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More "Trenchant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... aware of the facts which gave the speech its trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert Vallincourt, ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... of Queen Caroline. Her trial was taken up by the House of Lords, where she was defended by Lord Brougham. To this day the proceedings of the trial are remembered as one of the most outrageous scandals in England. The feelings thereby engendered in the people have been immortalized in the trenchant writings of Thackeray. Before the trial was concluded, Lord Liverpool's bill was brought up for the third time in Parliament. It passed by a majority of a few votes. With so slender an indorsement, the Ministry had cause to tremble for its existence. Lord Liverpool ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... party, then in opposition, and withdrew to a considerable degree from active participation in parliamentary affairs, devoting himself with his accustomed zeal to his studies, which at that time were concerned with ecclesiastical subjects. From his retirement he emerged, in 1876, to write that trenchant series of letters on the "Bulgarian Atrocities," which so stirred the indignation of the English people that Disraeli was unable to carry them into an armed alliance with the red- handed Turk against the Russians. His fierce and persistent onslaughts upon the foreign policy ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... might be kept humble, and not called to Edinburgh for at least two years; and now he lifted the sheets with fear. The brilliant opening, with its historical parallel, this review of modern thought reinforced by telling quotations, that trenchant criticism of old-fashioned views, would not deliver. For the audience had vanished, and left one careworn, but ever beautiful face, whose gentle eyes were waiting with a yearning look. Twice he crushed the sermon in his hands, and turned to the fire his ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... books, and "exhibited considerable acquaintance with both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures."[14487] It is now lost, but its general character is well known from the works of Eusebius, Jerome, and others. The style was caustic and trenchant. An endeavour was made to show that both the historical scriptures of the Old Testament and the Gospels and Acts in the New were full of discrepancies and contradictions. The history and antiquities of the Jews, as ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... wit, while often amiable enough, may on occasion be as trenchant as any French sally. For example, we have the definition of gratitude as given by Sir Robert Walpole—"A lively sense of future favors." The Marquis of Salisbury once scored a clumsy partner at whist by his answer ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... fact that the literary women of the country would express no sympathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public affairs than perhaps any woman in the United States, and whose trenchant pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs. Cutler, Catherine Beecher said: "I am not ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... long as he believed them to be the mere "blagues de reclame" of the wily Swiss host. His brilliant qualities of style and irony themselves told heavily against him. Was he not already known for having written the most trenchant satire that had appeared since "Gulliver's Travels"? Had he not sneered therein at the very foundations of society, and followed up its success by a pseudo- biography that had taken in the "Record" and the "Rock"? In "Life and Habit," at the very start, ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... it be regarded as an abortion, a monster? The reader will readily understand how welcome to an author in such perplexity came the following article from the Standard (September 12), usually attributed to the popular and trenchant pen of Mr. Alfred Austin. I must be permitted to quote it entire, because it expresses so fully and so admirably all and everything I could desire a reviewer to write. And the same paper has never ceased to give me the kindest encouragement: its latest notice ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... upon my paste-pot. I sat at the editorial desk in my non-rotary revolving chair, and prepared my editorial against the oligarchies. The room, with its one window, was already a prey to the twilight. One by one, with my trenchant sentences, I lopped off the heads of the political hydra, while I listened, full of kindly peace, to the home-coming cow-bells and wondered what Mrs. Flanagan was going to have ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... up from that great immolation, but Poland's loyalty to Europe will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiments to end in negation. Polish loyalty will ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... old days, of his own old days here in Valenciennes, when, working long hours as a mason's boy, he in fancy reclothed the walls of this or that house he was employed in, with this fairy arrangement—itself like a piece of "chamber-music," methinks, part answering to part; while no too trenchant note is allowed to break through the delicate harmony of white and pale red and little golden touches. Yet it is all very comfortable also, it must be confessed; with an elegant open place for the fire, instead of the big old ...
— Imaginary Portraits • Walter Pater
... looked twice at the one and several times at the other. That little basement-room was not only the office in which Doctor LaTurque received professional calls, but it was also the sanctum in which were prepared most of the oddly-trenchant articles in the Scimetar, a quarterly medical and critical publication with a habit cutting as its name and a reputation dangerous enough to suit the most sensational fancy. Few persons connected with the practice of medicine in or about the great city, ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... "familiar verse." Frederick Locker-Lampson in the preface to the first edition of his Lyra Elegantiarum (1867) declared that Holmes was "perhaps the best living writer of this species of verse." His trenchant attack on Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions (1842) makes us wonder what would have been his attitude toward some of the beliefs of our own day; Christian Science, for example. He might have "exposed" it under ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the artist's most virile and trenchant performances, it was painted in 1798-9. The child was introduced after the grandfather's death. ...
— Raeburn • James L. Caw
... at a recitation in school or college. In court, in congress, in society, he was equally punctual. So, amid the cares and distractions of a singularly busy life, Horace Greeley managed to be on time for every appointment. Many a trenchant paragraph for the Tribune was written while the editor was waiting for men of leisure, tardy ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... theoretic freedom. "We are masters of our acts," he began, "in the sense that we can choose such and such a thing; now, we have not to choose our end, but the means that relate to it, as Aristotle says." Unfortunately, even this trenchant amputation of man's free energies would not accord with fact or with logic. Experience proved that man's power of choice in action was very far from absolute, and logic seemed to require that every choice should have some predetermining cause which decided the will to act. ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... one of these business-like and narrow investigations which precede an election will furnish. How you find them rated and classified—what odd notes you make to them in the margin; and after the trenchant and rapid vivisection, what sinister scars and seams remain, and how gaunt and repulsive old acquaintances stand ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to hate different vices, to place ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... furtherance of our political ends—had consented to accord to him." He hurried expectant to Ferrieres; there to be summarily disillusioned. Bismarck gave him an interview on the 28th, and crushed him in a few trenchant sentences:— ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... returned to Russia an Anglomaniac. Short hair, starched frills, a pea-green, long-skirted coat with a number of little collars; a soar expression of countenance, something trenchant and at the same time careless in his demeanor, an utterance through the teeth, an abrupt wooden laugh, an absence of smile, a habit of conversing only on political or politico-economical subjects, a passion for under-done roast beef and port wine—every thing ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... sent mee a passeport to signe, telling me plainely after I had denied them, that if I made any difficulty, they would all come and cut my throat in the shippe. Thus was I constrained to signe their Passe-port, and forthwith to grant them certaine mariners, with Trenchant an honest and skilfull Pilot. When the barks were finished, they armed them with the kings munition, with powder, with bullets, and artillery, asmuch as they needed, and chose one of my Sergeants for their Captain, named Bertrand Conferrent, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... the grip of habit is hopelessly in the *rut, that the man who has reduced his work to habit ceases to be original and is incapable of further improvement. On the contrary, the grip of habit is but a support. The editor could not write his trenchant editorials, and the advertiser could not write his compelling copy, unless in the act of writing each could turn over to habit the manipulation of the pen, the formation of the letters, and the spelling of the words. The attorney cannot make his most logical arguments and the salesman ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... a sofa, a romance in his hand which he simply pretended to read, and seemed absorbed in deep reverie. Verses were sent to him from Paris which he read aloud, expressing his opinion in a brief and trenchant style; he spent three days writing regulations for the French comedy at Paris. It is difficult to understand this attention to such frivolous details when the future was so ominous. It was generally believed, and probably not without reason, that the Emperor acted ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... more probable. But even that was doubtful. Her trenchant remark about civilization wasn't the product of a conditioned mind. But why was he worrying about her attitudes? They weren't important—she wasn't even human. He shook his head. That was a sophistry. The fact that she ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... of at the Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, and made me ...
— Options • O. Henry
... ere they pass and fly. So Gareth ere he parted flashed in arms. Then as he donned the helm, and took the shield And mounted horse and graspt a spear, of grain Storm-strengthened on a windy site, and tipt With trenchant steel, around him slowly prest The people, while from out of kitchen came The thralls in throng, and seeing who had worked Lustier than any, and whom they could but love, Mounted in arms, threw up their caps ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... knowing that my statement was not true. To deny my request was simply one of his ill-advised whims, and his refusal was given with customary curtness and contempt. I met his refusal in kind, and presented him with a trenchant critique ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... parodies of "Ensign O'Doherty." Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae became a characteristic feature of Blackwood's; John Galt and Susan Ferrier won popularity among the novel readers of the day; and in the trenchant literary criticism of Lockhart, Wilson, Hogg and their confreres an equally ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... knows the exact point of attachment between the hard shell and its soil, can remove a mussel with dexterity. These women, as they dipped their knives into the thick mud, swept the diminutive black bivalve with a trenchant movement, as a Moor might cleave a human head with one turn of his moon-shaped sword. Into the bronzed, wrinkled old hands the mussels then were slipped as if they had been ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... admit, and he was impressed by the learning and critical standards of Rymer's attack. But like Samuel Johnson he was not often prone to substitute theory for experience, and like most of his contemporaries he felt Shakespeare's power to move and to convince. Perhaps the most trenchant expression of his final stand in regard to Shakespeare and to the whole art of poetry is to be found in his letter to Dennis, dated 3 March, 1693/4. Shakespeare, he said, had genius, which is "alone a greater Virtue ... than all the other Qualifications ...
— Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) • Nicholas Rowe
... essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We may have race-memories ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Thor only, the god of thunder, never passed over the bridge, for fear lest his heavy tread or the heat of his lightnings would destroy it. The god Heimdall kept watch and ward there night and day. He was armed with a trenchant sword, and carried a trumpet called Giallar-horn, upon which he generally blew a soft note to announce the coming or going of the gods, but upon which a terrible blast would be sounded when Ragnarok should come, and the frost-giants and Surtr ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... embodied Journal, including the Leading Article, the Law Reports, Foreign Intelligence, the Court Circular, down to the Births, Deaths, and Marriages. Gordon from time to time interrupted this flow of soul with brief, trenchant remarks, which evinced his own knowledge of the subjects treated, and a habit of looking on all subjects connected with the pursuits and business of mankind from a high ground appropriated to himself, and through the medium of that blue glass which conveys a wintry aspect to summer ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... turned on the character of a person in whom we used to believe; and as Dan gradually revealed himself to Beth, trait by trait, a kind of distaste seized upon her, a want of respect, which found involuntary expression in trenchant comments upon his observations and in smart retorts. She did not seek sympathy from him now for the way in which she had been slighted at the ball, knowing perfectly well that he was more likely to blame her than anybody else. He had, in fact, by this time, so far as any confidence ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... between these three families are trenchant and easily remembered. The Ericae {207} are all quatrefoils, and quatrefoils of the most studied and accomplished symmetry; and they bear no berries, but only dry seeds. The Myrtillae and Aurorae are both Cinqfoil; but the Myrtillae are symmetrical in their ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... that ilk never made a mistake in judging a man's nerve. Knell had cut out with the trenchant call, and stood ready. The stranger suddenly lost his every semblance to the rough and easy character before manifest in him. He became bronze. That situation seemed familiar to him. His eyes held a singular piercing light that danced like ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... is that Mr. Asquith possesses all the appearance of greatness but few of its elements. He has dignity of presence, an almost unrivalled mastery of language, a trenchant dialectic, a just and honourable mind; but he is entirely without creative power and has outgrown that energy of moral earnestness which characterized the early ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... and proceeds in good earnest to the assassination of Vittoria. But at this critical moment Lodovico and his masquers appear; brother and sister both die unrepentant, defiant to the end. Vittoria's customary pride and her familiar sneers impress her speech in these last moments with a trenchant truth ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... India during the early period of the Edinburgh Review. Jeffrey, as editor for its first quarter of a century, may be taken more fully to represent its spirit. Jeffrey's trenchant, if not swaggering style, covered a very timid, sensitive, and, in some respects, a very conservative temperament. His objection to the 'Lake Poets' was the objection of the classical to the romantic school. Jeffrey's brightness of intellect may justify Carlyle's comparison of him to Voltaire,—only ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... in particular of his gillie, Joseph. This Joseph was much of a character; and his appreciations of Fleeming have a fine note of their own. The bringing up of the boys he deigned to approve of: 'FAST SO GUT WIE EIN BAUER,' was his trenchant criticism. The attention and courtly respect with which Fleeming surrounded his wife, was something of a puzzle to the philosophic gillie; he announced in the village that Mrs. Jenkin - DIE SILBERNE FRAU, as the folk had prettily named her from ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... recess of the window, with his head hanging and his hands plunged deep into his trousers pockets, pale, visibly moist with perspiration, saying never a word, a very wreck of soul and body; the other sat on the divan close by the chimney, and attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... influence on the light literature of his generation, and possibly also on its manners, for it is quite conceivable that one reason why his descriptions of snobbery and shams appear to us now overdrawn, may be that his trenchant blows at social idols did materially discredit the worship of them. His literary style had the usual following of imitators who caught his superficial form and missed the substance, as, for example, in the habit which arose of talking with warm-hearted familiarity of great ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... poem which appears—by the numbering of the Cantos—to have been of about four times that length. This remnant contains what would naturally have been the most vigorous and stirring parts of the poem: the riotous drinking of Holofernes, the trenchant act of Judith, her return with her maid to Bethulia, their enthusiastic reception, the muster for battle, the anticipation of carnage by the birds and beasts of prey, the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... relax his mind, he took a French book. It was one of the works of Blaise Pascal, his "Lettres Provinciales." He admired their originality, the trenchant satire, and the galling blows of this man whom Chateaubriand called ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... the centers around whom the reformers rallied. James directed their counsels in the House and Jeff pounded away in the World with vital trenchant editorials and news stories. Every day that paper carried to the farthest corner of the state bulletins of the battle. Farmers and miners and laboring men watched its roll of honor to see if the local ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... away, the spring came, and after spring, summer, with its greenery and flowers. Godfrey was happy enough during this time. To begin with, the place suited him. He was very well now, and grew enormously in that pure and trenchant air, broadening as well as lengthening, till, notwithstanding his slimness, he gave promise of becoming a ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... Richard see to it; so he dealt with the host, and bought good war-gear of him, and a trenchant sword, and an axe withal; and when the Sage was armed he looked as doughty a warrior as need be. By this time was Richard's horse and war-gear come, and he armed him speedily and gave money to the host, and they rode therewith all four out of the hostel, ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... his hand to take hold of the Countess's veil. With the readiness which frequent use had given to the warlike lady, she withdrew herself from the heathen's grasp, and with her trenchant sword dealt him so sufficient a blow, that Toxartis lay lifeless on the plain. The Count leapt on the fallen leader's steed, and crying his war-cry, "Son of Charlemagne, to the rescue!" he rode amid the rout of heathen cavaliers with a battle-axe, which he found at the saddlebow ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was from his mother that Prince Bismarck, the future ruler of Germany, received his endowment of dauntless audacity, his gift of trenchant argument, his bursts of ironical laughter, his power of instant decisions, his scolding, and his bitter wrath. All these qualities shone in the parliamentary fight before the Austrian war, when for three years he defied the country, and raised the ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so doubtful, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... uncomplimentary) on himself, as a prelude in the book last mentioned, and adding a long reply. The proceeding was honest, but rather suicidal. One may not wholly admire the famous editor of the Univers.[441] But nothing could better throw up his clear, vigorous, classical French and trenchant logic, than the verbose and ambaginous preciousness, and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... a very trenchant article from an American pen on the power of the moneyed members of a church to dictate the tone of the pulpit; and it is a common accusation against ministers, that they flatter the prevailing classes in their congregations. If their congregations ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... Hard and fiercely driven as those terrible thorns were, they could do no more than dent his heavy armor. His powerful left arm, driving the double-razor-edged dirk in short, resistless arcs, managed to keep the snaky tendrils from coiling about his right arm, which was wielding the heavy, trenchant sword. Every time that mighty blade descended it cleaved its length through snapping spikes and impotently grinding leaves; but more than once a flailing tendril coiled about his neck armor and held his helmet immovable ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... was some fragments of the grandiose but shadowy Ossian which first stirred the imitative impulse in this poet of trenchant and clear-cut form. "The first composition I ever was guilty of," he wrote to Elizabeth Barrett (Aug. 25, 1846), "was something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived through two ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... opposite force. Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a clergyman. But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great and complex a question. Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific temper he would have hesitated. This is not the place to discuss in detail the theological position very ably ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... undaunted heart, was ty'd; With basket-hilt, that wou'd hold broth, And serve for fight and dinner both. In it he melted lead for bullets, 355 To shoot at foes, and sometimes pullets, To whom he bore so fell a grutch, He ne'er gave quarter t' any such. The trenchant blade, Toledo trusty, For want of fighting, was grown rusty, 360 And ate unto itself, for lack Of somebody to hew and hack. The peaceful scabbard where it dwelt The rancour of its edge had felt; For of the lower end two handful 365 It had devour'd, 'twas ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... The trenchant and tragic article concludes with the expression of the hope that the day is not far distant when not only the profession but the public shall demand that this senseless slaughter be stopped. "Is not this day of medical and moral preaching and uplifting," it is asked, "a fitting ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... pronounced it "aoweld"—"Yas! you go tell that t' th' Marines, me lad! . . . Took a few o' th' sime 'old sweats' t' knock ''Ay Leg!' 'Straw Leg' inter some o' you mossbacks at th' stort orf. Gee! Har! oh, gorblimey, yas!" He illustrated his trenchant remarks in ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... John Knox.... The zealous disciple, who had counted it an honour to be allowed to carry a sword before his master, stood forth immediately to wield the spiritual sword which had fallen from the master's grasp, and to wield it with a vigour and trenchant execution ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... floor into a studio hung with old stuffs, and balmy in every season with the scent of flowers. The place was well known to tolerant and intellectual society. Lisbeth was there found in perpetual jubilation, clad in a long blouse, somewhat of a gamine in her ways, trenchant too and often bold of speech, but nevertheless capital company, and as yet compromised with nobody but Prada. Their liaison had begun some four months after his wife had left him, and now Lisbeth was near the time of becoming ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... discuss) trakti. Treatise traktato. Treatment (medical) kuracado. Treaty kontrakto, traktajxo. Tree arbo. Trefoil trifolio. Trellis palisplektajxo. Tremble tremi. Trembling tremo—ado. Tremendous grandega. Tremor tremeto, skueto. Tremulous trema, skueta. Trench fosajxo. Trenchant akra. Trencher lignotelero. Trepidation tremeco, tremado. Trespass transpasxo, ofendo. Tress (hair) harligo. Tress plektajxo. Trestle (bench) stablo. Trial (an attempt) provo—ajxo—ado. Triangle triangulo. Tribe gento. Tribulation doloro, malgxojo, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... her conception of the history and the romance of wheat to Dorn at this critical time when it was necessary to give a trenchant call ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... noticed, admits that Ossian's Poems were admired by men of taste and of genius. But it never seems to have occurred to him that this fact should have made him pause and reconsider his opinions ere he expressed them in such a broad and trenchant style. Hugh Miller speaks of a critic of the day from whose verdicts when he found himself to differ, he immediately began to re-examine the grounds of his own. This is a very high compliment to a single writer; but Macaulay on the Ossian ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... same depth of spiritual experience and trenchant moral analysis comes all that is true and valuable in his so-called ‘Apology.’ That the ‘Pensées’ were more or less designed to form such an Apology—to be woven into the plan of a treatise in defence of the Christian religion—seems beyond ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... were Joe could not understand, but to him they sounded like French. He smiled at the absurdity of imagining he had heard a savage speak a foreign language. At any rate, whatever had been said was trenchant with meaning. The Indians changed from gay to grave; they picked up their weapons and looked keenly on every side; the big Indian at once retied Joe, and then all crowded ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... Ruthlessly trenchant fellow, wordy pedagogue, meddlesome theorist, you seek the limits of your mind. They are at ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... advantageously with the second par. of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1776) by the Representatives of the U.S., which declares, "these truths to be self-evident:—that all men are created equal," etc. It is regretable that so trenchant a state-paper should begin with so gross and palpable a fallacy. Men are not born equal, nor do they become equal before their death-days even in condition, except by artificial levelling; and in republics and limited monarchies, where all are politically equal, the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... consists first, pp. 265-267, of his comments on these words of Columbus, and second, pp. 268-274, of a criticism of Vespucci's claim to have made a voyage in 1497 to this region of Paria, and of his narratives and the naming of America from him. This criticism is translated with Las Casas's other trenchant criticisms of Vespucci's work and claims by Sir Clements R. Markham in his Letters of Amerigo Vespucci (London, 1894), pp. 68 et seq.[TN-8] These passages are very interesting as perhaps the earliest piece of detailed critical work relating ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... Society, I caught sight of a face which instantly arrested my attention. A very small man, both short and slim, with a rosy complexion, protruding chin, and trenchant nose, the remains of reddish hair, and an extremely alert and vivacious expression. The broad Red Ribbon of a G.C.B. marked him out as in some way a distinguished person; and I discovered that he was the Lord Chief Justice of England,—Sir Alexander ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... other utterances of the papers which follow in our enemies' wake is the trenchant leading article of the World, which on foreign questions generally expresses the point of view of the Administration. This paper says: 'If Germany is ready to end the war, the first thing for the Imperial ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... their opinions involved. They were the pioneers in the great cause of political freedom for women, and opened the way in the true pioneer spirit. The clear sense of justice and the broad humanity which inspired their trenchant rebukes and fervid appeals not only enlightened and encouraged other women, but led to inquiry into various wrongs practised towards the sex which had up to that time been suffered in silence and in ignorance, or in despair ...
— The Grimke Sisters - Sarah and Angelina Grimke: The First American Women Advocates of - Abolition and Woman's Rights • Catherine H. Birney
... reckless jesters then! And when a man was hit, He quick returned the stroke again With trenchant blade of wit. 'Twas parry, thrust, and counter-thrust That round the board befell; They quaffed the wine and crunched the crust With "Vive ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... suddenly shatter'd at last Alfred Vargrave's fantastical holiday nature, Had sharply drawn forth to his full size and stature The real man, conceal'd till that moment beneath All he yet had appear'd. From the gay broider'd sheath Which a man in his wrath flings aside, even so Leaps the keen trenchant steel summon'd forth by a blow. And thus loss of fortune gave value to life. The wife gain'd a husband, the husband a wife, In that home which, though humbled and narrow'd by fate, Was enlarged and ennobled by love. ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... Englishman at heart, he was none the less a fervent philo-Turk in politics and convictions, and latterly devoted his talents and his life to the defence of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire. As ready with his pen as with his sword, he was a clear, trenchant, vigorous writer, and could talk on paper as fluently and as cogently about ironclads and torpedoes as about the wrongs of the natives of Lazistan, the necessity of upholding the integrity of the ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... wealth, for honor, and precedence; of plots and counterplots, of foiled ambition and ruined reputations,— with all this Hawthorne had but slight acquaintance. We miss in him the masculine vigor of Fielding, the humanity of Dickens, and the trenchant criticism of Thackeray; but he knew that the true poetry of life (at the present time) was to be found in quiet nooks and in places far off from the turbulent maelstrom of humanity, and in his own line he ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... a new form of literature has sprung up; that dialogue (the easiest form of writing) is overdone, and description dispenses with any need for thinking on the part of the author or reader. You bring up the fiction of Voltaire, Diderot, Sterne, and Le Sage, so trenchant, so compact of the stuff of life; and turn from them to the modern novel, composed of scenery and word-pictures and metaphor and the dramatic situations, of which Scott is full. Invention may be displayed in such work, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... cordially the thin white hand of an invalid, and in a few moments they were pleasantly chatting, while the husband strode up and down the room, joining in the conversation with a vigour, humour, eagerness, and affluence of curious lore which, with his trenchant thought and subtle sympathy, make him one of the most charming and inspiring ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... opponents' strength, and sees there are fully a hundred of them. Then he who thus is pressing him thinks he had better call a hair. Then they ride to meet each other, and strike upon each other's shield great blows with their sharp and trenchant swords. Erec caused his stout steel sword to pierce his body through and through, so that his shield and hauberk protected him no more than a shred of dark-blue silk. And next the Count comes spurring on, who, as the story tells, was a strong and doughty knight. But the Count in this was ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... to wounds and diseases over which his white comrade triumphs? Or how will you explain analogous facts in the history of disease among other uneducated races? Our explanation is simple. As the slightest interfusion of carbon may change the dull iron into trenchant steel, so intelligence working through invisible channels may add a new temper to the physical nature. And thus it may be strictly true that it is not only the mind and soul which slavery and ignorance wrong, but the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... not of the constructive order, his critical and analytical faculties were highly developed. Always effective, often trenchant, sometimes cruel, his powers of sarcasm and invective were unrivalled. Once, when a former minister of Inland Revenue, not remarkable for his knowledge of the affairs of his department, had proposed ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... you ever, my most acute professor of vivisection, employ your trenchant blade in the splitting ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... when he must be more than himself—become general of an army, with a battle imminent; but he was under dire necessity, and forced himself to listen to and gather the import of the few terse orders and directions that Henry, breathless as he was, rendered clear and trenchant as ever. ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... words with great distinctness and sonority, and Newman assured him that his way of dealing with the French tongue was very superior to the bewildering chatter that he heard in other mouths. Upon this M. Nioche's accent became more finely trenchant than ever, he offered to read extracts from Lamartine, and he protested that, although he did endeavor according to his feeble lights to cultivate refinement of diction, monsieur, if he wanted the real thing, should go to ...
— The American • Henry James
... completely absorbed in politics, and in the mighty anti-slavery struggle, which constituted the greater part of the politics of the United States in those and many succeeding years. He became a journalist in the anti-slavery cause; and, in 1850, he wrote a trenchant answer to Mr. Carlyle's then just published "Latter Day Pamphlets." Later on, slavery having been at length abolished, he appeared as a writer in yet another field, publishing several works, one as lately ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... stands, the Anglo-Saxon instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and, after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... face. They belonged to Nora Hooper, and in another minute Connie found herself taken possession of by her cousin. Nora was deeply sunburnt. Her colour was more garishly red and brown, her manner more trenchant than ever. At sight of Connie her face flushed with a sudden smile, as though the owner of the face could not help it. Yet they had only been a few minutes together before Connie had discovered that, beneath the sunburn, there was a look of tension and distress, and that ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that Miss Seaton "conversed" with me. She merely scattered trenchant remarks and now and then twinkled a baited question over my head. But her face was like a dense and involved accompaniment to her talk. She presently dropped the "Mr.," to my intense relief, and ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... adversary to the very chine; but Risingh, nimbly raising his sword, warded it off so narrowly, that, glancing on one side, it shaved away a huge canteen in which he carried his liquor,—thence pursuing its trenchant course, it severed off a deep coat-pocket, stored with bread and cheese,—which provant, rolling among the armies, occasioned a fearful scrambling between the Swedes and Dutchmen, and made the general battle to wax more furious ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of justice that legislation affecting the Southern States should be open to the participation of representatives from those States; but Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, who had as keen an intellect as Mr. Seward and a more trenchant style, declared that view to involve an absurdity. He avowed his belief that there was no greater propriety in admitting Southern senators and representatives to take part in considering the financial adjustments and legislative safeguards rendered necessary by their crime, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... certainly increased as the little grey politician denounced the witlessness of the working-class, and when they howled at him, went on to expound a trenchant doctrine of universal Responsibility, which preceded the universal Suffrage that was to come. Much of what he said was drowned in uproar. It had become clear that his opinions revolted the majority of his hearers even more than they did the two ladies. So outraged were the sensibilities ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... the gift of close and searching reasoning, and the ability to present his views in a vivid and trenchant form, as convincing as the writings of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... burned in the early beams of the torrid sun. Light fogs rose reluctantly from the river's bosom and dispersed in delicate vapors of opal and violet. The tangled banks of dripping bush shone freshly green in the misty light. The wilderness, grim and trenchant, reigned in unchallenged despotism. Solitude, soul-oppressing, unbroken but for the calls of feathered life, brooded over the birth of Jose's last day on the Magdalena. About midday the steamer touched at the little ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... place in it. You have not lived, Varhely, or you have lived only for your idol, your country, and everything amazes you. If you had, like me, wandered all over the world, you would not be astonished at anything; although, to tell the truth"—and the young man's voice became bitter, trenchant, and almost threatening—"we have only to grow old to meet with terrible surprises, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... upon the adaptation of its chiselling to the effect at a certain distance from the eye; and to render the peculiar confusion in the midst of order, and uncertainty in the midst of decision, and mystery in the midst of trenchant lines, which are the result of distance, together with perfect expression of the peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the most admirable artist, devoted to the work with the most severe conscientiousness, ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... to convey anything to such people; in fact, it is almost impossible to communicate with them at all. "Never tell people how you are," as a trenchant lady of my acquaintance said to me the other day; "they ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... were "as azure as the heavens"), black and bushy eyebrows, aquiline nose, and features which expressed the stern, haughty, and dauntless turn of his mind." He grew savage under the slightest contradiction; and dukes and great lords were obliged to pay court to him. His prose was as trenchant and powerful as were his manners: it has been compared to "cold steel." His own definition of a good style is "proper words ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... less reading than himself. Milton, who at least knew so much suspicion of the genuineness of these remains as Casaubon's Exercitations on Baronius and Vedelin's edition (Geneva, 1623) could suggest, pounced upon this critical flaw, and delightedly denounced in trenchant tones this "Perkin Warbeck of Ignatius," and the "supposititious offspring of some dozen epistles." This rude shock it was which set Usher upon a more careful examination of the Ignatian question. The result was his well-known edition of Ignatius, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... is Abbe Maury; Ciceronian pathetic is Cazales. Keen-trenchant, on the other side, glitters a young Barnave; abhorrent of sophistry; sheering, like keen Damascus sabre, all sophistry asunder,—reckless what else he sheer with it. Simple seemest thou, O solid Dutch-built Petion; if solid, surely dull. Nor lifegiving in that ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... mixture of contrariness and magnanimity from joining in the general denunciation of her former allies, compromising as were the circumstances under which they had elected to take their departure. In her society, therefore, he was not obliged to overhear trenchant criticisms upon his Tom's behaviour, and could dilate, at least uncontradicted, upon those gifts and graces in the young man, which recent events had certainly placed in some ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... serious obstacles to the establishment of these decorous records. They wished not only to give but to talk freely, and the more the husband wisely preached "policy" and an astute prudence, the more certainly were his cob-webs of caution torn into shreds by the trenchant tongue of his wife. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... That trenchant word was thought-provoking. A glimmer of understanding began to dawn in Lane. Already an immense pity had flooded his soul, and a profound sense of the mystery and tragedy of Mel Iden. She had always been unusual, aloof, proud, unattainable, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... country grappled with the problems of natural science and set them solved before us, the name of Professor Huxley [cheers], a name known far and wide wherever the pregnant science of biology is studied, and through the vehicle of other tongues besides that strong and trenchant English with which he is wont to strike ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... long may flourish Round about the King, They who love gold treasures All around to fling. Lords, the first of heroes, With their trenchant swords; Counsellors held in ...
— Mollie Charane - and Other Ballads • Thomas J. Wise
... "A powerful, trenchant, savage attack on all the leading literary and artistic idols of the time by a man of great intellectual power, immense range of knowledge, and the possessor of a lucid style rare among German writers, and becoming rarer everywhere, owing to the very influences which Nordau ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... audiences. Mr. Douglass deeply wounded the religious feelings of his race by declaring; "I shall not dwell in any hackneyed cant by thanking God for this deliverance which has been wrought out through our common humanity." A hundred pulpits, a hundred trenchant pens sprang at the declaration with fiery indignation; and it was some years before the bold orator was able to make himself tolerable to his people. There was little of the spirit of tolerance among the Colored people at the time, and upon such an occasion the remark was ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... of the ills of the body politic—he advocated the employment, meantime, of persuasion instead of force, of gentleness rather than rigor, of charity and good works, as more effective than the most trenchant of material weapons. And, while he recommended his hearers to pray for the conversion of the erring, he exclaimed: "Let us remove those diabolical words, names of parties, factions, and seditions—'Lutherans,' 'Huguenots,' ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt his particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it, to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall by ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... follies, for the most part, as everybody condemns. By reason of this quality in him, he avoids strongly controverted points in history; or, if his course lies over them, he gives a fairly adjusted average of opinion; he is not in mood for trenchant assertions of this or that belief. This same quality, again, makes him shun political life. He has a horror of its wordy wars, its flood of objurgation. Not that he is without opinions, calmly formed, and firmly held; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... American traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in South Africa, has read the New York Nation every week for the past forty years, he has had an extraordinary "moving picture" of American tendencies, as interpreted by independent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. That a file of the Nation will convey precisely the same impression of American tendencies as a file of the Sun, for instance, or the Boston Evening Transcript, is not ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... "Scold not, nor fret. William will be himself again ere yet the morrow's sun shall clear the horizon. Let us avoid recrimination. The tongue is, or would seem to be, the most vital weapon of modern society. Therefore let us leave the trenchant blade quiescent in its scabbard. I'd rather settle a dispute with my fists, or ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... language, history, manners, and customs. But what do we find? The profoundest ignorance of the rudiments of English. The special correspondent sent to London by the Figaro to be amusing on our darker side, cannot spell the word theatre; but he is trenchant when dealing with what he saw at the Adelphi Theater. How completely he must have understood the dialogue, he who describes Webster as a comique de premier ordre! In the same paper the dramatic critic, after explaining that at the rehearsals of L'Abime, the ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... appointed professor of Belles-lettres in Harvard College. From 1877 to 1885 he was U.S. Minister, first to Spain, afterwards to Great Britain. Lowell's powers as a writer were very versatile, and his poems range from the most dreamy and imaginative to the most trenchant and witty. Among his most noted poetical works are "The Biglow Papers," "A Fable for Critics," "The Vision of Sir Launfal," "The Cathedral," and "The Legend of Brittany;" while "Conversations on some of the Old Poets," "Among my Books," and "My Study ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the head of my hammock. Was it not storied as the good trenchant blade of brave Bayard, that other chevalier? The knight's may have slain its scores, or fifties; but the weapon I preserved had, doubtless, run through ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... throng, One might discern all stages and degrees, From wealth and power to helpless indigence; Extravagance to trenchant penury, And all extremes of want and misery. Some blest by wealth, some cursed by poverty; Some in positions neutral to them both; Some wore a gaunt and ill-conditioned look Which told its tale of lack of nourishment; While others ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... a drop of morning dew, my dear fellow," replied Heliobas. "There was nothing puzzling about him. His remarks were all true and trenchant—hitting smartly home to the heart like daggers plunged down to the hilt. That was the worst of him—he was too clear—too honest—too disdainful of opinions. Society does not love such men. What do I mean, you ask, by accepting everything ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... though it is doubtful if they should be absolutely referred to this group. In these reptiles, the teeth are implanted in distinct sockets in the jaws, their crowns being more or less compressed and pointed, "with trenchant and finely serrate margins" (Owen). The bodies of the vertebrae are hollowed out at both ends, but the limbs appear to be adapted for progression on the land. The genus Belodon (fig. 152, c) is ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... had entrenched himself, and to thrust him towards the Assyrian frontier, where the king's troops would be able to capture him. His offer was not accepted, and a second embassy, headed by Tammaritu, who was once more in favour, arrived to propose more trenchant terms. The Elamite might have gone so far as to grant the extradition of Nabo-bel-shumi, but if he had yielded the point concerning Nana, a rebellion would have broken out in the streets of Susa: he preferred war, and prepared in desperation to carry it on to the bitter end. The conflict ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... absolute ignorance. The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble, in its modern form, as it was in the prescientific ages. Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, 'Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke!' That may or may not be the case; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... and before his departure a scimetar was sent to him by the king, the blade of the finest Damascus steel, the hilt of agate enriched with precious stones, and the guard of gold. De Vera drew it, and smiled grimly as he noticed the admirable temper of the blade. "His Majesty has given me a trenchant weapon," said he: "I trust a time will come when I may show him that I know how to use his royal present." The reply was considered a compliment, of course: the bystanders little knew the bitter hostility that lay ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... this to Rustem due? And what, if all thou say'st be true? Are his large limbs of iron made? Will they resist my trenchant blade? His head may now his shoulders grace, But will it long retain its place? Let me but meet him in the fight, And thou shalt see ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... divinity, and Rabelais was at his elbow always. Poor, uneducated, ignorant of nearly every thing, he was educating himself for the future—sharpening, by attrition with the strongest minds in all literatures, ancient and modern, that trenchant weapon which afterward flashed its superb lightnings in the heated atmosphere of the great epoch in ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... Virgil describes the Italian plains to have been to the peasant of his day, a scene of gigantic recollections; as, turning up with the ploughshare the site of ancient battles, he finds the remnants of a race of bolder frame and more trenchant weapons—the weightier ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... for trenchant force, And will like a dividing spear; Have praised the keen, unscrupulous course, Which knows no doubt, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... for all other spheres and toils. At Oxford, not long ago, four years were spent in mastering some fourteen books. Whatever may be our criticism of the process, we may not deny its singular effect. In its best estate it forged many a trenchant blade. To the man who asks for its monument, it can point to British thought, law, statesmanship. Bacon and Burke, Coke and Eldon, Hooker and Butler, Pitt and Canning, shall make answer. The whole massive literature of England ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... stopped his allowance, Hector began to write for musical journals. At first ignorant of the ways of journalism, his wild utterances were the despair of his friends; later his trenchant pen was ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... one of the most favourable specimens of Swift's controversial method and trenchant satire. The style is excellent—forcible and pithy; while the arguments are like most of Swift's arguments, aptly to the point with yet a potentiality of application which fits them for the most general ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... in the water; and incapable of moving rapidly, it is unable to run from its foes. Its hind-feet, unlike those of many animals, are valueless for defence; but yet it has not been left without ample means of protection. Examine its fore-feet, and on each will be seen two large, powerful, trenchant claws. With these, aided by its muscular power, and thick hide covered with long coarse hair, it boldly defies the attacks ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... gradually won himself that renown which prosperity has endorsed. But what a unity in divergence did those philosophers present! The calm moralism of Pope, his sweet and polished rhyme, contrasted with the fiery wit and hissing sarcasm of the Frenchman, more trenchant than Pope's, yet wanting his sparkling epigrams. The keen discernment of both these men saw in Bolingbroke a master, and they ranked by his side as twin apostles of a new and living faith. It was the penetration of true greatness which discerned in the English peer ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... forth his hand to take hold of the Countess's veil. With the readiness which frequent use had given to the warlike lady, she withdrew herself from the heathen's grasp, and with her trenchant sword dealt him so sufficient a blow, that Toxartis lay lifeless on the plain. The Count leapt on the fallen leader's steed, and crying his war-cry, "Son of Charlemagne, to the rescue!" he rode amid the rout of heathen cavaliers with a battle-axe, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... Still more trenchant is the conclusion of Korting in his Geschichte des griechischen und rAmischen Theaters (P. 218 ff.): "Die neue attische KomAdie und folglich auch ihr Abklatsch, die romische Palliata, war nicht ein Lustspiel im hAchsten, im sittlichen Sinne des Wortes, sondern ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... hard and trenchant as she said these last words; womanlike, she was already prepared to hate the man whose mysterious personality she had hitherto admired, now that the life and safety of Armand appeared to depend on the will of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... in that trenchant generalization, this vigorous assailant proceeded to describe a coffee-house in detail. The room "stinks of tobacco worse than hell of brimstone;" the coffee itself had the appearance of "Pluto's diet-drink, that witches tipple out of dead men's skulls;" and ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... in the most hopeful terms to his mother and sister, and spent his first earnings in buying gifts for them. His pride and ambition were amply gratified by the promises and interested flattery of editors and political adventurers; Wilkes himself had noted his trenchant style, "and expressed a desire to know the author"; and Lord Mayor Beckford graciously acknowledged a political address of his, and greeted him "as politely as a citizen could." But of actual money he received but little. He was extremely abstemious, his diligence was great, and his versatility ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... recall of romance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quite insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the London tragedy has no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return of adventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant and swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of the romantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... there is a growing desire that finds expression frequently in the newspapers for Kitchener's translation from Calcutta to the War Office in London, from whence the British army as a whole might profit by the trenchant efforts of the Irish soldier who has seldom blundered. As commander in India Lord Kitchener is paid a lakh of rupees a year—$32,000, and heads an army of 242,000 men—77,000 ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... that great immolation, but Poland's loyalty to Europe will not be rooted in anything so trenchant and burdensome as the sense of an immeasurable indebtedness, of that gratitude which in a worldly sense is sometimes called eternal, but which lies always at the mercy of weariness and is fatally condemned by the instability of human sentiments ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... Bernhardi has the gift of close and searching reasoning, and the ability to present his views in a vivid and trenchant form, as convincing as the writings of ...
— Cavalry in Future Wars • Frederick von Bernhardi
... it with all its facts distinctly revealed, as in Fig. 1; and in many respects this clear statement is precious, though, so far as regards ocular truth, it is not natural. A modern sketcher of the "bold" school would represent the tower as in Fig. 3; that is to say, in a manner just as trenchant and firm, and therefore ocularly false, as Durer's; but, in all probability, which involved entireness of fallacy or ignorance as to the wall facts; rendering the work nearly valueless; or valuable only in color or composition; ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... away their armour. And they sent mee a passeport to signe, telling me plainely after I had denied them, that if I made any difficulty, they would all come and cut my throat in the shippe. Thus was I constrained to signe their Passe-port, and forthwith to grant them certaine mariners, with Trenchant an honest and skilfull Pilot. When the barks were finished, they armed them with the kings munition, with powder, with bullets, and artillery, asmuch as they needed, and chose one of my Sergeants for their Captain, named ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... the Assyrian frontier, where the king's troops would be able to capture him. His offer was not accepted, and a second embassy, headed by Tammaritu, who was once more in favour, arrived to propose more trenchant terms. The Elamite might have gone so far as to grant the extradition of Nabo-bel-shumi, but if he had yielded the point concerning Nana, a rebellion would have broken out in the streets of Susa: he preferred war, and prepared in desperation ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... remember, Europa, remember, Asia, that foreign culture is as necessary to the spirit of a nation as is foreign commerce to its industries. Elsewise, thy materialism, Europa, or thy spiritualism, Asia, no matter how trenchant and impregnable, no matter how deep the foundation, how broad the superstructure thereof, is vulgar, narrow, mean—is nothing, in a ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... paladin we must seek the incomparable Cid, the campeador or champion of Spain, the noblest figure in Spanish story or romance. El Mio Cid, "My Cid," as he is called, with his matchless horse Bavieca and his trenchant sword Tisona, towers in Spanish tale far above Christian king and Moslem caliph, as the pink of chivalry, the pearl of knighthood, the noblest and worthiest figure in all ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... real bond of union he is in absolute ignorance. The problem of the connection of body and soul is as insoluble, in its modern form, as it was in the prescientific ages. Phosphorus is known to enter into the composition of the human brain, and a trenchant German writer has exclaimed, 'Ohne Phosphor, kein Gedanke!' That may or may not be the case; but even if we knew it to be the case, the knowledge would not lighten our darkness. On both sides of the zone here assigned to the materialist he is equally helpless. If you ask him whence is ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... of our political ends—had consented to accord to him." He hurried expectant to Ferrieres; there to be summarily disillusioned. Bismarck gave him an interview on the 28th, and crushed him in a few trenchant sentences:— ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... them. Their chiefs are described as "mighty of frame and having numerous followers." In dealing with the first band, Keiko caused his bravest soldiers to carry mallets made from camellia trees, though why such weapons should have been preferred to the trenchant swords used by the Japanese there is nothing to show. (Another account says "mallet-headed swords," which is much more credible). In dealing with the second, he was driven back once by their rain of arrows, and when he attacked from another quarter, the Tsuchi-gumo, their submission having ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... day he threw himself on a sofa, a romance in his hand which he simply pretended to read, and seemed absorbed in deep reverie. Verses were sent to him from Paris which he read aloud, expressing his opinion in a brief and trenchant style; he spent three days writing regulations for the French comedy at Paris. It is difficult to understand this attention to such frivolous details when the future was so ominous. It was generally believed, and probably not without reason, that the ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... only, the god of thunder, never passed over the bridge, for fear lest his heavy tread or the heat of his lightnings would destroy it. The god Heimdall kept watch and ward there night and day. He was armed with a trenchant sword, and carried a trumpet called Giallar-horn, upon which he generally blew a soft note to announce the coming or going of the gods, but upon which a terrible blast would be sounded when Ragnarok should come, and the frost-giants and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... will be remembered that the ancient law of Rome, the Twelve Tables, authorized creditors to take an insolvent debtor, kill him and divide his body amongst them, a real execution against the person more trenchant if not more effective than the capias ad satisfaciendum dear to the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... departure a scimetar was sent to him by the king, the blade of the finest Damascus steel, the hilt of agate enriched with precious stones, and the guard of gold. De Vera drew it, and smiled grimly as he noticed the admirable temper of the blade. "His Majesty has given me a trenchant weapon," said he: "I trust a time will come when I may show him that I know how to use his royal present." The reply was considered a compliment, of course: the bystanders little knew the bitter hostility that ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... that they would accept it seriously as sense. Therefore I am all at sea about the existing situation; I scarcely know whether to be relieved or enraged by this substitution of the feeble platform lecture for the forcible curtain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant and candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know what to do with the prostrate and penitent Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern woman has taken us all so much by surprise that it is desirable to pause a moment, and collect our wits about what ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... shrouded and coffined at once out of the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we have learned something. But a sapling truth, with earth at its root and blossom on its branches; or a trenchant truth, that can cut its way through bars and sods; most men, it seems to me, dislike the sight or entertainment of, if by any means such guest or vision may be avoided. And, indeed, this is no wonder; ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... of diamantine sheen, Which the blood-reeking feet of Mars degrade, The mad Manchegan's banner now hath been By him in all its bravery displayed. There hath he hung his arms and trenchant blade Wherewith, achieving deeds till now unseen, He slays, lays low, cleaves, hews; but art hath made A novel style for our new paladin. If Amadis be the proud boast of Gaul, If by his progeny the fame of Greece Through ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... hatred. Braves of the tribe were these, and brothers, gigantic in stature, Huge as Goliath of Gath, or the terrible Og, king of Bashan;[45] 755 One was Pecksuot named, and the other was called Wattawamat. Round their necks were suspended their knives in scabbards of wampum,[46] Two-edged, trenchant knives, with points as sharp as a needle. Other arms had they none, for they were running and crafty. "Welcome, English!" they said,—these words they had learned from the traders 760 Touching at times on the ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... of Carr. At a moment when conciliation and concession were most needed on the part of the Crown, the character of Villiers made concession and conciliation impossible. To James his new adviser seemed the weapon he wanted to smite with trenchant edge the resistance of the realm. He never dreamed that the haughty young favourite, on whose neck he loved to loll, and whose cheek he slobbered with kisses, was to drag down in his fatal career ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green
... Lombard's Kop. He was usually walking about close to the firing line, leading his grey horse, a conspicuous mark for every bullet. Veteran officers used to marvel that he was not hit. In the midst of it all he would stand quite unconcerned, and speak in his usual voice—slow, trenchant, restrained by a cynicism that came partly from youth and an English horror of fuss. How different from the voice of unconsciousness which I heard raving in his room ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... basing human values on some purely natural substitute is, if judged by the same standards, as absurd as those dogmas of orthodoxy which the naturalists are attempting to supersede. With the purpose of emphasizing this contention in a yet more trenchant way, I supplemented, as I have said already, The New Republic by a short satirical romance, Positivism on an Island, in the manner of Voltaire's Candide. My next work, Is Life Worth Living? in which I elaborated this argument by the methods of formal logic, was largely due to that ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... When, however, it is read in conjunction with Nietzsche's trenchant criticism, particularly on pp. 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 of this work, and also with a knowledge of Wagner's music, it becomes one of the most striking passages in Wagner's autobiography, for it records how soon he became conscious of ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... "Lorna Doone") lets his lover make quite a neat and appropriate speech, but that was in the seventeenth century. When Artemus Ward began a harangue of this sort, Betsy Jane knocked him off the fence on which he was sitting, and first criticising his eloquence in a trenchant style, added, "If you mean being hitched, I'm in it." In other respects the lover of Lorna Doone behaved ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... narrative of the fight we have not paused to particularize, neither have we enumerated, the list of the combatants. Amongst them, however, were Jerry Juniper, the knight of Malta, and Zoroaster. Excalibur, as may be conceived, had not been idle; but that trenchant blade had been shivered by Ranulph Rookwood in the early stage of the business, and the knight left weaponless. Zoroaster, who was not merely a worshipper of fire, but a thorough milling-cove, had engaged to some purpose in a pugilistic encounter with the rustics; ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... importance to the elaboration of the more technical parts of the law. I find, however, that his critics are agreed in ascribing to him with remarkable unanimity the virtue of 'open-mindedness.' His trenchant way of laying down his conclusions might give the impression that they corresponded to rooted prejudices. Such prejudices might of course intrude themselves unconsciously into his mind, as they intrude into the minds of most of us. But no one could be more anxious for fair play in ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... measures were dictated less by great energy of initiative than by absolute necessity. The finances had fallen into such a chaos of jobbery and confusion that the very existence of the government depended upon a prompt and trenchant reform. It was Louis' rare good-fortune to find beside him one of the most able and vigorous administrators who have ever lived—Colbert. He had the merit—not a small one in that age—of letting this great minister invent ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... force. Yes! Robert Elsmere was certainly right in ceasing to be a clergyman. But it strikes us as a blot on his philosophical pretensions that he should have been both so late in perceiving the difficulty, and then so sudden and trenchant in dealing with so great and complex a question. Had he possessed a perfectly philosophic or scientific temper he would have hesitated. This is not the place to discuss in detail the theological position very ably and seriously ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... were the centers around whom the reformers rallied. James directed their counsels in the House and Jeff pounded away in the World with vital trenchant editorials and news stories. Every day that paper carried to the farthest corner of the state bulletins of the battle. Farmers and miners and laboring men watched its roll of honor to see if the local representatives were standing firm. As the weeks passed the fight grew more bitter. Now and ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... height of pity, despair, and terror to which the ballad strains of Scotland have reached, what master of modern realism has surpassed in trenchant and uncompromising power ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... strength, and sees there are fully a hundred of them. Then he who thus is pressing him thinks he had better call a hair. Then they ride to meet each other, and strike upon each other's shield great blows with their sharp and trenchant swords. Erec caused his stout steel sword to pierce his body through and through, so that his shield and hauberk protected him no more than a shred of dark-blue silk. And next the Count comes spurring on, who, as the story tells, was a strong and doughty knight. But the Count in this ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... reminded me how I had degraded my office by a studious, though cold, deference toward it on her own part. The king was the king, be he never so unruly. His mother could only disapprove and grieve in silence. But in the hands of Princess Heinrich silence was a trenchant weapon. William Adolphus also was very sulky with me. I found some excuse for him. Toward his wife he wore a hang-dog air; from Princess Heinrich he fairly ran away whenever he could. In these relations toward one another we settled down to ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... and faced successfully all dangers of Alpine travel, so long as he believed them to be the mere "blagues de reclame" of the wily Swiss host. His brilliant qualities of style and irony themselves told heavily against him. Was he not already known for having written the most trenchant satire that had appeared since "Gulliver's Travels"? Had he not sneered therein at the very foundations of society, and followed up its success by a pseudo- biography that had taken in the "Record" and the "Rock"? In "Life and ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... modern life that the reaction set in and stirred the deeper layers of consciousness to reproduce their store of magic. For this return to what seemed the paltry activities of an age of machinery, physical luxury, and superficial contrivances brought him a sense of pain that was acute and trenchant, more—a deep and poignant sense of loss. The yearnings, no longer satisfied, began again to reassert themselves. It was not the actual things the world seemed so busy about that pained him, but rather the point of view from which the world approached ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... imitator of the man who wrote the Dialogue Between an Awd Wife, a Lass, and a Butcher. All that has been said about the trenchant realism of farmlife in the dialogue of 1673 applies with equal force to the dialogues of 1684. The later poet, having a larger canvas at his disposal, is able to introduce more characters and more ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... illustration of it does not exist. For all good architecture depends upon the adaptation of its chiselling to the effect at a certain distance from the eye; and to render the peculiar confusion in the midst of order, and uncertainty in the midst of decision, and mystery in the midst of trenchant lines, which are the result of distance, together with perfect expression of the peculiarities of the design, requires the skill of the most admirable artist, devoted to the work with the most severe conscientiousness, neither the ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... particular corpse, and would feel her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under my feet. My cold berth would swallow up like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers and my mental excitement. It was a cruel winter. The very air seemed as hard and trenchant as steel; but it would have taken much more than this to extinguish my sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No young man of twenty-four appointed chief mate for the first time in his life would ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... appeared for the first time as a journalist, in connection with the Canada Farmer; but when that journal was merged into the Canada Agriculturist, he founded the North American, which exerted no small influence as a trenchant, vigorous exponent of Reform principles, until it was amalgamated, in 1857, with the Globe. In 1852 the Leader was established, at Toronto, by Mr. James Beaty—the old Patriot becoming its weekly issue—and during ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot
... little rift between the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys. To the first, there is shown but a very small field of experience, and taught a very trenchant principle for judgment and action; to the other, the world of life is more largely displayed, and their rule of conduct is proportionally widened. They are taught to follow different virtues, to hate ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... borrowing, by right of years, her matron's plumes; Mrs. Chapone, sensible, ugly, and benevolent; the beautiful Mrs. Sheridan; the lively, absurd, incisive Mrs. Cholmondeley; sprightly, witty Mrs. Thrale; and Hannah More, coiner of guineas, both as saint and sinner: a most piquant, trenchant, and entertaining society it was, and well might be, since the bullion of genius was so largely wrought into the circulating medium of small talk; but a society which, from sheer lack of vision, must have entertained its angels unawares. Such was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... the conflict now impending, and stern the struggle of the natives for life and liberty. Here were no peaceful chiefs, like the one met at Arasaka, and only by dint of trenchant blows was the land to be won. On went the fight, victory now inclining to one side, now to the other, until in the midst of the uncertain struggle the gods sent down a deep and dark cloud, in whose thick shadow ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the Parisian Restaurant; but he came to be a formidable visitor in the Hinkle parlor. His competition reduced Bud to an inspired increase of profanity, drove Jacks to an outburst of slang so weird that it sounded more horrible than the most trenchant of Bud's imprecations, and ...
— Options • O. Henry
... here to-day, about the Pall Mall Gazette. You would be the very man to help us with a genuine West-end article,—you understand—dashing, trenchant, and d—— aristocratic. Lady Hipshaw will write; but she's not much you know, and we've two lords; but the less they do the better. We must have you. We'll give you your own terms, and we'll make a hit ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... from his mother that Prince Bismarck, the future ruler of Germany, received his endowment of dauntless audacity, his gift of trenchant argument, his bursts of ironical laughter, his power of instant decisions, his scolding, and his bitter wrath. All these qualities shone in the parliamentary fight before the Austrian war, when for three years ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... Conversations," embracing six volumes, on which recent critics have bestowed unbounded praise, Swinburne in particular; he died in Florence separated from his family, and dependent on it there for six years; Carlyle visited him at Bath in 1850, and found him "stirring company; a proud, irascible, trenchant, yet generous, veracious, and very dignified old man; quite a ducal or royal man in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that exceeded Frederick Travers' farthest disciplined forbearance, she did not dare explain. Her wide artist-eyes had seen and sensed the whole trenchant and essential difference. Alike they looked, of the unmistakable same stock, their features reminiscent of a common origin; and there resemblance ceased. Tom was three inches taller, and well-greyed was the long, Viking moustache. His was the same eagle-like nose as his ...
— The Turtles of Tasman • Jack London
... of a work rich in the raciest beauties and defects of an author long since made known to the British public, the present writer has striven to recast the trenchant humour, the scornful eloquence, the epigrammatic dash of Mr. Michelet, in language not all unworthy of such a word-master. How far he has succeeded others may be left to judge. In one point only is he aware of having been less true to his ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... (Capt. John Hindmarsh, R.N.). It is matter of history how the Governor and the Commissioner of Lands differed and quarrelled, the latter having the money and the former the power of government, and it was soon found that Mr. Stevenson could wield a trenchant pen. He had been on the "Traveller" branch of the London paper what would be called now a travelling correspondent. The Governor was replaced by Col. Gawler, and Mr. Stevenson went on The Register as editor. Mrs. ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... so well established that one evening at the Prefecture, Monsieur Tournel, a man of keen and trenchant wit, author of certain fables and songs—a local glory—seeing the ladies growing drowsy, proposed a game of "L'oiseau vole."[1] The pun itself flew through the prefect's reception rooms and afterwards through the town, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... of organized community. It was distinctly an aristocratic society: elegant in dress, punctilious in manner, exacting in taste, ready to be amused, and not indifferent to criticism when it took the form of sprightly badinage or of keen and trenchant satire. The informal organization of society, which made it possible to reach and affect the Town as a whole, is suggested by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... volley of further and far more trenchant abuse was discharged by Superintendent Cairns, of the New South Wales Police. But Kilbride was already in the saddle; a covert outward kick with his spurred heel, and the third horse went cantering riderless ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung
... abrupt and trenchant in his tone that I have not the spirit to pursue my inquiries any further. In deep astonishment and still deeper mortification, I pursue my way ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... hunger's rage, Sharpened by fresh sea-air, was quelled, the jest Succeeded, and the tale of foreign lands; Yet, boast who might of distant chief renowned, His battle-axe, or fist that felled an ox, The Anglian's answer was 'our Hilda' still: 'Is not her prayer trenchant as sworded hosts? Her insight more than wisdom of the seers? What birth like hers illustrious? Edwin's self, Deira's exile, next Northumbria's king, Her kinsman was. Together bowed they not When he of holy hand, ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... the cakes out of the bake-kettle, will you?' said Mary; 'and if them ducks be raw, 'tain't my fault, remember.' She was evidently a woman of few words, but trenchant. ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... a brief period Muhammedanism spread from the Nile Valley to the Mediterranean. Muhammed's trenchant argument was the sword. He gave a distinct command to his followers to convince the infidels of the Power of truth on the battle-field. "The sword is a surer argument than books," he said. Accordingly the Koran ordered war against unbelievers: "The sword is the key ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... whom I had heard much, a man who had newspapers and race horses. The bright witty glances of his brown eyes at once prejudiced me in his favour, and it was not long before I knew that I had found another friend. His house was what was wanted, for it was so trenchant in character, so different to all I knew of, that I was forced to accept it, without likening it to any French memory and thereby weakening the impression. It was a house of champagne, late hours, and evening clothes, of literature and art, of passionate discussions. ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... foolish as we stood before our present. I do not think any of the people we had taken in had looked so thoroughly and completely so. We were both on the eve of crying, and both ended by laughing. Then Polly—in those trenchant tones which recalled Aunt Maria ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Everywhere, whether the lecturer be sketching the salient features of the sixteenth century or of the eighteenth, whether he be dealing with Italy or America, we feel the sureness of touch of one who is familiar with every detail. Although we may often not agree with his trenchant judgments, with his paradoxes, or even with his interpretation of the teaching of history, we are made to feel that his ample knowledge would never have been at a loss for weighty arguments ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... with his head hanging and his hands plunged deep into his trouser pockets, pale, visibly moist with perspiration, saying never a word, a very wreck of soul and body; the other sat on the divan close by the chimney, and attracted notice by a trenchant dissimilarity from all the rest. He was probably upwards of forty, but he looked fully ten years older; and Florizel thought he had never seen a man more naturally hideous, nor one more ravaged by disease and ruinous excitements. He was no more than skin and bone, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fantastical holiday nature, Had sharply drawn forth to his full size and stature The real man, conceal'd till that moment beneath All he yet had appear'd. From the gay broider'd sheath Which a man in his wrath flings aside, even so Leaps the keen trenchant steel summon'd forth by a blow. And thus loss of fortune gave value to life. The wife gain'd a husband, the husband a wife, In that home which, though humbled and narrow'd by fate, Was enlarged and ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... afire to see a strain of remarkable blood proclaiming itself in so diverse a fashion through members of one household; a household that has come from the pinch of want. Take the girl. Leave her beauty out of the question, because beauty is not genius. But her mind is as trenchant as her brother's. She could reign on any throne in Europe and stand out as conspicuous in brilliant contrast to that colorless royalty as a torch flaming among candles. I'll wager that her courage is as unflinching as his and ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... mighty anti-slavery struggle, which constituted the greater part of the politics of the United States in those and many succeeding years. He became a journalist in the anti-slavery cause; and, in 1850, he wrote a trenchant answer to Mr. Carlyle's then just published "Latter Day Pamphlets." Later on, slavery having been at length abolished, he appeared as a writer in yet another field, publishing several works, one as lately as ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... considerable attention to the work and methods of the Salvation Army, the publication of In Darkest England interested him greatly, and on March 9 he sent in a letter the following trenchant criticism, all the more noteworthy because of his strong sympathy with much in the Army that others find it ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... rapidly underneath his black cloak as he saw this spectacle of helpless prisoner defying a power, which, in its sphere of action, was almost omnipotent. It was manifest that the Emperor's trenchant sentences had disturbed more than one member of the convention, and even the Freigraf glanced in perplexity towards the supposed Archbishop of Treves as if for a hint anent the answer that should be given. As if in response to the silent appeal, Wilhelm rose slowly ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... panacea which all the state doctors of the day offered for the cure of the ills of the body politic—he advocated the employment, meantime, of persuasion instead of force, of gentleness rather than rigor, of charity and good works, as more effective than the most trenchant of material weapons. And, while he recommended his hearers to pray for the conversion of the erring, he exclaimed: "Let us remove those diabolical words, names of parties, factions, and seditions—'Lutherans,' 'Huguenots,' and 'Papists'—and let us retain only the name of 'Christians.'"[986] In ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... is perhaps the wittiest of modern novelists. Of all the ladies who in later times have taken in hand the weapon of satire, her blade is certainly the most trenchant. A vapid lord or a purse-proud citizen, a money-hunting woman of fashion or a toad-eater, a humbug in short, male or female, and of whatsoever cast or quality he may be, will find his pretensions well castigated in some one or other of her brilliant pages; while scattered about in many places are ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... since that time, here in this sordid realm of crime and misery, the name of Rhoda Gray, her own name, her actual identity, seemed to have become lost, obliterated in that of the White Moll. A "dip" had given it to her, and the underworld, quick and trenchant in its "monikers," had instantly ratified it. There was not a crook or denizen of crimeland, probably, who did not know the White Moll; there was, probably, not one to-day who knew, or cared, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... spring came, and after spring, summer, with its greenery and flowers. Godfrey was happy enough during this time. To begin with, the place suited him. He was very well now, and grew enormously in that pure and trenchant air, broadening as well as lengthening, till, notwithstanding his slimness, he gave promise of ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... was behind her. As they made their way towards the luggage van, Connie saw a beckoning hand and face. They belonged to Nora Hooper, and in another minute Connie found herself taken possession of by her cousin. Nora was deeply sunburnt. Her colour was more garishly red and brown, her manner more trenchant than ever. At sight of Connie her face flushed with a sudden smile, as though the owner of the face could not help it. Yet they had only been a few minutes together before Connie had discovered that, beneath the sunburn, there was ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... no whit less noble: but as much may be said of the whole part—and indeed of the whole play. Violent and extravagant as the mere action or circumstance may be or may appear, there is a trenchant straightforwardness of appeal in the simple and spontaneous magnificence of the language, a depth of insuppressible sincerity in the fervent and and restless vibration of the thought, by which the hand and the brain and the ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the close of a poem which appears—by the numbering of the Cantos—to have been of about four times that length. This remnant contains what would naturally have been the most vigorous and stirring parts of the poem: the riotous drinking of Holofernes, the trenchant act of Judith, her return with her maid to Bethulia, their enthusiastic reception, the muster for battle, the anticipation of carnage by the birds and beasts of prey, the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... of essay writing, surely, have seemed in our own generation less distinctive of our peculiar quality. While admirable biographical and critical studies appear from time to time, and here and there a whimsical or trenchant discursive essay like those of Miss Repplier or Dr. Crothers, no one would claim that we approach France or even England in the field of criticism, literary history, memoirs, the bookish essay, and biography. We may have race-memories of a pine-tree ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... an Anglomaniac. Short hair, starched frills, a pea-green, long-skirted coat with a number of little collars; a soar expression of countenance, something trenchant and at the same time careless in his demeanor, an utterance through the teeth, an abrupt wooden laugh, an absence of smile, a habit of conversing only on political or politico-economical subjects, a passion for under-done roast ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... superiority to more natural and generous feelings. Our ardent and dauntless reformer followed out the moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan into its most rigid and repulsive consequences with a pen of steel, and let fall his "trenchant blade" on every vulnerable point of human infirmity; but there is a want in his system of the mild and persuasive tone of the Gospel, where "all is conscience and tender heart." Man was indeed screwed up, by mood and figure, into a logical machine, that was to forward the public ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... increased as the little grey politician denounced the witlessness of the working-class, and when they howled at him, went on to expound a trenchant doctrine of universal Responsibility, which preceded the universal Suffrage that was to come. Much of what he said was drowned in uproar. It had become clear that his opinions revolted the majority of his hearers even more than they did the two ladies. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... and even cordial manners, and an address always considerate even when not sympathetic. He was not a loud or a long talker, but his terse remarks were full of taste and a just appreciation of things. If they were sometimes trenchant, the blade was of fine temper. Old Mr. Ferrars was there and the Viscountess Edgware. His hair had become quite silvered, and his cheek rosy as a December apple. His hazel eyes twinkled with satisfaction as he remembered the family had now produced ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... to finish the two small vessels on which the carpenters had been for some time at work. In a fortnight they were ready for sea, armed and provided with the king's cannon, munitions, and stores. Trenchant, an excellent pilot, was forced to join the party. Their favorite object was the plunder of a certain church, on one of the Spanish islands, which they proposed to assail during the midnight mass of Christmas, whereby a triple end would be achieved: first, a rich booty; secondly, the punishment ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... World in opposing the Writs of Assistance he also did in opposing the enforcement of the Stamp Act—remonstrances suggested by the patriot's love of independence, and which, besides numberless letters, speeches and addresses, drew from the pre-Revolutionist's trenchant pen several able pamphlets, one vindicating the action of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, of which Otis was now a member, in protesting against England's intolerance in laying grievous taxation ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... constituted in a peculiar way. Our national life is complex. To hold in party association the six millions or more of American men whose support, continued for years, is necessary to carry a great measure, requires the proper connection with the past, and trenchant dealing with the present which is full of imperious demands. Abraham Lincoln was not borne into the presidency in 1860 solely by the strength of the anti-slavery issue, but found necessary support in Pennsylvania from the committal of the Republicans ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... each side of the body. It lives entirely on ants; and on opening its mouth we found that it could not provide itself with other food, as it was entirely destitute of teeth. Its claws, which were long, sharp, pointed, and trenchant, were its only implements of defence. Its hinder claws were short and weak; but the front ones were powerful, and so formed that anything at which it seizes can never hope to escape. The object of its powerful crooked claws is to enable it to open ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... to the charge against him, and listened to the exaggerated tale of the arrest without comment, though with a look of disgust that did not escape Mr. Weaver. Perhaps he knew his man in Wilder. At any rate, a few trenchant questions brought out the fact that Friedrich had resisted only when an attempt ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... parties feared him: each in turn Beheld its schemes disjointed, As right or left his fatal glance And spectral finger pointed. Sworn foe of Cant, he smote it down With trenchant wit unsparing, And, mocking, rent with ruthless hand The ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... Peter, watching his opportunity, aimed a blow enough to cleave his adversary to the very chine; but Risingh, nimbly raising his sword, warded it off so narrowly, that, glancing on one side, it shaved away a huge canteen in which he carried his liquor,—thence pursuing its trenchant course, it severed off a deep coat-pocket, stored with bread and cheese,—which provant, rolling among the armies, occasioned a fearful scrambling between the Swedes and Dutchmen, and made the general battle to ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... delivered in the Biological Section, in which he characterised the so-called new science of spiritualism as the invention of impostors and mountebanks. His address, which lacked the author's constitutional caution and discretion, was severely handled in several of the leading journals, and a trenchant pen, in an Edinburgh cotemporary, "cut up rough" with a vengeance. Among others who replied to Dr. Thomson's strictures was Dr. Robert H. Collyer, of London, who claims to be the original discoverer ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... instinctively and tenaciously believes in the liberty and initiative of the individual. We, of course, are no longer Anglo-Saxon. When De Tocqueville in 1831 visited our country, surveyed our institutions and, after returning home, made his trenchant diagnosis of our democracy, he could justly designate us Anglo-Americans. That time is past; we are to-day everything and nothing: a great nation in the womb of time, ...
— The Soul of Democracy - The Philosophy Of The World War In Relation To Human Liberty • Edward Howard Griggs
... criticism," said Don, "at once so trenchant and so unobjectionable, to what earlier phase should you ascribe the wit of G. K. ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... Jove Will o'er some high-vic'd city hang his poison In the sick air: let not thy sword skip one. Pity not honour'd age for his white beard; He is an usurer. Strike me the counterfeit matron; It is her habit only that is honest, Herself's a bawd. Let not the virgin's cheek Make soft thy trenchant sword; for those milk paps That through the window-bars bore at men's eyes, Are not within the leaf of pity writ, But set them down horrible traitors. Spare not the babe, Whose dimpled smiles from fools exhaust their mercy; Think it a bastard, whom the oracle Hath doubtfully pronounc'd ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... These trenchant passages were written partly, it may be imagined, to suit the English taste of the day. In that object they must have succeeded, for they were frequently transcribed into contemporary periodicals. In extenuation of Smollett's ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... moment was terrible beyond expression. His whole fierce nature was roused. His mane stood erect—his tail lasher his flanks—his mouth, widely open, showed the firm-set trenchant teeth— their white spikes contrasting with the red blood that clotted his cheeks and snout, while his angry roaring ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... Many a trenchant word and many a witty jest must have been uttered this evening, for hearty laughter and loud applause were incessant in the head steward's porch; the captain of the guard at the gate cast envious and impatient glances at the merry band, which he would gladly have joined; but he could ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Hotel Royal one day, dining with Colonel Saunderson, M. P., his son, and Lieutenant Tipping, I met Mr. Stanley. The great explorer was just from Pretoria, and had already as good as flayed President Kruger with his trenchant pen. But that did not signify, for everybody has a whack at Oom Paul, and no one in the world seems to stand the joke better than he, not even the Sultan of Turkey himself. The colonel introduced me to the explorer, and I hauled close to the wind, to go slow, for Mr. Stanley was a nautical man ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... totters on her wabbly throne. I fear me there are lions in the way, And we must not in open battle wage; But let our minds deep strategy conceive And thus achieve what otherwise might fail. Quezox: Most trenchant Francos, how thy words do prick; I fear unjust suspicion rears its head, For it is not the nature of our race To open deal, when stealth can compass well The object which our surging souls shall seek; For practice which necessity hath caused Hath ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... bloody eagle, with the trenchant blade, graven on the back of Sigmund's slayer. No son of king, who the earth reddens, and the raven gladdens, is ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... mind was not of the constructive order, his critical and analytical faculties were highly developed. Always effective, often trenchant, sometimes cruel, his powers of sarcasm and invective were unrivalled. Once, when a former minister of Inland Revenue, not remarkable for his knowledge of the affairs of his department, had proposed a resolution to the ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... hypocrites recovered sufficiently from the startling climax to calm Lawson, who swore the cabin had been attacked by Indians; when Jones stopped roaring long enough to hear it was only a harmless snake that had caused the trouble, we hushed to repose once more—not, however, without hearing some trenchant remarks from the boiling Colonel anent fun and fools, and the indubitable fact that there was not a rattlesnake ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... with certain unalienable rights." It was well said. The rights of God are the only basis of the rights of man. One of the most sagacious of modern statesmen has borne his testimony to this fundamental truth—that religion is the only basis of social order—in words as trenchant as the guillotine which suggested them. "It is not," says Napoleon, "the mystery of incarnation which I perceive in religion, but the mystery of social order. It attaches to heaven an idea of equality which prevents the rich from being ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... with fair confidence that the first and the last scenes of the play bear the indisputable sign-manual of William Rowley. His vigorous and vivid genius, his somewhat hard and curt directness of style and manner, his clear and trenchant power of straightforward presentation or exposition, may be traced in every line as plainly as the hand of Middleton must be recognized in the main part of the tragic action intervening. To Rowley, therefore, must be ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and worked himself into a fever over the set of his tie. Nevertheless, before he left he had managed to get from the young man the whole story of his engagement to the under-housemaid, giving him thereupon some bits of advice, jocular but trenchant, which James accepted with a readiness quite unlike his normal behavior in ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... "suggest the policy of your postponing them for a session to give time to form an Irish Party, to assist the Ministry, if willing; to urge them on, if lagging; in procuring justice for Ireland." O'Connell replied in a letter, rich with the vigorous trenchant logic of his very best days. He reviews the many attempts made, at various times, to form an Irish party, all of which ended in unmitigated failure. His answer to Lord Miltown, therefore is, that he cannot comply with his request—he ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... breathe in you, Mary!" said Mrs. Scudder,—giving vent to herself in one of those trenchant shorthand expressions wherein positive natures incline to sum up everything, if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the way; but now you might as well have sets of rails laid on the water and run the ships on them. There is no seamanship needed." He never quite forgave the Commissioners for deepening the river. As he said in his trenchant manner: "There used to be some credit in bringing a ship across the bar when you were never quite sure whether she would touch or not; but now you could bring the 'Duke of Wellington' in at low ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... way,—he has no comic power and (wiser, in this respect, than Ford) is aware of his deficiency. We find in Nero none of those touches of swift subtle pathos that dazzle us in the Duchess of Malfy; but we find strokes of sarcasm no less keen and trenchant. Sometimes in the ring of the verse and in turns of expression, we seem to catch Shakespearian ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... he had gone there to see: what would she think of him? He knew well enough that her trenchant classifications of life admitted no overlapping of good and evil, made no allowance for that incalculable interplay of motives that justifies the subtlest casuistry of compassion. Miss Talcott was too young to distinguish ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... Defoe lay the first stone of his literary reputation. He was now in the thirty-eighth year of his age, his controversial genius in full vigour, and his mastery of language complete. None of his subsequent tracts surpass this as a piece of trenchant and persuasive reasoning. It shows at their very highest his marvellous powers of combining constructive with destructive criticism. He dashes into the lists with good-humoured confidence, bearing the banner of clear common sense, and disclaiming sympathy with ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... also why he swore. Martinson thrust out his under lip at the oath, and tossed the script neatly into the clear space on the desk. "Oh, if that's the way you feel about it!" His tone was trenchant. "Sorry I offered any suggestions. There are some good bits, if they're worked up right, and I naturally supposed ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... bowie-knife, which is covered with blood; parts of the left are missing. All the jewelry has been stolen from the room. Lord Pharanx lies on the bed, stabbed through the bedclothes to the heart. Later on a bullet is also found imbedded in his brain. I should explain that a trenchant edge, running along the bottom of the sash, was the obvious means by which the fingers of Cibras had been cut off. This had been placed there a few days before by the workman I spoke of. Several secret springs ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... distilled could add to Shelby's intoxication. It was not reporting, this swift interchange of trenchant thought between men of the world; or if reporting, a sublimated sort, free of note-books and the disconcerting trademarks of the guild as ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... Popanilla to the sentimental rodomontade of Henrietta Temple; from ranting romanticism in Alroy to vivid realism in Sybil. Their author gives you no time to weary of him, for he is worldly and passionate, fantastic and trenchant, cynical and ambitious, flippant and sentimental, ornately rhetorical and triumphantly simple in a breath. He is imperiously egoistic, but while constantly parading his own personality he is careful never to tell you anything about ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... flickers on thy path, Whilst, as from vial full, thy spare-naught wrath Splashes this trembling race: These are thy grass as thou their trenchant scythes Cleaving their neck as 'twere a willow withe— Their blood ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... there were nothing else, they would have been swamped thirty times over during the course of Lantenac's harangue. Again, after Lantenac has landed, we have scenes of almost inimitable workmanship that suggest the epithet "statuesque" by their clear and trenchant outline; but the tocsin scene will not do, and the tocsin unfortunately pervades the whole passage, ringing continually in our ears with a taunting accusation of falsehood. And then, when we come to the place where Lantenac meets the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... da Vinci as we now read it there are some variations from the first edition. There, the painter who has fixed the outward type of Christ for succeeding centuries was a bold speculator, holding lightly by other men's beliefs, setting philosophy above Christianity. Words of his, trenchant enough to justify this impression, are not recorded, and would have been out of keeping with a genius of which one characteristic is the tendency to lose itself in a refined and graceful mystery. The suspicion was but the time-honoured form in which the world stamps its appreciation ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... desirable qualities in the use of English are the simple, plain, exact, lucid, concise, trenchant, vigorous, impressive, lively, figurative, polished, graceful, fluent, rhythmical, copious, elevated, flexible, smooth, dignified, terse, epigrammatic, felicitous, euphonious, elegant, and lofty. Undesirable qualities are the diffuse, ...
— Talks on Talking • Grenville Kleiser
... are plain to him; His trenchant will, like a fine-tempered blade, With unturned edge, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... The Emperor Wu-Tsung was more definitely Taoist than his predecessors. In 843 he suppressed Manichaeism and in 845, at the instigation of his Taoist advisers, he dealt Buddhism the severest blow which it had yet received. In a trenchant edict[668] he repeated the now familiar arguments that it is an alien and maleficent superstition, unknown under the ancient and glorious dynasties and injurious to the customs and morality of the nation. Incidentally ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... new board of village trustees, the shameful condition of the village streets, the prospects of a new roof for the railway station. Good-nature was the keynote of his character, but he would frequently sum up a situation or a person with a sly touch of irony or a trenchant word or two. He once described the village streets as being paved chiefly with good intentions. Another time he characterised the minister of a rival church as having the courage of his wife's convictions. But such flashes of satire went and left no rancour ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... if his lungs were bursting, his heart throbbed painfully, and something drummed deafeningly inside his head. His vision grew hazy, and he could scarcely see the widening gap in the rough bark into which the trenchant steel cut. It was evident that the steadily increasing jam would rub the bridge piers out of existence long before any two men could hew half way through the great trunk, but, fortunately, the log was now bending like a fully-drawn ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... warrant would be issued next day against Nutter. The case against him was black enough. Still, even supposing he had struck those trenchant blows over Sturk's head, it did not follow that it was without provocation or in cold blood. It looked, however, altogether so unpromising, that he would have been almost relieved to hear that Nutter's body had been found ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... tactics now in vogue out there in the front ranks. He says that instead of being the preparation for life, education is life itself. Some without trying to probe deeply into the thought back of the trenchant expression, have said that this was a mere play upon words. But Dewey is not a man who plays with words. What he meant by the statement is that the child is best prepared for life as an adult by living the right ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... proved unpropitious. But although the divine Astraea won recognition from easy-going John Dryden and approbation from the profligate wits of Charles II's court, her memory was little honored by the coterie about Pope and Swift. When even the lofty ideals and trenchant style of Mary Astell served as a target for the ridicule of Mr. Bickerstaff 's friends,[2] it was not remarkable that such authoresses as Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood should be dismissed from notice as infamous scribbling women.[3] Inded ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... encouraged Poe in its editorship. His connection with "Graham's Magazine" lasted about a year and a half, and this was one of the most active and brilliant periods of his literary life. He wrote in it several of his finest tales and most trenchant criticisms, and challenged attention by his papers entitled "Autography," and those on cryptology and ciphers. In the first, adopting a suggestion of Lavater, he attempted the illustration of character from handwriting; and in the second, he assumed that human ingenuity could construct no secret ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... a few moments they were pleasantly chatting, while the husband strode up and down the room, joining in the conversation with a vigour, humour, eagerness, and affluence of curious lore which, with his trenchant thought and subtle sympathy, make him one of the most charming and inspiring ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Order of the Czar Mr. JOSEPH HATTON exposes the cruelties of Muscovite rule in the most trenchant yet entertaining fashion. The headings to the chapters (to say nothing of their contents) are exciting to a degree, and consequently it is not altogether surprising that the Russian officials, possibly hearing that the three handsome volumes might cause a revolution, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... assumed a more formidable aspect than at others; and never were they more formidable than in the times of the Coal Measures. The teeth of the Rhizodus—a ganoidal fish of our coal fields—were more sharp and trenchant than those of the crocodile of the Nile, and in the larger specimens fully four times the bulk and size of the teeth of the hugest reptile of this species that now lives. The dorsal spine of its contemporary, the Gyracanthus, a great ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the remark be silly or the act mean. The hesitation of Hamlet, the credulity of Othello, the baseness of Emma Bovary, or the irregularities of Mr. Swiveller, caused neither disappointment nor disgust to their creators. And so with Pepys and his adored protagonist: adored not blindly, but with trenchant insight and enduring, human toleration. I have gone over and over the greater part of the Diary; and the points where, to the most suspicious scrutiny, he has seemed not perfectly sincere, are so few, so ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... rang to the making of sword-blades, many smiths had essayed to imitate the falchions of Damascus, their trenchant keenness and their wondrous golden inlaying. But numerous as were the attempts made to recapture the ancient secret of the East, they all signally failed, and brought about the ruin of many masters ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
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