well that it shall be always on tap: then in the class-room trust your spontaneity and ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Schiller, explained all art as being derived from the play instinct. It has been said that play is the overflow of life. Life, love, joy, all noble ideals, must awaken spontaneity or they will not grow. All parts of man's nature must have expression and not be repressed. Play is given to stimulate and to express the spontaneous in us, to manifest emotion and imagination and a sense of freedom. Freedom is a necessity of all unfoldment. Even the flower must bloom spontaneously ...
— How to Add Ten Years to your Life and to Double Its Satisfactions • S. S. Curry
... often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... admirably, when he has one to tell, and, failing that, never fails to be pleasant. Irish talk is apt to be discursive; to rely upon a general charm diffused through the whole, rather than upon any quotable brilliancy; its very essence is spontaneity, high spirits, fertility of resource. That is a fair description of Lever. He is never at a loss. If his story hangs, off he goes at score with a perfectly irrelevant anecdote, but told with such ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... wit, like a flash of lightning, can only be remembered, it cannot be reproduced. Its very marvel lies in its spontaneity and evanescence; its power is in being struck from the present. Divorced from that, the keenest representation of it seems cold and dead. We read over the few remaining sentences which attempt to embody the repartees and bon mots of the most famous wits of society, such as ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... renewed. I often wonder what I might have become if it could have been harnessed, directed! Speculations are vain. Calvinism, though it had begun to make compromises, was still a force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and human instincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied it. I loved him, but he made of righteousness a stern and terrible thing implying not joy, but punishment, the, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... living things are active, intelligent agents, personally continuous with all their ancestors, possessing an intense but unconscious memory of all that their ancestors did and suffered, and moving through habit from the spontaneity of striving to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... did more than merely make martyrs. Its strength, its spontaneity, and the devotion of its adherents were such that they undoubtedly awakened not merely some alarm, but also some sense of ...
— The Life Story of an Old Rebel • John Denvir
... road to its goal, must have determined the character of his part-writing. In spite of his remarks in Playford's book, it is plain that he looked at music horizontally as well as vertically, and constructed it so that it is good no matter which way it is considered. His counterpoint has a freedom and spontaneity not to be found in the music of the later contrapuntal, fugal, arithmetical school. Though he was pleased with musical ingenuities and worked plenty of them, he thought more of producing beautiful, expressive music than of mathematical skill. Handel ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... single moment the incongruity of it all made him forget himself, and he laughed—a chuckling, half-broken, and out-of-tune sort of laugh. It was the first time in a year that he had forgotten himself anywhere near to a point resembling laughter, and in the sudden and inexplicable spontaneity of it he was startled. He turned quickly, as though some one at his side had laughed and he was about to demand an explanation. He looked across the aisle and his eyes met squarely the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... sober conviction, upon the part of the writers, that they accurately conveyed the meaning they desired. Intentionally humorous efforts have been carefully excluded, and the interest of the collection consists in the spontaneity of expression and in the fact that it offers fair samples of the possibilities which lie hidden in the orthography and construction of our language. Let it be remembered, then, that anybody can write English as she "should be wrote," and ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... shake our heads over the self-importance of the nineteenth century, and to contrast it with the unconscious lyrical spontaneity of half-mythical singers in the beginning of the world, it is probable that some degree of egotism is essential to a poet. Remembering his statement that his name was written in water, we are likely to think of Keats as the humblest of geniuses, yet he wrote to a friend, "You will observe at ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... conventionality will often exhibit a negative refinement, while a mind of real and subtile delicacy, but of rugged and irrepressible individuality, will occasionally shoot out irregular and uncouth branches. Yet between the symmetry of the one and the spontaneity of the other the choice cannot be doubtful. We are not defending coarseness in any guise. It is always to be assailed, and never to be defended. It is always a detriment, and never an ornament. No excellence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... rest of the day for her visit. If she had kissed the children out of policy Mrs. Jocelyn would have been resentfully aware of the fact; but they were "kissable" children, and no one knew it better than the fond mother, who was won completely by the spontaneity of the act. ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... mainly that of selection. Creative work, when once seated at his desk, was as natural as breathing. Scott came to his desk with the zest of a boy starting on a holiday, and this pleasure is reflected in the ease and spontaneity of his stories. ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... enthusiastic praise of the labor-union official in question. The passage reads: "The idea of God must be destroyed. It is the keystone of a perverted civilization. The true root of liberty, of equality, of culture, is Atheism. Nothing must restrain the spontaneity of the human mind." Had the opponents of Socialism been familiar with the teachings of Marx, they would have known that he could not have said anything like this, that it is absolutely at variance with all his teaching. The man who formulated the materialist ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... in the room a constraint like a tangible inhibition against any natural spontaneity fell over them. Kendric read in Barlow's look no joy at the sight of him but only a sullen brooding; Betty flashed one look at him in which was nothing of last night's friendliness but an aloofness which might have been compounded ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... purpose of the artist- prophets; but his efforts after musical effects, as well as his untimely death, prevented the full fruitage of his admirable genius. Many of the poems that he has left us are lacking in spontaneity and artistic finish. Alliterative effects are sometimes obtrusive. His poetic theories, as presented in The Science of English Verse, often outstripped his execution. But, after all these abatements are ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... of design, and of the foot, have come together in our minds with sufficient spontaneity, we yet feel that there is a difference—and a wide difference if we could only lay our hands upon it—between the design and manufacture of the ligament and tendons of the foot on the one hand, and on the other ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... her face alight with joy and fine enthusiasm. All her spontaneity, her love and admiration were aroused. And she kissed him with so frank and glad a love that Stern felt his heart jump wildly. He thought she never yet had been ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the workings of the whole mind and the means by which we would fain render them articulate, there yawns a gap which no effort can bridge over? Even the poet fails—much more the scientist! To refuse to take cognisance of the fresh spontaneity of feeling and intuition is to rob life of its higher ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... author must also know when to let his material alone. In his excessive regard for style even so great a master as Robert Louis Stevenson robbed his work of much of the spontaneity and natural charm found, for example, in his Vailima Letters. The main thing is for a writer to say what he has to say in the best way, natural to himself, in which he can say it, and then let it alone—always remembering ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... meekly? No! It was the thoughtless brutality with which he went about this new affair that bit so poignantly. To show her, so indurately, that she was nothing, that, despite her magnificent sacrifice, she had never been more than a convenience, was maddening. There was no spontaneity in his heart; his life was a calculation to which various sums were added or subtracted. With all her beauty, intellect, genius and generosity, she had not been able to stir him as this young girl was unconsciously doing. She held no animosity for the daughter of her host; she was clear-visioned ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... that instinctive preference which we call Falling in Love, I believe that so far from improving man, you would only do one of two things—either spoil his constitution, or produce a tame stereotyped pattern of amiable imbecility. You would crush out all initiative, all spontaneity, all diversity, all originality; you would get an animated moral code instead of living men ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... spontaneity are represented in only a few snatches in Chaucer. Other touches of the spring he has, for no man better loved the merry month of May, and he has sung it until he has become for ever identified with it in our minds. All the same, he represents also a reaction which ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... an engagement so informal as in England. We find all sorts of ceremonies connected with the plighting of a troth which seems but little less important than the tying of the marriage knot itself. There is less spontaneity and exercise of private judgment on the part of the young people; in fact, there are several countries in which they are allowed no voice ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... school, and that I have only three years and a half more to keep him by me. The flowers that blossom in his sunny childhood will fall before the scythe of a public school system; his gracious ways and bewitching candor will lose their spontaneity. They will cut the curls that I have brushed and smoothed and kissed so often! What will they do with the thinking being ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... The eighty-two sketches on the margins of that priceless copy of the Praise of Folly, which Basel preserves in her Museum, had been suited to their company. Admirable, though unequal, as are their merits, they are sketches, whose chief beauty is their happy spontaneity. Such things are among the trifles of art, and are not to be put into the scales at all with the finished perfection of his serious designs for wood engraving. These were drawn on the block; and even these cannot properly ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... the work—whose force and significance, of course, cannot be felt in this dry enumeration—are that language issues from the spontaneity of the human spirit,—"spontaneity, which is both divine and human"; that its origin is simultaneous with the opening of consciousness in the human race; that it preserves a constant parallel with consciousness, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... indication of structural design in a hymn. Textual equations, such as distinguish Dr. Bonar's beautiful stanzas, are not necessarily technical. To emphasize them as ingenious by an ingenious tune seems, somehow, a reflection on the spontaneity of the hymn. ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... themselves that her early style of acting—easy, flowing, impulsive, the natural translation in action of a strong and imaginative nature—must remain what, in the long absence of the actress, it had become, a beautiful tradition of the stage,—that her present personations were wanting in force and spontaneity,—that they were efforts, rather than inspirations,—were marked by a weary tension of thought,—were careful, but not composed, roughened by unsteady strokes of genius, freshly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... act with a certain degree of spontaneity on their environment, and they likewise react effectively to surrounding stimuli. Animals come to have definite "answers back," sometimes several, sometimes only one, as in the case of the Slipper Animalcule, which reverses ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... and he had not discovered his gift for writing comedy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life. No scandal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spontaneity. One day he began: 'I have been inventing a Christian heresy,' and he told a detailed story, in the style of some early father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, escaping from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... supernaturalise. Sing me a lullaby, O Mother eternal! Give me to drink of thy love, divine and diabolic; thy cruelty and thy kindness, I accept both, if thou wilt but whisper to me the secret of both. Anoint me with the chrism of spontaneity that I may be ever worthy of thee.—Withdraw not from me thy hand, lest universal love and sympathy die in my breast.—I implore thee, O Mother eternal, O sea-throned, heaven-canopied Goddess, I prostrate my face before thee, I surrender myself wholly to ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... majestically; but it takes depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of spontaneity. ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... is supposed to have given Rembrandt the idea for his drawing, his genius made it his own in realism and movement, and in its beauties of line, color and texture. "An Old Woman Sleeping" (No. 129)), although scarcely to be included in this series, is another that has wonderful spontaneity. This is no posed model, but one who has actually fallen asleep over her book; Rembrandt sees her, and before her "forty winks" are over, she is immortalized, and probably she never knew it. About 1640 Rembrandt began ...
— Rembrandt and His Etchings • Louis Arthur Holman
... their disarmed understandings as far down the vale of tears as he deemed wise, then permitted himself a magnificent burst of spontaneity. ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... refreshing each other's lives. Yes, Howard, this is your great opportunity to take your position and draw your wife up to it. Life will be a new thing to you, and all of us who can accept these truths. Our present forms and ceremonies hold us apart, and there is scarcely a ripple of spontaneity upon life's surface. The highest hours, and those most productive of good, are when two souls converse and reflect each ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... Shakspeare, Milton have left a deep and permanent impression upon the forms of thought and speech, the language and literature, the science and philosophy of nations. And inasmuch as a nation is the aggregate of individual beings endowed with spontaneity and freedom, we must grant that exterior conditions are not omnipotent in the formation of national character. Still the free causality of man is exercised within a narrow field. "There is a strictly necessitative limitation drawing an impassable boundary-line around the area of volitional freedom." ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... literature that did not owe its inspiration and form to Greek models. Even the primitive national metre had died out. Roman literature—more especially poetry—was therefore bound to be unduly self-conscious and was always in danger of a lack of spontaneity. That Rome produced great prose writers is not surprising; they had copious and untouched material to deal with, and prose structure was naturally less rapidly and less radically affected by Greek influence. That she should have produced a Catullus, a Lucretius, a Vergil, a Horace, ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... whole page of description is a task for a master, and very few attempt it; but for the uninitiated amateur about three sentences of description mark the limit of his ability to see and describe. To get started, to gain confidence in one's ability to say something, to acquire freedom and spontaneity of expression,—this is the first step in the practice of composition. Afterward, when the pupil has discovered that he really has something to say,—enough indeed to cover three or four pages of his tablet paper,—then it may be time to begin the study of description, and to acquire ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... They pay a price, and they want a good show of colour and gilding for their money. Presently they buy from outside, and a half-hearted imitation of foreigners is the best ambition of Venetian artists. Art, it has been said, does not declare itself with true spontaneity till it feels behind it the weight and unanimity of the whole body of the people. That true outburst was long in coming, but its seeds were fructifying deep in a congenial soil. They were fostered by the warmth and colour of Oriental intercourse, and at last the ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... her favorite. By a strange contrariety the sunny-faced little mother had set herself to accomplish her son's union with the tall, dark, and haughty cousin, who had expired in giving birth to little Hildreth. There was nothing of spontaneity and no display of conjugal affection on the part of the young husband or his wife; but during the absence of her son, the invalid was well cared for and entertained by the wife, whom she came to love with an intensity second only to that ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Letter-Writers has failed to provide are met by Mr. Parker with consummate discretion. His letters are to Senators, Shakers, Professors, Doctors, Slaveholders, Abolitionists, morbid girls, and heroic women: they are all equally rich in spontaneity, simplicity, and point. Keen criticisms of noted men, speculations upon society, homely wisdom of the household, estimates of the arts, and consolations of religion, all packed in plain and precise English, seem to have been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... established form, without any qualms about the capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order, intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be laid on the second phase of the transformation, ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... suspicions. They stowed away the luggage with the deft capacity of men who have returned to the primitive art of using their hands. She climbed beside the driver on the box of the stage. Lone Tooth Hank and the cow-punchers chivalrously raised their sombreros with a simultaneous spontaneity that suggested a flight of rockets. The driver cracked his whip and turned the horses' heads towards the billowing sea of foot-hills, and the last cable that bound Mary Carmichael to ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... completed in August, 1861, and the first number of "Our Mutual Friend" appeared in May, 1864. This was an unusual interval, but the great writer's faculty of invention was beginning to lose its fresh spring and spontaneity. And besides he had not been idle. Though writing no novel, he had been busy enough with readings, and his work on All the Year Round. He had also written a short, but very graceful paper[30] on Thackeray, ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... of spontaneity and natural force, I think what struck me most was the physical effect London has already exercised upon her in six weeks. She looks superbly sound and healthy; she is tall and fully developed, and her colour, for all its delicacy, is pure and glowing. ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... deal with romantic incidents of daily life. The romances juglarescos are longer poems, mostly concerned with Charlemagne page 254 and his peers, veritable degenerate epics, composed by itinerant minstrels to be sung in streets and taverns to throngs of apprentices and rustics. They have not the spontaneity and vigor which ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... sadly decreased during the war and completely evaporated after it. For several years the place was entirely deserted and neglected, then Miss Woodhull, recently graduated from a New England college, and fairly bristling with degrees, for which she had exchanged the freshness, sweetness and spontaneity of youth and health, was ordered to spend at least a year in the south in the doubtful hope of recovering ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... precepts governing lyric form follow from the general principles already discussed. The lyric vocabulary, every one admits, should not seem studied or consciously ornate, for that breaks the law of spontaneity. It may indeed be highly finished, the more highly in proportion to its brevity, but the clever word-juggling of such prestidigitators as Poe and Verlaine is perilous. Figurative language must spring only from living, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... her life at Northampton, and thought she had come over from Canada only a year or two ago. Yes, she amused him. By contrast with the drawing-room young lady, of whom he had always been afraid, she seemed to have originality of character, spontaneity of talk. Of course her learning was not exactly profound; the quality of her mind left something to be desired; her breeding fell short of what is demanded by the fastidious; but there was something healthy and genuine about ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... me. But now, thank heaven, I breathe freely once more. I have lost my dear husband, but I have escaped from that prison-house; and with his memory to keep me merciless, I am eager to wage war against those influences which are conspiring to fetter the free-born soul and stifle spontaneity. Luella Bailey must be elected, and these people be taught that foreign ideas may flourish in New York, but cannot obtain ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... is its spontaneity. It has no ulterior aim, but delights in simple expression. These people write because they like to write. They are original because they sketch from life. There is something naive and fresh in their vivid pictures. ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... of sitters that it is scarcely to be wondered at that it sometimes failed him. Occasionally he resorted to such artificial devices as were common among his contemporaries. Such fresh inspirations as the Strawberry Girl and Master Bunbury could come but rarely in a lifetime. The spontaneity of Miss Bowles is perhaps unexcelled in ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... is probably agreed, seem suddenly to flare before Becky and Rawdon, after the clear daylight that reigned in Thackeray's description of them; they appear upon the scene, as they should, but it must be owned that the scene has an artificial look, by comparison with the flowing spontaneity of all that has gone before. And this it is exactly that shows how and where Thackeray's skill betrays him. He is not (like Dickens) naturally inclined to the theatre, the melodramatic has no fatal ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... the sonata—to mention the three branches of composition to which his genius was specially directed. Acknowledged on every hand as the father of instrumental music, Haydn compels our admiration by 'his inexhaustible invention as shown in the originality of his themes and melodies; the life and spontaneity of the ideas; the clearness which makes his compositions as interesting to the amateur as to the artist; the child-like cheerfulness and drollery which charm away trouble and care.' His insistence on the importance of melody was a marked characteristic. 'It ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... fond of sport in every way, but the aristocrats lack sporting spontaneity; they like it, or pretend to like it, because it is the fashion, and they take up one sport after another as it becomes the fad. That this is true can be shown by comparing the Englishman and the American ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous
... oratory, his eyes rolling and flashing, his hands and head poised into beautifully effective gesture, and appealed to them in great rolling, fiery sentences that completely swept the conference like a whirlwind, and sat down amid a great burst of applause which broke with splendid spontaneity from the assembled delegates, and the winning golden smile upon his face which Robert's companion had described ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... laughed quietly, with an accent of indulgence. It was the habit of her world to find everything Madame de Sevigne did or said charming. Even her frankness was forgiven her, her tact was so perfect; and her spontaneity had always been accounted as her chief excellence; in the stifled air of the court and the ruelles it had been frequently likened to the blowing in of a fresh May breeze. Her present mood was one well ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... like Sterne's in an absolute whirl. The contagion of his high spirits is, however, irresistible; and, putting aside all other and more solid qualities in them, these chapters are, for mere fun—for that kind of clever nonsense which only wins by perfect spontaneity, and which so promptly makes ashamed the moment spontaneity fails—unsurpassed by anything of the same kind from the same hand. How strange, then, that, with so keen an eye for the humorous, so sound and true ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... of the will of God. No doubt that was an habitual attitude and not one taken up on the spur of the moment. It is indeed very rarely that what seem spontaneous actions are really such; and S. Mary's first word was nearer spontaneity than the second. Her exclamation in answer to the angelic Ave was the natural expression of her surprise at so unexpected a message: its variance from all her thought about her life was the thing that struck her; and therefore her ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... kept pace with her. He had noticed, even if she had not, that those two motionless figures at the bridge had not advanced one step to meet her, but were maintaining an attitude portentously watchful, it seemed to him, and boding ill for the warmth and spontaneity of the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... students would do well not only to take advantage of such training in college, but to have their teacher, if it were possible, follow them, for a time, into their professional work. This idea was well exemplified in the case of Phillips Brooks—a speaker of spontaneity, simplicity, and splendid power. It is said that, in the period of his pulpit work, in the midst of his absorbing church labors, he made it a duty to go from time to time for a period of work with his teacher of voice, that he might be kept ...
— Public Speaking • Irvah Lester Winter
... Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness to waive inquiry. Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise destination than the entire area of Europe. Genius, he held, is necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work, only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime chances. The attitudes of ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... fussiness about petty detail, and insistence on non-essentials, is a deterrent from which the robust are free. Over-attention to the mechanics of voice production is a kindred deterrent. Both deterrents prevent that prime characteristic of expression—spontaneity. ...
— Resonance in Singing and Speaking • Thomas Fillebrown
... anything else. What you say about the vagueness of what I have called the direct action of the nervous system, is perfectly just. I felt it so at the time, and even more of late. I confess that I have never been able fully to grasp your principle of spontaneity, as well as some other of your points, so as to apply them to special cases. But as we look at everything from different points of view, it is not likely that we should agree closely. (Professor Bain expounded his theory of Spontaneity in the essay ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the voice ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finer than the originals," but, however this may be, there is no question whatever as to the excellence of the ballads in their English form. They have vigor and swiftness of movement, grace and picturesqueness, simplicity and spontaneity. And there are exquisite lyrics amongst them, witness The Wandering Knight's Song. Mr. Lang has made a few selections from Lockhart's scattered verse in Blackwood as further illustrations of his poetic gift,—a number of admirable stanzas ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... enthusiastic theater party, oblivious of surroundings, and lost in wonder at the strange sights. Billy's laugh rang out frequently, with refreshing spontaneity. Their enjoyment was so evident that Redding was surprised, at the close of the first act, to see them put on their wraps and march solemnly out of the theater. He hastened to the lobby, and touched Billy ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... in it, he insisted on it; I will not say that he affected minute daily acts of devotion, for that word would not accord with the spontaneity of his nature; but he accented his demonstrations, he spoke constantly of his religion. Without any intention to wrong the serious side of his religious feelings, it seemed to be a bravado put on for the incredulous, a toy which ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... has worth has several elements. First, It must be individual. It must be joyfully done: there must enter into work the vitality of a happy spirit. It must be spontaneous. This is why machine-work can never be thoroughly beautiful: it lacks the spontaneity of life. The hand never makes two things alike. With the mood, the weather, the occasion, there are little touches added which a machine cannot give. Life always varies and thinks of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... do not play the organ as well at St Blank's as I played it in the little church where I gave my services and was unknown. People are praising me too much here, and this mars all spontaneity. ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... that gives any true idea of the sailor's life. Sea stories generally depend for their interest on the inventive skill of their authors; Dana knew how to hold the attention by a simple statement of facts. The book has all the charm and spontaneity of a keenly observant yet imaginative and cultivated mind, alive to all the aspects of the outer world, and gifted with that fine literary instinct which, knowing the value of words, expresses its thoughts with precision. Seafaring men have ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... over what he had written, but there was nothing left for him to do but to correct in cold blood, make plain the meaning, and reduce all to such order as he could. One result of this method was that his verse preserved an unparallelled rush and spontaneity, which is perhaps as great a quality as anything attained by the more bee-like toil ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... motives of hostility to such modifications in these gigantic departments as changing circumstances might make needful, in the breasts of the only men who could produce these modifications without a violent organic revolution. Such a system left too little course to spontaneity, and its curse is the curse of French genius. Some of its evil effects were obvious and on the surface. The man who should have been a soldier found himself saying mass and hearing confessions. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... years of travel were over. He had accomplished the globe with an intensity and curiosity that in any one else would have seemed pedantic, without redeeming spontaneity, almost the self-editing of a human Baedeker; but, in this case, it assumed an air of mysterious purpose and significant design—as though Maury Noble were some predestined anti-Christ, urged by a preordination to go everywhere there was to go along the earth ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... as I did not at the time, how closely my father and mother studied in all things the welfare and cultivation of their children. They were not formal or oppressive about it; all went pleasantly and with seeming spontaneity, as if in accordance with our own desire; but we were wisely and needfully guided. We were never sent to school during our seven years in Europe; but either we were taught our lessons by our parents at home or by governesses. In addition ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... come to love that boy. I find myself clinging to him. I think it is because he stands to me for the spirit of my own boyhood; perhaps that, perhaps because he stands for the spirit of the woods he loves; because he stands for simplicity, honesty, spontaneity. At any rate he is rare, what with his musical gift and his high melody of living—and—oh well, I've sometimes felt sorry that he is not all wood-spirit, that he is part human." The characteristics that had made ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... spontaneity, Papik laughed and turned shoreward. As he passed the assembled maidens he paused momentarily and greeted them. He made a brief proposal of marriage to Ahningnetty, a fat maiden, ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... testimony as comes to hand leaves the inquirer in a very perplexed condition, and inclines him rather to accept than reject the old-fashioned theory of a "general corruption of the atmosphere" as the only working hypothesis whereby to account for the startling spontaneity of the outbreak and its appearance at so many and such distant points at ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... nonsense, but from the standpoint of literary history, it is highly significant nonsense. It represented a revolt against all dramatic conventions and shared a number of qualities with graffiti, including the sense of spontaneity. ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany - Parts 2, 3 and 4 • Hurlo Thrumbo (pseudonym) |
