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More "Opulence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her mother's brother, and a number of elated New York relatives came to the Belgian capital, shedding their American opulence as the sun throws out its light. The skill of a general was required to direct, manage and control the pageant of the sixteenth. Thousands of dollars were tossed into the cauldron of social ambition by the lavish mother, who, from behind an army of lieutenants, ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... magnitude of his debauches, in opulence of murders, and that's all. It's a fact. Read Michelet. You will see that the princes of this epoch were redoubtable butchers. There was a sire de Giac who poisoned his wife, put her astride of his horse and rode at breakneck speed for five leagues, until she died. There was another, ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans
... lady Feng, "my eldest uncle say that things were in such a state, and how couldn't I believe? but what surprises me is how it ever happened that this family attained such opulence and honour!" ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... order and freedom, sprang a prosperity of which the annals of human affairs had furnished no example; how our country, from a state of ignominious vassalage, rapidly rose to the place of umpire among European powers; how her opulence and her martial glory grew together; how, by wise and resolute good faith, was gradually established a public credit fruitful of marvels which to the statesmen of any former age would have seemed incredible; how a gigantic commerce gave birth to a ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... commerce and navigation the Etruscans were indebted for their opulence and consequent magnificence; their destruction was owing to the defects of their political system. There were twelve Tuscan cities united in a federative alliance. Between the Mac'ra and Arnus were, Pi'sae, Pisa; Floren'tia, Florence; ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... him, knocked speechless by this great beaker of bounty that had rolled in upon the flat expanse of our afternoon. Mr. Pegg, in his shiny top hat and neat Prince Albert moved away in the ruddy November sunlight as in a halo of opulence. Never before had we appreciated the princely turn of his toes beneath their drab spats, the flash of his twirled walking-stick. We resolved to keep him in mind. He was a neighbour worth having. Angel even suggested certain time-honoured ditties ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... little sympathy with the dreamy romanticism which found such splendid exponents, while he was yet in his early youth, in Schumann, Chopin, and Liszt. Imagination in its higher functions he seemed to lack. A certain opulence and picturesqueness of fancy united in his artistic being with an intelligence both lucid and penetrating, and a sense of form and symmetry almost Greek in its fastidiousness. The sweet, vague, passionate aspiration^, the sensibility that quivers with every breath ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... never expected then to learn, that the everlasting laws of righteousness were to give way to imaginary, political, and commercial expediency; and that thousands of our fellow-creatures were to be reduced to wretchedness, that individuals might enjoy opulence, or ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... life is living The love-heart of the year; And the pagan meadow-lark and I Can nothing find to fear. We build our simple homes For opulence of rest Among the hills and the meadow grass, And ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... this, further, it came over him that he hadn't been prepared and that his wretched appearance must show it. He wasn't fit to receive a visit—any visit; a flush for his felt misery, in the light of her opulence, broke out in his lean cheeks. But if he coloured he sat as he was—she should at least, as a visitor, be satisfied. His eyes only, at last, turned from her and resumed a little their gaze at the sea. That, however, didn't relieve him, and he perpetrated in the course of another ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... that gala day was a glorious evening. Rich and warm and beautiful, self-indulgent nature had swaddled herself about in barbaric bands of colour, a drowsy opulence of green and scarlet, soft-toned amber and pale, veiled azure. It was an hour when the senses riot in carnival, when colour sings and sound seems pink and gold, when light is fragrant and flowers emit ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... money, and the increase of our opulence, might form, says Johnson, a curious subject of research. In the reign of Edward the Sixth, Latimer mentions it as a proof of his father's prosperity, that though but a yeoman, he gave his daughters five pounds each for their ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... Society with the clubs of France, read Priestley's adherence to their opinions. 5th, What the French is with regard to religious toleration, and with regard to, 1. Religion,—2. Civil happiness,—3. Virtue, order, and real liberty,—4. Commercial opulence,—5. National defence. In proof of the fifth proposition, read the representation of the French minister of the Home Department, and the report of the committee ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the pile. A great sigh of indrawn breaths swept through the crowd. The North had never known a bet like this—it meant a fortune. Here was a tale for one's grandchildren—that a man should win opulence in an evening, then lose it in one deal. This final bet represented more than many of them had ever seen a one time before. Its fate ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... altogether. Nothing at all was said about the "great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence." Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and "winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe." ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... Priory, we are told in the Neustria Pia[24], that it was anciently of much opulence, and that a Queen of France contributed largely to the endowment of the house. Many men of eminence, particularly three of the Talbot family, were buried within its walls. Peter Megissier, a prior of Longueville, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... proportion taxes to wealth? Yesterday I had two hundred oxen, to-day I have sixty, to-morrow I shall have a hundred. Clunic has three cows, but they are thin; Nicclu has only two, but they are fat. Which is the richer, Clunic or Nicclu? The signs of opulence are deceitful. What is certain is that everyone eats and drinks. Tax people according to what they consume. That would be wisdom and it ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... paper on the subject), the means by which Britain may now, on the most distant voyages, preserve numbers of her intrepid sons, her mariners; who, braving every danger, have so liberally contributed to the fame, to the opulence, and to the maritime empire, of their country?"—An acknowledgement so judicious finds a response in every breast that knows how to estimate the value of human life and happiness, and will not fail ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr
... fastidious as Bromfield should patronize a place so dingy and so rough as this. At the end of one room was a marble mantelpiece above which there was a defaced, gilt-frame mirror. The chandeliers, the chairs, the wall-paper, all suggested the same note of one-time opulence worn ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... what I should have said. As I am not an inventive liar, I could only smile feebly. I am never at my ease with Aunt Jessica. I am not the kind of person to afford her entertainment. I do not belong to her world of opulence, and if even I desired it, which the gods forbid, my means would not enable me to make the necessary display. My uncle, thinking to retrieve the fallen fortunes of the title, amassed enormous wealth as a company ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... subpremi. Oppressor tirano, subpremanto. Opprobrium malnobleco, malgloro. Optics optiko. Optical optika. Optician optikisto. Optimism optimismo. Optimist optimisto. Option elekto—ajxo. Opulence ricxeco. Opulent ricxa. Opusculum libreto, brosxuro. Or aux. Oracle orakolo. Oral vocxa, parola. Orange orangxo. Orange (colour) orangxkolora. Orangery orangxerio. Oration parolado. Orator oratoro, parolisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... prolonged stare to the portrait of Heyst's father, that severe profile ignoring the vanities of this earth. His eyes gleamed sideways at the heavy silver candlesticks—signs of opulence. He prowled as a stray cat entering a strange place might have done, for if Ricardo had not Wang's miraculous gift of materializing and vanishing, rather than coming and going, he could be nearly as noiseless in his less ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... above that witnessed in any other country. Their land, with less labour, yields a greater usufruct than other land; they get more money for their industry; they jingle more coin in their pockets than other peoples. But it is a grievous error to mistake that superior opulence for a sign of money-hunger, for they actually hold money very lightly, and spend a great deal more of it than any other race of men and with far less thought of values. The normal French family, it is often said, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... through all his manners reign: Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain; Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue; And ev'n in penance planning sins anew. 130 All evils here contaminate the mind That opulence departed leaves behind; For wealth was theirs,[16] not far removed the date When commerce proudly nourished through the state, At her command the palace learnt to rise,[17] 135 Again the long-fallen column sought the skies,[18] The canvas glowed, beyond e'en nature warm,[19] The pregnant quarry ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... half-an-hour by fast car. She liked its spacious lawns and its terraced Italian garden—they were so admirable for garden parties and open-air theatricals. She liked the useless size of the house—it ministered to her love of opulence. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... the optimist finds the "very rich," with but few exceptions, amiable, generous, and kindly, often regretting that poorer friends will allow their wealth to bar them off, wishing often that their opulence need not shut them off from the little dinners, the homely hospitality, the small gifts, the sincere courtesies of those whose means are moderate, The cheerful people who are not dismayed by the superior magnificence ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... and very naturally presumed, that the injuries which they had suffered, and the dangers which they still apprehended from his most inveterate enemy, would secure the fidelity of a party already considerable by their numbers and opulence. Even the conduct of Maxentius towards the bishops of Rome and Carthage may be considered as the proof of his toleration, since it is probable that the most orthodox princes would adopt the same measures with regard to their established clergy. Marcellus, the former of these prelates, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... through the saving influence of his faith, approving himself in the sight of all [224] an ideal judge, even according to the highest conception; because John Howard, opulent and free to enjoy his opulence and repose, was drawn thereby throughout the whole continent of Europe in quest of the hidden miseries that torture those whom the law has shut out, in dungeons, from the light and sympathy of the world; because Thomas Clarkson, animated by the spirit of its teachings, consecrated wealth, ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... refinement. It was the first time she had ever entered its gates, although, in a measure, she was entitled to look upon it as her own home. Perhaps never so much as now she realized what a deep gulf lay between her husband's family and herself. This was a world she had never known—a world of opulence and luxury. She did not know how she had summoned up courage enough to come. Yet there was no time to be lost. Immediate action was necessary. Howard must have the best lawyers that money could procure. Judge Brewster had been deaf to her entreaties. ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... The stress of mind engendered by the alternating of these themes of suffering would have rendered life an unbearable burden to John, had he not found anchorage in an invincible belief in God, a belief which set in stormily for the pomp and opulence of Catholic ceremonial, for the solemn Gothic arch and the jewelled joy of painted panes, for the grace and the elegance and the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... native language, and, finding that I understood him, he commenced talking with astonishing volubility. In the space of five minutes he informed me that, having a desire to see the world, he had run away from his friends, who were people of opulence at Madrid, and that he did not intend to return until he had travelled through various countries. I told him that if what he said was true, he had done a very wicked and foolish action; wicked, because he must have overwhelmed those with grief whom he was bound to honour ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... on Kenoza fall, Her autumn leaves by Saltonstall; No lavished gold can richer make Her opulence of hill ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... sufficiently celebrated in Orleans, a city where, in general, we should be puzzled to say why he came to pass his days of penitence. Provincial debauches, petits-maitres of six hundred livres a year, shared the fragments of his opulence. ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thirty-six feet, lofty and elegant, and singularly well designed. The sleeping apartments above are executed upon a scale equally luxurious and regardless of expense. Externally, the building must ever remain a monument of the splendor which, as far as opulence is concerned, places some of our merchants on a footing almost with royalty itself, and a glance at the interior will be a privilege eagerly sought ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... Contrasted faults through all his manner reign; Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain; Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue; And e'en in penance planning sins anew. 130 All evils here contaminate the mind, That opulence departed leaves behind; For wealth was theirs, not far remov'd the date, When commerce proudly flourish'd through the state; At her command the palace learn'd to rise, 135 Again the long-fall'n column sought the skies; The canvas glow'd beyond e'en Nature warm, The pregnant quarry teem'd with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... intellect was such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the mechanical emptiness of the modern German system ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... respite—the temptation was irresistible. And he really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome honesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, as if the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled the fragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being with such people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touched at Naples he agreed ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... The Sowing of the Seed Old Clothes High Noon Obstacles Thought Force Opulence Eternity Morning Influences The Philosophy of Happiness A Worn Out Creed Common Sense Literature Optimism Preparation Dividends Royalty Heredity Invincibility Faces The Object of Life Wisdom Self-Conquest The Important Trifles ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... is, no doubt, a fine country,—finer than ever under the present reign. The more magnificent the Court is, the more uneasy do I become. Wealth and opulence are needed there; and to your family I never figured as a Croesus. By dint of order and thrift, we shall ere long have satisfactorily settled our affairs; and I promise you that our stay in the Provinces shall last no longer ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... are not brought immediately under our notice. That these funds were not however adequate to his style of living is plain: Perhaps his train may be considered only as incumbrances, which the pride of family and the habit of former opulence might have brought upon his present poverty: I do not mean absolute poverty, but call it so as relative to his expence. To have "but seven groats and two-pence in his purse" and a page to bear it, is truly ridiculous; and it is for that reason we become so familiar with ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... something about all that I saw which seemed to intimate that I was rather in the abode of a decayed gentleman, who clung to a few of the forms and observances of former rank, than in that of a common peasant, raised above his fellows by comparative opulence. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... commercial interests. The citizens copy after the State, and regard wealth, pomp, and luxury as the great goods of life. Such a nation creates wealth rapidly, and distributes it badly. Thence the two extremes, of monstrous opulence and monstrous misery; all the enjoyment to a few, all the privations to the rest, that is to say, to the people; Privilege, Exception, Monopoly, Feudality, springing up from Labor itself: a false and dangerous situation, which, making Labor ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... with her prizes, sighted the southern end of Zanzibar. As she ran along the western shore, the flat-roofed buildings, like palaces with numerous windows, gave the place an appearance of considerable opulence and magnificence. On either side of the city stretched away a low coast-line of glittering sand, above which could be seen cocoanut palms, raising their lofty heads at intervals, while the country, gradually rising ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Towns-refused to advance money for the pay of the French troops. The men were absolutely destitute. I declared that it was urgent to put an end to this state of things. The Hanse towns had been reduced from opulence to misery by taxation and exactions, and were no longer able to provide ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... reasoning citizen would not refer the starving people to the taxes, to the ill-gotten gains of the princes, as the source of their poverty? German princes and German distress! In other words, the taxes on which the princes live in opulence and which the people pay with the sweat of their blood! What inexhaustible ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... III. being Stadtholder of Holland) the Dutch discovered this island. The enterprise of that people had raised them to the zenith of their power: unless by England, they were unrivalled in nautical science and commercial opulence. More for the purposes of trade than the acquisition of knowledge, they were anxious to discover unknown countries, and to conceal the information they possessed from the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... they shall die miserable, and shall be forgotten; and there shall never arise a novelist great enough to make live in art that eternal spirit of devotion, disinterestedness, and aspiration, which in each generation incarnates itself in one heroic soul. Better wast thou than those who stepped to opulence and fame upon thee fallen; better, loftier-minded, purer; thy destiny was to fall that others might rise upon thee, thou wert one of the noble legion of the conquered; let praise be given to the conquered, for with them lies the brunt of victory. Child of the ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... She was tastefully dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he remembered had swept away the ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before, luxury and opulence had ...
— Jacqueline, v2 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... volumes. Seneca seems to me to be out of humour, when, speaking of the conflagration, he bestows his censures both on the library itself, and the eulogium made on it by Livy, who styles it an illustrious monument of the opulence of the Egyptian kings, and of their judicious attention to the improvement of the sciences. Seneca, instead of allowing it to be such, would have it considered only as a work resulting from the pride and vanity of those ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... perceiving no sign of disaster, shrugged its shoulders. Irish members had taught the House of Commons how to talk for twenty-four hours without a pause. The wages of the agricultural labourer had sprung into the air and leaped over the twelve shilling bar into regions of opulence. Moody and Sankey had found and conquered England for Christ. Landseer and Livingstone had died, and the provinces could not decide whether "Dignity and Impudence" or the penetration of Africa was the more interesting feat. Herbert ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seems like a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems and exquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her insolent courtier lover; her ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... stuff in him. It's undeniable, indeed. It strikes us, however, that he has more imagery than verity, more colour than form. He will learn to be less arbitrary in the use of his figures—of which the opulence is so striking—and attain, as he ripens, more clearness of outline and depth of intention. Meanwhile none but a poet could write this, and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... you could do a great deal of good with a hundred pounds. If you will set this gentleman's mind at ease by taking his pound, I will give the other ninety-nine [Bill, astounded by such opulence, instinctively touches his cap]. ...
— Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... connecting himself with several others of similar pursuit, they took a genteel house in a respectable part of the town, and dividing themselves into classes of masters, clerks, out-riders, shopmen, porters, and servants, and thus making a show of opulence, they easily obtained credit, and laid in goods of every kind, which they sent into the country and sold, or bartered for other commodities; these commodities they brought up to London, and sold for ready money, generally taking in exchange double the quantity, and paying for the same with notes ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... consecrating a book, from which he said we should derive immense riches. We should then ask the demons to discover to us the various treasures with which the earth abounds, which would raise us to opulence and power; but that those love-affairs were mere follies from which no good could be expected. I made answer, that I would readily have accepted his proposal if I had understood Latin. He assured me that ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... as regarded the object. Honest hard work, and some cunning in the method of his eloquence, had at first sufficed him. He was not called upon to have, or at any rate to state, any marked political tenets. But no man can rise to great note as a lawyer without a party. Opulence without note would by no means have ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... Hacienda del Venado. The proprietor, Don Augustin Pena, was a man of great opulence. In addition to a rich gold mine which he worked, at no great distance off, he was the owner of countless herds of horses, mules, and cattle, that in a half-wild state roamed over the vast savannahs and forests that constituted ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... looked at it now, in the sparse light from the bedside lamp, with a fresh interest in its significance. He saw with new understanding the conventionalism of the pose—hip thrust out, arm akimbo, shoulder cocked—contrasted against the dark vivacity of the face and all the pulsing opulence of the flesh. It was an epic, an epic of the savage triumphant against civilization, of the spirit victorious ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... better and truer to life than the last; and winding up with snatching away their work from the young ladies' not unwilling hands, and piling it in heaps on the floor around him, he sat himself in the middle with an armful hugged close and an air of comically mingled resignation and opulence, and announced himself as "a photo from life of ye destitute ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... left him to dwell over their little talk, but most of all he recurred again and again to the sight of her with her arms about the child, kneeling on the sand and looking off to the east, to that far east that might, if it would, with its opulence, save ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... per hour; or six and twenty dollars for every minute that flew. Thus the usual track of supposition was thoroughly broken up. Men knew not what to imagine. There were some who even conceived that Mr. Ellison would divest himself of at least one-half of his fortune, as of utterly superfluous opulence—enriching whole troops of his relatives by division of his superabundance. To the nearest of these he did, in fact, abandon the very unusual wealth which was his own ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed he wondered how he ever got there, ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... lived in opulence and splendour, even to an extreme old age. He had several losses in his trade, according to the chance of things which are depending on the sea; but his friends continually relieved him in his necessities, and gave him wherewithal to set up again. At length, being one day at a great ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... those who hold wealth in esteem—and understand by this word, not the opulence of the few, but the comfort, the well-being, the security, the independence, the instruction, the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... them described in front of him a large semicircle, and, all in a line, they advanced at the same time. The two Parisians admired their arms, and felt smitten with an almost religious veneration for the opulence of the soil. Then they proceeded to inspect some of the ploughed lands. The twilight was falling, and the crows swooped down ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... sources of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... obedience. It taught men, as Hall has said, that true liberty smothers the voice of kings, dispels the mists of superstition, and by its magic touch kindles the rays of genius, the enthusiasm of poetry, the flame of eloquence, pours into our laps opulence and art, and embellishes life with innumerable institutions and improvements which make it one grand theatre of ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... good deal of pains on that point. I can by no calculation justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own European blood and color, besides at least five hundred thousand others, who form no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole. This, Sir, is, I believe, about the true number. There is no occasion to exaggerate where plain truth is of so much weight and importance. But whether I put the present numbers too ...
— Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America • Edmund Burke
... caught the fever of speculation, and expected to get on in the world by the omission of some of the regular processes which have been appointed from of old. And examples were not wanting to encourage him. He saw people, all around him, poor yesterday, rich to-day, who had come into sudden opulence by some means which they could not have classified among any of the regular occupations of life. A war would give such a fellow a career and very likely fame. He might have been a "railroad man," or a politician, or a land speculator, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... people of sufficient opulence to contract for so vast a fishery, the Company might undertake it themselves; three or four gun-boats would be necessary to protect the fishermen; and a small fort should be erected at Tambisan or Tawi Tawi. But it is necessary to observe, the Sulo people do not practice diving at all, as is the ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... the princess by a respectful silence due to her name, which is one of those that all men honor, to her misfortunes, which they ceased to discuss, and to her beauty, the only thing she saved of her departed opulence. Society, of which she had once been the ornament, was thankful to her for having, as it were, taken the veil, and cloistered herself in her own home. This act of good taste was for her, more than for any other woman, an immense sacrifice. Great deeds are always ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... hope decayed, and there increased in proportion that feverish agony of anticipation with which a man, educated in a sense of consequence, and possessed of opulence,the supporter of an ancient name, and the father of two promising children,foresaw the hour approaching which should deprive him of all the splendour which time had made familiarly necessary to him, and send him forth into the world to ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... doctor, after a moment's pause, "that it is wise or right in a girl like Dora Bannister, accustomed to fine living, good society, and an atmosphere of opulence, to allow a poor man like Ralph Haverley to fall in love with her? And he will do it, just as sure as the ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... Campbell; "we will hope for the best; we are as much under his protection here in the wilderness, as we were at Wexton Park; we were just as liable to all the ills which flesh is heir to when we were living in opulence and luxury as we are now in this log-house; but we are, I thank God, not so liable in our present position to forget Him, who so bountifully provides for us and in His wisdom ordereth all our ways. Most truly has ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... was a Monsieur PICHON; who, on being taken prisoner by the English, at the capture of Louisburg in 1758, resided a long time in England under the name of TYRREL, and lived in circumstances of respectability and even of opulence. There—whether on the dispersion of the libraries of our Meads, Foulkes', and Rawlinsons, I know not—he made his collection; took his books over with him to Jersey, where he died in 1780: and bequeathed them, about 3000 in number, to his native ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... after a taste of freedom, of power and opulence, here she was back in practically the same position and rapidly developing the same mental attitude towards those more affluent and, therefore, more socially important than herself. Mrs. Toomey's thoughts were much the color of the ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... his house with statues and pictures, and extended a generous patronage to the painters. He was a collector of books, and, as Crabbe and less conspicuous men discovered, a helpful friend to their writers. Guests were ever welcome at his board; the opulence of his mind and the fervid copiousness of his talk naturally made the guests of such a man very numerous. Non invideo equidem, miror magis, was Johnson's good-natured remark, when he was taken over his friend's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the Golden Peninsula," there spreads before the Englishman a space of nearly a million and a quarter of square miles, inhabited by about one hundred and thirty-four millions of souls, with a sea-coast of immense extent, washed by two oceans, and bordering on vast countries of hitherto unexplored opulence. The resources of Birmah, Siam, and the Eastern Archipelago, have been scarcely touched by the hand of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet it is within the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... courtly manners was here centered. Even the houses were more imposing than elsewhere throughout the country. They were usually well constructed of stone or brick with either thatched or slated roofs. They were supplied with barns bursting with the opulence of the fields. The countryside round about was teeming with fatness. Indeed, in all the colonies no other place was so replete with affluence ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... astonishment will vanish. With the prospect before him of a prolonged stay in Gaul with Caesar, Quintus might doubtless have borrowed to any extent; and in fact with Caesar's help—the proceeds of the Gallic wars—both brothers found themselves in opulence. The Civil War, and the repayment of his debts to Caesar, nearly ruined Marcus towards the end of his life, but nothing prevented his contriving to find money for any object on which he had set his heart; when in his grief for the loss of his daughter he wishes to buy suburban ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... was the son of another Sir Thomas Nobody, whereas two or three antiquarians can incontestably prove that he was the son of Sir John Nobody, and nephew of the above. To me, I confess, he appears distinguished scarcely more by the splendor of his imagination than by the opulence of his knowledge, and the imperial command which he possesses over it. But, in truth, the accuracy or otherwise of history, when it is at all remote, is a matter in which I feel less interest than ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of the Hanseatic League was chiefly in iron and the precious metals; among them were armourers, watch-makers, and goldsmiths. In the Stahlhof, called in English the Steelyard, and which the founders themselves had designated the Palace of Steel, was to be noted a certain opulence and pursuit of comfort which is to be found in all ages. After having finished their business, the merchants formed a social circle of their own. They had a festival-hall of their own, and they ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... wince at the sound of her voice in the room. He'd say things to her; not often, but just enough to see how far he could go. He was afraid of going too far. He wasn't prepared to give up the comfort of Lena's house, the opulence and peace. There wasn't one of Lena's wines he could have turned his back on. After all, when she worried him he could keep himself locked up in the ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... be sure, one could not say, as the horse-dealer Marx did, that the surroundings reminded one of a count's estate; on the other hand, in whatever direction one looked there was an atmosphere of peasant prosperity and opulence which could not but call out to the hungriest stranger: Here you can eat your fill; the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... long to write an ode And magnify his name, The man of honor, on the road To opulence and fame, On whom was never aid ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... the broad stone steps and stood within the doorway. I was certainly much surprised at what I saw. There was a rude magnificence about this house such as I had never expected to find in the South Sea Islands. Nay, though I am not unacquainted with the abodes of opulence at home, and have been a favoured guest of some of our merchant princes (including Messrs. Bunton, the eminent haberdashers, whose light is so generously bestowed on our Connection), I admit that I had never looked on a more spacious reception-room, furnished, ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... do not know us gibe at us and throw our sins in our teeth. But this mightiest of democracies is at last awakening, is casting out the evil genii of opulence, is girding on its sword for the great work. Soldier of freedom, thou camest to us in the time of our greatest need. "Now," thou saidst, "is precisely the moment to serve your cause." Symbol of the united democracies of the world, symbol of a union which will make the earth safe for its peoples, ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... had found many dwellings of the peasantry tidy and neat enough, displaying at any rate more opulence than we are accustomed to find with this class of people; but I had seen none to compete ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... incomes. Then came a world shortage of tonnage and immediately coastwise freights soared skyward. The big schooners of the Palmer fleet began to reap fabulous dividends and their masters shared in the unexpected opulence. Besides their primage they owned shares in their vessels, a thirty-second or so, and presently their settlement at the end of a voyage coastwise amounted to an income of a thousand dollars a month. They earned this money, and the managing owners cheerfully paid them, for there had been lean years ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... that a man of romantic taste, a "Man of Feeling," will be better pleased with the poverty, but intelligent minds of the peasantry in Ayrshire (peasantry they are all below the justice of peace) than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when at the same time, he considers the vandalism of their plough-folks, &c. I carry this idea so far, that an unenclosed, half improven country is to me actually more agreeable, and gives me more pleasure as a ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... this age in beauty or in art; Nothing is wrought to-day that shall endure, For earth's adornment, through long centuries Not ours the fervid worship of a God That wastes its splendid opulence on glass, Leaving but hate, to give it mortal kin. Yet great this age: its mighty work is man Knowing himself, the universal life. And great our faith, which shows itself in works For human freedom and for racial ...
— Poems of Sentiment • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... spectacles. As for the music, we may be certain that in the beginning it followed the lines laid down in the "Orfeo." It rested first on the basis of the frottola, but when the elegant and gracious madrigal provided an art form better suited to the opulence of the decorative features of the embryonic lyric drama, the madrigal became the dominating element in the music. Together with it we find in time the dance slowly assuming that shape which eventually became the foundation ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... said he, "this poor young man, coming from opulence, no doubt, a dear English home, to die here for no end, one of the first-fruits of a bloody war,—so much privately sacrificed. But let him rest, Septimius. I am sorry that he fell by your hand, though it involves no shadow of a crime. But death is a thing ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... humour, he caught a glimpse of two Roman knights; he had them arrested and confiscated their property. Then returning to the gaming table, he exultingly exclaimed that he had never made a better throw!(31) On another occasion, after having condemned to death several Gauls of great opulence, he immediately went back to his gambling companions and said:—'I pity you when I see you lose a few sestertii, whilst, with a stroke of the pen, I have just won six ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... methods. Her lines are at times involved and turgid and almost cryptic, but she shows an originality which does not depend upon eccentricities. In her "Before the Feast of Shushan" she displays an opulence, the love of which has long been charged against the Negro as one of his naive and childish traits, but which in art may infuse a much needed color, warmth and spirit ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... individual with whom the professors come in contact, form the character of the new philosophy. Setting up for an unsocial independence, this their hero of vanity refuses the just price of common labor, as well as the tribute which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... arrival; but had then been unable to see anything. Now her eyes were in requisition. Here there was even more attention paid to comfort and appearances than in the dining-room. In the simplest possible manner; but somebody had been at work there who knew that elegance is attainable without the help of opulence; and that eye and hand can do what money cannot. Eye and hand had been busy everywhere. Very pretty and soft native mats were on the floor; the windows were shaded with East Indian jalousies; and not only personal convenience ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume II • Susan Warner
... where a confluence of many millions of human beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked, the crowd "dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind." But fairs and general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the results of the inconvenience attendant upon travelling. It was once easier for goods to come to customers than for customers to leave their homes in search ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... Pair said; and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own. But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather a liberal allowance,—something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, and treated her with the utmost complaisance. But ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... the coach being already full. On this very first day of his arrival, he perceived between the English and the people among whom he had hitherto lived, such essential difference in customs, appearance, and way of living, as inspired him with high notions of that British freedom, opulence, and convenience, on which he had often heard his mother expatiate. On the road, he feasted his eyesight with the verdant hills covered with flocks of sheep, the fruitful vales parcelled out into ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the timid, they said there would be no coercion. To the ambitious, they spoke of military glory, and the formation of a vast slave empire, to include Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies. The merchants were assured that Charleston would be a free port, rivaling New York in its trade and opulence. ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... home little she was cruelly flogged, so she says, and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story, found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence, after she got possession ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... pride, nor during the anxieties of improvident distress. No nation ever had, or will have, the power of suddenly developing, under the pressure of necessity, faculties it had neglected when it was at ease; nor of teaching itself in poverty, the skill to produce, what it has never, in opulence, had the ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... projecting but intelligent eyes, clothed in a new suit, wearing an enormous black pearl in his necktie and a diamond ring on his finger; the very ideal of Mammon in every detail of his person and of his carefully advertised opulence. ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... competing aspirants for repute. Some such effect, in the way of leisurely manners and carriage, etc., follows from simple persistent abstention from work, even where the subject does not take thought of the matter and studiously acquire an air of leisurely opulence and mastery. Especially does it seem to be true that a life of leisure in this way persisted in through several generations will leave a persistent, ascertainable effect in the conformation of the person, and still more in his habitual bearing and demeanour. But all ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... evening toilettes during the summer were considered immoral; but by degrees, as time tooled in its irresistible modernities, they gradually fell into the habit of wearing out their winter party gowns at the evening diversions of the country season. Burlingame, that borough of concentrated opulence founded in the early nineties as a fashionable colony, began its career with a certain amount of simplicity; but its millions increased to tens of millions; and what in heaven's name, as Mrs. Clement Hunter, a leader and an individual, once remarked, is the use of having ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... up! a fountain! an aqueduct! are these acquisitions to brag of? Cast your eye upon the magistrate under whose ministry you boast these precious improvements. Behold the despicable creature, raised all at once from dirt to opulence; from the lowest obscurity to the highest honors. Have not some of these upstarts built private houses and seats, vying with the most sumptuous of our public palaces? And how have their fortunes and their power increased, but as the commonwealth has ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... sincerity. His disposition was easy-going, although his intellect was such a high-flyer; in pagan times he would have believed in ridiculous divinities rather than set himself up as an atheist. He did not believe that excess of knowledge gives firmness to the judgment, and he remarks that the opulence of learned men often leads to more errors than the poverty of those who depend on the native virtues of instinct and experience. He has phrases which seem meant to condemn the mechanical emptiness of the modern German ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,—literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... "we in America have so far got out of the way of a womanhood that has any vigor of outline or opulence of physical proportions that, when we see a woman made as a woman ought to be, she strikes us as a monster. Our willowy girls are afraid of nothing so much as growing stout; and if a young lady begins to round into proportions like the women in Titian's ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... us gibe at us and throw our sins in our teeth. But this mightiest of democracies is at last awakening, is casting out the evil genii of opulence, is girding on its sword for the great work. Soldier of freedom, thou camest to us in the time of our greatest need. "Now," thou saidst, "is precisely the moment to serve your cause." Symbol of the united democracies of the world, symbol of a union which will make ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... misery, was not the only object in the embrace of the whirl. Both above and below were visible fragments of wreckage—significant wreckage—plumed hats, sword-sheaths, portfolios, epaulettes, decorations, insignia of honour, as if here a national Argosy, laden with Opulence, Rank Intelligence, and Honour, had gone, dismally and desperately, down to—what? Let those Phlegethon walls, that Tophet-like mist, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 28, 1893 • Various
... Durbar Hall as she spoke—a long room overloaded with gilt furniture, gilt-framed mirrors, and the inevitable chandeliers and musical boxes that are the insignia of semi-civilised opulence throughout India. No self-respecting Maharajah, or Rana, or Nawab would dream of living in ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... it, Georgino, and you know how I hate display," she said. "Shakespeare was content with the most modest scenery for his masterpieces, and it would be a great mistake if we allowed ourselves to be carried away by mere wasteful opulence. In all the years I have lived here, and contributed in my humble way to the life of the place, I have heard no complaints about my suppers or teas, nor about the quality of entertainment which I offer my guests when they are so good as to say ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... they? Delinquents by nature, such as are to be found in most of our large cities; people born with savage instincts; men who would rather pass their days in the midst of vice and open corruption than live a life of honour and opulence. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... you shall seem meet, all and every such servant or servants of the Company who may by you be found guilty of any of the above offences." "We had" (say the Directors) "the mortification to find that the servants of the Company, who had been raised, supported, and owed their present opulence to the advantages gained in such service, have in this instance most unfaithfully betrayed their trust, abandoned the Company's interest, and prostituted its influence to accomplish the purposes of individuals, whilst the interest of the Company is almost wholly ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and benevolence, they became rich, honoured, and respected by all who knew them. Their cotton-mills and print-works gave employment to a large population. Their well-directed diligence made the valley teem with activity, joy, health, and opulence. Out of their abundant wealth they gave liberally to all worthy objects, erecting churches, founding schools, and in all ways promoting the well- being of the class of working-men from which they had sprung. They afterwards ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... mind, and is impossible with a mental attitude which is hostile to it. We can not attract opulence mentally by a poverty-stricken attitude which is driving away what we long for. It is fatal to work for one thing and to expect something else. No matter how much one may long for prosperity, a miserable, poverty-stricken, mental attitude ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... The whole opulence of an Indian Court was unfolded at the Maharajah's banquet. At the table covered with red velvet and luxuriously laid with gold and silver plate, the Russian officers sat in gay-coloured ranks with the chiefs of the Prince's retinue. The viands were excellent, and champagne flowed ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... new plate, Sevres porcelain, and white damask, was redolent of opulence. The dishes were from Chevet, the wines from a celebrated merchant on the Quai Saint-Bernard, a personal friend of Matifat's. For the first time Lucien beheld the luxury of Paris displayed; he went from surprise to surprise, but he ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... liberties, now common to all; and the apprehension of their approach dictated to the reluctant Bonaparte the immediate signature of the treaty of Leoben. The Romish hierarchy of Hungary exists in all its former splendour and opulence; never has the slightest attempt been made to diminish it; and those revolutionary principles, to which so large a portion of civilised Europe has been sacrificed, have here failed in making ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... prettier village than this. If you doubt my word, come and see it. Yonder we discern a portion of the Basin of Minas; around us are the rich meadows of Nova Scotia. Intellect has here placed a crowning college upon a hill; opulence has surrounded it with picturesque villas. A ride into the country, a visit to a bachelor's lodge, studded with horns of moose and cariboo, with woodland scenes and Landseer's pictures, and then—over the bridge, and over the Avon, towards ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... might reasonably have been expected. This will be understood when the general financial condition of the city is called to recollection. Every one who has known the country but for a few years back must remember the almost general bankruptcy occasioned by the failure of land speculating men of opulence and high credit. During that time commerce in all its classes sensibly felt the shock, and business languished in all its branches. No wonder that the theatre, which can only be fed by the superflux of all other departments of society, should droop, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol I, No. 2, February 1810 • Samuel James Arnold
... cupola days; but the herd of cast-iron deer that once guarded these lawns, standing sentinel to all true gentry: Whither were they fled? In his boyhood, one specimen betokened a family of position and affluence; two, one on each side of the front walk, spoke of a noble opulence; two and a fountain were overwhelming. He wondered in what obscure thickets that once proud herd now grazed; and then he smiled, as through a leafy opening of shrubbery he caught a glimpse of a last survivor, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... in brilliancy, and illumined the landscape with all the opulence, splendour and superabundance of radiance common to the south,—the air was soft and balmy, and one great white cloud floating lazily under the silver orb, moved slowly to the centre of the heavens,—the violet-blue of night falling around ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... historian Josephus, Hist. vi. 1. Procopius of Caeserea, who lived in the sixth century, says that Chosroes, king of Persia, had a great desire to make himself master of Palestine, on account of its extraordinary fertility, its opulence, and the great number of its inhabitants. The Saracens thought the same, and were afraid that Omar. when he went to Jerusalem, charmed with the fertility of the soil and the purity of the air, would never return to Medina. (Ockley, Hist. of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... exorbitant exactions upon the farmers, he confiscated many estates to his own use, and reaped the crops. Even travellers were attacked to enrich this extraordinary thief, and six vessels were afterward dispatched to Rome with the plunder, which he asserted was sufficient to permit him to revel in opulence the remainder of his life, even if he were obliged to give up two thirds in ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... short space of time, by the exercise of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days of Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, sallied ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Rusticucci.] Giacopo Rusticucci, a Florentine, remarkable for his opulence and the generosity ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... inhabited by our most extensive and wealthy agriculturists. It was a large, whitewashed, ornamentally thatched building, that told by its external aspect of the good living, extensive comforts, and substantial opulence which prevailed within. Stretched before its hall-door was a small lawn, bounded on the left by a wall that separated it from the farm-yard into which the kitchen door opened. Here were stacks of hay, oats, and wheat, all upon ...
— Fardorougha, The Miser - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... was once my own, I might find myself a pied a terre in Paris or Vienna, and finish life pleasantly enough among some of the friends I liked when I was young. Six or seven hundred a year would be opulence for a man of ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... was beautifully situated on the river Pactolus, in the middle Hermus valley, at the foot of Mount Tmolus, and was once the capital of the kingdom of Lydia, the place of residence of Croesus and other Lydian kings. It was a city of great opulence and splendor, and "distinguished for the voluptuous and debauched ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... good deal of her first interview with Lady Arabella, of her first return to the house; but she had resolved to carry herself as though the matter were easy to her. She would not allow it to be seen that she felt that she brought with her to Greshamsbury, comfort, ease, and renewed opulence. ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... opulence and splendour, even to an extreme old age. He had several losses in his trade, according to the chance of things which are depending on the sea; but his friends continually relieved him in his necessities, and gave him ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... to lose and feared nothing, who believed implicitly in himself and his star; who could say to himself as did Croustillac, "In risking death during a moment—for death can be but a moment's agony—I may live in luxury and opulence"—such a man can perform miracles above all when he undertakes a project with such a grand object and as stimulating ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... and property of his father, whose health had been failing for years, and who died quite unexpectedly. His mother never recovered from the shock, but in a short time followed her loved husband to the grave. So the son was left with a good business and ample means, seeming to be on the road to opulence. ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... the purple of the bass, and these, the souls of the carven stone, like birds hovering, like birds in swift flight, like birds poising, floated from the arches. Then the organ intoned the massive Gregorian, and the chant of the mass moved amid the opulence of gold vestments; the Latin responses filled the ear; and at the end of long abstinences the holy oil came like a bliss that never dies. In the ecstasy of ordination it seemed to him that the very savour and spirit of God had descended ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... best work, Saint Thomas of Villanueva distributing Alms, to my mind offers the entire impression of that full life of Andalusia. In the splendour of mitre and of pastoral staff, in the sober magnificence of architecture, is all the opulence of the Catholic Church; in the worn, patient, ascetic face of the saint is the mystic, fervid piety which distinguished so wonderfully the warlike and barbarous Spain of the sixteenth century; and lastly, in the beggars covered with ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... your devoted husband? Take this—fear not—why should love have suspicions? When she is gone, I shall have a wife of whom I may not be ashamed—yet, is she not a stranger in a foreign land? Has she not left her country, her relations, her friends, her gods, for me, whom she has raised to opulence? Cease, cease—I cannot stand these thoughts—there is a strife in this heart between the powers of hell and heaven—when will it terminate, and who ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... gift by a structure dedicated to his service, corresponding with the magnificence of private mansions, and the natural beauties of local scenery." We can only wonder that, in a neighbourhood abounding with men of rank and opulence, such ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... Hippoclus, was descended, as likewise Epaminondas was, from an honorable family in Thebes; and, being brought up to opulence, and having a fair estate left him whilst he was young, he made it his business to relieve the good and deserving amongst the poor, that he might show himself lord and not slave of his estate. For amongst men, as Aristotle observes, some are too narrow-minded to use their wealth, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... perceived between the English and the people among whom he had hitherto lived, such essential difference in customs, appearance, and way of living, as inspired him with high notions of that British freedom, opulence, and convenience, on which he had often heard his mother expatiate. On the road, he feasted his eyesight with the verdant hills covered with flocks of sheep, the fruitful vales parcelled out into cultivated enclosures; the very cattle ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... the more ready to listen to Josephine's suggestion of the marriage of Louis and Hortense. This union in every respect seemed exceedingly desirable. Napoleon could gratify their highest ambition in assigning to them posts of opulence and honor. They could also be of great service to Napoleon in his majestic plan of redeeming all Europe from the yoke of the old feudal despotisms, and in conferring upon the peoples the new political gospel of equal rights ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... lived in them; for them he found apt imagery or symbol; and in verse which has the dignity of reserve and of passion controlled to sobriety, he let them as it were involuntarily escape from the seclusion of his soul. He is the thinker among the poets of his time, and when splendours of colour and opulence of sound have passed away, the idea remains. In fragments from his papers, published in 1867, with the title Journal d'un Poete, the inner history of Vigny's ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Amelia, is it you, the object of grief, the daughter of opulence, of wisdom and philosophy, that thus complaineth? It cannot be you are the child of misfortune, speaking of the monuments of former ages, which were allotted not for the reflection of the distressed, but ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... awe-stricken. How had he dared come here? Neither in the Hotel de Soto, with its many divinities, nor in the palace of Nelse Ackerman, the king, had he felt such a sense of his own lowliness as the sight of this calm, slow-moving great lady inspired. She was the embodiment of opulence, she was "the real thing." Despite the look of kindliness in her wide-open blue eyes, she impressed him with a feeling of her overwhelming superiority. He did not know it was his duty as a gentleman to rise from his chair when a lady entered, but some instinct brought him to his ...
— 100%: The Story of a Patriot • Upton Sinclair
... governed by a set of worthy gentlemen who know little about Kentucky and her wants, and think less [cries of "Ay, ay!"]. I am not decrying General Washington and his cabinet; it is but natural that the wants of the seaboard and the welfare and opulence of the Eastern cities should be uppermost in their minds [another interruption]. Kentucky, if she would prosper, must look to her own welfare. And if any credit is due to me, gentlemen, it is because I reserved my decision ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... complexion, and her blue eyes were so pale that she appeared to look at the world with the empty white candour of a statue. You could not call her good-looking. It was something much more impressive. The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... the intercourse with mankind on a large scale, which such meetings secure. A fine time of year is chosen, when days are long, skies are bright, the earth smiles, and all nature rejoices; a city or town is taken by turns, of ancient name or modern opulence, where buildings are spacious and hospitality hearty. The novelty of place and circumstance, the excitement of strange, or the refreshment of well-known faces, the majesty of rank or of genius, the amiable charities of men pleased both with themselves and with each other; ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... being Stadtholder of Holland) the Dutch discovered this island. The enterprise of that people had raised them to the zenith of their power: unless by England, they were unrivalled in nautical science and commercial opulence. More for the purposes of trade than the acquisition of knowledge, they were anxious to discover unknown countries, and to conceal the information they possessed from ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... travelled to Egypt, Persia, and Babylon. He almost seemed a compound of two different characters, uniting the intellectual energy of the sage with the social feelings of a man of the world. Living in ease and opulence, he was not inclined to be censorious or morose; having mingled much in society, he was not very emotional or sympathetic; not tempted to think life a melancholy scene of suffering, but callous enough to find amusement in the ills he could not prevent. He regarded man, generally, as a curious ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 1 (of 2) - With an Introduction upon Ancient Humour • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... careful calculation and rigid economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seems like a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems and exquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her insolent ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... the Hacienda del Venado. The proprietor, Don Augustin Pena, was a man of great opulence. In addition to a rich gold mine which he worked, at no great distance off, he was the owner of countless herds of horses, mules, and cattle, that in a half-wild state roamed over the vast savannahs ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... were discussing the budget of 1898, and one of the members called attention to the fact that for several years past advances to the amount of L2,400,000 had been made to various officials, and were unaccounted for. That is a specimen of what the Boer regime has become in this school of opulence."[36] M. Naville continues:—"We do not consider the Boers, as a people, to be infected by the corruption which rules the administration. The farmers who live far from Pretoria have preserved their patriarchal ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... superior culture and refinement, fell from opulence to extreme poverty, within four years. No less ready when at the bottom of fortune's ladder, than at the top, to do good as she had opportunity, she paid another poor woman's way to a neighboring State, where employment awaited ...
— The Wonders of Prayer - A Record of Well Authenticated and Wonderful Answers to Prayer • Various
... air of calm and reserved opulence about the Weightman mansion that spoke not of money squandered, but of wealth prudently applied. Standing on a corner of the Avenue no longer fashionable for residence, it looked upon the swelling tide of business with an ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... first shock of his appearance, it soothed Mr. Gunning to see Prothero sitting there, smoking, his long legs stretched out, his head thrown back, his eyes half closed. It established him in the illusion of continued opulence, for Mr. Gunning was not aware of the things that had happened to him four years ago. But there had been lapses and vanishings, unaccountable disturbances of the illusion. In the days of opulence people ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... joint-stock banks, and the proprietors are liable to the public for the whole of the bank responsibilities to the last shilling of their private fortunes. The number of persons connected with these banks as shareholders is very great, almost every man of opulence in the country being a holder of stock to a greater or a less amount. That some jealousy must exist among so many competitors in a limited field, is an obvious matter of inference. Such jealousy, however, has only ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... a rustler, but always a dude, rode from El Paso in deep disgust at his steady losses at faro and monte. The pecuniary side of these caused him no worry, for he was flush. This pleasing opulence was due to his business ability, for he had recently sold a claim for several thousand dollars. The first operation was simple, being known in Western phraseology as "jumping"; and the second, somewhat more complicated, was ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... the blinds now (put in Otway) under the Lighting Order: but in those days the Ritz was given—I won't say to advertising its opulence—but to allowing a glimpse of real comfort to the ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... understood and reddened. The winter had been a fairly prosperous one for the sisters, and their slowly accumulated savings had now reached the handsome sum of two hundred dollars; but the satisfaction they might have felt in this unwonted opulence had been clouded by a suggestion of Miss Mellins's that there were dark rumours concerning the savings bank in which their funds were deposited. They knew Miss Mellins was given to vain alarms; but ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... was the thought that awakened Harry Cresswell to a sense of endless well-being. Rich! No longer the mirage and semblance of wealth, the memory of opulence, the shadow of homage without the substance of power—no; now the wealth was real, cold hard dollars, and in piles. How much? He laughed aloud as he turned on his pillow. What did he care? Enough—enough. Not less than half a million; ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... writers of classic times, and is chiefly valuable as showing the estimation in which the classic writers were held in that day. This is also in octosyllabic verses, and is further remarkable for the opulence of its imagery and its variety of description. The poet is carried in the claws of a great eagle into this house, and sees its distinguished occupants standing upon columns of different kinds of metal, according to their merits. The poem ends ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... existence ten days before it had gone on record as a thoroughly "first-class" establishment. No wonder, then, that an air of peculiar respectability attached itself to the "wheel" itself which revolved in a corner of the barroom night after night, whirling into opulence or penury, such as entrusted their fortunes to its revolutions. Despite its high-toned patronage, however, the terms "roulette" and "croupier" found small favor with the devotees at that particular shrine of the fickle goddess, and Dabney Dirke, its presiding genius, was familiarly known among "the ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... aggrieved by the illegal opulence of the profiteers, but we are all liable to the infection. The feudalistic Fronde awaits its opportunity. The aristocracy of office endeavours to monopolize the State-machine. The emigres of culture find themselves looked askance at, on suspicion of intellectual arrogance, and ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... two hundred thousand people, judging from the length of this street and the wonderful quantity and richness of the goods displayed in the shops. Along this street I see a more lavish display of rich silks, furs, tiger-skins, and other evidences of opulence than was shown me at Canton. The pressure of the crowds reduces me at once to the necessity of drifting helplessly along, whithersoever the seething human tide may lead. Sometimes I fancy the few officiously interested persons about me, whom I endeavor to question ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... one so clearly demanded by the most ordinary humanity as this. The Liverpool merchants declared that the absence of restrictions on the slave-trade had been the chief cause of the prosperity and opulence of their town, and obtained leave to be heard by counsel against the bill. But Fox united with Pitt on this subject, and the bill was carried. But this was all the practical success which the efforts of the "Abolitionists," ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... Atwater twelve years to reach this Wilson Avenue, though they carried it with them all the way. They had begun their married life in this locality before it had become a definite district. Twelve years ago the neighbourhood had shown no signs of mushrooming into its present opulence. Twelve years ago Raymond, twenty-eight, and Cora, twenty-four, had taken a six-room flat at Racine and Sunnyside. Six rooms. Modern. Light. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... purpose; for we had distanced the monarch and his eight carriages. The royal party had not yet entered the house; and I enjoyed, for a few minutes, one of the most striking displays that the opulence and animation of a great country can possibly produce—the coup-d'oeil of a well-dressed audience in a fine and spacious theatre. Multitudes spread over hill and dale may be picturesque; the aspect of great public meetings may be startling, stern, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... wandered about the narrow streets of Paris. Ronald was somewhat disappointed in the city of which he had heard so much. The streets were ill paved and worse lighted, and were narrow and winding. In the neighbourhood of the Louvre there were signs of wealth and opulence. The rich dresses of the nobles contrasted strongly indeed with the sombre attire of the Glasgow citizens, and the appearance and uniform of the royal guards filled him with admiration; but beyond the fashionable quarter it did not appear to him ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... all that I saw which seemed to intimate that I was rather in the abode of a decayed gentleman, who clung to a few of the forms and observances of former rank, than in that of a common peasant, raised above his fellows by comparative opulence. ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... of L800,000,000: did she not give L20,000,000 to free her West India slaves; did she not expend L7,000,000 to combat the famine of Ireland? Is not the proposed expenditure for the National Executive of the present year an evidence of her boundless opulence? And yet to save a trifling outlay compared with the injustice now done, the representative of Her Majesty is compelled to carry about under his skirts a parcel of convictism; to deposit these tokens of imperial interest he is driven to have recourse to artifice, trickery and falsehood. ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... was brought in, Charles Townshend concluded a speech in its favor with words to the following effect: "And now will these Americans, children planted by our care, nourished up by our indulgence, till they are grown to a degree of strength and opulence, and protected by our arms—will they grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy weight of that burden which we lie under?" To which Colonel Barre replied: "They planted by your care? No, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... situation. Upon her arrival in London, fresh trains of ideas were quickly forced upon her mind, which were as dissimilar as possible from those associated with love, friendship, and Elmour Grove. At Sir Thomas Stock's, every thing she saw and heard served to remind, or rather to convince her, of the opulence of the owner of the house. Here every object was estimated, not for its beauty or elegance, but by its costliness. Money was the grand criterion, by which the worth of animate and inanimate objects was alike decided. In this society, the worship of the golden idol was avowed without ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... the least known squares in London is Hexham Square, though it is one of the oldest. Not that it is very remote from the throng of existence, but it is isolated in a dingy district of silent and decaying streets. Once it was a favored residence of opulence and power, and its architecture still indicates its former and prouder destiny. But its noble mansions are now divided and broken up into separate dwellings, or have been converted into chambers and offices. Lawyers, and architects, and agents, dwell in apartments where the richly-sculptured ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the scene—the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving garcons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the melange of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the Wuerzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... maritime enterprise; consequently there is no reason to infer that the vast sum of money which must of necessity have been expended in the improvement of the harbour, has been unprofitably sunk. During the late war the islanders rapidly increased in opulence, as the island was filled with troops and emigrants, who greatly enhanced the value of home produce; but the cessation of hostilities restored matters to their natural order, and the Jerseymen bewail the return of peace and plenty with as much sincerity as any half-pay ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... add that the count de Tendilla redeemed his promises like a loyal knight; and this miracle, as it appeared in the eyes of Fray Antonio Agapida, is the first instance on record of paper money, which has since inundated the civilized world with unbounded opulence. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... borrowed plate were on his table he was terribly afraid that the whole transaction would fail; as one of the people invited was a painter, and painters are an "observant, malicious, profound race, who take in everything at a glance."[*] Everything else in his rooms would represent the opulence, ease, and ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... kind." All was indeed going happy as a marriage bell. Did I not rightly say that the world was conspiring to spoil this young man of thirty, whose youth had certainly not been passed in the splendour of opulence or power? What wonder if in the dawn of his American experiences, and of such a reception, everything assumed a roseate hue? Is it matter for surprise if he found the women "very beautiful," the "general breeding ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... of an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose him to have been unselfish beyond the fashion ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... a most accomplished artist, holds that he has "long since surpassed" Randolph Caldecott.[34] I doubt whether Mr. Thomson himself would concur with his eulogist in this. But he has assuredly followed Caldecott close; and in opulence of production, which—as Macaulay insisted—should always count, has naturally exceeded that gifted, but shortlived, designer. If, pursuing an ancient practice, one were to attempt to label Mr. Thomson with a special distinction ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson
... production, of France, - the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all, the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold. The whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence, an appear- ance which culminates in the great place which sur- rounds the Grand-Theatre, - an establishment in the highest style, encircled with columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafes. One feels it to be a monument to the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If I had not for- bidden ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... were ever greater lovers of peace. Some philosophers have seen or tried to see in the War a judgment on the luxury and frivolity of pre-War England, on her neglect of defence, and her absorption in opulence. Were this the case, it would be ironical to reflect how the North Country homes, first and most cruelly scourged by the War, were homes to which the so-called "sins of society" were least known and most repugnant, and where military training had been long pursued in the teeth of ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... and sweet-smelling harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts of the German high explosives hammering ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... letters. Count DE CAYLUS expended a princely income in the study and the encouragement of Art. He passed his mornings among the studios of artists, watching their progress, increasing his collections, and closing his day in the retirement of his own cabinet. His rank and his opulence were no obstructions to his settled habits. CICERO himself, in his happier moments, addressing ATTICUS, exclaimed—"I had much rather be sitting on your little bench under Aristotle's picture, than in the curule chairs of our great ones." This wish was probably sincere, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... quarter of square miles, inhabited by about one hundred and thirty-four millions of souls, with a sea-coast of immense extent, washed by two oceans, and bordering on vast countries of hitherto unexplored opulence. The resources of Birmah, Siam, and the Eastern Archipelago, have been scarcely touched by the hand of man. Savage governments, savage nations, and savage indolence, have left those countries almost in a state of nature; yet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... with opulent business houses and luxurious mansions, most of the latter being surrounded by gardens and embowered in groves of flowering trees. Nor do these magazines and dwelling-houses stand merely for taste and opulence. Within the bounds of the Concessions is the reign of law—not, as elsewhere in China, the arbitrary will of a magistrate, but the offspring of freedom and justice. Foreigners live everywhere under the protection ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... promising future opulence, her skin a warm cream deepening to shades of coral, her hair a blonde cloud, hanging misty round her brows. She was as unsubtle as a chromo, as fragrantly fresh as a newly wakened baby. Her hands, large, plump, with flexible broad-tipped fingers, ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... immediately accepted the situation of a governess in the family of an Irish nobleman. The mansion was only to be approached, as Miss Edgeworth would have said, 'through eighteen sloughs, at the imminent peril of one's life', and when one had reached it, the mixture of opulence and squalor, of civility and savagery, was unspeakable. But my Mother was well paid, and she stayed in this distasteful environment, doing the work she hated most, while with the margin of her salary she helped first one of her brothers and then the other through ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... labelled "Harbor Castle. Residence of Fletcher Farrell." I need not say that I studied it intently. According to the post-card, Harbor Castle stood on a rocky point with water on both sides. It was an enormous, wide-spreading structure, as large as a fort. It exuded prosperity, opulence, extravagance, great wealth. I felt suddenly a filial impulse to visit the home of ...
— The Log of The "Jolly Polly" • Richard Harding Davis
... insignificant-looking man of about forty. All his characteristics might be described as being of medium quality. He was five feet nine in height, his brown hair was neither fair nor dark, his dress suggested neither poverty nor opulence, and his features were of the type known as ordinary. In a word, he was not one whose appearance would provoke a second glance or who would be credited with taking an important part in anything that might be ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... unwieldly was the treasure with which the soldiers were loaded, that it is solemnly averred that creditors avoided their debtors fearing lest the latter should pay them what they owed in further heaps of the bulky treasure; and it is certainly a fact that even the animals shared in the opulence of the conquest, for the horses were shod with silver. Silver was cheaper and easier to get ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... this an exaggeration. Deep as science and research have explored, extensive as is the field which genius and art have occupied, they have an Herculean labor yet to perform before India will have yielded up all her opulence of learning. The literature of the world in all ages has been richly furnished, if not actually inspired, from that fountain. The Wisdom of the Ancients, so much lauded in the earlier writings of Hebrews, Greeks, and Phoenicians, was ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... of opulence in air and attire, came briskly forward and held up his hand to receive both sticks, with a harlequin bow from the dark-eyed Oriental, who wore a spruce black broadcloth suit, in honour of America, and a red fez, in loyalty, doubtless, to ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... whom the general and public good was regarded as the standard by which the use of public power was to be measured; the life of a man who had struggled hard and successfully for the material prosperity and opulence which makes work easy and gives a man room and force for carrying out his purposes. All his life long his first and never-sleeping passion was the romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest of nature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spirit ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... terrorists of Vaucluse.) "These carnivorous fellows, regretting the times when they could rob and massacre with impunity.... Who, six months ago, were starving and who now live in the most scandalous opulence... Squanderers of the public funds, robbers of private fortunes... Guilty of rapine, of forced contributions, of extortions," etc.—Prudhomme, "Les crimes de la Revolution," VI., 79. (On the Revolutionary committee installed by Fouche at Nevers.) The local investigation shows that the eleven ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... be a mountebank, a clown, a circus Hercules. By stiffening one of his senseless arms he could bring down roars of applause. By years of bitter labour with his pen he earned the barest living. The muscles that a porter might have, offered him opulence, because it was tougher by a few degrees than the flesh of other men. The knowledge he had striven for just kept ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... sorts hurried to the new centre of opulence. Already an obsequious personage from Paris had taken up his abode in a room of one of the new houses, and a painted board hanging from his window informed the passers-by that he was permitted to style himself Coiffeur to her Excellency the Landhofmeisterin, ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... septuagenarians sat smoking short pipes and playing nap on trays in the sun. From several doorways came the reek of fish frying. The houses looked ineffably petty and shabby. Esther wondered how she could ever have conceived this a region of opulence; still more how she could ever have located Malka and her family on the very outskirt of the semi-divine classes. But the semi-divine persons themselves had long since shrunk ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Merse, Roxburgh, &c.; and for this, among other reasons, I think that a man of romantic taste—'a man of feeling'—will be better pleased with the poverty but intelligent minds of the peasantry of Ayrshire (peasantry they all are, below the Justice of Peace), than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when he at the same time considers the Vandalism of their plough-folks." The deteriorating effect of the large-farm system, remarked by the poet, is inevitable. It is impossible that the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... vicinity of his own palace. The known virtues of the murdered prince caused his shrine to be visited as that of a martyr; and such was the fame of his miracles, that the city and cathedral attained a degree of opulence from the pious ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 576 - Vol. 20 No. 576., Saturday, November 17, 1832 • Various
... those great golden globes which made one end of the window like the remove from a mine, those satin-smooth spheres, those cuts as of red and white marble? She had eaten apples, but these were as the apples of the gods, lying in a heap of opulence, with a precious light-spot like a ruby on every outward side. The turnips affected her imagination like ivory carvings: she did not recognize them for turnips at all. She never afterwards believed them to be turnips; and as for cabbages, they were green inflorescences of majestic ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... plantation, at this present moment a sheet of bluebells, towards the level of the river. There was a dainty and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden splendour and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity even in the summer; the memory of winter seems to be still lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farmhouses, with their rough ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to be estimated by their appearance of neatness and opulence, Chalons deserves to be marked on the map in more capital letters than the imposing names of Sens or Auxerre. To no town indeed does it bear a greater resemblance than to Tours, both from the modern air of its houses, and from its noble river, adapted for every ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... and diminish the power, of the lord. [92] The Colonna and Ursini vied with each other in the decoration of their palaces and chapels; and their antique splendor was rivalled or surpassed by the sudden opulence of the papal families. In Rome the voice of freedom and discord is no longer heard; and, instead of the foaming torrent, a smooth and stagnant lake reflects the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... very naturally presumed, that the injuries which they had suffered, and the dangers which they still apprehended from his most inveterate enemy, would secure the fidelity of a party already considerable by their numbers and opulence. Even the conduct of Maxentius towards the bishops of Rome and Carthage may be considered as the proof of his toleration, since it is probable that the most orthodox princes would adopt the same measures with regard to their established ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit and disgrace after meat. Plethora has filled us with indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual opulence. Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station. We squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered. We eat of the best, not from delicacy, but from brazen habit. We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a luxury; we are unaccustomed ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... stately banquets, but the furniture of the table was not after the manner of feasts, though the best the country afforded, and the supply of meat improved daily, while the fruit told of the kindly opulence ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... that the courier introduced him. He is evidently immensely charmed with Miss Miller. If she thinks him the finest gentleman in the world, he, on his side, has never found himself in personal contact with such splendor, such opulence, such expensiveness as this young lady's. And then she must seem to him wonderfully pretty and interesting. I rather doubt that he dreams of marrying her. That must appear to him too impossible a piece of luck. He has nothing but his handsome face to offer, and there is a ...
— Daisy Miller • Henry James
... days in great joy, in the company of Duryodhana, O bull of Bharata's race! Once on a time, O monarch, many kings repaired to a self-choice at the capital of Chitrangada, the ruler of the country of the Kalingas. The city, O Bharata, full of opulence, was known by the name of Rajapura. Hundreds of rulers repaired thither for obtaining the hand of the maiden. Hearing that diverse kings had assembled there, Duryodhana also, on his golden car, proceeded thither, accompanied by Karna. When the festivities commenced ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... distant lands the produce of this commercial nation. Thus all the mercantile glories crowd on my fancy, emblazoned in the most effulgent colouring of an ardent imagination. Borne on her soaring pinions, I wing my flight to the time when Heaven shall have crowned my labours with success and opulence. I see sumptuous palaces rising to receive me; I see orphans, and widows, and painters, and fidlers, and poets, and builders, protected and encouraged; and when the fabrick is pretty nearly finished by my shattered pericranium, I cast my eyes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... rooms, which Trevor furnished in a stately manner, hanging a selection of his mezzotints on the walls—ladies of old years, after Romney, Reynolds, Hoppner, and the rest. A sober opulence and comfort characterised the chambers; a well-selected set of books in a Sheraton bookcase was intended to beguile the tedium of waiting clients. The typewriter (Miss Blossom accepted the situation) ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
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