"Virility" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... allusion, in place or out of place, which will allow you to make use of bars. Can there be imagined a more certain process for breaking up all continuity of thought, for taking out all the vigor, all the virility, which belongs to natural prose as the vehicle of strong, graceful, spontaneous thought, than this miserable subjugation of intellect to the-clink of well or ill matched syllables? I think you will smile ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... music-stool at all the dances. He had once sung tenor in Bishop Methuen's choir, but, offended by a word of wise and kindly advice, was seen no more in surplice or in church. It will be perceived that Oswald Melvin had all the aggressive independence of Young Australia without the virility ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... importance of the Negro press as a factor in the elevation of the masses. It is not too much to say, in this connection, that of the primary levers to which the race must look for support, none contribute more toward endurance, permanency, and virility than the press. We have the pulpit, the schoolhouse, the field of politics, and the arena of business. Each has its bearing in the development of a larger life and a more perfect manhood for the Afro-American; but, conceding all due respect to the noble ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... sheer, dominant virility had imbued her with a fatalistic sense of her total inability to escape him. She had had a glimpse of the primitive man in him—of the man with the club. Even were she to violate her conscience sufficiently to end the engagement between them, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the teaching of Jesus: and I thank God for the honesty and virility of His religion which makes us face the facts and calls us to take a man's part in the ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... immortality of the soul, the Arioi imagined a heaven suited to their own wishes. They called it Rohutu noa-noa, or Fragrant Paradise. In it all were in the first flush of virility, and enjoyed the good things promised the faithful by Mohammed. The road to this abode of houris and roasted pig was not to be trod in sackcloth or in ashes, but in wreaths and with gaily colored bodies. To the sound of drums and of flutes ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Eleazar Albin in 1740, though its existence was hinted by Sir Thomas Browne sixty years before, if not by the emperor Frederick II, has been found wanting in examples that, from the exhibition of all the outward marks of virility, were believed to be thoroughly mature; and as to its function and mode of development judgment had best be suspended, with the understanding that the old supposition of its serving as a receptacle whence the bird might supply itself or its companions ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won't worry you about things that are not vital. I'll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can't have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you can have passion. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fulness of form and fulness of substance, both philosophizing and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... saying, "is found in his greatest purity of blood in ouah Southe'n states. It is thah, suh, that those qualities of virility and capacity fo' rulership which make the race what is ah found in theiah highest development—on this side of the watah, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... grandfathers did. And how do I know, too, that they are right about it all? It seems to me that when a man is born a gentleman and is a gentleman he can follow any occupation he pleases. Instead of his trade making him respectable he should make IT so." He spoke with a virility she had never suspected in him before, this boy whom she had held in her arms as a baby and who was still only the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... would love the West. But I have come to love it for other things—even spiritual things. Majesty, I have been studying you. I see and feel what this life has made of you. When I came I wondered at your strength, your virility, your serenity, your happiness. And I was stunned. I wondered at the causes of your change. Now I know. You were sick of idleness, sick of uselessness, if not of society—sick of the horrible noises and smells and contacts one can no longer escape in the cities. I am sick of all that, ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... has said, paying wholehearted tribute to them. "There is no other word. Our armies were fatigued by years of relentless struggle and the mantle of war lay heavily upon them. We were magnificently comforted by the virility of the Americans. The youth of the United States brought a renewal of the hope that hastened victory. Not only was this moral factor of the highest importance, but also the enormous material aid placed at our disposal. Nobody among ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... world apart from all these things. We joined in the earnest acquirement of all that was necessary for Greek epigrams and Latin verse, and for the rest played games. We dipped down into something clear and elegantly proportioned and time-worn and for all its high resolve of stalwart virility a little feeble, like our blackened and decayed ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... sobered to a steady brown—evidenced in the crisp, curly hair and sun-tanned skin; and the misty hyacinth-blue of her eyes had hardened in the eyes of her son into the clear, bright azure of the sea, whist the beautiful contours of her face, repeated in his, had strengthened into a fine young virility. ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... beat the spear into a pruning hook. With this to leaven them, the rough habiliments were most becoming. In a word, they supplied the very setting which manhood should have; and since Anthony, sitting there at his meat, was the personification of virility, they served, as all true settings should, by self-effacement to magnify their treasure. The ex-officer might have stepped out ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... it is not necessary to say more than that some of it is fine. For the most part it lacks virility, though there are passages of marvellous loveliness. The flower-maidens' waltz shows what Wagner could do in that way; the Good Friday music, dating back to the Lohengrin days, is sweet and fresh. But the quasi-religious music has no charms ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the Libocedrus in all its glory, you must go to the woods in winter. Then it is laden with myriads of four-sided staminate cones about the size of wheat grains,—winter wheat,—producing a golden tinge, and forming a noble illustration of Nature's immortal vigor and virility. The fertile cones are about three fourths of an inch long, borne on the outside of the plumy branchlets, where they serve to enrich still more the surpassing beauty of this ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... roughness of Scotch tweeds—or character. It is the even balancing of these two elements—the force of the Northerner with the grace of the Southerner—which gives the Castilian his admirable poise and explains the graceful virility of men such as Fray Luis de Leon and the feminine strength of women such as Queen Isabel and Santa Teresa. We are therefore led to expect in so forcible a representative of the Basque race as Unamuno the more substantial and earnest features ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... but in the depth of her humiliation and at the climax of her jealous fury created by Turiddu's rejection of her when he follows Lola into church. Moreover, her love opens the gates to remorse the moment she realizes what the consequence of her act is to be. The opera sacrifices some of the virility of Turiddu's character as sketched by Verga, but by its classic treatment of the scene of the killing it saves us from the contemplation of Alfio's dastardly trick which turns a ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... corrugated by fierce suns, expressed that virility which kept driving him back, for his contentment, into remote and dangerous places. But his salient features suggested also the patience and wisdom of those who have suffered hardship and derived extraordinary thoughts from solitude. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... The virility of a country is worth more than the splendor of its monuments. It does not humiliate us, therefore, to have you see houses and towns destroyed, for it was not a civil war or a foreign enemy which razed them to the ground, but a higher hand. It is rather ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... come. The cause of the crowd was really an early form of our vital modernist democratic movement, not to be put down nor yet shut out; all political life was to be revalued, also all new ideas of political happiness were to be henceforth tested by their virility and actuality, ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... University that runs on the towing-path, and that utters loud cries. Here and there coachmen are seen carrying pistols and pronouncing terrible execrations. Why these pistols? . . . A little brutal, these English: but of a force, a virility! . . . . . I myself who speak to you am infected by this enthusiasm. I run: I utter cries: I raffole of the leading-boat: I shout En avant! Vive la Madeleine! Vive le Cercle Nautique! Hourra! . . . But one does not do these things at forty years. I am out of breath, what? ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... manhood, virility, energy, simple strength, directness, all that this poor neurotic world is yearning for, the primal force, uncomplex, untroubled, just the exultation of the delight ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... and more. For the first time in her two-and-twenty years, Catherine had sensed the power, the virility of a real man—not of the make-believe, manicured and tailored parasites of her own class—and something elemental in her, some urge of primitive womanhood, grappled her to that memory and, all against her will, caused her to live and re-live those moments, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... ship, Attis, as with hasty hurried foot he reached the Phrygian wood and gained the tree-girt gloomy sanctuary of the Goddess, there roused by rabid rage and mind astray, with sharp-edged flint downwards wards dashed his burden of virility. Then as he felt his limbs were left without their manhood, and the fresh-spilt blood staining the soil, with bloodless hand she hastily hent a tambour light to hold, taborine thine, O Cybebe, thine initiate rite, and with feeble fingers beating the hollowed bullock's back, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the train he had an appointment, made by telephone, with Mr. Fenimer. The interview was to take place at Mr. Fenimer's club, a most discreet and elegant organization of fashionable virility. Riatt was not kept waiting. Fenimer ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... mineral springs of Monte Vulture and sold cheaply enough all over the country. And the mass of the country people have small charm of feature. Their faces seem to have been chopped with a hatchet into masks of sombre virility; a hard life amid burning limestone deserts is reflected in ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... with ordinary gifts and responsive to ordinary opportunities, is undeniably—a man; whereas what we require here is something just a little short of that. Wanted, in fact, a young male who shall seem fully adult to those who are younger still, and who may even appear the accomplished flower of virility to an idealizing maid or so, yet who shall elicit from the middle-aged the kindly indulgence due a boy. Perhaps you will say that even a man of twenty-eight may seem only a boy to a man of seventy. However, ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility; but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair
... seldom that a book comes to the reviewers' hands, which, by its virility and its honest merit as literature, in the old and true sense of the word, rises as high above the average as does "The Garden of Allah," which Robert Hichens publishes through the Stokes Company; and it is because it truly possesses these qualities that it gives promise of a life of appreciation ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... that Farfrae could play upon him as on an instrument. So thoroughly subdued was he that he remained on the sacks in a crouching attitude, unusual for a man, and for such a man. Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of so stern a piece of virility. He heard a conversation below, the opening of the coach-house door, and the putting in of a horse, but took ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... political play, and cannot be discussed profitably apart from its political ideas and arguments. It can no more be treated as pure literature than the poetry of Keats can be treated as anything else. Frankly "pacificist," and to some extent "feminist," hostile, at any rate, to arrogant virility, it sounds in its ideas and arguments oddly familiar to modern ears; and, in the interest of those ears, it may be worth pausing a moment to consider the circumstances in which ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... transformed itself into a keen appreciation and some ambitions in literature, and it gave a light and shade to his character which made him rather complex, and therefore interesting. His best friends could not deny the shade, and yet it was but the shadow thrown by the light. Strength, virility, emotional force, power of deep feeling—these are traits which have to be paid for. There was sometimes just a touch of the savage, or at least there were indications of the possibility of a touch of the savage, in Frank Crosse. His intense love of the open air and of physical exercise ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... such that all her bonds and bands served but little to check or retard the growth of her rich nature. Do what they might they could not make a Morgan of her. Her every step was a dance, her every word and gesture full of a grace and virility that filled the old folks with uneasy wonder. She seemed to them charged with dangerous tendencies all the more potent from repression. She was sweet-tempered and sunny, truthful and modest, but she was as little ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... for the last time into such ardent virility that Rachel's first maidenly instinct was to withdraw her hand from his earnest pressure ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... their favor, there never was such a concurrence of circumstances as put me to the trial. Further, I am thankful to the gods that I was not longer brought up with my grandfather's concubine, and that I preserved the flower of my youth, and that I did not make proof of my virility before the proper season, but even deferred the time; that I was subjected to a ruler and father who was able to take away all pride from me, and to bring me to the knowledge that it is possible for a man to live in a ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
... a child is to become a man. But the first symptom of virility, the first serious step taken in life, is marked by ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... himself up, squared his shoulders and smiled again, not quite so blandly. His attitude gave him a sensation of exquisite and powerful virility. ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... be dissolved in a listlessness that was more than languor. It was only the eye that corrected this impression; an eye of an unusual mingled brilliancy and softness, sombre as coal and with lights that outshone the topaz; an eye of unimpaired health and virility; an eye that bid you beware of the man's devastating anger. A complexion, naturally dark, had been tanned in the island to a hue hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian; only his manners and movements, and the living ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... that the children grow up into rotten adults, without virility or stamina, a weak-kneed, narrow-chested, listless breed, that crumples up and goes down in the brute struggle for life with the invading hordes from the country. The railway men, carriers, omnibus drivers, corn and timber porters, and all those who require physical ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... face, she saw, was gaunt, the ridges of his skull apparent under the bronzed skin. His hair, worn in a queue, was pinned in a flat disk on his head, and small gold loops had been riveted in his ears; but these peculiarities of garb were lost in the man's intense virility, his patent brute force. His fine perfumed linen, the touch of scarlet at his waist, his extremely high-heeled patent-leather boots under soft uncreased trousers, served only to emphasize his resolute metal—they resembled an embroidered and tasseled scabbard that held ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Unionists, as voiced by the ablest representative they ever had, Colonel Saunderson,[80] is hopeful for the prospects of Home Rule. They fight doggedly for the Union, but I believe they would prefer a real Home Rule to a half-measure, and in making that choice they would show their virility and ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... Franck only avails himself of guiding themes to a limited extent, in mastery of the polyphonic style his work will compare with Wagner's most elaborate scores. In fact, the opulence of orchestral resource and the virility of inspiration displayed in 'Hulda' strikingly recall the beauties of 'Tristan und Isolde.' 'Ghiselle,' a work left unfinished by the composer and completed by several of his pupils, was produced in 1896 at Monte Carlo. Although by no means ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the cachet of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which his wasted body must soon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... devices, perhaps the most entertaining is that which deals with the question of mottoes. These are derived from an infinite variety of sources, not infrequently from the fertile brains of the printers themselves. Their application is not always clear, but they are nearly always indicative of the virility which characterized the old printers. It is neither desirable nor possible to exhaust this somewhat intricate phase of the subject, but it will be necessary to quote a few representative examples. Occasionally we get a snatch of verse, as in ...
— Printers' Marks - A Chapter in the History of Typography • William Roberts
... tears welled up beneath her lids. Strong under all misfortunes, the girl knew not how to weep except from joy. At this moment she was all glorious, especially to the priest, who was sometimes distressed by the virility of her character, and who now caught a glimpse of the infinite tenderness of her woman's nature. But such feelings lay in her soul like a treasure hidden at a great depth beneath ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... a key to life, and a key to love, which has never been placed in my hands. What it is, I know not. But if I ever learn, it will be from just such a man as Jim Airth. I have never really talked with him, yet I am so conscious of his strength and virility, that he stands to me, in the abstract, for all that is strongest in manhood, and most vital ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... (Methuen and Co.), is delightful for more than one reason. To begin with, the tales themselves are remarkable, and the language in which they are told, though at times it overshoots the mark by a long way and offends by what I may call an affected virility, is always distinguished. You feel that Mr. Parker considers his sentences, not letting his bolts fly at a venture, but aiming at his effects deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight wildness of aim ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... very best: another man almost since they last sat there; not good-looking, no one would ever call van Hert good-looking, but muscular and lean, with an air of virility and force always alluring. A man destined to be a leader in some way; one who must carry others along with him, if only because of his enthusiasm and fervour. The main point was, that he should carry them in a useful, ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... strength that lay behind, sleeping in the deeps of his being. The jaw, the chin, the brow rising to a goodly height and swelling heavily above the eyes,—these, while strong in themselves, unusually strong, seemed to speak an immense vigour or virility of spirit that lay behind and beyond and out of sight. There was no sounding such a spirit, no measuring, no determining of metes and bounds, nor neatly classifying in some pigeon-hole with others ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... require much further elucidation before the final verdict of contemporaries or posterity can be passed upon them. In the first place, the causes which have led to the military humiliation of a race which, whatever may be its defects, has been noted in history for its martial virility, require to be differentiated. Was the collapse of the Turkish army due merely to incapacity and mismanagement on the part of the commanders, aided by the corruption which has eaten like a canker into the whole Ottoman system of government and administration? Or must the causes be ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... days of overmuch involved plot and diction in the writing of novels, a book like this brings a sense of refreshment, as much by the virility and directness of its style as by the interest of the story it tells.... The human interest of the book is absorbing. The descriptions of life in India and England are delightful. ... But it is the intense humanity of the story—above all, that of its dominating character, Nick ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... door and cut short the word. But it had been heard, "Pastors?" a raucous voice cried. "Passers and Flinchers is what I call them!" And a stout heavy man, whose small pointed grey beard did but emphasise the coarse virility of the face above it, appeared on the threshold, glaring at the four. "Pastors?" he repeated defiantly. "Passers and Flinchers, ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... recklessness that shone in his eyes, the energy that slumbered in them ready to be applied any moment in response to any whim that might seize him, were traits that had not yet yielded to the stern governors of manhood—nor would they yield in many years to come—they were the fountains of virility that would keep him young. She felt the irresistible appeal of him, responsive to the youth that flourished in her own heart—and Corrigan, older, more ponderous, less addicted to impulse, grew distant in her thoughts and vision. The day ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... back joined in. The effectiveness of their cheers was heightened by the fact that they were not in their places, but standing on the floor. From out their cheering ranks stood the splendid figure—the broad shoulders, the massive head, the shaggy beard and hair, all the virility and sensitiveness that are found in the splendid form of Mr. Allen—manufacturer and workman, poet and Radical. The Old Man, splendidly composed, and yet profoundly moved, looked back, gave a courtly ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... know, before the end people often lose control over themselves and make absurd requests. Don't pay any attention to them, Eustace. Good-bye!" and he held out his hand. Eustace took it. It remained in his a fraction of a second longer than he had expected, and gripped him with a virility that was surprising. There was, too, in its touch ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... jester and was also unweakened by previous efforts. But still the fool contended fiercely, striving to turn so as to grapple with his assailant, and wonderingly the free baron for a moment watched that exhibition of virility and endurance. During the wrestling the jester's doublet had been torn open and suddenly the gaze of the king's guest fell, as if fascinated, upon an object ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... caressed, now ill-treated, but always at beck and call, always obedient. It was the fashion, and no courtier resented this treatment, which served both to reduce the men to the rank of puppets and to render incredibly capricious the beauties who found themselves so powerful. All the virility of Calvert's nature, all his new-world independence and his sense of honor, was revolted by such a state of things. As he looked around the company, there was not a man or woman to be seen of whom he had not already heard some risque story or covert insinuation, ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... demolition of theories any more than with the defence of prejudices, has no random words at its command. The words it pronounces have the value of acts of integrity, tolerance, and compassion. A woman's true tenderness, like the true virility of man, is expressed in action of a conquering kind. The ladies of Sulaco adored Mrs. Gould. "They still look upon me as something of a monster," Mrs. Gould had said pleasantly to one of the three gentlemen from San Francisco ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Pan. But this mesalliance, this mating with Davus the detested instead of with Oedipus the adored, is not the only cause of indifference. The health of American wives, their muliebrity or womanly power, is sapped in various ways. Millions of them are overworked, all the virility ground out of them in the brutal treadmill of existence; and it not infrequently happens that they are the wives of men in easy circumstances, who are too fat- headed to realize that those womanly attributes which so charm ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... who by reason of their older culture were able to be Rome's teachers. One lay to the north of her, the mysterious Etruscans, whose culture fortunately for Rome had only a very moderate influence, because the Etruscan culture had already lost much of its virility, possibly also because it was distinctly felt to be foreign, and hence could effect no insidious entry, and probably because Rome was at this time too strong and young and clean to take anything but the best from Etruria. The other lay to ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... of Mirabeau speak of their domestic affairs as Plutarch of the quarrels of Marius and Sulla, of Caesar and Pompey. We perceive the great men descending to trifling matters. Mirabeau inspired this domestic majesty and virility in his very cradle. I dwell on these details, which may seem foreign to this history, but they explain it. The source of genius is often in ancestry, and the blood of descent is sometimes the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... patches and carried muffs. The robust qualities of the old nobility still lingered among the exiles of the provinces, while at Court they had melted into refinements tainted with corruption. Yet if the butterflies of Versailles had lost virility, they had not lost courage. They fought as gayly as they danced. In the halls which they haunted of yore, turned now into a historical picture-gallery, one sees them still, on the canvas of Lenfant, Lepaon, or Vernet, ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... a brilliant seaman, thus not only typified an era of transition, with which he was contemporary, but foreshadowed the period of merely formal naval warfare, precise, methodical, and unenterprising, emasculated of military virility, although not of mere animal courage. He left to his successors the legacy of a great name, but also unfortunately that of a defective professional tradition. The splendid days of the French Navy under Louis XIV. passed away with him,—he died in 1701; but during the long period of naval lethargy ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... very weak. Privation had sapped the young virility that had held out so long. She had not eaten for a long while—did not, indeed, crave food any longer. But her thirst raged, and she knelt at a little pool within the cavern walls and bent her bleeding mouth to the icy fillet of water. She drank little, rinsed her mouth and face and dried her ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... to have a preordained right to each other. He, dry, stern, simple stick of a man needed the flame-like quality that ran through her physical magnificence. She, piercing beneath the glamour of his soldierly achievements, found in him the primitive virility she could fear combined with the spiritual helplessness to which she could come in her full womanly and maternal aid. To her he was as a rock, but a living rock, vitalized by a myriad veins of sensitiveness. To him—well, I knew my Auriol—and could quite understand what Auriol in love could be ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... this attitude was tentative. Everything depended on how well Thorpe lived up to his reputation at the outset,—how good a first impression of force and virility he would manage to convey,—for the first impression possessed the power of transmuting the present rather ill-defined enthusiasm into loyalty or dissatisfaction. But Tim himself believed in Thorpe blindly. So ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... all, and stepped highly and daintily with proud archings of necks and tossings of green plumed heads, and behind them the May-pole rasped and bumped and grated, the trunk of a mighty oak yet bristling with green, like the stubble of a shaggy beard of virility. And after the May-pole came surely the queerest company of morris dancers that ever the world saw, except those of which I have heard tell which danced in Herefordshire in the reign of King James, those ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... the Earth. Typhon, his hands and feet horrid with serpents, and whose habitat in the Egyptian planisphere was under Scorpio, confined him in a chest and flung him into the Nile, under the 17th degree of Scorpio. Under that sign he lost his life and virility; and he recovered them in the Spring, when he had connection with the Moon. When he entered Scorpio, his light diminished, Night reassumed her dominion, the Nile shrunk within its banks, and the earth lost ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... she said, low-voiced, "you're running true to form, anyway." She eyed him appraisingly. "Your appeal is in your virility, I suppose. Yes." ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... Virility! Pray spare my Husband; for he has not been so idle as you imagin; He may have an—Offspring abroad for ought you know, ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... were eighty-four hoboes with me at the time. The strength of numbers made us pretty nonchalant on most things, but not on Jeff Carr. The connotation of "Jeff Carr" stunned our imagination, numbed our virility, and the whole gang was mortally scared ...
— The Road • Jack London
... the ground. But men were not allowed to profess arms at their own will, nor until they were admitted to that dignity by an established order, which at a certain age separated the boys from men. For when a young man approached to virility,[50] he was not yet admitted as a member of the state, which was quite military, until he had been invested with a spear in the public assembly of his tribe; and then he was adjudged proper to carry arms, and also ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... no possible doubt here, the condition of the King is sympathetically reflected on the land, the loss of virility in the one brings about a suspension of the reproductive processes of Nature on the other. The same effect would naturally be the result of the death of the sovereign upon whose vitality these ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... treasure the young Methuselah must have been to his parents and to his doting ancestors; with what tender solicitude must the old folks have watched the child's progress from the innocence of his first to the virility of his later centuries. We can picture the happy reunions of the old Adam family under the domestic vines and fig-trees that bloomed near the Euphrates. When Methuselah was a mere toddler of nineteen years, Adam was still living, and so was his estimable wife; ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... the sitting-room, the bed in the bedroom, were the only changes he now had from one day's end to another. Emmy and Jenny, pledges of a real but not very delicate affection, were all that remained to call up the sorrowful thoughts of his old love, and those old times of virility, when Pa and his strength and his rough boisterousness had been the delight of perhaps a dozen regular companions. He sometimes looked at the two girls with a passionless scrutiny, as though he were trying to remember something buried in ancient neglect; and his ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... a formula you find that he is fifty per cent Roosevelt in the virility and forcefulness of his character, fifteen per cent Bryan in the purely demagogic phase of his makeup, while the rest is canny Celt opportunism. It makes a dazzling and well-nigh ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... morning. Tomorrow evening I'll go up and have supper with him and see if he has another article in the stewpan. I like this work with Peter. I like having him make me dream dreams and see pictures. I like the punch and the virility he puts into my drawings. It's all right reproducing monkey flowers and lilies for pastime, but for serious business, for real life work, I would rather do Peter's brainstorming, heart-thrilling pictures than my merely pretty ones. On the subject of Peter, I must remember in the morning ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... its heels. As the last commonplace of club gossip, smoke-room heroics, and music-hall sentiment issued from these portals, transfigured by the moderate discount that made it twice itself, you not only saw it was final truth, or virility's quintessential emotion; you felt he had done something decisive, even gallant, and that you were in it—a fine fellow, too, in your way; and you quickened; you lived back and forward, back to the blithe ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... facing them. His face had changed in a flash. It was not at all the face of a man who had been caught and was ashamed; it was rather glad. Even his ill-made London clothes could not at that moment disguise his magnificent gift of virility. So he might have looked—when there was no one to see him—face to face with sudden, unexpected danger in far different surroundings, dauntless, and eager to wrest his life out of ...
— The Squire's Daughter - Being the First Book in the Chronicles of the Clintons • Archibald Marshall
... in strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin, mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... rite?" There is one probable explanation, this being that Paul, who was the real promulgator of Gentile Christianity, had to establish his creed among an uncircumcised race; although, as we shall see, devotees have not scrupled to sacrifice their virility in the hope of being more acceptable to God and to be better able to observe His commandments, and others, in their blind bigotry, have not objected to sitting naked on sand-hills, with a six-inch ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... produced a mental shock like that of a psychological earthquake, literally sealing up the spring of his life as it was flowing into consciousness at that time, and the John Barclay of his boyhood and youth became subterranean, to appear later in life after the weakening of his virility under the strain of the crushing events of his fifties. Yet the subterranean Barclay often appeared for a moment in his life, glowed in some kind act and sank again. Ellen Culpepper explains it all. How ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... knowledge and education; there has been continuous advance in science and invention; there has been distinct gain in public health. Business depressions have been recurrent in the life of our country and are but transitory. The Nation has emerged from each of them with increased strength and virility because of the enlightenment they have brought, the readjustments and the larger understanding of the realities and obligations of life and work which ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Coleman had slept but a short time he was now as fresh as a total abstainer coming from the bath. He heard the creak of battery wheels; he saw crawling bodies of infantry moving in the dim light like ghostly processions. He felt a tremendous virility come with this new hope in the daylight. He again took satis. faction in his sentimental journey. It was a shining affair. He was on active service, an active service of the heart, and he' felt that he was a strong man ready to conquer difficulty even as the olden heroes conquered ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... He was a little above medium height, with dark crisp hair and a sallow complexion. His figure and features gave the impression of metallic virility: they were at once hard, supple, clean-cut, and finely moulded. His mouth was a little full, and his jaw perhaps a trifle heavy, but the deep thoughtful eyes gave a balance to his face which saved it ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... oak-trees by far too long. Yes; when young Frank came of age there was still enough left at Greshamsbury, still means enough at the squire's disposal, to light one bonfire, to roast, whole in its skin, one bullock. Frank's virility came on him not quite unmarked, as that of the parson's son might do, or the son of the neighbouring attorney. It could still be reported in the Barsetshire Conservative Standard that "The beards wagged all" at Greshamsbury, now as they had done for many centuries ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... little inclined to stoutness. By this time millionaires had lost their novelty for the girl. She had met some who were more distinguished in appearance than this man, but never one who seemed possessed of more nervous energy and virility. Jarvis Hammon had a bold, incisive manner that was compelling and stamped him as a big man in more ways than one. Playfully he pinched Lilas's cheek, then turned ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... inhabited: some one is looking out of the window." This time Mademoiselle Jacquemart exhibits portraits of M. Duruy, M. Dufaure and a young lady. Singularly enough, she paints men better than she does women. Her portrait of Mademoiselle G—— B—— is very inferior to the others. Virility, in short, is the distinguishing characteristic of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various |
