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More "Suppleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... definition; then there is such a want of unity that quite special mechanisms adapted to each phenomenal detail have to be imagined; and, lastly—most serious argument of all—so much comprehensiveness and suppleness is employed, that no experimental law is found which cannot be understood mechanically, and no fact of observation which shows an error in the mechanical explanation—a sure proof that this mode ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous,—acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... short, Mme. Le Brun belonged entirely to the eighteenth century—I wish to say to that period of our time which rested itself suddenly at David. While she followed the counsels of Vernet, her pencil had a certain suppleness, and her brush a force; but she too often attempted to imitate Greuze in her later works and she weakened the resemblance to her subjects by abusing the regard noye (cloudy or indistinct effect). She was too early in vogue to make all the necessary studies, and she too often contented herself ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... range of those brilliant dark eyes of his, so, with infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J. Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile and whimsical ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... Shoes, flannel shirt, and kersey trousers make His brief toilette: at night, or in the rain, He dons a surcoat which he doffs at morn: A paddle in the right hand, or an oar, And in the left, a gun, his needful arms. By turns we praised the stature of our guides, Their rival strength and suppleness, their skill To row, to swim, to shoot, to build a camp, To climb a lofty stem, clean without boughs Full fifty feet, and bring the eaglet down: Temper to face wolf, bear, or catamount, And wit to trap or take him ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... sense without the fatigue of learning a totally new grammar and vocabulary. So long as there is a potent literary tradition keeping the core of the language one and indivisible, vernacular variations can only tend, in virtue of the survival of the fittest, to promote the abundance, suppleness, and nicety of adaptation of the language as a literary instrument. The English language is no mere historic monument, like Westminster Abbey, to be religiously preserved as a relic of the past, and reverenced as the burial-place of a bygone breed ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... years, having only a superficial knowledge of public affairs, scarcely known to the Ministers, and endowed with a narrow pedantic nature which was to be the bane of his people. He lacked alike the sagacity, the foresight, and the suppleness of Leopold. Further, though his inexperience should have inspired him with a dread of war for his storm-tossed States, yet that same misfortune subjected him to the advice of the veteran Chancellor, Kaunitz. That crabbed old man advised the maintenance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... who now advanced along the winding path, "why do you remain behind, Rosa?" And so saying, she threw herself upon her knees before the new-comer, and clasped her arms around her with a rapidity and suppleness that almost resembled the coilings ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... approaching meal. This induced their brief journeys back and forth, albeit embarrassed by their physical conformation, short turns on four legs not being apparently the easy thing it would seem from so much youthful suppleness. The dignity of the elder hounds did not suffer them to move, but they looked on from erect postures about the hearth with ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... gentle breeding under foot to reach the spot in time. Wayne spoke of a friend in Vienna from whom he had heard that day and turned to Ann with an interrogation about the Viennese. Katie, contemplating the suppleness of Ann's neck, momentarily asleep at her post, missed the "Come over and help us" look, and Ann had begun upon a fatal, "I have never been in—" when Katie, with ringing laugh broke in: "Isn't it odd, Ann, that you should never have been in Vienna, when ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... informal and disconnected as they are, that he owes his high rank among French authors. These "Causeries du Lundi" have now reached the fourteenth volume.[A] In the last we find the same easy admiration, facility of approbation, and suppleness that enable him to praise the "Fanny" of Feydeau, calling it a poem, and on the next page to do justice to the last volume of Thiers's "Consulate and Empire," or to the recent publication of the Correspondence of Buffon. The most important ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... stone, while the cedar, being light and elastic, lent buoyancy and suppleness, all that we could ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... river at the buffalo-ford above, and exchanging the road to which it led for wilder and lonelier paths traced by smaller animals, they made their way through the forest, travelling with considerable speed, which was increased, as the warmth of exercise gradually restored their native suppleness to the ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... to the child; for certain natural dispositions in course of growth may have passed from the plasma engendering the father to the plasma engendering the son, may have grown on the way by the effect of the primitive impetus, and thus assured to the son a greater suppleness than the father had, without troubling, so to speak, about what the father did. So of many examples drawn from the progressive domestication of animals: it is hard to say whether it is the acquired ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... detect, with half an eye, nineteen out of twenty of them; dress them how you would, disguise them as you like. They step the regulation length, bring their foot down in the regulation way, are as stiff as if they had swallowed a ramrod. They have neither suppleness nor adaptability. They are so accustomed to obey that they have almost lost the power of originating, and would be taken and shot before they were in the enemy's lines ten minutes. Now, Fergus has ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... Archer, was considerably taller than Frank, straight as an Indian, though rather inclined to be slender; but with a suppleness that indicated such strength and agility as the ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... coward calls black white, white black, At bidding, or in fear of death; Such suppleness, thank God, I lack, To die is but to lose my breath. Is death annihilation? No. New worlds will open on my view, When persecuted hence I go, The right ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... she made her repast, with the most profound attention. The suppleness of her motions sent a thrill of delight through my frame; my heart beat madly as she turned her beautiful eyes in the direction of the spot in which I stood. What would I not have given to have had the power to precipitate myself into that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... grew older—features wrought with delicacy and yet imbued with strength, suggestive of carved ivory. Delicacy imbued with strength was betokened, too, by the tall slenderness of her figure, whose silence and suppleness of movement came—in Conquest's imagination at least—from her ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... more healthy state. In proof of this, I might mention in the first place that superior agility, ease of motion, speed, and power of endurance which so distinguish vegetable-eaters, wherever a fair comparison is instituted. They possess a suppleness like that of youth, even long after what is called the juvenile period of life is passed over. They are often seen running and jumping, unless restrained by the arbitrary customs of society, in very advanced age. Their wounds heal with astonishing ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Get the spirit. Learn the grammar, certainly. But read Latin—till you can speak Latin, think Latin. It is more difficult to think Greek. Our stiff-necked, stubborn Lowland nature, produce of half-a-score of conquering nations, has not the right suppleness. But if there is any poetry in you, it will find you ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... its plaything and swung him slowly around Creede let out a big loop and began to swing it about his head, his teeth showing in a tense grin as he fixed his eyes upon the mark. At each turn his wrist flexed and his back swayed with a willowy suppleness but except for that he was like a herculean statue ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... forwardness the most officious took care to be noticed, was Mr Morrice, a young lawyer, who, though rising in his profession, owed his success neither to distinguished abilities, nor to skill-supplying industry, but to the art of uniting suppleness to others with confidence in himself. To a reverence of rank, talents, and fortune the most profound, he joined an assurance in his own merit, which no superiority could depress; and with a presumption which encouraged him to ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... between courses of the dinner he asked Carley to dance, and she complied. The music would have stimulated an Egyptian mummy, Carley thought, and the subdued rose lights, the murmur of gay voices, the glide and grace and distortion of the dancers, were exciting and pleasurable. Morrison had the suppleness and skill of a dancing-master. But he held Carley too tightly, and so she told him, and added, "I imbibed some fresh pure air while I was out West—something you haven't here—and I don't want it all squeezed out ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... incurred the suspicion and persecution of the Chinese Government. Even in the fifth century Buddhist monasteries were accused of organizing armed conspiracies and many later sects suffered from the panic which they inspired in official bosoms. But both difficulties were overcome by the suppleness of the clergy. If they outraged family sentiment they managed to make themselves indispensable at funeral ceremonies.[576] If they had a dangerous resemblance to an imperium in imperio, they minimized it by their obvious desire to exercise influence through ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... and bitter enmity. But the bare record of what he did and endured reveals him sufficiently. His qualities speak through his actions, so that he who runs may read. His most conspicuous defect was a want of suppleness—a certain rigidity of spirit which, when he succeeded, was called firmness, and when he failed, obstinacy. Yet the charge so often brought against him, that he allowed himself to be misled by evil counsellors, shows that this persistence in his own opinion did not ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... and hair also short that was swiftly turning to grey. The only thing that suggested the musician was the heaviness and swelling of his brows, and the delicacy of his hands and wrists, which were white, like a woman's, of an extraordinary suppleness and full of power; hands that were watched instinctively and obeyed. The eyes of the entire chorus were fixed on them now, gazing as if hypnotized, and hanging on every movement ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... This elaboration of new social forms can only be made by the collective work of the masses. To satisfy the immense variety of conditions and needs which will spring up as soon as private property shall be abolished, it is necessary to have the collective suppleness of mind of the whole people. Any authority external to it will only be an obstacle, only a trammel on the organic labor which must be accomplished, and beside that a source of discord ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... Her own veranda was the natural, familiar place to judge the work of time in those character-forming years from seventeen to twenty-seven. She was not like what she had been in the artificial surroundings of a fortnight ago. She filled the eye and the mind now in the well-knit suppleness of figure and the finished maturity of features which bore the mark of inner growth of knowledge of life. She was not a species of intellectual exotic, as he had feared, too baffling to allow the male intellect to feel comfortable, but very much, as he noted discriminatingly, a woman in all ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... instant that he was in combat with a man larger and more powerful than himself, but his own youth and suppleness were in his favor. ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... disgusting scene. I heard the bolt grate stealthily against the door of the little temple in which I was imprisoned, and was minded to give these brutish rebels somewhat of a surprise. I had rid myself of my bonds handily enough; I had rubbed my limbs to that perfect suppleness which is always desirable before a fight; and I had planned to rush out so soon as the door was swung, and kill those that came first with fist blows on ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... not convinced. The amazing improvement in Mildred's health, the splendid slim strength and suppleness of her body, the new and stable glories of her voice—all these she knew about, but they did not convince her. She believed in work, in hard work, but to her work meant the music itself. She felt that the Rivi system and the dirty, obscure little Moldini between them ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... hand. Prescott observed his thin, almost ascetic face, smooth-shaven and finely cut. Both General Wood and the Secretary were mountaineers, but the two faces were different; one represented blunt strength and courage; the other suppleness, dexterity, meditation, the power of silent combination. Had the two been blended here would have been one of the ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... removing the blanket, placed her in a chair. Elsie stared about, too frightened and tired even to whimper. The whip fell to the floor and Tess picked it up. For a long time, she held it in her hand, meditatively trying its strength and suppleness while she glared at the child. Then she slipped quietly into the hall, still carrying the riding ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... and indignation, when the English tired of fighting for him and it. When the English said to their great Marlborough: "Enough, you sorry Marlborough! You have beaten Louis XIV. to the suppleness of wash-leather, at our bidding; that is true, and that may have had its difficulties: but, after all, we prefer to have the thing precisely as it would have been without any fighting. You, therefore, what is the good of you? You are ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... followed the same color as the brows, lashes and eyes, that is to say, a decided black. As for the unknown's figure, it was seen, when he entered the dining-room, to be tall, well-formed and flexible, denoting, if not great muscular strength, at least much suppleness and agility. ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... to restore a little suppleness to the painting, which was too much dried, it was rubbed all over with carded cotton imbibed with oil, and wiped with old muslin: then white lead, ground with oil, was substituted in the room of the impression made by paste, and fixed by means ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... to be. It is you who have gained a double set of muscles to every limb; that is all. Strike out from the shoulder with your clenched hand; once your arm was loose-jointed and shaky; now it is firm and tense, and begins to feel like a natural arm. Moreover, strength and suppleness have grown together; you have not stiffened by becoming stronger, but find yourself more flexible. When you first came here, you could not touch your fingers to the ground without bending the knees, and now you can place your knuckles on the floor; then you could scarcely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... a fine proportion to the limbs; whilst the heavy and gross resist her by their weight. So women that take physic during their pregnancy, have slighter children indeed, but of a finer and more delicate turn, because the suppleness of the matter more readily obeys the plastic power. However, these are speculations which we ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... the heiress of a large estate, and having lost her mother in her infancy, was committed to a governess, whom misfortunes had reduced to suppleness and humility. The fondness of Turpicula's father would not suffer him to trust her at a publick school, but he hired domestick teachers, and bestowed on her all the accomplishments that wealth could purchase. But how many things are necessary to happiness which money cannot obtain! ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... planted himself with his back to the wall. Whoever came up the well hunting the cause for the failure would be facing the other way. Ross crouched a little, pushing the cape well back on his shoulders to free his arms. There was a feline suppleness in his stance just as a jungle cat might wait ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... growling they packed forward again, and Dolores found herself fighting desperately against men maddened into steel-armed wolves, thirsty for her blood in payment for that split. She more than held her own by sheer skill and suppleness for a space; but assailed from all sides save the back she speedily felt her limbs growing heavy and awkward, and a cutlas sang above her bent head when her foot had failed, leaving her without guard ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... I found such contests as disagreeable to me as they were new. One evening, under the pretext that I had purposely jostled him in running, he struck me, and we fought. Although he was probably stronger than I, as he was heavier and older, my suppleness enabled me to get the better of him in a wrestle; and I got him under me, when the master, attracted by the shouts of the boys, made his appearance. He separated and reproved us, and sent us off in disgrace to our respective rooms. From that time Balty Mahu treated me with ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... lining-muslin, snakes of piping; skeins, shreds; and the floor literally sown with pins, escaped from the fingers of the fair, those taper fingers so typical of the minds of their owners: or they have softness, suppleness, nimbleness, adroitness, and "a plentiful lack" ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... properly so called, Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Arabs and Spaniards have made of it the preferred seat of their business and pleasure. In his so often unsparing verses, Martial, even, celebrates with an erotic rapture the undulating suppleness of the ballet dancers of Gades, who are continued in our day by the majas ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... to the courtyard and Flann began to climb the Fairy Rowan Tree with all suppleness, strength and cunning. The cats that were below felt him going up the tree and the cats that were above humped themselves up. Flann passed the first branch on which a cat was crouched. He went above where the rowan berries were, and bending down ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... to-morrow night, General." He bowed with almost extravagant submission, and turning walked sharply away, energy and suppleness in every line of his slight figure, leaving Sir Terence to the unpleasant, almost desperate, thoughts that reflection must usher in as his ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... have within it, a continual Yes. When the heart is in union with God, there is no Nay,—it is Yes, be it so, which reverberates through the soul. This Yes, this suppleness, renders the heart agreeable to the heart of the Spouse. It was thus with Mary, the mother of our Lord, when the angel messenger came to her, she replied, "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word." It was thus with the child-like soul of Samuel, when ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... that with us would be associated with decrepitude, wrinkles and imbecility. They were all practical chemists, and their work was the preparation of food from the elements. No wonder that they possessed the suppleness and bloom of eternal youth, when the earthy matter and impurities that are ever present in our food, were unknown ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... been entrusted by his employer, and which are often of more importance than the letters themselves. Indeed, all the inferior classes possess an innate self-respect, and a natural gravity of deportment, which differs as far from the suppleness of a Hindustani as from the awkward rusticity of an English clown." ... "Even children," he continues, "in Mahomedan countries have an unusual degree of gravity in their deportment. The boy, who can but lisp his 'Peace be with you,' has imbibed this portion of the national character. In passing ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... importance of good footwork and impresses on the men the fact that quickness of foot and suppleness of body are as important for attack and defense as is the ability to parry and deliver a ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... awkward shapes recall the attempts of a vanished creation. On the hump of the foremost is perched the turbaned driver, as majestic as Eleazar, the servant of Abraham, going to Mesopotamia to seek a wife for Isaac; he yields with lazy suppleness to the rough, but regular motions of the animal; sometimes smoking his chibouque as if he were seated at the door of a cafe, or pressing the slow pace of his steed. Camels like to go in single file; they are accustomed to it, and ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... dinner-jacket. He and his comrade were strangely agile; their movements were quick, their step was light, like a cat's, and she noted how they lifted their feet. She did not know the prospector gets the habit by walking through tangled bush and across rough stones. They had a suppleness that came from using the long ax, and toil in the wilds had given them a fine-drawn look. In some ways both were modern, but in some they belonged to the past, when the fortress peels were built and ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... swords dangling at their sides, were seen riding forward, followed by a little knot of officers. The crowd parted before them as they came, not sullenly, perhaps, but certainly with no alacrity or suppleness of deference. There was no love lost on either side; but Cartwright, who wore the most arrogant front of the three, really feared the Puritans more than either of his colleagues; and when, seven years afterward, he was called ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... which the truly great leader of men shares with the domestic pig; though in the case of the pig it is generally spoken of as obstinacy. But the leader—General, Prime Minister or Captain of Industry—is distinguished from the pig by a certain intellectual suppleness which makes his obstinacy a more effective though less showy thing. The pig, being determined to go his own way, has no better idea than to tug desperately against the rope which is tied round his ankle. He tugs unwaveringly up to the very last moment, but in the end he is beaten because his ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... pocket and obeyed him at once. Mr. Parker's fingers seemed to play with it for a moment and I noticed at that moment what a strong and capable hand he seemed to have, with fingers of unusual length and suppleness. ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stripped, there was ohs! and ahs! of delight. His body was perfect, alive with easy suppleness and health and strength. The skin was white as a woman's, and as smooth. All grace, and resilience, and power resided therein. He had proved it in scores of battles. His photographs were in all ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... when standing—unlike nearly every other tribe of savages I have seen—they spread their toes outward instead of keeping both feet parallel. To a lesser extent the feet were held in that position also when walking. The suppleness of their bodies gave them a great advantage in penetrating with ease anywhere in the forest without having ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... fires, hearing shouts and turning round quickly, imagining that some one had touched her on the shoulder. The good man gave us a soothing draught to overcome our fatigue, and the next day a very hot bath brought back the suppleness to our limbs. It was then six days since we had left Paris, and it would take about twenty more hours to reach Homburg, for in those days trains went much less quickly than at present. I took a train for ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... as she turned, holding the little animal up. She was a woman of twenty-seven, but she looked a girl. The outline of her face was pure, the pale gold of her hair almost ethereal, and her tall, slight figure still suggested the suppleness, the possibility of future development, that belongs to youth. She wore a lace-colored gown that harmonized with the room and with the delicacy of ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... As they began the gay undulations of the waltz she looked away and then down without answering. Her movements were as light and airy as those of a butterfly. He felt a sudden lightness himself, communicated as by an invisible current. He wanted to match the suppleness of her body with his own, and did. Her arms, the flash and glint of the crimson sequins against the smooth, black silk of her closely fitting dress, her neck, her glowing, radiant hair, all combined to provoke a slight intellectual intoxication. She was so vigorously ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... for the piano are concerned, there is a mine practically inexhaustible and from which new treasures are constantly brought to light. For Recital purposes, the choice and sequence of a programme is second in importance only to its execution. And although suppleness and adaptability are valuable, even necessary, qualities, in a concert-singer, he will sometimes find that certain songs—admirable in themselves—are unsuited to him, for reasons which it is not always possible to define. In such cases ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... think of that?" said he, giving it two or three switches in the air to try its suppleness and toughness; "don't that look like a whip? Now we'll see ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... color slowly faded out of her face, leaving her quite pale, with eyes that began to blaze. The suppleness of her ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... understood. "It is all imagination about falling; one does not fall, when one does not fear to do so. Come, place your one paw so, and your other so! Take care of your fore-paws! Look sharp with your eyes, and give suppleness to your limbs! If there be a hole, jump, hold fast, that's the ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... a busy life, if I attain a very real happiness, I am tormented by the desire to know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his anaemia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom we look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living, why he is filling his life with activity. ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... industries," the great marts of commerce and the banks. It has friends at every Court, in every Cabinet, in every European Parliament, and its agents are alert and active in every branch of the administration of foreign lands. And while suppleness marked their dealings with others, they were inflexible only in their fidelity to the Teuton cause. Thus in Russia they were conservative and autocratic in their intercourse with the ruling spheres, and revolutionary in their ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... exquisite finish of the diction. Few finer things have been said on the raison d'etre of tragedy from the time when Aristotle in the Poetics formulated his memorable dictum. The admirable rhythmical flow should be noted. There is a rare suppleness and strength in the verses; we could not put one line before another without destroying the effect of the whole; no verse stands out obstinately from its fellows, but all are knit firmly, yet lightly, ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... a happier and more courageous frame of mind, Peveril stiffly gained his feet, moved his limbs, and rubbed them until a certain degree of suppleness was restored. He was about to build a fire, but refrained from so doing upon reflection that his stock of fuel must be limited, and that a fire might be of infinitely greater value at some ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... ability have taken it in hand, each in his own day, and have done for it what the master of a gymnasium does for the bodily frame. They have formed its limbs, and developed its strength; they have endowed it with vigour, exercised it in suppleness and dexterity, and taught it grace. They have made it rich, harmonious, various, and precise. They have furnished it with a variety of styles, which from their individuality may almost be called dialects, and are monuments both of the powers ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... she would die, painlessly, in some accident, she who was out of doors in the streets, crossing busy thoroughfares, from morning to night. And as she always returned safe and sound, he marvelled at the strength, at the suppleness of the human body, which was able continually to hold in check, to outwit all the perils that environed it (which to Swann seemed innumerable, since his own secret desire had strewn them in her path), and so allowed its occupant, the soul, to ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Duke keenly as he swung into the saddle in the suppleness of his youthful grace. She shaded her eyes against the sun, looking after him still as he rode with ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... the hard brightness of steel; his keen glances, subject to his will, often questioned, but never allowed themselves to be interrogated. Well made, slender, a slight and graceful figure, he had in his gait and movements a feline suppleness and stealthiness. He was slow, but easy of speech, and never animated; the tone of his voice was cold and veiled, and whatever the subject of conversation might be, he neither raised nor lowered it; no modulations; everyone ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... He played his game himself, not liking to receive any suggestions from his chiefs, intending to follow his own ideas. The battle once begun, he invariably attacked the strongest enemy and pursued those comrades who occupied the highest rank. With the marvelous suppleness of a cat, he climbed trees, flung himself to the ground, crept along barriers, slipped between the legs of his adversaries, and bounded triumphantly off with a number of brassards. It was a great joy ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... wept with joy as the campaign went forward. They were fit—physically fit beyond the other troops; they were good children in camp, wet or dry, fed or unfed; and they followed their officers with the quick suppleness and trained obedience of a first-class foot-ball fifteen. They were cut off from their apology for a base, and cheerfully cut their way back to it again; they crowned and cleaned out hills full of the enemy with the precision of well-broken ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... watching Delvile, she now reasonably concluded were actions directed by Mr Monckton, whose house he had but just left, and whose orders, whatever they might be, she was almost certain he would obey. Availing himself, therefore, of the forwardness and suppleness which met in this young man, she doubted not but his intelligence had contributed to acquaint him with ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... upon the pavement. He was glad to find himself amongst them and of them. He felt that he had come down from the chilly heights to walk the lighted highways of the world. The keen air with its touch of frost invigorated him. There was a new suppleness in his pulses, a queer excitement in his whole being, which he scarcely understood until his long walk came to an end and he found himself at a standstill in front of the house in ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... smiled and waved his hand with a deprecatory gesture—that hand, by the by, was remarkably small and delicately formed—it looked almost fragile. Yet the strength and suppleness of D'Avencourt's wrist was reputed to be prodigious by those who had seen him handle the sword, whether in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... that study seriously undertaken, with what precision should we resolve the problem of which now we can but indicate the solution! Habituated to the wonders of the nervous fluid, knowing that it can raise, at a distance, inert objects, that it can biologize, that it can communicate suppleness or rigidity, the highest development of the senses or absolute insensibility, we should not be greatly surprised to discover that it communicates also, in certain cases, elasticity and that degree of impenetrability ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... gesture of weariness, infinitely pathetic, he turned back to the bed, and bending down, mechanically rearranged the sheet, and smoothed a crease or two out of the pillow. The bowed back and shoulders, despite their suppleness and strength, had in them a pathos too deep for tears: and Mackay, feeling himself ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... various qualities of jute are mixed as judiciously as possible in order to obtain a satisfactory mixture. Fibres of different grades and marks vary in strength, colour, cleanness, diameter, length and suppleness; it is of the utmost importance that these fibres of diverse qualities should be distributed as early as possible in the process so as to facilitate the ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... democracy had a comparatively easy part assigned him. Had it been necessary for him to persuade, he would probably have failed, for he lacked the gifts of the orator and the suppleness of the intriguer; but he was expected only to confirm, and better confirmation was to be gained from his martial bearing and his rugged manner than from his halting words. The speaking might be done by others more practised in the art; a few words of harsh verification from this living ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... the sinews of her thighs as well developed as those of a race-horse, her deep chest, her enormous jutting shoulders, the nerve and muscle in her short, thick paws—all announced that this terrible animal united vigor with suppleness, and strength with agility. ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... wanting in good looks. He was fairer, clearer, better framed in every way than his sister, and had a pleasant, lively countenance, prepossessing to all. He had a well- grown, upright figure, his father's ready suppleness of movement, and his mother's hazel eyes and flashing smile, and there was a look of success about him, as well there might be, since he had come out triumphantly from the examination for Eton College, and had been ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... a groan, under any exertion his rheumatic old back always punished him cruelly for the days of indolence that had let its suppleness depart. ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... think of everything. Trouble has been taken, of course, to include enumerations, but there are much fewer fabricated and fantastic words. In short, the hand of the maker is far from showing the same suppleness and strength. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Fix mine eyes, nor let them rove From the mark where shafts of love Their flight wing. Try, my girl, O try what bliss Young men render when they kiss! Youth is alway sturdy, straight; Old age totters in its gait. These delights of love we bring Have the suppleness of spring, Softness, sweetness, wantoning; Clasp, my Phyllis, in their ring Sweeter sweets than poets sing, Anything ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... discovered in his nature a number of sensitive fibres which it required the utmost caution not to wound; so that a conversation with him of any length was a positive strain upon the mind. When I had, as it were, felt of his defects, I conformed to them with the same suppleness that his wife showed in soothing him. Later in life I should certainly have made him angry, but now, humble as a child, supposing that I knew nothing and believing that men in their prime knew all, I was genuinely amazed at the results obtained ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... of Time between the Beginning and End of a Motion: It proceeds from a regular and frequent Exercise, joined with a good Disposition; that is to say, Vigour and Suppleness, which ...
— The Art of Fencing - The Use of the Small Sword • Monsieur L'Abbat
... as the poets aver, we were some months, if not years, older at that moment than we had been two days before. Yet younger, too,—though this be a paradox,—for the birches had infused into us some of their own suppleness and strength. ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said "hum," or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... she sighed, changing her position beneath the lace with the swift suppleness of a kitten. "And what luck hunting?" she asked, as she loosened the ribbon ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... my sight that dreadful beast with gaping mouth, and cruelly glittering eyes. The horrible vision gave new vigour to my body, extraordinary suppleness to my ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... however, a great respect for his word, and there is nothing false about him. This is an excellent quality for a negotiator. Mr. Canning is a man of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals. As a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... position of the singer before taking breath, that is, at the end of an expiration. The singer must stand erect, the weight of the body evenly supported on the balls of both feet, with the whole body in a condition of lithe suppleness. In both systems of breathing the manner of expiration is simply a ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... pair of dark blue eyes were regarding them, and they thought they heard a trill of laughter, but it might have been one of the maids. They need not have felt embarrassed for there was the grace in their movements that goes with strength and youth and suppleness. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... is limpid, accurate, easy and strongly marked, with a sound framework and having the suppleness of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... the gallinago vulture, are the most formidable enemies the little turtles have. Humboldt justly remarks, "When we reflect on the difficulty that the naturalist finds in getting out the body of the turtle, without separating the upper and under shells, we cannot enough admire the suppleness of the jaguar's paw, which empties the double armor of the arraus, as if the adhering parts of the muscles had been cut by means of ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... literature mentioned he would not be distinguished from other writers of the group called "naturalists." His true glory is in the extraordinary superiority of his art. He did not invent it, and his method is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew how to give it a suppleness, a variety, and a freedom which were always wanting in Flaubert. The latter, in his best pages, is always strained. To use the expressive metaphor of the Greek athletes, he "smells of the oil." When one recalls that when attacked by hysteric ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... simplicity, cleverness, stupidity, and grace; he is a kind of sketch of a man, a tall child, yet with gleams of reason and wit, and all whose mistakes and follies have something arch about them. The true mode of representing him is to give him suppleness, agility, the playfulness of a kitten, with a certain grossness of appearance, which renders his conduct more absurd; his part is that of a patient, faithful valet, always in love, always in hot water, either on his master's or his own account, troubled and consoled as easily as a child, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... had to turn his telescope from politics. The torch of war was actually lighting, and he was not fashioned to be heedless of what surrounded him. Our diplomacy, after dancing with all the suppleness of stilts, gravely resigned the gift of motion. Our dauntless Lancastrian thundered like a tempest over a gambling tent, disregarded. Our worthy people, consenting to the doctrine that war is a scourge, contracted the habit of thinking it, in this case, the dire necessity which ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... forms of our political economy. This unexampled multiplicity of ways of cultivating the soil is not only typical of the wonderfully rich organization of our social conditions, but it also furnishes the most natural basis for the peculiar suppleness, many-sidedness, and receptivity of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... muslin, poplin and paper; clouds of lining-muslin, snakes of piping; skeins, shreds; and the floor literally sown with pins, escaped from the fingers of the fair, those taper fingers so typical of the minds of their owners: or they have softness, suppleness, nimbleness, adroitness, and "a plentiful ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... piano-playing side these new effects rest upon the utmost equality and suppleness of the fingers, a much wider extension of the hand than any previous composer demanded (save possibly Schumann in the "Kreisleriana" and the "Phantasie"), and a melodic quality in all the voices. When ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... consignments of American leather. This latter he was inclined, in general, to despise. Nevertheless, it had its uses. He found that an outer-sole of hemlock-tanned leather would greatly lengthen the working life of a poor man's heavy boot; though for want of suppleness it was useless for goods supplied to the "quality." The American patterns and lasts, on the other hand, he treated with great respect. He held that they embodied a far sounder knowledge of the human foot than did the English variety, and found them a great help to his trade in giving style, comfort, ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... yards she was still a tall, slender girl. Her body retained the habit, as well as the lines of youth; a trick of gliding into unexpected, pleasing attitudes, which would have been awkward but for the suppleness of limb to which they testified, and the unconsciousness ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his hands ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... a copying-pad and the ink used thereon was given in No. 2, vol. V. —E. D. AND AUTHOR. We are fully supplied with literary material by experienced writers. —SOLOMON C. Acrobats do not use any artificial preparation to increase their suppleness. Constant practice is the secret of the agility displayed by them. —W. B. The construction of a photographic camera was detailed in No. 13, Vol. IV; while the making of blue prints formed the subject of an article in No. ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... to be profitable, we must proceed analytically. It will be best to begin with the fundamental technical qualities. First of all, then, we have to note the suppleness and equality of Chopin's fingers and the perfect independence of his hands. "The evenness of his scales and passages in all kinds of touch," writes Mikuli, "was unsurpassed, nay, prodigious." Gutmann ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... (long mirrors had not been very plentiful on the frontier), and was appalled by the fact that my own lines corresponded but too well, alas! with those of the Staff. Ah, me! were the days, then, of Lieutenants forever past and gone? The days of suppleness and youth, the careless gay days, when there was no thought for the future, no anxiety about education, when the day began with a wild dash across country and ended with a dinner and dance—-were they ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... the forefinger of his right hand. Prescott observed his thin, almost ascetic face, smooth-shaven and finely cut. Both General Wood and the Secretary were mountaineers, but the two faces were different; one represented blunt strength and courage; the other suppleness, dexterity, meditation, the power of silent combination. Had the two been blended here would have been one ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of minutes the swords clashed, and then the captain lunged, but the major, recovering his old suppleness of wrist, parried in a masterly style, and if he had returned the attack Burle would have been pierced through. The captain now fell back; he was livid, for he felt that he was at the mercy of the man who ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... bumped. Such a scrambling as there was! Ann Hicks showed her suppleness by being one of the first to land and beating some of the boys; but she ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... one else. After they had been married six months I notice they have quit holding each other's hands, and now you seldom see them together much. With how few married couples who have been married six years do you see that suppleness and alertness, that zeal to please each other, and be with one another that you see in couples about to ...
— A California Girl • Edward Eldridge
... less, that her life was in question. With one bound she rushed to the other end of the room to escape the fatal knot which De Marsay tried to pass round her neck. There was a struggle. On either side there was an equality of strength, agility, and suppleness. To end the combat Paquita threw between the legs of her lover a cushion which made him fall, and profited by the respite which this advantage gave to her, to push the button of the spring which caused the bell to ring. Promptly the mulatto arrived. In a second ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of wrath, grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates. Also there were forms voluptuously feminine: the light grace of the limbs folded within their lotos-cups, the suppleness of the fingers numbering the numbers of the Good Law, were ideals possibly inspired in some forgotten tune by the charm of an Indian dancing-girl. Shelved against the naked brickwork above, I could perceive multitudes ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... man. As a whole, grace would be met with especially amongst women; beauty, on the contrary, is met with more frequently in man, and we need not go far without finding the reason. For grace we require the union of bodily structure, as well as that of character: the body, by its suppleness, by its promptitude to receive impressions and to bring them into action; the character, by the moral harmony of the sentiments. Upon these two points nature has been more favorable to the woman ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... again, and Dolores found herself fighting desperately against men maddened into steel-armed wolves, thirsty for her blood in payment for that split. She more than held her own by sheer skill and suppleness for a space; but assailed from all sides save the back she speedily felt her limbs growing heavy and awkward, and a cutlas sang above her bent head when her foot had failed, leaving her without ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... neither the King nor the ministers, and that the whole province was disposed for a revolt. The Cardinal was in extreme consternation, and commended himself to the favour of the meanest man of the Fronde with the greatest suppleness imaginable. ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... expressive eyes, a small retrousse nose, a pretty mouth, and a voice that charmed all listeners. She was rather undersized, but her figure was so perfectly proportioned as to give the impression of height and suppleness. Its charms were scarcely concealed by the clothing she wore, made as it was in the suggestive fashion of the day, with no support to the form but a belt, and as scanty about her shoulders as it was about her shapely feet. It ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... this fits accurately into its corresponding (glenoid) cavity, there can be no side motion, but a vertical chopping one only. The skeleton of a typical carnivore is the perfection of strength and suppleness. The tissue of the bones is dense and white; the head small and beautifully articulated; the spine flexible yet strong. In those which show the greatest activity, such as the cats, civets and dogs, the spinous ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... increase with the lapse of time. We should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time one hesitates, and possibly ends ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... and expedient only, but also on wicked, unjust, and inexpedient objects, do not give their commendations to the mere innocence whose boast is its inexperience of evil, and whose truer name is, by their award, suppleness and ignorance of what all men who live aright should know. The ancient Spartans, at their festivals, used to force their Helots to swallow large quantities of raw wine, and then to expose them at the public tables, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... firmness and patience in a negotiator to any other qualities. Suppleness, no doubt, often supplies the place of patience, and the man who can tack and veer was formerly not without his value; but the time for using these small wares has now passed for ever. They have been worn threadbare by a politician of our day, and are foul in the nostrils of every civilized ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... good writing then as now demanded choice and forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well. His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His "Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the attempts of a vanished creation. On the hump of the foremost is perched the turbaned driver, as majestic as Eleazar, the servant of Abraham, going to Mesopotamia to seek a wife for Isaac; he yields with lazy suppleness to the rough, but regular motions of the animal; sometimes smoking his chibouque as if he were seated at the door of a cafe, or pressing the slow pace of his steed. Camels like to go in single file; they are accustomed to it, and five or six are ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... mere skin and bone; the contrast between her ghastly complexion and her steely glittering black eyes was more startling than ever. Robed in dismal black, relieved only by the brilliant whiteness of her widow's cap—reclining in a panther-like suppleness of attitude on a little green sofa—she looked at the stranger who had intruded on her, with a moment's languid curiosity, then dropped her eyes again to the hand-screen which she held between her face and the fire. ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... figurehead of the democracy had a comparatively easy part assigned him. Had it been necessary for him to persuade, he would probably have failed, for he lacked the gifts of the orator and the suppleness of the intriguer; but he was expected only to confirm, and better confirmation was to be gained from his martial bearing and his rugged manner than from his halting words. The speaking might be done by others more practised in the art; a few words of harsh verification from this living ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... so much beauty and so many graces enshrined in the form of woman as in this daughter of Sweden. Her description reads like a catalogue of all human perfections. Of medium height and a figure as faultless in its exquisite modelling as in its grace and suppleness; her hair, black as a raven's plumage, and falling, like a veil of night, below her knees, emphasised the white purity of face and throat, arms, and hands. Her teeth, twin rows of pearls, glistened between smiling crimson lips, curved like Cupid's bow. Her face ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... prey,—the beak of the eagle, but the eye of the vulture. His cheeks were hollow; the arms, crossed on his breast, were long and fleshless. Yet in that skeleton form there was a something which conveyed the idea of a serpent's suppleness and strength; and as the hungry, watchful eyes met my own startled gaze, I recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of danger which is conveyed to man, as to inferior animals, in the very aspect of the creatures that sting ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... callowness expressed in their lack of manners and perfervid interest in the approaching meal. This induced their brief journeys back and forth, albeit embarrassed by their physical conformation, short turns on four legs not being apparently the easy thing it would seem from so much youthful suppleness. The dignity of the elder hounds did not suffer them to move, but they looked on from erect postures about the hearth with glistening eyes ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... spurred each other mutually, they went mad with dreams of glory; and there was such a burst of youth, such a passion for work about their plans, that they themselves often smiled afterwards at those great, proud dreams which seemed to endow them with suppleness, strength, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... is formed, and in which it lives. Men of great ability have taken it in hand, each in his own day, and have done for it what the master of a gymnasium does for the bodily frame. They have formed its limbs, and developed its strength; they have endowed it with vigour, exercised it in suppleness and dexterity, and taught it grace. They have made it rich, harmonious, various, and precise. They have furnished it with a variety of styles, which from their individuality may almost be called dialects, and are monuments both of the powers of the language and the ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... difficulty experienced by the naturalist in getting out the body of the turtle without separating the upper and under shells, we cannot sufficiently wonder at the suppleness of the tiger's paw, which is able to remove the double armour of the arrau, as if the adhering parts of the muscles had been cut by a surgical instrument. The jaguar pursues the turtle into the water ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavorable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... be kept in order after he has been taken by the consciousness of his gain. Among hardheaded and highly practical peoples, such as the Jews and the French, the dot flourishes, and its effect is to promote intellectual suppleness in the race, for the average child is thus not inevitably the offspring of a woman and a noodle, as with us, but may be the offspring of a woman and a man of reasonable intelligence. But even in France, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... feel that her beauty—the brightness of her hair and eyes, the grace and suppleness of her limbs—were slipping from her and from the man she loved! Was there anything more bitter?—or any more sacred duty than not to add to that bitterness, not to push her with suffering into old age, but to help keep the star of her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... car, Banneker reflected with profound distaste that the plan upon which he was hired was not essentially different from the Zucker scheme, in Marrineal's intent. He, too, was—if Marrineal's idea worked out—to draw down a percentage varying in direct ratio to his suppleness in accommodating his writings to "the best interests of the paper." He swore that he would see The Patriot and its proprietor eternally damned before he would again alter jot or tittle of his editorial expression with reference ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... [50] Note Professor Woodberry's praise of the heroic couplet | | for its simple music, its suppleness, its power of forcing | | brevity: "the best metrical form which intelligence, as | | distinct from poetical feeling, can employ." (Makers of | | Literature, p. 104.) ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... an ax round his head, and the girl kneeling beside the stove noticed the sinewy suppleness of his frame and the precision with which the heavy blade cleft the billets. The ax, she knew, is by no means an easy tool to handle. At last the red flame crackled, and, though she had not intended the question to be malicious, there was a faint trace of irony in her voice as she asked, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... up into a splendid girl, a perfect type of a race, a sort of lovely and stupid Venus. She was sixteen, and I have rarely seen such perfection of form, such suppleness and such regular features. I said she was a Venus; yes, a fair, stout, vigorous Venus, with large, bright, vacant eyes, which were as blue as the flowers of the flax plant; she had a large mouth with full lips, the mouth of ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... compact and trim of figure with a short, pointed beard, and hair also short that was swiftly turning to grey. The only thing that suggested the musician was the heaviness and swelling of his brows, and the delicacy of his hands and wrists, which were white, like a woman's, of an extraordinary suppleness and full of power; hands that were watched instinctively and obeyed. The eyes of the entire chorus were fixed on them now, gazing as if hypnotized, and hanging on every movement of ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... and eighteenth Chap, our Author descends to particulars, perswading his Prince in his sixteenth to such a suppleness of disposition, as that upon occasion he can make use either of liberality or miserableness, as need shall require. But that of liberality is to last no longer than while he is in the way to some designe: which if he well ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... fast disappearing type of gentleman, and I knew that for him this was possible through an extraordinary suppleness of mind, fineness of tact and feeling, and a philosophic broadness ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... the bolt grate stealthily against the door of the little temple in which I was imprisoned, and was minded to give these brutish rebels somewhat of a surprise. I had rid myself of my bonds handily enough; I had rubbed my limbs to that perfect suppleness which is always desirable before a fight; and I had planned to rush out so soon as the door was swung, and kill those that came first with fist blows on ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... mildly remarked by dear uncle as he savagely flourished a cowhide of most formidable aspect and alarming suppleness. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... heaven," I exclaimed, "how delighted I should be to have the friendship of this lady, whose wit and amiable manners are so greatly talked of." "Yes," said de Maupeou, laughing, "she is a type of court ladies, a mixture of dignity and suppleness, majesty and condescension, which is worth its weight in gold. She was destined from all eternity to be the companion of the king's female friends." We both laughed; and the chancellor went on to say: "There are others whom I will point out to you ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... but admire the deftness and skill with which the stranger worked. His long tapering fingers seemed to have the suppleness and deftness of a woman's and his whole attention seemed ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... must do his own training. No one else can do it for him. The assumption of superiority over his opponent will riot develop his suppleness of body and strength of muscle. To be sure, faith and courage are essential to—victory, but they must be backed by careful and persistent training. Vainglorious boasting alone will not win ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... restore a little suppleness to the painting, which was too much dried, it was rubbed all over with carded cotton imbibed with oil, and wiped with old muslin: then white lead, ground with oil, was substituted in the room of the impression made by paste, and fixed by means of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... anthologies. His facility in the handling of blank verse is also remarkable. Lovers of Milton may regret the massive grandeur of an earlier style; but, as in every art, so in poetry, we pay for advance in technical accomplishment, in suppleness and melodious phrasing, by the loss of other qualities which are difficult ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... grapple with and generalize the minutiae of official labour or of legislative enactments with a masterly success. But as the road became clearer to his steps, his ambition became more evident and daring. Naturally dictatorial and presumptuous, his early suppleness to superiors was now exchanged for a self-willed pertinacity, which often displeased the more haughty leaders of his party, and often wounded the more vain. His pretensions were scanned with eyes more jealous ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... his head; so that the substance, especially of the Journey to the Hartz, is less what was to be seen in the Hartz than what was suggested to a very lively imagination; and we admire the agility with which the writer jumps from place to place quite as much as the suppleness with which he can at will unconditionally subject himself to the genius of a single locality. For Heine is capable of writing straightforward descriptive prose, as well-ordered and as matter-of-fact as a narrative of Kleist's. But the world ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Irae," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... these items, it shows what an invaluable assistant he has been. Now, besides superintending the putting up of the tent, he thinks out and arranges the packing of the sledge; it is extraordinary how neatly and handily everything is stowed, and how much study has been given to preserving the suppleness and good running qualities of the machine. On the Barrier, before the ponies were killed, he was ever roaming round, correcting ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... daily domestic life. See, for instance, at the British Museum, Trypho,— "the son of Eutychus," one of the very pleasantest human likenesses there, though it came from a cemetery—a son it was hard to leave in it at nineteen or twenty. With all the suppleness, the delicate muscularity, of the flower of his youth, his handsome face sweetened by a kind and simple heart, in motion, surely, he steps forth from some shadowy chamber, strigil in hand, as of old, and with his coarse towel or cloak of monumental drapery over one shoulder. ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... hard as the nether millstone, the other (just as after constant 'pinching' a limb becomes insensible) grows callous, and also (though it seems like a contradiction in terms) sometimes acquires a certain dreadful suppleness. Nothing is more monstrous than the generally received opinion with respect to a moderate competence; that 'fatal gift,' as it is called, which encourages idleness in youth by doing away with the necessity for exertion. I never hear the same people inveighing against great inheritances, ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... stairs to her own room, and after removing the blanket, placed her in a chair. Elsie stared about, too frightened and tired even to whimper. The whip fell to the floor and Tess picked it up. For a long time, she held it in her hand, meditatively trying its strength and suppleness while she glared at the child. Then she slipped quietly into the hall, still carrying the riding ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... physical plane great strides are being made. The suppleness of one, the power of balance of another, the feats of the acrobat, the will of the juggler which commands the action, and the seeming suspension of natural law; all these expressions are ever increasing and varying through the industry and the ingenuity of man, ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... sensitive fibres which it required the utmost caution not to wound; so that a conversation with him of any length was a positive strain upon the mind. When I had, as it were, felt of his defects, I conformed to them with the same suppleness that his wife showed in soothing him. Later in life I should certainly have made him angry, but now, humble as a child, supposing that I knew nothing and believing that men in their prime knew all, I was genuinely amazed at ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... own vanity. Next she was seized with a sense of the great indelicacy and unpardonable impropriety of letting her mind run at all upon a person of the other sex; and shaking her lovely shoulders, as much as to say, "Away idle thoughts," she nestled and fitted with marvelous suppleness into a corner of the carriage, and sank into a sweet sleep, with a red cheek, two wet eyelashes, and a half-smile of the most heavenly character imaginable. And so she glided along till, at five in the afternoon, the carriage turned in at Mr. Bazalgette's gates. Lucy ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... obtained from Eau-de-Cologne in the domain of the toilet, has been widely sought by both sexes in Europe. Devoting long vigils to the study of the skin and cuticle of the two sexes, each of whom, one as much as the other, attach the utmost importance to the softness, suppleness, brilliancy, and velvet texture of the complexion, the Sieur Birotteau, perfumer, favorably known in this metropolis and abroad, has discovered a Paste and a Lotion justly hailed as marvellous by the fashion and elegance ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... rapidity which left sober analysis far behind in the race. The girl's exuberant vitality asserted itself all over her, from head to foot. Her figure—taller than her sister's, taller than the average of woman's height; instinct with such a seductive, serpentine suppleness, so lightly and playfully graceful, that its movements suggested, not unnaturally, the movements of a young cat—her figure was so perfectly developed already that no one who saw her could have supposed that she was only ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... needed nourishment, and the blood circulates more rapidly to carry the material for repair to the parts that need it, so that by moderate physical exercise, judiciously distributed, the whole body is built up and strengthened, and the result is a suppleness of frame and a clearness of head that ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... conscious that a pair of dark blue eyes were regarding them, and they thought they heard a trill of laughter, but it might have been one of the maids. They need not have felt embarrassed for there was the grace in their movements that goes with strength and youth and suppleness. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... his style, it is limpid, accurate, easy and strongly marked, with a sound framework and having the suppleness of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Ralestones, possessing the thin, three-cornered faces, the dark mahogany hair, the sharply defined cheek-bones which had been the mark of the family as far back in history as portraits or written descriptions existed. The "Red" Ralestones were marked also by height and a suppleness of body and movement. The men had been fine swordsmen, the ladies noted beauties. But they were also cursed, Val remembered ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... shed. His skin got very itchy, and he found pleasure in rolling in the mud and scraping his back against some convenient tree. He never climbed now: his claws were too long, and his arms, though growing big and strong, were losing that suppleness of wrist that makes cub Grizzlies and all Blackbears great climbers. He now dropped naturally into the Bear habit of seeing how high he could reach with his nose on the rubbing-post, whenever ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... especially would have been much smaller, than it now is, had the Russian genius been permitted to break its own way through the darkness; but there is still less doubt, that in this case it would have preserved its original peculiarity, that wonderful blending of the East and the West, of Asiatic suppleness and European energy, of which their popular songs give such affecting, and in ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... in these parts a woman who followed a band of mountebanks and jugglers, who stretched out her legs in such an extraordinary manner, and raised up her feet to her head, before and behind, with as much suppleness as if she had neither nerves nor joints. There was nothing supernatural in all that; she had exercised herself from extreme youth in these movements, and had contracted the ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... did seek to depreciate it by insinuating that my grouse was one which, having been seriously wounded by other hands some days previously, had come up to the hills to shuffle off its mortal coil in seclusion, arguing thus from its total absence of heat and suppleness. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... show and affectation of neatness with a touch of smartness, and is always a term of mild contempt; as, a spruce serving man. Trim denotes a certain shapely and elegant firmness, often with suppleness and grace; as, a trim suit; a trim figure. Prim applies to a precise, formal, affected nicety. Dapper is spruce with the suggestion of smallness and slightness; natty, a diminutive of neat, suggests minute elegance, with a ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... clearer cut as she grew older—features wrought with delicacy and yet imbued with strength, suggestive of carved ivory. Delicacy imbued with strength was betokened, too, by the tall slenderness of her figure, whose silence and suppleness of movement came—in Conquest's imagination at ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... tuft of grass, running swiftly along the high bank of a watercourse, and sneaking under the shadowing border of a belt of jungle, is to understand his cunning and craftiness. His attitude, when he is crouching for the final bound, is the embodiment of suppleness and strength. All his actions are graceful, and half display and half conceal beneath their symmetry and elegance the tremendous power and deadly ferocity that lurks beneath. For a short distance he is possessed of great speed, and with a few short agile bounds ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... later volumes his must seem to us a godlike voice chanting in the void. For, fit or unfit as we may be to grasp the elusive substance of his strains, all must confess the voice of the singer to be divine. At once in the range and suppleness of his music he is not merely the first of our living poets, but incomparable. In learning he has Robert Bridges for a rival, and no other. But no amount of learning could give us 228 pages of music that from ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... circulate round the head of the poor saint, who was suffocating in that thick atmosphere. Look how the drapery now floats, and you see that the breeze lifts it; just now it looked like heavy linen held out by pins. Observe that the satiny lustre I am putting on the bosom gives it the plump suppleness of the flesh of a young girl. See how this tone of mingled reddish-brown and ochre warms up the cold grayness of that large shadow where the blood seemed to stagnate rather than flow. Young man, young man! what I am showing ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... Young Egmont, who had been captured, fighting bravely at the head of coward troops, by Julian Romero, who nine years before had stood on his father's scaffold, regarded this brutal scene with haughty indignation. This behaviour had more effect upon Roda than the suppleness of Capres. "I am sorry for your misfortune, Count," said the councillor, without however rising from his chair; "such is the lot of those who take arms against their King." This was the unfortunate commencement of Philip Egmont's career, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... lean, skulking, prowling, tawny—on the scent of his tracks. Then the mist passed over it. When he beheld it again it had approached nearer and was creeping rapidly toward the door. His listless eyes grew fascinated by its motions—its litheness, suppleness, grace, stealth, exquisite caution. Never before had he seen a dog with the step of a cat. A second time the fog closed over it, and then, advancing right out of the cloud with more swiftness, more cunning, its large feet falling as lightly as flakes of snow, the ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... "Then—until to-morrow night, General." He bowed with almost extravagant submission, and turning walked sharply away, energy and suppleness in every line of his slight figure, leaving Sir Terence to the unpleasant, almost desperate, thoughts that reflection must usher ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... fervent worship and bitter enmity. But the bare record of what he did and endured reveals him sufficiently. His qualities speak through his actions, so that he who runs may read. His most conspicuous defect was a want of suppleness—a certain rigidity of spirit which, when he succeeded, was called firmness, and when he failed, obstinacy. Yet the charge so often brought against him, that he allowed himself to be misled by evil ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... and there is nothing false about him. This is an excellent quality for a negotiator. Mr. Canning is a man of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals. As a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... moments of rest, following the march of the clouds as they sailed divinely over the rich breadth and colour of the commons, a whole brood of images nestled at his heart, or seemed to hover in the sunny air before him,—visions of a slender form fashioned with Greek suppleness and majesty, of a soft and radiant presence, of looks all womanliness, and gestures all grace, of a smile like no other he had ever seen for charm, of a quick impulsive gait! He followed that figure ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... assured; there was something antique and laboured in his determined grasp at the amenities of the occasion. It was the only heaviness. To the other contest between them he brought an amazing sureness, a suppleness, power, and audacity beyond praise. He directed his battle, and at his elbow Tom Mocket, sandy-haired and ferret-eyed, ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the office of a provincial notary ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... more kingly countenance. His body, however, seemed to lag behind, and was no match for his sublime spirit. But when fired by his position as Conductor, or when at the piano, the slender body was nerved to a point where it seemed all suppleness and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... at this moment, for so many slight, easy, human pleasures were new to her. She sat curved on the ground, with the ease and suppleness of a greyhound ready to spring, whereas Sir Edmund was forty and a little more stiff than his ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... the definition; then there is such a want of unity that quite special mechanisms adapted to each phenomenal detail have to be imagined; and, lastly—most serious argument of all—so much comprehensiveness and suppleness is employed, that no experimental law is found which cannot be understood mechanically, and no fact of observation which shows an error in the mechanical explanation—a sure proof that this mode of explanation has ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... defending us against injuries, and of performing innumerable other good offices, for which they were originally intended; and these becoming unequal to the weight they were wont to sustain, lose their active suppleness, and fail in bending. Likewise the double teeth or grinders, either drop out, or rot away; so as now to be too few remaining to comminute solid food. In the translation of the Hebrew word, which I have here rendered by double teeth or grinders, I followed Arias Montanus, ...
— Medica Sacra - or a Commentary on on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned - in the Holy Scriptures • Richard Mead
... suffers, and weakness, anaemia, and dyspepsia are common. Even though most of the joints become useless, there is often sufficient suppleness in the fingers to allow of their use, as in writing or knitting. In old men the disease is seen attacking one joint alone, as the hip, shoulder, knee, and spine. Children are occasionally sufferers, and in young women it may follow ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... contests, are permitted only occasionally and rarely to be driven at their extreme speed, but are assiduously made to walk several hours each day. By this constancy of moderate exercise they preserve health and suppleness of limb, without exhaustion of strength. And it appears, that, were such an animal never to be taken from the stable but to be pushed to the top of his speed, he would be sure to make still greater speed toward ruin. Why not be as wise for men as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... twenty-four years, having only a superficial knowledge of public affairs, scarcely known to the Ministers, and endowed with a narrow pedantic nature which was to be the bane of his people. He lacked alike the sagacity, the foresight, and the suppleness of Leopold. Further, though his inexperience should have inspired him with a dread of war for his storm-tossed States, yet that same misfortune subjected him to the advice of the veteran Chancellor, Kaunitz. That crabbed old man advised the maintenance ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with experience of reality, she could not turn and bend quickly enough ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the show, instead of two days a week, as had been his custom. Never was he more calm, graceful and fascinating in his performances. The evening before the eventful day, he repeated in pantomime his victory over the lion near Damascus, with so much elegance, precision and suppleness as to elicit round after round of enthusiastic cheers. Of course everybody who had seen him play killing a lion was wild with curiosity to see him actually ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various
... had a string of opaque white, wax-like beads around the neck of her dress, and the contrast of the pearly whiteness of the bauble with the creamy whiteness and softness of her throat was marked with much finish. Her figure was hardly of medium height, and, despite the suppleness of youth, as "plump as a partridge," according to the familiar saying. The clear iris of her eyes gave an impression of quick shifting, and by them one could see her ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... bravely attired, with cavalier boots, and swords dangling at their sides, were seen riding forward, followed by a little knot of officers. The crowd parted before them as they came, not sullenly, perhaps, but certainly with no alacrity or suppleness of deference. There was no love lost on either side; but Cartwright, who wore the most arrogant front of the three, really feared the Puritans more than either of his colleagues; and when, seven years afterward, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... increased. Never, however, indulge in heavy work or feats of strength. Such exercise is not good for any one, but especially is it dangerous for ball players. They do not want strength, but agility and suppleness; besides, the straining of some small muscle or tendon may incapacitate one for the entire season, or even permanently. Right here is the objection to turning loose a party of ball players in a gymnasium, for spring practice. The temptation to try feats ...
— Base-Ball - How to Become a Player • John M. Ward
... whose habits and tastes had been so far civilized as to admit of his tolerating the companionship of man and subsisting on a mixed diet; but at the second glance, noting his color, and the shape of his head, with a certain loftiness of mien and suppleness of backbone—neither of which is ever to be found in the wolf—you would have pronounced him a little lion, shorn of his brindled mane. On further acquaintance, however—I cannot say intimate acquaintance, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... who by forwardness the most officious took care to be noticed, was Mr Morrice, a young lawyer, who, though rising in his profession, owed his success neither to distinguished abilities, nor to skill-supplying industry, but to the art of uniting suppleness to others with confidence in himself. To a reverence of rank, talents, and fortune the most profound, he joined an assurance in his own merit, which no superiority could depress; and with a presumption which encouraged him to aim at all things, he blended a good-humour that no mortification ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... pages in which this apparatus is employed in its full strength. And in spite of this curious and unpopular reticence, we listen here, as M. Bruneau has observed, to "a magic orchestra"—an orchestra of indescribable richness, delicacy, and suppleness—an orchestra that melts and shimmers with opalescent hues—an orchestra that has substance without density, sonority ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... striking passages, with the exception of those in sixths and octaves, and I beg my sister not to devote too much time to these lest she spoil her quiet and steady hand and make it lose its natural lightness, suppleness and fluent rapidity. What, after all, is the use? She is expected to play the sixths and octaves with the greatest velocity (which no man will accomplish, not even Clementi), and if she tries she will produce ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... characteristic of these people was that, when standing—unlike nearly every other tribe of savages I have seen—they spread their toes outward instead of keeping both feet parallel. To a lesser extent the feet were held in that position also when walking. The suppleness of their bodies gave them a great advantage in penetrating with ease anywhere in the forest without having ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... But on him they were lost. The counsel of Achitophel, that counsel which was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God, was turned into foolishness. He who had become a by-word, for the certainty with which he foresaw and the suppleness with which he evaded danger, now, when beset on every side with snares and death, seemed to be smitten with a blindness as strange as his former clear-sightedness, and, turning neither to the right nor to the left, strode straight on with desperate hardihood to his doom. Therefore, after having ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... to a happier and more courageous frame of mind, Peveril stiffly gained his feet, moved his limbs, and rubbed them until a certain degree of suppleness was restored. He was about to build a fire, but refrained from so doing upon reflection that his stock of fuel must be limited, and that a fire might be of infinitely greater value ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... duties, even a little strict, with her exaggeration of the Christian austerity in her hate of all the brutalities and all the careless morals that paganism condoned. Nevertheless, this rigid soul knew how to bend when it was necessary. Monnica had tact, suppleness, and, when it was needed, a very acute and very reasonable practical sense of which she gave many a proof in the bringing up and management of her son Augustin. This soul, hard for herself, veiled her uncompromising religion under an unchangeable sweetness which was in ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... commerce and the banks. It has friends at every Court, in every Cabinet, in every European Parliament, and its agents are alert and active in every branch of the administration of foreign lands. And while suppleness marked their dealings with others, they were inflexible only in their fidelity to the Teuton cause. Thus in Russia they were conservative and autocratic in their intercourse with the ruling spheres, and revolutionary in their relations ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... imperious airs of superiority which that roysterer assumed, mistaking for effeminacy Jasper's elaborate dandyism, and not recognizing in the bravo's elegant proportions the tiger-like strength of which, in truth, that tiger-like suppleness should have warned him, Dolly Poole provoked a quarrel, and being himself a stout fellow, nor unaccustomed to athletic exercises, began to spar; the next moment he was at the other end of the room full sprawl on the floor; and ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little turtles have. Humboldt justly remarks, When we reflect on the difficulty that the naturalist finds in getting out the body of the turtle, without separating the upper and the under shell, we cannot enough admire the suppleness of the jaguar's paw, which empties the double armor of the arraus, as if the adhering parts of the muscles had been cut by ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... their procedure, but the evidence was soon overwhelming in favour of a vastly longer existence of man in the Nile Valley than could be made to agree with even the longest duration then allowed by theologians. For, in spite of all the suppleness of men like Wilkinson, it became evident that, whatever system of scriptural chronology was adopted, Egypt was the seat of a flourishing civilization at a period before the "Flood of Noah," and that no such flood had ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... a young man of little over one-and-twenty, of medium height, but with a well-built, well-knit figure that gave a promise of extraordinary strength and power of endurance, coupled at the same time with a scarcely less extraordinary suppleness. He had a face that was certainly handsome, though many handsomer faces were familiar in Paris at that day, but none more gallant, and, indeed, its chief charm was its almost audacious air of self-reliance, of unfailing courage, of changeless composure, and unconquerable ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... rubber, and Scanlon agreed to accept his ministrations. After a bath and a shower, the Bohemian kneaded and punched some suppleness into him; an hour's sleep followed this, and he was pleased to find himself in ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... of growth may have passed from the plasma engendering the father to the plasma engendering the son, may have grown on the way by the effect of the primitive impetus, and thus assured to the son a greater suppleness than the father had, without troubling, so to speak, about what the father did. So of many examples drawn from the progressive domestication of animals: it is hard to say whether it is the acquired habit that is transmitted or only a certain natural tendency—that, indeed, which has caused ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... expression! Ten thousand delicate veined hands reaching forth and waving a greeting to the air and light, making a union and compact with them, like a wedding ceremony. How young the old trees suddenly become! what suppleness and grace invest their branches! The leaves are a touch of immortal youth. As the cambium layer beneath the bark is the girdle of perennial youth, so the leaves are the facial expression of the same quality. The leaves have their day and die, but ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... been a breathless affair, demanding all they possessed of bodily fleetness and suppleness, of cool, yet reckless, courage. And it had been crowned with success; the good news wired home to mothers who waited and prayed. But Roy's nerves had suffered more severely than Desmond's. A sharp attack of fever had completed his prostration. And it was then, in the moment of his passing ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... found such contests as disagreeable to me as they were new. One evening, under the pretext that I had purposely jostled him in running, he struck me, and we fought. Although he was probably stronger than I, as he was heavier and older, my suppleness enabled me to get the better of him in a wrestle; and I got him under me, when the master, attracted by the shouts of the boys, made his appearance. He separated and reproved us, and sent us off in disgrace to our respective rooms. From that time ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... with joy as the campaign went forward. They were fit—physically fit beyond the other troops; they were good children in camp, wet or dry, fed or unfed; and they followed their officers with the quick suppleness and trained obedience of a first-class foot-ball fifteen. They were cut off from their apology for a base, and cheerfully cut their way back to it again; they crowned and cleaned out hills full of the enemy with ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... an age that with us would be associated with decrepitude, wrinkles and imbecility. They were all practical chemists, and their work was the preparation of food from the elements. No wonder that they possessed the suppleness and bloom of eternal youth, when the earthy matter and impurities that are ever present in our ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... across the shoulders or around the chest; and, in fact, he was rather a thin man than otherwise, nor did he appear a powerful one—but his bones were well set. His sinews were all strength—they were not encumbered with flesh. He was as much a model of activity and suppleness, as Meikle Robin was of bodily power. Now, Andrew was a native of Eyemouth; he was about three and thirty years of age, and he united in his person the callings of a fisherman and cadger; or, in other words, Andrew, being without mother, sister, wife, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... Tuyn turned quickly, with a charming, youthful grace, made up of a suppleness and litheness which suggested almost the movement of a fluid. Craven noted it with a little thrill of unexpected pleasure, against which an instant ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... pitted, however, and his eyelids had not suffered. Men were inclined to call him ugly; women thought him interesting. His frame was badly built from the athlete's point of view; but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent self-culture, which had been his ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... they pass. In the large cities you can see dozens of them squatting along the streets performing their sacred offices, shaving the heads and oiling the bodies of customers. Cocoanut oil is chiefly used and is supposed to add strength and suppleness to the body. It is administered with massage, thoroughly rubbed in and certainly cannot injure anybody. In the principal parks of Indian cities, at almost any time in the morning, you can see a dozen or twenty men being oiled and rubbed down by barbers or by friends, and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... woman watched the Duke keenly as he swung into the saddle in the suppleness of his youthful grace. She shaded her eyes against the sun, looking after him still as he rode with his companion toward ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... minutes to reach the platform of the ledge formed by the cliff; and Lupin had several times to help his companion, whose wrists, still bruised from the torture, had lost all their strength and suppleness. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... Viennese melody (i.e. the Haydn and Mozart type) and stodgy German counterpoint which formed the bulk of Marschner's and Spontini's music; and here we see him in the very deed of trying his hand at it. Very often the result, it must be admitted, is lamentable. There was no Italian suppleness and grace in Wagner's nature: when he was in deadly earnest, and striving to express himself without thinking of models, he wrote gorgeous stuff; when the inspiration waned, or when he deluded himself with the belief that what he supposed to be Bellini-like tunes really expressed ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, arid integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous,—acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... majority of people who call themselves well, because they are not, at present, upon any particular doctor's list, are not within sight of what perfect health would be. That fullness of life, that vigorous tone, and that elastic cheerfulness, which make the mere fact of existence a luxury, that suppleness which carries one like a well-built boat over every wave of unfavorable chance,—these are attributes of the perfect health seldom enjoyed. We see them in young children, in animals, and now and then, but rarely, in some adult human being, ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... then tripping through the measure on Hawtrey's arm, was native born. She was young and straight—straighter in outline than the women of the cities—with a suppleness which was less suggestive of the willow than a rather highly-tempered spring. She moved with a large vigor which barely fell short of grace, her eyes snapped when she smiled at Hawtrey, and her hair, which was ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... pleasure to watch my son or my daughters glide through the intricacies of these modern dances, which the natural elasticity and suppleness of youth render charming in spite of their grotesqueness. But why should I seek to copy them? In spite of the fact that I am still rather athletic I cannot do so. With my utmost endeavor I fail to imitate their grace. I am getting old. My muscles are stiff ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... with infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J. Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... return from Jerusalem, William found the situation extremely strained, and he endeavoured to relieve it by concessions of various kinds. None of them, however, were regarded as adequate. Thereupon, with the suppleness which costs him so little when it is a question of sacrificing his most devoted and valuable servant, the Emperor, King of Prussia, sacrificed Herr von Lucanus, the head of his private household, an almost legendary personage who ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... he asked Carley to dance, and she complied. The music would have stimulated an Egyptian mummy, Carley thought, and the subdued rose lights, the murmur of gay voices, the glide and grace and distortion of the dancers, were exciting and pleasurable. Morrison had the suppleness and skill of a dancing-master. But he held Carley too tightly, and so she told him, and added, "I imbibed some fresh pure air while I was out West—something you haven't here—and I don't want it all squeezed out ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... of an aristocracy. The system of Lycurgus was agreeable to his stern and inflexible temper. His integrity was republican—his loftiness of spirit was patrician. He had all the purity, the disinterestedness, and the fervour of a patriot—he had none of the suppleness or the passion of a demagogue; on the contrary, he seems to have felt much of that high-spirited disdain of managing a people which is common to great minds conscious that they are serving a people. ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Abraham Lincoln. Instead of a puffy face, his cheek-bones and jaw stood out hard and sharp, and in place of his former pasty colour his complexion had the clear glow of health. I saw now that he was a splendid figure of a man, and when he got to his feet every movement had the suppleness of an athlete in training. In that moment I realized that my serious business had now begun. My senses suddenly seemed quicker, my nerves tenser, my brain more active. The big game had started, and he and I were ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... useful qualities. It could no longer act as a spring or buffer to the body, nor could it adapt its sole to the various kinds of surfaces on which we have to tread or stand. Nature, with her usual ingenuity, has succeeded in combining those opposing qualities—rigidity, suppleness, and elasticity or springiness—by resorting to her favorite device, the use of muscular engines. The arch is necessarily constructed of a number of bones which can move on each other to a certain ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... the water and dived until he recovered them. To reward his skill, he threw other trifles to him, a generosity which tempted a crowd of men and women, who amused us by their surprising agility in the waves. Their easy attitudes in the water, and the suppleness of their limbs, made them ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... names," she sighed, changing her position beneath the lace with the swift suppleness of a kitten. "And what luck hunting?" she asked, as she loosened the ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... to throw sufficient glow and warmth upon the wall. The low and narrow rooms having, instead of windows, only a door opening on the court, had need of this painted daylight which skilful pencils wrought for them. And what movement there was in all those figures, what suppleness and what ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... outside their own work. Anyone could detect, with half an eye, nineteen out of twenty of them; dress them how you would, disguise them as you like. They step the regulation length, bring their foot down in the regulation way, are as stiff as if they had swallowed a ramrod. They have neither suppleness nor adaptability. They are so accustomed to obey that they have almost lost the power of originating, and would be taken and shot before they were in the enemy's lines ten minutes. Now, Fergus has the advantage of knowing both languages, and of being quick-witted ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... has nothing further to teach me in that respect, and that I have mastered the fact that a gentlewoman should give the impression that the ground is hardly good enough to tread on. She has also made me go through all kinds of exercises to insure suppleness, and to move from the hips. And the day she told me she was pleased I shall ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... Guide as having the advantage—in common with most names borne by the higher nobility of England—of not being confined, as the ancient names of untitled gentlemen usually are, to the members of a single family. And when, with his wonted adaptability and suppleness, he had contrived to lay aside or smooth over whatever in his manners would be calculated to displease Trevanion, and had succeeded in exciting the interest which that generous statesman always conceived for ability, he owned candidly one day, in the presence of Lady ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... are discounted, it is natural to ask ourselves whether, as a work of pure art, Ghosts stands high among Ibsen's writings. I confess, for my own part, that it seems to me deprived of "poetic" treatment, that is to say, of grace, charm and suppleness, to an almost fatal extent. It is extremely original, extremely vivid and stimulating, but, so far as a foreigner may judge, the dialogue seems stilted and uniform, the characters, with certain obvious exceptions, rather types than persons. In the old fighting ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... were the debates between his fond mother and me, what trade we would breed him up to—for the matter now became serious, Benjie being in his thirteenth year; and, though a wee bowed in the near leg, from a suppleness about his knee-joint, nevertheless as active as a hatter, and fit for any calling whatsoever under the sun. One thing I had determined in my own mind, and that was, that he should never with my will go abroad. The gentry are ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... felt more than half inclined to laugh himself. Either one of them could have strangled him with a finger and a thumb if he could have got hold of him; but getting a good hold was the trouble. An Indian makes up in suppleness and activity what he lacks in strength, and it takes a good man to handle one. Of course the troopers were sorry for their wounded comrade, but they had "got a joke" on him, and it was a long time before he heard ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... or home practice, and especially be careful while you are new at the work, and the novelty of it tempts your ambition to keep on and on. Alternate work and rest, strenuous toil and complete relaxation, is the ideal way to build yourself into beauty and strength and suppleness by my method, without ...
— The Art of Stage Dancing - The Story of a Beautiful and Profitable Profession • Ned Wayburn
... through fervid religious sentiments and quaint humor. Alice must have interested him more than he was fully aware of; for his eyes followed her, as she came and went, with a curious criticism of her half-savage costume and her springy, Dryad-like suppleness, which reminded him of the shyest and gracefulest wild birds; and yet a touch of refinement, the subtlest and best, showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied a strange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddly attractive plumage. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... matched. Sheeny Rose made up in superior suppleness of limb for the pent-up malice of the other. Grace aimed her thrusts at her opponent's face. She tried to reach her eye. Once the sharp steel just pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... pleasure, the Sageman was careful about his exercises, assiduously devoting from two to three hours each day to physical culture. He practiced all manner of games and acrobatic performances, in order to bring the body up to its best possible shape. Suppleness, agility, and gracefulness were desired in preference to brute strength. Running, jumping, swimming, and flying were considered a necessary part of every one's daily routine, from early youth until ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... likely to set eyes upon. Their fur, rich and soft and dark, was the finest ever seen. Like their parents, they had bodies shaped for going through the water at a tremendous speed—built like a bulldog's for strength, and like an eel's for suppleness." ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... esteems her: "In short, Mme. Le Brun belonged entirely to the eighteenth century—I wish to say to that period of our time which rested itself suddenly at David. While she followed the counsels of Vernet, her pencil had a certain suppleness, and her brush a force; but she too often attempted to imitate Greuze in her later works and she weakened the resemblance to her subjects by abusing the regard noye (cloudy or indistinct effect). She was too early in vogue to make all the necessary studies, and she too often contented ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... ardent glances came from under the long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed, as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic, with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same way the energetic grace of her figure suggested ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
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