"Wayward" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... into the wilderness." Diderot remonstrated rather more loudly than Rousseau's other friends, but there was no breach, and even no coolness. What sort of humours were bred by solitude in Rousseau's wayward mind we know, and the Confessions tell us how for a year and a half he was silently brooding over fancied slights and perhaps real pieces of heedlessness. Grimm, who was Diderot's closest friend next to Mademoiselle ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... inglorious. And then their religious faith! It might be gloomy, it might be wild, it might be altogether misplaced or misdirected,—but it was at least sincere; for it exerted an influence over their most wayward humours; it urged them both to do and to suffer as none but men who believed that they acted aright would have done. Let us not, then, even when standing in the dungeon of a baron's hold, come to the conclusion, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... the pride disdaining life, That with this mortal world at strife Would yield to the soul's inward sense, Then groan in human impotence, 40 And weep because it is not given To taste on Earth the peace of Heaven. 'Twas not that in the narrow sphere Where Nature fixed my wayward fate There was no friend or kindred dear 45 Formed to become that spirit's mate, Which, searching on tired pinion, found Barren and cold repulse around; Oh, no! yet each one sorrow gave New graces to the narrow grave. 50 For broken vows had early quelled The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... it be granted that any answer which did not come of love, and was not for the final satisfaction of him who prayed, would be unworthy of God; that it is the part of love and knowledge to watch over the wayward, ignorant child; then the trouble of seemingly unanswered prayers begins to abate, and a lovely hope and comfort takes its place in the child-like soul. To hear is not necessarily to grant— God forbid! but to hear is necessarily ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... capricious, more inexplicable, more wayward, than fashion. It is true that, taken as a whole, there is a certain conformity in the rules it prescribes. For instance, as the crinoline diminishes in size and the area which petticoats cover in their circumference is lessened, so also ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... descended from an honorable ancestry. His grandfather, David Poe, was a Revolutionary hero, over whose grave, as he kissed the sod, Lafayette pronounced the words, "Ici repose un coeur noble." His father, an impulsive and wayward youth, fell in love with an English actress, and forsook the bar for the stage. The couple were duly married, and acted with moderate success in the principal towns and cities of the country. It was during an engagement at Boston that the future poet ...
— Poets of the South • F.V.N. Painter
... voice is heard far up amid the mists of the heights—not the eagle's cry this time—not the freak of a wayward echo—but human words, which say "Shall we begin?" Silence! It is a host that holds its breath and listens. Was it a spirit of the upper air parleying with its kind? If so, it has its answer countersigned ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... wisdom, and able to pierce with acute analysis to the depth of the abstrusest philosophic problem, may nevertheless find himself hopelessly baffled by some quite common fact of life, such as how to treat a wayward son, or a sinful woman. I am not likely to lose a night's rest because I am unable to define the Trinity but with what sore travail of heart do I toss through midnight hours when I have to settle some course of action towards the ...
— The Empire of Love • W. J. Dawson
... holy vocation she fixed on her second son, Hereward, a wild, wayward lad, with long golden curls, eyes of different colours, one grey, one blue, great breadth and strength of limb, and a wild and ungovernable temper which made him difficult of control. This reckless lad ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... literature? that is, drowsy, slow, and of small compass? Perhaps we may say, some Sermons. But this is only conjecture. Certainly Jeremy Taylor rolls along as majestically as any of them. We have had Alfred Tennyson here; very droll, and very wayward: and much sitting up of nights till two and three in the morning with pipes in our mouths: at which good hour we would get Alfred to give us some of his magic music, which he does between growling and smoking; and so to bed. All this has not cured my ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... and in spite of gray hair, thirty-five years, and a somewhat drawn look, arising from her discontent, one might discover sufficient traces of this fading beauty to idealize her. All this summer she had watched the wayward young artist with a keen interest in the fresh life he brought among her flat surroundings. His buoyancy cheered her habitual depression; his eagerness and love of life made her blood flow more quickly, out of sympathy; and his intellectual alertness bewildered ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... practically, as well as prayerfully, try to reach those for whom prayers are asked. In many cases distinct answers to these prayers are secured, so evident that none could mistake them. At an after-service on Sunday evening a mother asked prayers for a wayward son in Chicago. Dr. Conwell and some of the deacons led the church in prayer for the boy, very definitely and in faith. At that same hour, as the young man afterward related, he was passing a church ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... My father therefore, still minded to make me a churchman, sent me to Robert of Montrose's new college that stands in the South Street of St. Andrews, a city not far from our house of Pitcullo. But there, like a wayward boy, I took more pleasure in the battles of the "nations"—as of Fife against Galloway and the Lennox; or in games of catch-pull, football, wrestling, hurling the bar, archery, and golf—than in divine learning—as of logic, and ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... with gaping creditors, Watchful as fowlers when their game will spring. I've now not fifty ducats in the world, Yet still I am in love, and pleas'd with ruin. Oh! Belvidera! Oh! she is my wife— And we will bear our wayward fate together, But ne'er ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... her, and assuring her that his feelings toward her were now wholly changed, he lavished upon her expressions of the tenderest regard. A mother is always very easily deceived by such protestations on the part of a wayward son, and Agrippina believed all that Nero said to her. In a word, the reconciliation seemed to ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... kept together and chatted, at other times they separated a little, each attracted by some object of interest, or following the lead, it might have been, of wayward fancy. But they never lost sight of each other, and, after a couple of hours, converged, as if by tacit consent, until they met and sat down to rest on ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... thunderstorm suddenly breaks over the assembled family, after her husband's return, and the weird old lady again makes her appearance, Katerina is fairly crazed. She thinks the terrible punishment for her wayward affections has arrived; she confesses to her husband and mother-in-law that she loves Boris. Spurned by the latter—though the husband is not inclined to attach overmuch importance to what she says, in her startled condition—she rushes off and drowns herself. The savage mother-in-law, who is ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... well-managed business is a business which runs smoothly and efficiently when the manager is not managing, and to that other maxim that the highest aim of the competent manager should be to make himself unnecessary. Hence he was perfectly at liberty to be wayward and freakish in his activities from time to time. And this happened to be one of his wayward and freakish mornings. There were, however, few young women in the common room to behold his aberration, for the hour was within two minutes of nine, and ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... colt-breaking is an affair of patience, you cannot have too much forbearance: put off the evil day of force. Forgive him seventy times seven times a-day, and be assured that what does not come to-day will to-morrow. The grand thing is to get rid of dogged sulks and coltishness; of that wayward, swerving, hesitating gait, which says, "here's my foot, and there's my foot;" or, "there is a lion in the street, I cannot go forth." This is the besetting sin of colts; and this it is which, on the turf, gives so great an advantage to a young horse to ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... question was merely that of breaking up a vast republic beyond the Atlantic in the interests of negro slavery, the horrors and wickedness of war were obvious and impressive to us. That historical phrase of General Scott's, "Wayward sisters, go in peace!" was very generally, and I think rightly, regarded as expressing one of the points of view which might with honor, caution, and consistency have been acted upon, when the tremendous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... little kingdom I possess, Where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard I find the task Of governing it well. For passion tempts and troubles me, A wayward will misleads, And selfishness its shadow casts On all my words ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... that you as a man must exonerate me from blame in that matter, but I cannot expect your mother to see it in the same light. I ask you whether they do not regard her as wayward and unmanageable?" ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... worshipped her very name and she was a tower of strength to him. 'Mothers!' he used to say, 'if you only knew your power! God be merciful to the wayward ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... of me, won't you? It would be very sad to be dead, and to be remembered by no one. I have been wayward at times; I beg pardon of you all. I am sure that, if God had so willed it, we might yet have been happy, my Gwynplaine; for we take up but very little room, and we might have earned our bread together in another land. But God has ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... distress. I saw an aged mother with her white locks and wrinkled face, swoon at the Governor's feet; I saw old men tottering on the staff, with broken hearts and tear stained faces, and heard them plead for their wayward boys. I saw a wife and seven children, clad in rags, and bare-footed, in mid-winter, fall upon their knees around him who held the pardoning power. I saw a little girl climb upon the Governor's knee, and put her arms around his neck; I ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... work, "The Messiah," was composed in Dublin for the benefit of poor debtors who were imprisoned there. The influence of this masterpiece was tremendous. It was said it out-preached the preacher, out-prayed prayers, reformed the wayward, softened stony hearts, as it told the wonderful story of ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... possessed; For not alone they touch the village breast, But filled in elder time th' historic page. There Shakespeare's self, with every garland crowned,— [Flew to those fairy climes his fancy sheen!]— In musing hour, his wayward Sisters found, And with their terrors dressed the magic scene. From them he sung, when, 'mid his bold design, Before the Scot afflicted and aghast, The shadowy kings of Banquo's fated line Through the dark cave in gleamy pageant passed. Proceed, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... take them, but apres we abandoned the project so hopeless and travelled sans payer. When asked at the barriers or in the lifts, we offered pennies, and the men who collected took them joyfully, asking not whence we came. It was une procedee tres simple. It is possible that these wayward uncounted pennies dropped into their own pockets. They rejoiced always to receive them. From Wimbledon we returned to Earl's Court, and then, descending by an electric staircase, which moved of itself, again found ourselves ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Geoffrey Battersby he has given us a piece of character-drawing almost flawlessly perfect. Not for a very long time has it been my good fortune to attend such a triumph, and I wish to proclaim it. The women by whom Geoffrey, the weak and the wayward, was attracted hither and thither are also well drawn; but here Mr. MAIS shows his present limitations. Nevertheless I feel sure that he has within him the qualities that go to make a great novelist, and that if he will free himself from certain marked prejudices his future ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 152, Feb. 7, 1917 • Various
... wanderer had been a nine days' wonder; now his presence elicited no comment. He was walking cap in hand in the sunshine, just as he had walked in the winter snow. To Trenholme the sight of him brought little impression beyond a reminder of his brother's wayward course. It always brought that reminder; and now, underneath the flow of his talk about college buildings, was the thought that, if all were done and said that might be, it was possible that it would be expedient for the future of the New College that the present principal should resign. This ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... found him still sitting there. Ethel's depression had vanished, to be followed by a mood of wayward merriment for which the honest, straightforward soldier was totally at a loss to account. Sincere himself, he looked for sincerity in others. If Ethel's gravity had been unfeigned, how could it so ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... shower—sun and shower— Now rough, now smooth, is the winding way; Thorn and flower—thorn and flower— Which will you gather? Who can say? Wayward hearts, there's a world for your winning, Sorrow and laughter, love or woe: Who can tell in the day's beginning The paths that your ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... of the water-witches,' wherever she learned that term. Her cousin Violette was standing in the doorway as she saw Annette move off, and she cried out to her to beware of the eddies; but my sister, wayward and reckless as it is her habit to be in such matters, merely replied with a laugh; and then as the canoe began to turn round and round in the gurgling circles ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... need not waste our schoolboy art To gild this notch of time; Forgive me, if my wayward heart Has throbbed in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... more than battles and forts and the paraphernalia of war; history is economic development as well. And from this same balcony we can pick out Thompson's, Rainsford, and Deer Island, set aside for huge corrective institutions—a graphic example of a nation's progress in its treatment of the wayward and ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... to her feet and turned to the open door. The tents lay silent in the moonshine, but wayward lights flickered in the sumptuous dusk, and the quiet of the hills hung like a canopy over the bivouac of the little army. No token of misfortune came out of this peaceful encampment, no omen of disaster crossed the long lane of drowsy fires and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... "Musical Symbolism," for Adelaide Ann Proctor's "The Story of the Faithful Soul." Of the greatest delicacy imaginable is the music (for piano, violin, and voice) to William Sharp's "Coming of the Prince." The "Watteau Pictures" are poems of Verlaine's variously treated: one as a head-piece to a wayward piano caprice, one to be recited during a picturesque waltz, the last a song with ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... orderly and inexorable treatment of people just as, according to the best modern lights, they ought to be treated, this lawless love was strong in Beaumaroy. Not as a principle; it was the stronger for being an instinct, a wayward instinct that might carry him, he scarce ...
— The Secret of the Tower • Hope, Anthony
... heavy tone, without any apparent feeling. Always he was mercilessly frank and never spared the truth. But Columbine, who knew him well, felt how this news flayed him. Resentment stirred in her toward the wayward son, but she knew ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... that pass. I hear a nation's voice Raised to defend the absent, wronged child; My hopes and aims were high, albeit my choice Was fixed on one who felt not for my wild And wayward nature; one who never smiled On imperfection. From my home of light Unscathed, I see life's blackening billows piled, Ready to sweep the daring soul from sight, Sinking his name and ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... it burn; constraint its life doth chill. If pity soften not thy wayward will, Love, feigned and real, will ...
— The Countess of Escarbagnas • Moliere
... Astolpho; here's the place Which men (for being poor) are sent to starve in;— Rude remedy, I trow, for sore disease. Within these walls, stifled by damp and stench, Doth Hope's fair torch expire, and at the snuff, Ere yet 'tis quite extinct, rude, wild, and wayward, The desperate revelries of fell Despair, Kindling their hell-born cressets, light to deeds That the poor Captive would have died ere practised, Till bondage sunk his ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Fay in long procession followed Fay; And still the little couch remained unblest: But, when those wayward sprites had passed away, Came One, the last, the ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... walk with thee In lowly paths of service free; Tell me thy secret; help me bear The strain of toil, the fret of care; Help me the slow of heart to move By some clear winning word of love; Teach me the wayward feet to stay, And guide them ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the outset in a remarkable way with her mother's relations. At first, to be sure, Elma could see Mrs. Clifford was rather afraid to leave her alone with the odd new-comer, whose habits and manners were as curious and weird as the sudden twists and turns of her own wayward music. But, after a time, a change came over Mrs. Clifford in this respect; and instead of trying to keep Elma and Miss Ewes apart, it was evident to Elma—who never missed any of the small by-play of life—that her mother rather ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... tramps toward Shottery. It is no new thing to go to Shottery with or without Mother for a day at the Hathaways'. There always has been rebellion in the blood of Will Shakespeare, and there is a slender, wayward, grown-up somebody at Shottery who understands. Ann Hathaway has stayed often in Stratford with the Shakespeare household. Mother loves Ann; Father teases and twits her; the young men, swains and would-be sweethearts, swarm about her ...
— A Warwickshire Lad - The Story of the Boyhood of William Shakespeare • George Madden Martin
... lurking in ambush everywhere. We wait to rob you of your last savings of withered hours to scatter them in the wayward winds. We shall bind you in flower chains where Spring keeps his captives, For we know you carry your jewels of youth hidden ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... Jesuits had gained the confidence and good-will of the Huron population. Their patience, their kindness, their intrepidity, their manifest disinterestedness, the blamelessness of their lives, and the tact which, in the utmost fervors of their zeal, never failed them, had won the hearts of these wayward savages; and chiefs of distant villages came to urge that they would make their abode with them. [ Brbeuf preserves a speech made to him by one of these chiefs, as a specimen of Huron eloquence.—Relation des Hurons, 1636, 123. ] As yet, the results of the mission had been faint ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... raging vanity, which she was convinced must prompt its owner to sacrifice, on all occasions, every feeling of duty to its gratification. Amid all the fervour of rebellious passions, and the violence of a wayward mind, a sentiment of profound egotism appeared to her impressed on every page she perused. Great as might have been the original errors of Herbert, awful as in her estimation were the crimes to which they had led him, they might in ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... newly wedded pair was short. Love soon changed to aversion, at least on the part of the bride. She was not of a tender nature; her temper was imperious, and she had a restless craving for excitement. Frontenac, on his part, was the most wayward and headstrong of men. She bore him a son; but maternal cares were not to ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... into the state of society; it is, moreover, a relation which can exist and no sin be committed under the relation; hence, it is not sin in itself, any more than the throne of Nero is sin in itself; and the Apostle speaks to the slave-holding Philemon as he would to a father receiving back a wayward son. ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... Calabria's coast, And Murat's little fleet wore sailing there; No peering moon lit up the lonely sea, But all was sable as his wayward fate. A storm dispers'd them, and Sardinia's isle Receiv'd the bark that held the hapless king, And morn beheld it on the main again; But far apart his faithful followers. Calabria's beach was gain'd; where Murat stood Amidst the dastard throng that hemm'd him round, With ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 384, Saturday, August 8, 1829. • Various
... says expressly, that henceforth, by all his actions, he will 'stand off from them.' To the most learned authorities, the two Universities, he announces that, by his own regular art, he intends giving these wayward disciples of Dramatic Poesy proper instruction and amendment. Had his object not been to strike the most popular of the stage-poets—Shakspere—he would have been bound to make an exception for that name of which everyone must have thought first when stage-poets were subjected ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... he cried, throwing up his hands. 'The best of fathers! The kindest of kings! See that my words are placed upon the record, clerk! The most indulgent of parents! But wayward children must, with all kindness, be flogged into obedience. Here he broke into a savage grin. 'The King will save your own natural parents all further care on your account. If they had wished to keep ye, they should have brought ye up in better principles. ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Son. In another sense the most beautiful part immediately follows. It is a description of the matchless love shown by God to every repentant soul. The father had never ceased to love the prodigal or to hope and yearn for his return. He had been eagerly looking for his wayward son. The first sight of the prodigal filled his heart with compassion; he "ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him." The prodigal was ready to confess his fault, but the father scarcely heard his words as ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... character from dress alone. This runner business is heart-breaking. I tried to make up by getting another short heliogram through, but the sun was uncertain, and the receivers on the distant mountain sulky and wayward. They showed one faint glimmer of intelligence, and then ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... my Gerald," Clorinda said, "I only know. She is my saint—sweet Anne, whom I dared treat so lightly in my poor wayward days. Gerald, she knows all my sins, and to-day she has carried them in her pure hands to God and asked His mercy on them. She ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... maturity as is required for legible record, shall presume to reconstruct, either from memory or from observation, the mind of a child? Certain mental attitudes may be recalled, certain actions predicated in certain circumstances, but the stream of the mind, with its wayward currents, its secret eddies, flows underground, and its course can only be guessed at by tokens of speech and of action, that are like the rushes, and the yellow king-cups, and the emerald of the grass, that show where hidden waters run. Nothing more presumptuous ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... a wholly undisciplined and weak woman, proud of her descent, wayward and hysterical. She ruined the child, whom she alternately petted and abused. She interfered with his education and fixed him in all his bad tendencies. He never learned anything until he was sent away from her to Harrow. He was passionate, sullen, defiant of authority, but very amenable to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... park-land rising up behind her, and the low sun catching her short locks and surrounding her head, her exquisitely bowed head, with a pale-yellow halo. But I confess I thought the original Alice Oke, siren and murderess though she might be, very uninteresting compared with this wayward and exquisite creature whom I had rashly promised myself to send down to posterity in all her unlikely ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... forth, the night was long and the earth cold. Once upon a time Ta-wats, the hare-god, was sitting with his family by the camp-fire in the solemn woods, anxiously waiting for the return of Tae-vi, the wayward sun-god. Wearied with long watching, the hare-god fell asleep, and the sun-god came so near that he scorched the naked shoulder of Ta-wats. Foreseeing the vengeance which would be thus provoked, he fled back to his cave beneath the earth. Ta-wats awoke in great anger, ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell
... friend that taught this wayward little girl to use these spectacles, and they proved a perfect blessing to her, and, step by step, led her up to a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... farther I do grow from La Boheme, The more I do regret that foolish shame Which made me hold it something to conceal, And so I did myself expatriate; For in my pulses and my feet I feel That wayward realm was still my own estate; Wise wagged our tongues when the dear nights grew late, And quainter, clearer, rose our quick conceits, And pure and mutual were our social sweets. Oh! ever thus convivial round the gate ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... feet have held their way; And still, unrestful, bowed and gray, She watches under Eastern skies, With hope each day renewed and fresh, The Lord's quick coming in the flesh, Whereof she dreams and prophesies! Where'er her troubled path may be, The Lord's sweet pity with her go! The outward wayward life we see, The hidden springs we may not know. Nor is it given us to discern What threads the fatal sisters spun, Through what ancestral years has run The sorrow with the woman born, What forged her cruel chain of moods, What ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... a maze of feeling. The night before I had reasoned with myself and schooled my wayward passion to a resolve neither to see nor to speak with her. Resentment at the shame she had brought on me aided my stubbornness, and helped me to forget that I had been shamed because she had remembered me. But now ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... greatly troubled, holding down her pride and her anger, but uncertain how best to deal with this strong wayward spirit. ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thinking what a terrible end Curly and the old vessel came to. Poor Jake, he was a fine, swaggering fellow; a smart sailor, and as brave as a Turkish Bashi-Bazouk. He was very wayward at times, but always faithful as a mastiff dog to me. His apparent disregard for breaking the Sabbath grieved me, and when I rebuked him for it he frequently took me in a sort of humorous way as though it were a good joke to talk to him of religion. But he had periods ...
— The Shellback's Progress - In the Nineteenth Century • Walter Runciman
... words, the Frenchman hurried out, fastening the tent flap after him and leaving me to reflect on the wild impulses of his wayward nature. Was his strange, unwilling generosity the result of animosity to the big squaw, who seemed to exercise some subtle and commanding influence over him; or of gratitude to me? Was the noble blood that coursed in his veins, directing him in spite of his degenerate tendencies; ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... as we see a face That trembles in a forest place Upon the mirror of a pool For ever quiet, clear, and cool; And, in the wayward glass, appears To hover between smiles and tears, Elfin and human, airy and true, And backed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Craig. Alas, Sibley's place of recruiting and assembly has been ill chosen! The animals, crowded on the bare plains, suffer for lack of forage. Recruits are discouraged by the dreary surroundings. The effective strength has not visibly increased in three months. The Texans are wayward. A strong column, well organized, in the rich interior of Texas, full of the early ardor of secession might have pushed on and reached the Gila. But here is only a chafing body of undisciplined men. They are ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... possessed of any elevation of mind, you have no embarrassment in speaking to a King; but to a Great Man you present yourself not without fear. Friedrich, in his private sphere, was of sufficiently unequal humor; wayward, wilful; open to prejudices; indulged in mockery, often enough epigrammatic upon the French;—agreeable in a high degree to strangers whom he pleased to favor; but bitterly piquant for those he was prepossessed against, or who, without knowing it, had ill-chosen the hour of approaching ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dream-faces at the windows; she fancied they stole out timidly into the gardens, and went running away among the rabbits on the gleamy hill-side. Helena laughed to herself, pleased with her fancy of wayward little dreams playing with weak hands and feet among the large, solemn-sleeping cattle. This was the first time, she told herself, that she had ever been out among the grey-frocked dreams and white-armed fairies. She imagined herself lying asleep ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... talked himself into his carriage. As it drove by the drawing-room windows, he saw Caroline standing motionless where he had left her; he kissed his hand,—her eyes were fixed mournfully on his. Hard, wayward, and worldly as Caroline Merton was, Vargrave was yet not worthy of the affection he had inspired; for she could feel, and he could not,—the distinction, perhaps, between the sexes. And there still stood Caroline Merton, recalling the last tones of that indifferent ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his two maiden sisters, he took possession of the estate at Fontenay-aux-Roses, from whence he had been cruelly banished when a boy, and which the unkindness of his parent had never after permitted him to enter. Fortune, which had hitherto played a wayward and capricious game with him, had not yet ceased her freaks. In removing a mirror from over a chimney-piece which required an alteration, he discovered a prodigious treasure that had been concealed there by his father! With that generosity and ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes
... even opposition, in the youth on whom his father's pursuits have been prematurely forced. Seeing the evil, and weary of the good, it often requires a strong sense of duty to prevent him from flying to the contrary extreme, or from becoming wayward, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... have been swift and wayward on the peaks ere they are fed, become tranquil as they ruminate, silent in the shade while the sun is hot, guarded by the herdsman, who on his staff is leaning and, leaning, watches them; and as the shepherd, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 2, Purgatory [Purgatorio] • Dante Alighieri
... enumerated my errors. I have erred, nor do I myself deny it. That man indeed is equivalent to many troops, whom Jove loves in his heart, as now he hath honoured this man, and subdued the people of the Greeks. But since I erred, having yielded to my wayward disposition, I desire again to appease him, and to give him invaluable presents. Before you all will I enumerate the distinguished gifts: seven tripods untouched by fire,[295] and ten talents of gold, and twenty shining caldrons, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c v.; restless; agitated &c 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c 605; capricious &c 608; touch and go; inconsonant, fitful, spasmodic; vibratory; vagrant, wayward; desultory; afloat; alternating; alterable, plastic, mobile; transient &c 111; wavering. Adv. seesaw &c (oscillation) 314; off and on. Phr. a rolling stone gathers no moss; pictra mossa non fa muschis ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... (With tender grace). This is a pure and delectable piece of lyrical work, in MacDowell's most delightful style. The verse tells of a lissom maid whose wayward grace neither sturdy Autumn nor the frown of Winter can ever efface. The words are obviously fanciful, but the song has a graceful ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... members of probity, loyal and honourable in their intentions, who would never become the destroyers of a limited legitimate monarchy, or the corrupt regicides of a rump Parliament, such as brought the wayward Charles the First, of England, to the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... appropriateness, or otherwise, of its significance. In seventeen years and some odd months Francesca had had ample opportunity for forming an opinion concerning her son's characteristics. The spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth of which Francesca herself could seldom see the humorous side. In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... charity—that his life has probably been shortened by his scrupulous regard for justice. His career was one splendid refutation of the popular fallacy, that genius has of necessity vices—that its light must be meteoric—and its courses wayward and uncontrolled. He has left mankind two great lessons,—we scarcely know which is the most valuable. He has taught us how much delight one human being can confer upon the world; he has taught us also that the imagination may aspire to the wildest flights without wandering into error. Of whom ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... inexplicable impulse drives him towards the sombre and the gloomy. The delicacy and wistful charm of the words in which Hawthorne criticises his own work and character reveal how impossible it would have been for him to force his wayward genius. His imagination hovers with curious persistence ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... others would have hated, loving his prodigal with a more anxious fondness as his ingratitude grew baser—as the claims upon a parent's heart dwindled more and more away. The grey-haired man was a girl in tenderness and sensibility. He remembered the mother of the wayward child, and the pains she had taken to misuse and spoil her only boy; his own conduct returned to him in the shape of heavy reproaches, and he could not forget, or call to mind without remorse, the smiles of encouragement ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... is left By a little crooked, crotchety man, Who cannot find his wayward son; When the horn begins to blow, He has to drop his light and run. Of course he limps so slow He squeezes through the very last, When he is gone the naughty scamp Jumps up and ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... application of knowledge to the practical purposes of life. Fostered by the spirit of freedom, which goes before to disenthral the mind from that state of servitude in which its powers had been made to minister to ignorant and wayward ambition, or still more cramping and perverting superstition, it promises to gain an universal ascendancy, and to render all that influence which had been arrayed against it, henceforth subservient only to ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... who will deem This strain a wayward, youthful folly, To be derided as a dream Born of the poet's melancholy. The wealth of worlds, if it were mine, With all that follows in its train, I would with gratitude resign, To dream ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... felt intensely weak, yet delightfully restful—so much so that mere curiosity seemed to have died within him, and he was content to lie still and think of whatever his wayward mind chose to fasten on, or not to think at all, if his mind saw fit to adopt that course in its vagaries. In short, he felt as if he had no more control over his thoughts than a man in a dream, and was quite satisfied that it ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... her, And as he fell to her, so fell she to him. "Even thus," quoth she, "the wanton god embraced me!" And then she clasped Adonis in her arms; "Even thus," quoth she, "the warlike god unlaced me!" As if the boy should use like loving charms. But he, a wayward boy, refused the offer, And ran away the beauteous queen neglecting Showing both folly to abuse her proffer, And all his sex of cowardice detecting. O that I had my mistress at that bay, To kiss and clip me ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... you remember I was praying for your success— and safety, I nearly died of joy. For you know I had been, well, attached to you—to Shabaka, I mean—all the time—that's my part of the story which I daresay you did not see. Although I seemed so cold and wayward I could love, yes, in that life I knew how to love. And Shabaka looked, oh! a hero with his rent mail and the glory of triumph in his eyes. He was very handsome, too, in his way. But what nonsense I ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... the law, Monsieur Mouillard. I have studied Fabien. His temperament is somewhat wayward. With special training he might have become an artist. Lacking that early moulding into shape, he never will be anything more than ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... still uninformed of an entanglement it was impossible he should conjecture, attributed her varying humours to the effect of wayward health meeting a sort of sudden wayward power: and imagined that caprices, which he judged to be partly feminine, and partly wealthy, would soberise themselves away ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... an army upon the land, A navy upon the seas, Creeping along, a snail-like band, Or waiting the wayward breeze; When I saw the peasant faintly reel, With the toil which he faintly bore, As constant he turned at the tardy wheel, Or tugged at ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... she could spend her life in passionate adoration at its foot; but when she did not see it, and the wind, coming in from the desert through the tent door, where she heard the movement of Androvsky, stirred in her hair, she felt reckless, wayward, savage—and something more. A cry rose in her that was like the cry of a stranger, who yet was of her and in her, and from whom she would ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... to say that he kept his word, and was to the last, the same genial, warm-hearted, impulsive, wayward man who had by these and other engaging qualities made for himself so large a place in the heart of his countrymen, during the long years he had wandered over her moors and hills, seeing all her beauties, and describing them as no other ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... patches of mellow light upon the floor seemed more bright here than anywhere else. If it rained, this place was less dreary than any other, and in sun or storm it was the only spot that Nan felt had the power to quell her wayward mood when it rose against her will and urged her back to her ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... as the tree is bent the tiny twig's inclined, And in the very littlest girls we see The contradictious tendencies of woman's wayward mind Developed to a marvellous degree. For each small daughter of her mother Will say one ...
— Children of Our Town • Carolyn Wells
... thing she sees: True grief is fond and testy as a child, Who wayward once, his mood with nought agrees: Old woes, not infant sorrows, bear them mild; Continuance tames the one: the other wild, Like an unpractised swimmer plunging still, With too much labour ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... toilet—and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? For these are the things that all may have, as Pippa had. The ambushing of that beam and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... were, and peered about to see his way. At this moment a figure appeared in the street for which he felt a violent antipathy; it was that of his new landlord, little Molineux. Every one has dreamed dreams filled with the events of a lifetime, in which there appears and reappears some wayward being, commissioned to play the mischief and be the villain of the piece. To Birotteau's fancy Molineux seemed delegated by chance to fill some part in his life. His weird face had grinned diabolically at the ball, and he had looked at its magnificence with an evil eye. ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... conduce to men's best interest, and that vice is not sin merely, but folly. But of these men each has passions and prejudices, the gratification of which he prefers, not only to the general weal, but to that of himself as an individual. Under the action of these wayward impulses a man drinks to-day though he is sure of starving to-morrow. He murders to-morrow though he is sure to be hanged on Wednesday; and people are so slow to believe that which makes against their own ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... who called upon Flora to talk over her projected emigration was a Miss Wilhelmina Carr—a being so odd, so wayward, so unlike the common run of mortals, that we must endeavour to give a slight sketch of her to our readers. We do not possess sufficient artistic skill to do Miss Wilhelmina justice; for if she had not actually lived and walked the earth, and if we had ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... was determined to have this morning. I had often seen such demonstrations before, and borne them with comparative patience, knowing how well worth the trouble of winning, how true and tender after all, if only it could be reached under these disguising caprices, was the wayward little heart that had tested my love and tried my temper all these years. From her very cradle she provoked me, from the frills of her baby cap she mocked me; and, grown into the ranks of little girlhood, systematically aggravated me by artful preference of all the little boys I most hated, for ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... nor of wayward mood: [To WILL. Wait as do these; use faith and diligence, And mark him well that dare disdain this shield, Which London's lord, that Pleasure hath to name, Hath here advanc'd in honour of his dame. I bid thee mark him well, whate'er he be, That London's ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... wayward; Symptoms unable to study; no self-analysis, restless; sad; living by irritable; not rule or reading equal to medical books; amusement. May Fond of gaiety; be suicidal. sad and joyous by ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... realized that he wanted to know about this business of marrying Dick. He wanted to know tremendously. Yet, though this was the little Nan who sometimes used to seem more his child than anybody's, he could not ask her. She looked difficult, if not wayward. ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... actions he extends them to the conduct of the whole of life, and makes what was a momentary feeling a permanent and immutable principle. And obedience in the child to the will of such a parent may be compared to faith in and obedience to the will of the Supreme Being; and a wayward and disobedient child who reasons upon and doubts the utility of the discipline of such a father is much in the same state in which the adult man is who doubts if there be good in the decrees of Providence and who questions the harmony of the ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... sways the earth, And o'er the wayward holds his threatening rod, Who dares molest the gentle maids that keep Their holy vigils ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... fade, and wanton fields To wayward Winter reckoning yeilds A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancies spring, but ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... ungentle wayward mood! 'Tis said of thee, when in the lap, Thy nurse to tempt thee to thy food, Would squeeze a lemon in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... That full justice might be done to the eloquence of the composition, the favorite part of the esquire was supported by Toby Matthew, whose father was afterwards archbishop of York; a man of a singular and wayward disposition, whose prospects in life were totally destroyed by his subsequent conversion to popery; but whose talents and learning were held in such esteem by Bacon, that he eagerly engaged his pen in the task of translating into ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... ghost. You will please then, in what follows, to represent to yourselves the charms of Sophia as decked and burnished with a suit of sables. Her exterior indeed was sable and gloomy, but her heart was far superior to the attacks of wayward fate. She sat aloft in the region of philosophy. She steeled her heart with the dignity of republicanism; for her to drop one tear of sorrow would ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... the stars aside with its battle-scarred head and sending swift gleams of light through the heavens as its hoofs strike against an upturned planet? Your horns, are they tipped with fire and your beard gloriously aflame, or has the great evil spirit of Wayward Goats descended upon you and borne you away to a place where there is never anything to butt save unsatisfactorily yielding walls of padded cotton? Many changes have taken place, Eli, since you were with us, much adversity has befallen ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... were falling on the wake Which far and near my wayward path betrayed, Shone there upon me in that fateful hour, A Holy Being, clothed in light and power. And with Him came th' eternal morning's break. How sweet His words, 'Tis I, be ...
— Across the Sea and Other Poems. • Thomas S. Chard
... did philosophic tube, That brings the planets home into the eye Of observation, and discovers, else Not visible, His family of worlds, Discover Him that rules them; such a veil Hangs over mortal eyes, blind from the birth, And dark in things divine. Full often too Our wayward intellect, the more we learn Of nature, overlooks her Author more; From instrumental causes proud to draw Conclusions retrograde, and mad mistake: But if His Word once teach us, shoot a ray Through all the heart's dark chambers, ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... treasons were apparently forgotten, which had proved so fatal to his country—the sending of Gylippus to Syracuse, the revolt of Chios and Miletus, and the conspiracy of the Four Hundred. The effect of this treatment, so much better than what he deserved, intoxicated this wayward and unprincipled, but exceedingly able man. His first exploit was to sail to Andros, now under a Lacedaemonian garrison, whose fields he devastated, but was unable to take the town. He then went to Samos, and there learned ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... into my solitude from this time. In this child I lived, breathed, and had my being, until later events startled my individuality once more into its old currents of existence. Not that I merged myself entirely in Ernie, sickly, wayward, fitful, ugly little mite that he was undeniably. Nay, rather did I draw him forcibly into my own sphere of being and find nutrition ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... comforts and consoles. The heart of man is wayward and goes oft astray. No one can be belabored into righteousness. The true lover of souls allows for the hereditary weaknesses of man, for his infirmities of will and temper, for his excuses, wanderings, and tears, and presents ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... shadow, giving him their own and accepting his. Day and night, at all hours, and in all weather, he would face them. If it rained, he might fling his plaid over him, but would take no admonition. He must have his way. On such occasions, dutiful as he was in higher matters, he remained incurably wayward. In vain one reminded him that a letter needed an answer, or that the storm would soon be over. It was very necessary for him to do what he liked; and one of his dearest friends said to me, with a smile of the most affectionate humour, 'He wrote his "Ode ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... on earth are of course men, and the words encourage us to dim hopes about which we cannot dogmatise of a time when all the wayward self-seeking and self-tormenting children of men shall have learned to know and love their best friend, and 'there shall be one flock and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... prized simply for its external tangible results. Achievement comes to denote the sort of thing that a well-planned machine can do better than a human being can, and the main effect of education, the achieving of a life of rich significance, drops by the wayside. Meantime mind-wandering and wayward fancy are nothing but the unsuppressible imagination cut loose from concern with ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... still to be seen pouring over the highlands to the south-east. Above the glacier ahead whirlies, out-lined in high revolving columns of snow, "stalked about" in their wayward courses. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... subdued the earth, and began rapidly to replenish it, for they married and were given in marriage. The State of North Carolina, several years afterward, with a motherly forgiveness, passed laws to confirm marriages and other deeds of these wayward children in ...
— Sketches of Western North Carolina, Historical and Biographical • C. L. Hunter
... Davie was not more wilful and wayward than is often the case with lads of his age, nor was he idle, or inclined to do less than his just share of what was to be done. On the contrary, he had great good sense and perseverance in carrying out any plans of ...
— David Fleming's Forgiveness • Margaret Murray Robertson
... in the mood for sounds of every kind now, and strained her ears to catch the faintest, in wayward enmity to her quiet of mind. Another ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... who can't sleep easy underground it seems, want to have everybody waked up at the same hour in the morning. When I hear that whistle, and the fifty other whistles of the factories that have since followed its wayward and unlicensed example, I have wished more than once that we had in Boston a little more of the firm ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... quandary, so totally unforeseen was this situation. And then a glimmer of hope came to me that perhaps his mother and Riddle might not be in St. Louis after all. I recalled the conversation in the cabin, and reflected that this wayward pair had stranded on so many beaches, had drifted off again on so many tides, that one place could scarce hold them long. Perchance they had sunk,—who could tell? I turned to Nick, who ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... are you a man of sensitive perceptions as to the proprieties and dignities of dress and deportment which should characterise some great historical personage whose name you have held in profound veneration all your life long? Now, in the wayward drift of your imagination among the freaks of modern fashion, did it ever dare to present before your eyes St. Paul in strapped pantaloons, figured velvet vest, swallow-tailed coat, stove-pipe hat, and a cockney glass at his eye? Did your fancy, in its wildest fictions, ever pass such an image across ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... was: "I told you so!" Warrington had disappointed her, too. He behaved himself. He did not run after young Mrs. Bennington; he never called there alone; he was seen more frequently at the old Bennington place. The truth is, Patty was busy reforming the wayward dramatist, and Warrington was busy watching the result. There were those who nodded and looked wise whenever they saw the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... friends, the first has been all his life one of that easy, wayward, truant class whom the world is accustomed to designate as nobody's enemies but their own. Bred to a profession for which he never qualified himself, and reared in the expectation of a fortune he has never inherited, he ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... her love, but upon whom he had no claims. But from that night his attitude towards her underwent a change. Very tenderly he took her into his own close keeping. She had become human in his eyes, no longer a wayward sprite, but a woman, eager-hearted, and his own. He gave her reverence because of that womanhood which he had only just begun to visualize in her. Out of his passion there had kindled a greater fire. All that she had in life she gave him, glorying ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... impulsively, a rare thing with her, and occasioned in this instance by the painful consciousness of how she was judged, when she was really so kindly disposed toward the wayward girls. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... ago three brothers—the eldest rich, the second a wayward, roving gambler, and the youngest a mere boy—lived together among their kind, the Dine{COMBINING BREVE} people. Their only sister was married, living apart with her husband. The gambler often took property belonging to his brothers, going to distant corners of the land to stake it on games ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... wilful, wayward, unjust," cried Middleton, with a flushed cheek. "I have not told you—yet you know well—the deep and real importance which this subject has for me. We have been together as friends, yet, the instant when there comes up an occasion when the slightest friendly feeling would induce ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... believe those rosy-tinted cheeks Concealed a heart torn by the pangs of love. Is it within the range of wayward chance That the fair Princess Eboli should sigh Unheard—unanswered? Love is only known By him who ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... men have known domestic sorrows, so many and so great, as those which befell David. He shared, in all its bitterness, the misery of a parent who sees his best hopes disappointed, and who is racked with anxiety as to what his wayward boy will do next, sometimes wishing that before such dishonour had befallen him his son had been laid to rest under the daisies, in the time of infant innocence. David's eldest son, Amnon, after committing ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... of the ceasing of Undine's wayward moods after she had received her soul—of her docility—of her tenderness—of Huldebrand's certainty of her love. Then of his inevitable weariness. And at last of the Court, and the meeting again with Hildegarde, ...
— Three Weeks • Elinor Glyn
... criticism of the results which the mothers who consult us achieve in the training of their children. A sensitive, nervous organisation is often the mark of intellectual possibilities above the average, and the children who are cast outside the ordinary mould, who are the most wayward, the most intractable, who react to trifling faults of management with the most striking symptoms of disturbance, are often those with the greatest potentialities for achievement and for good. It is natural for the mother of placid, contented, and perhaps rather ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... each other?" he interrupted. "Yes; and well you may. But it is easily explained. I have not always been the blood-stained villain that I now am; when I knew your mother I was, I need scarcely say, wholly innocent of crime. Idle, perhaps; wayward; and a trifle wild I undoubtedly was; but crime and I were strangers, and strangers we should have continued to be," he added somewhat wildly, "if I had but listened to and heeded the warnings and pleadings ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... observance, attended upon the ordinances of the church. In society he was esteemed as a just and righteous man; in the church as one who lived near to heaven. As for himself, he believed that severity toward his boy, and intolerance of all the weaknesses, errors, and wayward tendencies of childhood, were absolutely needed for the due correction of evil impulses. Alas! that he, like too many of his class, permitted anger toward his children's faults to blind his better judgment, and to stifle the genuine appeals of nature. Instead of ...
— The Iron Rule - or, Tyranny in the Household • T. S. Arthur
... but you mustn't tell it—you mustn't let him know it. He is wayward and I am afraid that he has innocently deceived you. He is hardly responsible—he says many ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... and their clear steam shrank to mist; and they saw themselves and each other wrapped in dull rain-laden clouds. They then drew their white cloud-garments round them, and veiled themselves for very shame; and said, "We have been wild and wayward: and, alas! our pure bright youth is gone. But we will do one good deed yet ere we die, and so we shall not have lived in vain. We will glide onward to the land, and weep there; and refresh all things with soft warm rain; and make the grass grow, the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... know, and who promises to be fit to lead? Think over those you know in Cleveland, or Painesville, or Warren. Is somebody to come from somewhere else? Think of your own plans and expectations. Who can help you? I see possibilities in this wayward, passionate, hasty, generous youth. He is a tender and devoted son, and I am glad he came back; and nobody knows how he may be pushed against us ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... critics—therefore, not unnaturally, suspicious of an actress who was so beautiful, so beautifully dressed, so well supported, and so well outfitted with actor-proof plays even the critics conceded her ability. She was worthy of the great character Brent had created—the wayward, many-sided, ever gay ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... blossoms glisten Within the crowned trees; The meadow grasses listen The din of busy bees; The wayward, woodland singer Carols along the leas, Not loth to be the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and with a trowel turned over the soft black soil. An odor arose. "See! Just see how rich and black it is!" she exclaimed eagerly. "It's a little sour now because water has stood on it." She seemed to be apologizing as for a wayward child. "When it's drained I shall use lime to sweeten it," she added. She was like a mother leaning over the cradle of a sleeping babe. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... detained him, while she prayed silently for heaven's blessing on his wayward head, and then releasing him, she bade him go. Had he known of all that was to follow, he would not have left her, but he believed as he said, that she would survive the winter, and with one more kiss upon her brow, where the perspiration was standing thickly, he departed. The ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... was his sister, and she regarded him in the light of a brother. He was never weary of playing with her, albeit she now and then gave herself not a few airs when he was inclined to humour her. Yet she was in no degree wayward, but always obedient and affectionate ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... Edwin Booth was associated with his father in all the wanderings and strange and often sad adventures of that wayward man of genius, and no doubt the many sorrowful experiences of his youth deepened the gloom of his inherited temperament. Those who know him well are aware that he has great tenderness of heart and abundant playful humour; that his mind is one of extraordinary liveliness, and that he sympathises ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... baron and the duke, Gobenheim and Latournelle as partners. Modeste took a seat near the poet, to Ernest's deep disappointment; he watched the face of the wayward girl, and marked the progress of the fascination which Canalis exerted over her. La Briere had not the gift of seduction which Melchior possessed. Nature frequently denies it to true hearts, who are, as a rule, timid. This gift demands fearlessness, an alacrity of ways and means that ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... hotheaded youth the benefit of their experience. The beautiful woman in the center draws to her side the splendid warrior, whose mother on his left gives her affectionate advice. On the right of the panel, a father restrains a wayward and jealous youth who has ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... the wayward world, That powerful world in which ye dwell, Come, Spirits of the Mind! and try, To-night, beneath the moonlight sky, What may be ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... Edam certain odd characters formed in Nature's wayward moods. Sneek also possessed a giant named Lange Jacob, who was eight feet tall and the husband of Korte Jannetje (Little Jenny), who was just half that height. People came from great distances to see this couple. And at Sneek, in ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... received more attention in recent years than ever before. They do not, however, belong to my field, and to consider them at any length would only divert attention from my proper topic. But they deserve mention in passing in order to make plain how wayward is self-consciousness,— how far from an assured ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... To-night there was not only vigor, but tenderness— there was a passion in her voice which arose now and then to power. She was so completely in sympathy with her part that she ceased to be Priscilla: she was the Prince who must win this wayward Princess ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... and wondering if he could himself take advantage of it. He had been in the reform school over a year, but it had not reformed him. The new superintendent, with his kindness, had won the hearts of many of the most wayward boys, but no impression had he made on Glen. As a matter of fact the boy rather laughed at his foolishness. To put boys on their honor, to trust the merit boys to go into town without guard, all was new policy, and the only interest Glen had in it was to take advantage of it. Let him ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... now smiling as in scorn, Muttering his wayward fancies he would rove; Now drooping, woeful-wan, like one forlorn, Or crazed with care, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... have not disturbed the ultimate confidence of man in the stability of this old and often seemingly wayward earth. All Greece was convulsed centuries ago from center to circumference and Constantinople for the second time was overturned with the loss of tens of thousands of lives. Five hundred years afterwards ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be overmastered with a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren, and truly I hold it a sin to match ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... our modern society admits libertines and seducers to the drawing-room, while it excludes their helpless and degraded victims, consequently it is not strange that there are skeletons in many closets, matrimonial infelicity and wayward girls. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the hand of the pale and sombre King. The petitioner was Pedro Menendez de Aviles, one of the ablest and most distinguished officers of the Spanish marine. He was born of an ancient Asturian family. His boyhood had been wayward, ungovernable, and fierce. He ran off at eight years of age, and when, after a search of six months, he was found and brought back, he ran off again. This time he was more successful, escaping on board ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... holidays were approaching, and the far-off haven of home could almost, as it were, be seen with the naked eye. Whether the disastrous termination to the dormitory sports had really served as a warning to Jack to put some restraint upon his wayward inclinations, it would be difficult to say; but certainly since the affair of the obstacle race he had managed to keep clear of the headmaster's study, and had only indulged in such minor acts of disorder as were the natural ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... near relation—although he was rich in this world's riches, but in them poor in comparison with the noble endowments that nature had lavished upon his mind. His guardians took little heed of the splendid but wayward youth—and knew not now whither his fancies had carried him, were it even to some savage land. Thus the Fold became to him the one dearest roof under the roof of heaven. All the simple ongoings of that humble home, love and imagination ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... if she were ever canonized, Martha of Bethany must be the patron saint—if again, feminine celestials, sainthood once achieved through the weary experience of earth, don't know better than to assume such charge of wayward man—born, as they are, seemingly, to the life destiny of being ever "careful and troubled about ...
— Faith Gartney's Girlhood • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... from that time forth, Dick had no firmer friend than Micky Maguire, who, I am glad to say, though occasionally wayward, improved vastly, and became a useful employe of the establishment which he had entered. Of course both in ability and education, though in the last he gained considerably, he was quite inferior to Dick; but he was advanced as he grew older to the position of porter, where ...
— Fame and Fortune - or, The Progress of Richard Hunter • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... I answered, following the wayward lead my wit had opened. "The gods of birth were careless, and I was mislaid in a far land and nursed by an alien people. I am Korean, and now, at last, I have ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... will. All evil and all good come from your heart. Your heart alone has the key of life and death for you.' I was just about to ask you at this point which of our two authors, our allegorical or our mystical author upon the heart, you like best. But that would be a stupid and a wayward question since you have them both before you, and both at their best, to possess and to enjoy. To go back then to John Bunyan, and to his ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... emancipated us from many illusions, but it has, as it were, taken the inspiration out of our lives. It has made knowledge a thing for specialists who have lost the sense of totality, the sense of the value of their particular studies in relation to the whole; and it has made action feeble and wayward by depriving men of the conviction that there is any great central aim to be achieved by it. And these results would have been still more obvious, were it not that men are so slow in realizing what is ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... so often the case with pious men, had a wayward child, the princess Dahut, who on one occasion while her father was sleeping gave a secret banquet to her lover, in which the pair, excited with wine, committed folly after folly, until at last it occurred ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence |
