"Lucidity" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering fall—melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... I was mad, absolutely mad, if I were not conscious that I knew my state, if I could not fathom it and analyze it with the most complete lucidity. I should, in fact, be a reasonable man laboring under a hallucination. Some unknown disturbance must have been excited in my brain, one of those disturbances which physiologists of the present day try to note and ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... over-statement. Ahura-mazda is less spiritual and less awful than Jehovah. He is less remote from the nature of man. The very ascription to him of health (haurvat) is an indication that he is conceived of as possessing a sort of physical nature. Lucidity and brilliancy are assigned to him, not (as it would seem) in a mere metaphorical sense. Again, he is so predominantly the author of good things, the source of blessing and prosperity, that he could scarcely inspire his votaries with any feeling of fear. Still, considering ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... to Maitre Jean de la Fontaine we are bound to admit the lucidity of his reply. "There is the Church Triumphant, in which are God, his saints, the angels and the souls that are saved," he said. "There is also the Church Militant, which is our Holy Father, the Pope, the Vicar of God on ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... in a fleeting moment of lucidity, Warrington had mentioned Garrick's name in such a way that Dr. Mead had looked it up in the telephone directory and then at the earliest moment ...
— Guy Garrick • Arthur B. Reeve
... a few words, and with admirable terseness and lucidity; and she nodded comprehensively ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... generally, as of that one most important feature in her career, the long protracted struggle with the Western Church, which terminated in their unhappy separation. The Author's investigation into the conflicting causes which led to this result is ably carried out, with considerable research, and great lucidity of style."—Ecclesiastic. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... Cultivate lucidity of style. You will do that at some risk at first. When a young lawyer is extremely clear, he is apt to be regarded as not deep. Abstruseness in expression is very frequently regarded as an indication of profundity. Nevertheless, ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... design, seek for no large sovereignty; and then work patiently on with ever-present enjoyment, learning his art, gaining skill and mastery over his vast and complex instrument, till he gained certainty of touch and the power of saying, with perfect lucidity, with pure transparency of phrase, exactly what he meant; and then, behind his art, to live resolutely in his simple creed, whatever article of it he could master, sure of this, that if his inspiration came, he would be able to ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... clear and his manner so full of authority and command, that it carried conviction to the minds of all those who were seated listening to him. He spoke of what would happen as if he was dealing with an absolute certainty, and went on with such wonderful lucidity and force of reasoning that they seemed ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau
... will acknowledge the pith, pointedness, and lucidity of Mr. Child's chapters on the chemistry of cookery, on the methods of preparing meats or vegetables, on acetaria, soups, and sauces; while the closing chapters on dining tables, dining-room decoration, table service, art in eating and on being invited ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... be! He recognized the giant pine, in a moment of lucidity. Then everything began to dance again, to quiver in the ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... phase of sentiment. Like the costume of the period, it strikes us now as 'artificial' because it was at the time so natural. It was worked out by the courtly and aristocratic class, and was fitted to give a certain dignity and lucidity, and to guard against mere greatness and triviality of utterance. At any rate it saved Pope from one enormous difficulty. The modern translator is aware that Homer lived a long time ago in a very different state of intellectual and social ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... a voice of passionate lucidity. "I knew it then—I knew it even while I was trying to argue with you—I've always known it! I didn't want my son to marry you till I heard your reasons for refusing him; and then—then I longed ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... she had always reasoned it out. No suffering had ever obscured the lucidity of Edith's mind. She knew that it was her spine that had kept her brother from marrying all those years. He couldn't leave her alone with it, neither could he ask any woman to share the house inhabited, pervaded, dominated by it. Unsafeguarded ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... has doubtless prompted it in the physical universe, as in man? How familiar the thought that the whole creation longs for God, the soul as the hart for the water-brooks! To unite oneself to the infinite by breadth and lucidity of intellect, to enter, by that admirable faculty, into eternal life—this was the true vocation of the spouse, of the rightly amorous soul—"a filosofia e necessario amore." There would be degrees of progress therein, as of course also of relapse: joys and ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... addressed, by General McClellan, at this time to President Lincoln. It is one of those papers which belong to history, and should be placed upon record. It not only throws the clearest light on the character and views of General Lee's great adversary, but expresses with admirable lucidity the sentiments of a large portion of the Federal people at the time. The President had invited a statement of General McClellan's views on the conduct of the war, and on July 7th, in the very midst of the ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the most complex of chemical reactions, regulated and determined as are the simple and complex chemical reactions around him, he will begin to rule and modify himself as he rules and modifies them. Whether or not he will ultimately come to this final lucidity of thought and action, it behooves us to consider some of the uses to which our present ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... rarely sympathetic. Where the best thoughts of the ablest men are to be displayed, it would be tempting to present an array of luminous points or a chaplet of polished gems. In the hands of such artists as Stahl or Cousin they would start into high relief with a convincing lucidity that would rouse the exhibited writers to confess that they had never known they were so clever. Without transfiguration the effect might be attained by sometimes stringing the most significant words of the original. Excepting one unduly ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... drawing-room where his daughter was, but there he fell his full length on the floor. He was cupped, and fully recovered his speech during the course of the day, but Mr. Lockhart thinks that never, after this attack, did his style recover its full lucidity and terseness. A cloudiness in words and a cloudiness of arrangement began to be visible. In the course of the year he retired from his duties of clerk of session, and his publishers hoped that, by engaging him on the new and complete edition of his works, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... for the reader. In 1849-1850 she published her "History of England during the Thirty Years' Peace," a thoroughly good bit of historical work, not less admirable for the general fairness of its tone than for the lucidity of its narrative. This was followed by her "Introduction to the History of the Peace, from 1800 to 1815." A careful English condensation of Comte's "Positive Philosophy" appeared in 1853. Meanwhile she was a constant contributor to Mr. Charles Dickens's "Household Words," ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... made a slip, and talked about a share which she possessed in the Russian Company being worth L50,000, he corrected her and said it was a good deal more, and gave her some explanations as to the real distribution of her capital, which astonished her by their lucidity and left her vaguely wondering how it happened that he knew. She had finally to promise to come to him at the cottage in Acol on the 2d of November—her twenty-first birthday—directly after her interview with the lawyer and ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... is the reader's friend much rather—in consequence of dispositions that make him so eminently require one; and she acts in that capacity, and REALLY in that capacity alone, with exemplary devotion from beginning to and of the book. She is an enrolled, a direct, aid to lucidity; she is in fine, to tear off her mask, the most unmitigated and abandoned of ficelles. Half the dramatist's art, as we well know—since if we don't it's not the fault of the proofs that lie scattered about us—is in the use of ficelles; by which I mean in a deep dissimulation ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... keep him from Mrs. Robinson. Faced at every turn with the evidence of this lady's complete indifference, he gives it all a lunatic twist to prove the contrary. He takes the strangest people into his confidence, John Brown, the sexton, and the Robinsons' coachman. Queer flames of lucidity dart here and there through this madness: "The probability of her becoming free to give me herself and estate ever rose to drive away the prospect of her decline under her present grief." "I had reason ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... with engaging lucidity, "if she were less so. It's her infernal virtue I can't stand, Gabriella. No man could stand it ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... this surgical treatise, the 30th and last in al-Zahr[a]w[i]aEuro(TM)s encyclopedic work al-Ta[s.]r[i]f Liman aEuroAjiza aEuroan al-TaaEuro(TM)l[i]f, is founded on certain merits. The text is characterized by lucidity, careful description, and a touch of original observation of the surgical operations to which the treatise as a whole is devoted.[4] Al-Zahr[a]w[i] furnishes his own drawings of the surgical and dental ...
— Drawings and Pharmacy in Al-Zahrawi's 10th-Century Surgical Treatise • Sami Hamarneh
... question is whether a word for word version of the Arabian Nights, executed with peculiar literary vigor, exact scholarship, and rare insight into Oriental modes of thought and feeling, can under any shadow of presence be classed with 'the garbage of the brothels.' In the lack of lucidity, which is supposed to distinguish English folk, our middle-class censores morum strain at the gnat of a privately circulated translation of an Arabic classic, while they daily swallow the camel of higher education based upon minute study of Greek and Latin ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... with such faults go an exceptional lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or bewildered it, a vividness of description ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... are not, could go to Berlin and learn something, not only of the language and intellectual history of Prussia, but of the standpoint of her people—and of the disadvantages as well as the advantages of an excessive lucidity of conception. Nowhere else in Germany that I know of is this to be studied so advantageously and so easily as in Berlin, the seat of Government, the headquarters of Real-politik, and it seems to me most apparent among the highly ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... continued clear mentally and in a more or less normal state until the latter part of November, 1902, when he again went into a stupor. From this time until the later part of April, 1903, he had alternating periods of stupor and lucidity, with amnesia for the stuporous states. On June 21, 1903, he was discharged as recovered and returned to the Indian Territory to undergo trial for his offense. Unfortunately, no mention is made in the hospital records of any possible relation ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... I suffered from the lucidity of my feelings. I saw, with indignation, my own wretched self being angled for like a fish. And with all that, in my forlorn state, I remained prudent. I did not rush out blindly. No. I approached the inner end of the passage, as though I had been stalking ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... quite astray!—And indeed we will here leave off, and shut down this magazine of rubbish; right glad to wash ourselves wholly from it (in three waters) forevermore. Possibly enough the Prussian Dryasdust will, one day, print it IN EXTENSO, and with that lucidity of comment and arrangement which is peculiar to him; exasperated readers will then see whether I have used them ILL or not, according to the opportunity there was!—Here, at any rate, my reader shall ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... wants at this moment of the three principal nations of Europe, he should say that the great want of the French was morality, that the great want of the Germans was civil courage, and that our own great want was lucidity. Our own want was, of course, what concerned us the most. People were apt to remark the defects which accompanied certain qualities, and to think that the qualities could not be desirable because of the defects which they saw accompanying them. There was no greater and salutary lesson for ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... came out of the wood and the yellow stars came out to crown it, as my friend, with the lucidity of despair, explained to me (on the soundest scientific principles, of course) that nothing would be any good at all. We must sleep the night in the lane, except in the very unlikely event of some one coming by to carry a message to some town. Twice I thought I heard some tiny ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... readiness or accuracy; and whilst it unquestionably kept suitors in ignorance of their own affairs, there is reason to believe that it often perplexed the most skilful of those official interpreters who were never weary of extolling his lucidity and precision. ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... passionate enthusiasts for Natural Law. The Law of Nature overleapt all provincial and municipal boundaries; it disregarded all distinctions between noble and burgess, between burgess and peasant; it gave the most exalted place to lucidity, simplicity and system; but it committed its devotees to no specific improvement, and did not directly threaten any venerable or lucrative technicality. Natural law may be said to have become the common law of ...
— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine
... Stuler struck his forehead with his fist as if to pound it into a state of lucidity. "Where is he? It is a stone wall; I can ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... live through them, but do not let us cry out every day, as we are disposed to do, that never under the sun were such storms known as we are enduring. To get away from the present state of feeling, to restore lucidity and proportion to our judgments, let us read every evening ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... There is nothing of the lyrical triviality of the verse in The Feast at Solhoug about the trenchant prose of The Vikings, and the crepuscular dimness of Lady Inger is exchanged for a perfect lucidity and directness. Whatever we may think about the theatrical propriety of the conductor of the vikings, there is no question at all as to what it is they do and mean. Ibsen has gained, and for good, that master quality of translucent presentation without which ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... enough what had happened: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say that Mrs. Culme ...
— The Triumph Of Night - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... doses of brandy and opium may not be insane in theory; in actual fact, he may be a dangerous madman. As one day followed another Meschini found it more and more impossible to exist without his two comforters. The least approach to lucidity made him almost frantic. He fancied every man a spy, every indifferent glance a look full of meaning. Before long the belief took possession of him that he was to be made the victim of some horrible private vengeance. ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... are made with great lucidity. The result is the throwing of an additional flood of light on the already dazzling truths of Holy Writ. The uses of such a work are self-obvious; and when we add that the plan is carried out with all the lucidity, faithfulness, piety, ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... languid, waked up to celebrate the psychology and the music of this new poetry, so delicate, fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty of extreme refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty made up of lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who are now approaching seventy will not forget with what emotion they listened, for instance, to that dialogue between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... stood him up and measured heights and even felt his arm for muscle. Then he made a remark that while lacking lucidity was nevertheless conclusive. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... Shakespeare imposed these lies upon the human consciousness. I had long suspected that Bluebeard was the victim of a similar fatality. All the circumstances of his life, as I found them related, were far from satisfying my mind, and from gratifying that craving for logic and lucidity by which I am incessantly consumed. On reflection, I perceived that they involved insurmountable difficulties. There was so great a desire to make me believe in the man's cruelty that it could not fail ...
— The Seven Wives Of Bluebeard - 1920 • Anatole France
... it by a finer-strung people at a chaster and more braced period of history. Nor should we be satisfied with such loose phrases as this, leading one to think, in a slovenly fashion (quite unsuitable to Tuscan artistic lucidity), that the difference lay in some vague metaphysical entity called spirit: the spirit of the Tuscan stonemasons of the early Middle Ages altered the actual tangible forms in their proportions and details: ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of the questions which were before the country; to discern the principles involved; and to so apply the principles to the questions as to clarify and illuminate them. There is little difficulty in accounting for the lucidity, simplicity, flexibility, and compass of Mr. Lincoln's style; it is not until we turn to its temperamental and spiritual qualities, to the soul of it, that we find ourselves ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... and precision, Lyly attained a lucidity almost unequalled among his contemporaries. His attention to form saved him from the besetting sin of Elizabethan prose,—incoherence by reason of an overwhelming display of ornament. His very illustrations ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... ran up against the couple. The old notary recognized the examining magistrate; and with the lucidity which comes of an experience of business, he saw that the fate of the d'Esgrignons lay in the hands of the young man ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... not in the least mollified but instead swinging to a certain degree of lucidity that was nevertheless governed largely by the hoot he had swallowed in ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... confidential gathering. The latter type of meeting is the more difficult to handle, and nothing could exceed his gift for presiding over and guiding debate. He could set out a political situation to his party with extraordinary force and lucidity. He could also, when he chose, so present an issue as to suggest almost irresistibly the conclusion which he desired—and this was how he led. Where he came short in the quality of leadership was ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... his lucidity. In no one could Buffon's aphorism on style find a better illustration, Le style c'est l'homme meme. In him science and literature, too often divorced, were closely united; and literature owes him a debt for importing into it so much of the highest scientific habit ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the Geological Society, in which he postulated the existence of 'three more or less contradictory systems of geological thought,' under the names of 'Catastrophism,' 'Uniformitarianism' and 'Evolution.' In this essay, distinguished by all his wonderful lucidity and forceful logic, Huxley sought to establish the position that evolution is a doctrine, distinct from and in advance of that of uniformitarianism, and that Hutton and Playfair—'and to a less extent Lyell'—had acted unwisely in deprecating the ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... two considerable works, "Principes de la Guerre" and "De la Conduite de La Guerre," which give a high idea of their author's character and talent. There is nothing in them that ought to scare away the average reader. Their style has the geometrical lucidity which is the polytechnician's birthright, but in spite of the deliberate impersonality generally attached to that style of writing, there emanates from it a curious quality which gradually shows us the author ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... an accomplished pianist fly over the keys. Her fingers seemed to be fairies, to use Perrault's expression, so infinite were the different actions of twisting, fitting, and pressure needed for the work, all hidden under grace of movement, while she adapted each motion to the result with the lucidity of instinct. ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... with the accent of pent-up sincerity, and even relieved because she was able to say something which she felt was true. For the last few days she had felt herself several times near that madness which is but an intolerable lucidity of apprehension. ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... moon is full of craters; therefore the moon is full of inhabitants. We appeal to any unbiased mind whether such argumentation is not as sound as much of our modern reasoning, conducted with every pretence to logic and lucidity. Besides, who has not heard of that astounding publication, issued fifty years since, and entitled Great Astronomical Discoveries lately made by Sir John Herschel, LL.D., F.R.S., etc., at the Cape of Good Hope? One writer dares to designate it a singular satire; stigmatizes it as the ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... power of literary form. It underwent some obscuration in the three volumes in which the great transformation of Germany and Prussia during the Napoleonic age was not very happily grouped round a biography of Stein. But here the reader once more finds that ease, lucidity, persuasiveness, and mild gravity that were first shown, as they were probably first acquired, in the serious consideration of religious and ethical subjects. Mr. Seeley's aversion for the florid, rhetorical, and over-decorated fashion of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is to be Moliere's antipodes, and to vanquish by congestion, clottedness, an anxious and determined dandyism of form and style. There is something bourgeois in his intolerance of the commonplace, something ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... interpretation is that of the working of great structural tendencies, or energies, or "qualities," as he calls them, which are common both to the inner and the outer universe. There are, he declares again and again with painful reiteration, but with little advance of lucidity, seven of these fundamental laws or energies or qualities, like the sevenfold colour-band of the rainbow, though they can never be untangled or sundered or thought of as standing side by side, for together in their unity and interprocesses they form the universe, with its warp ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... March 2.—In speech of flawless lucidity displaying perfect command of columnar figures upon which strength of British Navy is based, the WINSOME WINSTON moved Supplementary Estimates amounting to two and a-half millions. These raise total expenditure of year on the Navy to forty-eight millions. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 11, 1914 • Various
... trivial thoughts flashed through his brain he lost no time, not even in lighting a lamp, though the room was dark. What there was to be done must be done promptly, and with the same extraordinary lucidity of mind he remembered every simple remedy there was at his disposal. He ran upstairs, three steps at a time, for the blankets off his own bed. He had made up the kitchen fire, as was his wont, that evening, for the Boy to cook if it pleased him, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... more she reflected with all that lucidity with which the approach of a great crisis inspired her, the more she became impressed with the absolute necessity of flight. Yes, she must face unknown dangers, but only in order to escape from dangers which she knew but too ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau
... man meant for better things sunk at my age in such dishonour." St. George, in the same contemplative attitude, spoke softly but deliberately, and without perceptible emotion. His tone indeed suggested an impersonal lucidity that was practically cruel—cruel to himself—and made his young friend lay an argumentative hand on his arm. But he went on while his eyes seemed to follow the graces of the eighteenth-century ceiling: "Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. Let that ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... o'clock when Mr. CHAMBERLAIN rose to "open the Budget" (he clings to that old-fashioned phrase), and just after six when he completed a speech which Mr. ASQUITH (himself an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer) justly praised for its lucidity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... absent or dead, is an apostrophe, and when an inanimate object is assumed to be alive or an animate object is assumed to be raised to a higher plane of existence it is said to be by personification. Examples of the latter figure are "death's menace," "laugh of morn." In the line "Lucidity of soul unlocks the lips" are both metonymy and personification. The following is the beginning of ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... years older and stronger than the whole disease that is called Art. The objects of earth and heaven seem to combine into a nursery tale, and our relation to things seems for a moment so simple that a dancing lunatic would be needed to do justice to its lucidity and levity. The tree above my head is flapping like some gigantic bird standing on one leg; the moon is like the eye of a Cyclops. And, however much my face clouds with sombre vanity, or vulgar vengeance, or contemptible contempt, the bones ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... who knew the story of his early youth of the efforts of the poor boy, when he copied his compositions from the scraped wooden shovel, carefully to trim his expressions in order to save paper. His language had the energy of honest directness and he was a master of logical lucidity. He loved to point and enliven his reasoning by humorous illustrations, usually anecdotes of Western life, of which he had an inexhaustible store at his command. These anecdotes had not seldom a flavor of ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy. Many of us are profusely original, in that no man can understand us—violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity. The rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus. Bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable, and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal. This is why in France, where l'art de bien dire counts for so much and is so ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... talk about capital, however, is lucidity itself compared with the exposition of the remarkable thesis, "Wages not drawn from capital, but produced by labour," which occupies the third chapter of "Progress ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... fury fell into dust within him, like a crazy structure, leaving behind emptiness, desolation, regret. His resentment was not against the girl, but against life itself—that commonest of snares, in which he felt himself caught, seeing clearly the plot of plots and unconsoled by the lucidity ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... or not, as may be. The entries were scattered—as if put down when the stress of feeling had overcome her. They ranged over the two years of their married life. In each one she had seemed, with a startling lucidity, to have apprehended exactly her husband's state of mind toward her. She had written freely, baldly, without excess of sentimentality. "I know he hates me sometimes; I see it in his eyes." Again: "He is hideously kind." "He lives in a mental room that I can't break into." In another place ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... my question leaves nothing to be desired in the way of lucidity. Now, supposing I should happen to feel some repugnance to those delicate attentions on Morillo's part that you have just alluded to, what inducement would be sufficient to persuade you to 'bout ship, and land me on the wharf at Kingston, instead ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... among historians is in the first rank, and if the vast scale of his work and the enormous mass of detail involved in it are considered along with the learning and research employed in accumulating the material, and the breadth of view, lucidity of arrangement, and sense of proportion which have fused them into a distinct and splendid picture, his claims to the first place cannot be lightly dismissed. His style, though not pure, being tinged with Gallicisms, is one of the most noble in our literature, rich, harmonious, and stately; and ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... whatever cost to my literary vanity, that there is not the slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his per- pendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuber- ant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity, and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public Safety. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... clean, new, sweet lucidity of her just-returned consciousness she saw what she was not to forget, something like a steady, visible light, which was Neale's life. That was Neale himself. And as she looked at him silently, she thought it no wonder that she had been literally almost frightened to death ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... "is one that throws no light upon any of the facts. The second hypothesis" (which is unalloyed Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck) "is one that explains them all with transparent lucidity." Yet in his "Charles Darwin" Mr. Allen tells us that though Mr. Darwin "did not invent the development theory, he made it believable and ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... he looked on the sort of aspect he presented to the lady's discriminative regard. Of her feelings he had not a suspicion. But he knew with what extraordinary lucidity women can, when it pleases them, and when their feelings are not quite boiling under the noonday sun, seize all the sides of a character, and put their fingers on its weak point. He was cognizant of the total absence of the humorous ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink in her cheeks deepened ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... surveying.[93] His task was to distinguish the essential points of the problem, to state them plainly, and to weigh the evidence on each side. In this he shows notable clearness of thought, and also, throughout the rather long treatment of a complicated subject, great lucidity in arrangement and statement. He was led by this study to change the opinion which he had held in common with most of his countrymen, and to adopt the belief that the poems were essentially creations of Macpherson, with only the names and some parts ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... it?" Three exasperated voices screamed the question, and even Amy began to realize that her explanation had lacked lucidity. She ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... 33. B. to B's 5th is evidence with what perfect lucidity Lasker detects the weak spots, and how immediately he takes advantage of his ...
— The Blue Book of Chess - Teaching the Rudiments of the Game, and Giving an Analysis - of All the Recognized Openings • Howard Staunton and "Modern Authorities"
... unite Greece; that the energies of the city should be reserved for a real emergency; but that, before the city can successfully cope with any war, there must be a better organization of resources, and, first of all, a reform of the navy, which he outlines with characteristic lucidity ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... which, if spoken by another, would sometimes have sounded commonplace or obvious. Sarcasm he could use with effect, and a telling point was often made by an epigrammatic phrase which delighted his hearers. And, more than all else, his meaning was never in doubt. In lucidity of statement he excelled many much greater orators, and was surpassed by none; and these qualities, added to his unmistakable sincerity and candour, made him one of the most persuasive of speakers on the platform, as he was also, of course, in ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... Father Beron with his monotonous phrase, "Will you confess now?" reaching him in an awful iteration and lucidity of meaning through the delirious incoherence of unbearable pain. He could not forget. But that was not the worst. Had he met Father Beron in the street after all these years Dr. Monygham was sure he would have quailed ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... at the same time every one of Turner's contemporaries were surrounded by sunsets of precisely the same kind, and yet only Turner was capable of producing such masterpieces as his own. The case of the writer and the artist, indeed, illustrates with singular lucidity the fact which the philosophy of the evolutionary sociologists ignores that the great man does great things, not in virtue of conditions which he shares with the dullest and the feeblest of the men around him, but in virtue of the manner in which his exceptional genius ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... accident—physical only—the possibility of which their former agreements had unfortunately not foreseen. Hermia was mistaken—that was all. And yet—why this pursuit? It all seemed a little too deep for his comprehension at the present moment. His mind groped for lucidity, failed, and then ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... is intellectually vain does not make himself incomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with the difference between his readers' intelligence and his own that he talks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poet was ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid? But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart does not elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... may be lost and an irretrievable error committed by a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of thought. "He who would be Caesar anywhere," says Kipling, "must know everything everywhere." Nearly everything comes to the man who is ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... approached with eagerness. Again there is no disappointment. On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms. It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo. I like the way Kullak marks ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... I cannot go, but I must add that the lines are of the most perfect metrical lucidity and the purest melody when compared with some written by the LAUREATE in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 6, 1917 • Various
... itself several times that day and the next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with a fervent lucidity every point in her imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude, through which his looks, his words, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... He does not refer to Anthony Collins' essay on Liberty, published thirty-three years before, in which the same question is treated to the same effect, with singular force and lucidity. It may be said, perhaps, that it is not wonderful that the two freethinkers should follow the same line of reasoning; but no such theory will account for the fact that in 1754, the famous Calvinistic divine, Jonathan Edwards, President of the College of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... commanding minds of the century. He had a mental equipment of the foremost order, great intellectual curiosity, immense vigour and many-sidedness, combined with a firm grasp of a subject, perfect clearness of thought, and absolute lucidity of expression. ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... one of his prose works, Longfellow himself says, "In character, in manners, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." This simplicity he steadily aimed at, and in almost all his writings reached; and the result is the sweet lucidity which is manifest in his best poems. His verse has been characterised as "simple, musical, sincere, sympathetic, clear as crystal, and pure as snow." He has written in a great variety of measures— in more, perhaps, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... same who suggested and executed the brilliant stroke that disconcerted Dearborn's campaign in 1813; and who on the present occasion drew up the instructions to Riall, and to Lieutenant-Colonel Tucker, the officer in charge of the forts, with a delightful lucidity which characterizes all papers signed by him.[316] The brigs "Star" and "Charwell" left York July 23, with a re-enforcement of four hundred men for Fort Niagara, in which post the officer commanding was ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... that the great students are those who have combined the Teutonic thoroughness with the French comprehensiveness and lucidity. Gibbon and Mommsen are the great examples to which he points. England surely has been very rich in writers thorough and lucid, but we may observe that they follow rather the eighteenth-century tradition, with its intelligible common sense, than the ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... phenomena of the exterior world. As they broke upon him, these phenomena were discerned with wonderful quickness of perception, and made to contribute important principles to the stock of general knowledge. This lucidity of spirit, this quick convertibility of facts to principles, distinguish him from the dawn to the close of his sublime enterprise, insomuch that, with all the sallying ardor of his imagination, his ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... geometry gratis, and all who appreciated the help that was being offered to them streamed to his lessons. This young student, later Pastor Joergen Lund, had a remarkable gift for mathematics, and gave his instruction with a lucidity, a fire, and a swing that carried his hearers with him. I, who had never before been able to understand a word of the subject, became keenly interested in it, and before many lessons were over was ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... outside the colleges, crowded the first lecture to show our feeling not only for M. Taine, but for a France wounded and trampled on by her own children. The few dignified and touching words with which he opened his course, his fine, dark head, the attractiveness of his subject, the lucidity of his handling of it, made the lecture a great success; and a few nights afterward at dinner at Balliol I found myself sitting next the great man. In his published Correspondence there is a letter describing this dinner which shows ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as unfadingly—if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It was impossible after that not to read, for one's uses, high lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical appreciation, ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... the slightest danger of his reading these remarks, I may treat him as public property. With his diminutive stature and his perpendicular spirit, his flushed face, expressive protuberant eyes, high peremptory voice, extreme volubility, lucidity and neatness of utterance, he reminded me of the gentry who figure in the revolutions of his native land. If he was not a fierce little Jacobin, he ought to have been, for I am sure there were many men of his pattern on the Committee of Public ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... facts so long and openly discussed, there can be no question. The monks of Mount Athos did indeed put themselves into a state which may with safety be called one of mental lucidity, by fixing their eyes intently on a point. Mr. Robertson, who used to induce the mesmeric sleep by causing his votaries to fix their eyes on a wafer, had better precedent than he supposed for his practice; and Miss Martineau, who, in her artificial trances, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... when the mise-en-scene was quite to his liking, "that a good map, and a few realistic models of the principal buildings dealt with in my discourse, give a lucidity and a coherence ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy
... made it clear. He would constantly repeat whole phrases word for word in the same sentence, rather than risk ambiguity by abbreviation. His genius showed itself in turning this method of a laborious lucidity into a peculiarly exasperating form of satire and controversy. Newman's strength was in a sort of stifled passion, a dangerous patience of polite logic and then: "Cowards! if I advanced a step you would run away: it is not ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... the Jew, John Castell. I think that the matter may possibly be managed, provided that the money is all right, for, as you know, I do not work for nothing. Thus——'" And Inez dictated with admirable lucidity those suggestions as to the rescue of Castell, with which the reader is already acquainted, ending ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... ago the President wrote a letter to McClellan, with ability and lucidity, exposing to view the military urgency of a movement on the enemy with an army of one hundred and forty thousand men, as has now McClellan at Harper's Ferry. But the letter ends by saying that all that it contains is not to be considered by McNapoleon as being an order. Of course Mac obeys—the ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... is taken from Prof. Sherman's great work Roman Law in the Modern World, Boston, 1917. The learned author has laid philosophical lawyers of all countries under heavy obligations by this splendid book, as noted for its lucidity as for its learning. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... aghast for my own lucidity when I read what you say as to the first quatrain of my Keats sonnet. However, I always take these misconceptions as warnings to the Muse, and may probably alter the opening ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... from the hands of such patrons as of receiving her straight, say, from those of Mrs. Drack. It was a high note, too, of Julia's wonderful composition that, even in the long, lonely moan of her conviction of her now certain ruin, all this grim lucidity, the perfect clearance of passion, but made her supremely proud ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... holds the parts of a sentence together, is of greater importance than Mass. Upon Coherence depends the meaning of a sentence; upon Mass the force with which the meaning is expressed. That the meaning may be clear, it is necessary that the relation of the parts shall be perfectly evident. This lucidity is gained by placing related parts near together, and conversely, by separating unrelated ideas; by using parallel constructions for parallel thoughts; and by indicating relations by the correct use ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... art: the art of breaking the cables, the roots, the stolons, the slender rhizomes which check the body's descent into the grave. To the work of the shovel and the pick must be added that of the shears. All this is perfectly logical and may be foreseen with complete lucidity. Nevertheless, let us invoke experiment, the best ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... bound. They had of late determined that the old man must not be disturbed in his profound rest by any question tending to cause a state of mental activity. The test of a very fine instrument had proved that the shortest interval of positive lucidity was followed by a slight but distinctly perceptible rise of temperature in the body, and this could mean only a waste of the precious tissues they were so carefully preserving. They hoped and believed that the grand crisis was ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... August, nineteen-fourteen, he found himself thinking, in perfect freedom and with perfect lucidity, about the War. He had really known, half the time, that it was the greatest War of Independence that had ever been. As for his old hatred of the British Empire, he had seen long ago that there was no such thing, in the continental sense of Empire; there was a unique thing, ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... of the neo-Catholic school, which regarded the book as dangerous and absurd. It cannot be denied, however, that the problems were cleverly put, and the whole of these syllogistical dialectics formed an excellent course of training. I owe my lucidity of mind, more especially what skill I possess in dividing my subject (which is an art of capital importance, one of the conditions of the art of writing), to my divinity training, and in particular to geometry, which is the truest application of the syllogistical method. M. Manier mixed up ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... we walk the four miles to the famous caves, guided by a boy who wears the Nizam's livery, and explains to us, in a language we do not know, but with perfect lucidity, that it is to him, and no one else, that backsheesh is due. He sings snatches of music as old and strange as the hills; picks us balls of cotton, and prickly pear; and once stops to point to the fresh tracks of a panther. ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... secret fear, which, during the latter period of this daring game, so fired his blood and heated his brain that there came moments when he fell into the morbid condition of the gambler, who follows with his eye the roll of the ball on which he has staked his last penny. The senses then have a lucidity in their action and the mind takes a range, which human knowledge ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... the mischief we are, 'midst the jumble and jar of factions and fads, of crotchets and cads, of Tolstois and Jeunes, and Ibsens (whose lunes are more lunatic still). Oh, I'd learn with a will from any or aught, who could bring me, fresh caught, with lucidity fraught (what so long I have sought) a Clear Comforting Thought—though a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... of Sir Robert Ball as a writer on astronomy at once popular and scientific is in itself more than sufficient recommendation of his newly published 'Atlas of Astronomy.' ... The introduction is written with Sir Robert Ball's well-known lucidity and simplicity of exposition, and altogether the Atlas is admirably adapted to meet the needs and smooth the difficulties of young and inexperienced students of astronomy, as well as materially to assist the researches of those that ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... never gossiped; the musing impersonality and impartiality with which she commented and surmised lifted her themes to a realm almost of art; she was pungent, yet never malicious, and the tolerant lucidity of her ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... facts which by general consent in the present stage of psychological science require study is the nature, and if possible the cause, of a special lucidity, a sensitiveness of perception, or accessibility to ideas appearing to arrive through channels other than usual organs of sense, which is sometimes met with among simple people[1] in a rudimentary form, ...
— Mrs. Piper & the Society for Psychical Research • Michael Sage
... emphasis of line than in the nave, and there is less delicacy of detail; but the vaulting shafts are no more important, and the window tracery still plays a considerable part in the design. Hence the choir lacks that air of decision, that extreme lucidity, to be found in the design of the nave at Winchester. If it were not for the choir furniture, the stalls, the throne and pulpit, and the altar, this want of decision in the design would be much more evident than it is. But the builders of ...
— The Cathedral Church of York - Bell's Cathedrals: A Description of Its Fabric and A Brief - History of the Archi-Episcopal See • A. Clutton-Brock
... little to the greatness of such a one as Caesar, to add that in an age of oratory he stood in the first rank of orators; that his historical writings are an unrivalled model of vigor, lucidity, and elegance; that he carried his scientific culture to a point very unusual among his countrymen; and that his personal prowess and feats of endurance were the admiration of veteran soldiers. Women loved him, and he loved them. Enjoying life thoroughly, he was temperate in all things. To no man ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... may be received by those below, 795-l. Light inclosed in the seeds of species has its home in Universal Spirit, 783-m. Light initiates in Bacchian Mysteries cry Hail new-born, 522-u. Light is the creative power of Deity, 267-l. Light is the equilibrium of Shadow and Lucidity, 845-u. Light is the Father and Mother of all, 267-u. Light, modern and ancient conception of, 76-l. Light not Spirit, but the instrument of the Spirit, 98-l. Light not the body of the Protoplastes, but first physical manifestation, 98-l. Light of Ainsoph inheres in the Vessel as their Life, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Annet again; "that was just the reason." She was speaking frankly, as a child can speak; but children have their own code of honour, and it forbids them to give away a friend. "Jan was telling us, only the other day," she explained with careful lucidity, "how his father had once caught a mermaid in a pool there. We wanted very much to see one, and so we planned to go. But afterwards, when father rowed us home, we did not like to tell him about it. We were afraid he would laugh at us; and we were frightened, too; afraid that the ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... them in book form. You will experience the same pleasure as I do when you take them up, and you will at once compare them with some one of the old masters whose rival indeed he is. You will find even greater charm in the style of his historical compositions, in its terseness, its lucidity, smoothness, brilliancy and stateliness, for there is the same vigour in the historical harangues as there is in his own orations, only rather ...
— The Letters of the Younger Pliny - Title: The Letters of Pliny the Younger - - Series 1, Volume 1 • Pliny the Younger
... never been a clear writer in verse; Modern Love requires reading and re-reading; but at one time he had a somewhat exasperating semblance of lucidity, which still lurks mockingly about his work. A freshman who heard Mallarme lecture at Oxford said when he came away: 'I understood every word, but not a single sentence.' Meredith is sometimes equally tantalising. The meaning seems to be there, just beyond one, clearly visible on the other side ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... that he narrowed the range of his influence by the views he expressed with regard to culture and to all human learning. He forgot that, without the logic, the wit, the irony, the singular force and lucidity of style displayed in his own writings, he would have lost the power as a religious teacher which he was so eager ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... logician, with his usual lucidity and precision, lays it down that they shall be strictly practical and professional. "Make professors (regents) for me," said he one day in connection with the Ecole normale, "and not litterateurs, wits ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Madame Rameau. He was, indeed, one of those men in whom excess of drink, when slept off, is succeeded by extreme mildness, the effect of nervous exhaustion, and by a dejected repentance, which, to his mother, seemed a propitious lucidity of the ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... than by water and this simile is used with others in the Questions of Milinda. We cannot assume that this book reflects the views of the Buddha or his immediate followers, but it is the work of an Indian in touch with good tradition who lived a few centuries later and expressed his opinions with lucidity. It denies the existence of transmigration and of the soul and then proceeds to illustrate by metaphors and analogies how two successive lives can be the same and yet not the same. For instance, suppose a man carelessly allows his lamp to set his thatch on fire ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... in its clutches once again, the charm of it heightened by months of abstinence. For a while he held out against it; but the quiet within and without, the certainty of freedom from interruption, the lucidity of thought that brains of a certain order seem only able to arrive at in the small hours, were powerful advocates for surrender; and little by little habit conquered. He smoked more and slept less; and the quality of his work improved in ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... one great merit to the mind of a foreigner denied the lucidity of our Italian intelligence—it was adorably simple. I can give it to you now in a nutshell as I learned it later, not as I knew it then, for I did not know it then. Nobody knew it then except Messer Simone of the one part, and Messer Griffo of the other part, and ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... place whence she could survey the assembly. On the wall behind her hung a great sheet of paper on which were inscribed the names of all who had deposited money with Mutimer. Adela glanced at it and understood. Instead of being agitated she possessed an extraordinary lucidity of mind, a calmness of nerve which she afterwards remembered ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... and originality of even a second-rate man, are enough to establish an artist's reputation, made me understand that persistent toil and a thorough knowledge of the craft, might, in some happy hour of lucidity, power, and enthusiasm, by the fortunate occurrence of a subject in perfect concord with the tendency of our mind, lead to the production of a single work, short but as perfect as we can make it. Then I learned ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... delicacy, with regard to which, in Christian communities, religious authority only can legislate. These excepted, the Justinian code, with some necessary modifications, prevailed. Few changes have been made since Gregory the Sixteenth's time, and they are codified with such perfect scientific lucidity as to be available to practitioners. This is one of the special labors of the Council of State, which is aided by a commission consisting of the most eminent and learned jurists of Rome. The distinguished statesman (Baron Sauzet), moreover, repels the idea of thrusting on the Romans the Code ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... modest little volume called "The Evolution of an Empire" set forth, with a lucidity that was as remarkable as its brevity, the beginnings and growth of Germany; its author, Mary Platt Parmele, has since followed the same methods in treating France and England, and now brings out a fourth volume in the noteworthy series, a somewhat larger book, called ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 36, July 15, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... of order in her profession, over which so long had ruled chaos. And as her rich voice led the intrigued audience from one brilliant scene to another, in which she reincarnated before their eyes a very flower of the old Southern chivalry with dash, finish, and lucidity, he felt as if he had done his best and now had a right to be allowed to depart in peace from the world of tinsel and illusion. As Lindsey and Height held the audience spell-bound while the tempted wife dueled with her might against the tender and desperate lover, placing, ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Wassermann may have served as a model for his younger fellow-townsman Bernhard Kellermann (born at Fuerth in 1879). He too is a seeker after new forms of expression for psychical reactions; but he presents himself to us from the very first as a purer nature of greater delicacy and lucidity. He introduces himself as a troubadour of narrative art in his first two novels Yester and Li, a Story of Longing (1904) and Ingeborg (1905). With unutterable tenderness and richness of tone he depicts ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the bar whom I have ever heard reasoned with such perfect lucidity. He would explain a case which his client the solicitor would have wrapped up in fifty or sixty brief sheets, and involved in as much obscurity as it were well possible, to a committee in a few minutes; and ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... Constitution does resemble the Spanish Inquisition in this: that it is founded on a creed. America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... whole lecture, and at the same time the point on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance.' It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... "You are lucidity itself," she replied. "Will you forgive me if I leave you? I am scarcely used to this sort of situation, and I should ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... consideration of Webster's drama as a whole, especially in a book dedicated to Italian byways. For that mysterious man of genius had explored the dark and devious paths of Renaissance vice, and had penetrated the secrets of Italian wickedness with truly appalling lucidity. His tragedies, though worthless as historical documents, have singular value as commentaries upon history, as revelations to us of the spirit of the sixteenth century ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... faults, coarseness and unbridled violence of language, did not alienate most of his contemporaries. Even his Latin works, too harshly described by Hallam as "bellowing in bad Latin," were well adapted to the spirit of the age. But nothing like his German writings had ever been seen before. In lucidity and copiousness of language, in directness and vigor, in satire and argument and invective, in humor and aptness of illustration and allusion, the numerous tracts, political and theological, which poured from his pen, surpassed all that had hitherto been ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Moliere would not have been more than an act of strict justice. In all cases every thing has its day; now, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the most delicate, the most thorny points of doctrine were discussed with an entire good faith, with perfect lucidity, and in a style that placed many members of the faculty in the rank Of our best speakers. Servan, however, goes beyond the limits of a scientific discussion, when, without any sort of excuse, he accuses his adversaries of being anti-mesmerists through esprit de corps, ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... no reply to that except a frank confession that we did not know our own minds; that we came to a knowledge of them only when Germany's attack on France forced us to make them up at last; that though doubtless a chronic state of perfect lucidity and long prevision on our part would have been highly convenient, yet there is a good deal to be said for the policy of not fording a stream until you come to it; and that in any case we must entirely decline to admit ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... be admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity; that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings, have endeared him to none. It is impossible to take one's ease with Milton, to induce him ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... reputation that already stood very high. No recent book on any political question has been so good, and we are inclined to think it marks out Mr. Cook as the ablest political journalist of the day. The writing is of a masterly lucidity.'—Literature. ...
— Mr. Edward Arnold's New and Popular Books, December, 1901 • Edward Arnold
... you," said Syme with restraint, "that your remarks convey no impression to my mind. Perhaps if you were to remove the remains of your original forehead and some portion of what was once your chin, your meaning would become clearer. Mental lucidity fulfils itself in many ways. What do you mean by saying that the train has caught you? It may be my literary fancy, but somehow I feel that it ought ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... points need not be elaborated further. As we proceed to deal with the methods of naval warfare they will gather force and lucidity. Enough has been said to mark the shoals and warn us that, admirably constructed as is the craft which the military strategists have provided for our use, we must be ...
— Some Principles of Maritime Strategy • Julian Stafford Corbett
... parts of the last plays from English history is one of full, noble and comparatively equable eloquence. The 'honey-tongued' sweetness and beauty of Shakespeare's early writing, as seen in Romeo and Juliet or the Midsummer-Night's Dream, remain; the ease and lucidity remain; but there is an accession of force and weight. We find no great change from this style when we come to Julius Caesar,[28] which may be taken to mark its culmination. At this point in Shakespeare's literary development he reaches, if the phrase may be pardoned, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... still wading in deeper and deeper, inch by inch, the cautious minister was fast finding himself too far advanced to retreat. He was rarely decided, however, and never lucid; and least of all in emergencies, when decision and lucidity would have been more valuable than any ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... have the gift of laughter, even though his laughter ring harsh and painful. He must have the gift of mordant speech, of epigram, and of rhetoric. He must drive his points home with directness and lucidity. Mere denunciation of vice is not enough. Few prophets are satirists; ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... lucidity. How many dawns a morning brings! His first words were "How goes it with the child?" Having heard that she had had a good night, and was almost well, he turned over, and fell fast asleep. Then Dorothy, who had been by his bed all night, resumed her own ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... Egypt, and, if possible, reach down to their meaning, for meaning they must have, or be meaningless. We shall find that this Fourth Book stands in the front rank of Homeric poetry for depth and suggestiveness, if not for epical lucidity. ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... her head with her kind lucidity. "Not adventures—heaven forbid! You've had yours—as I've had mine; and my idea has been, all along, that we should neither of us begin again. My own last, precisely, has been doing for you all you so prettily mention. But it consists simply in ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... fellows hearty voiced, inexhaustible, spilling over with energy and vitality, deep down he was a very weary man. And sometime under the liquor drug, snatches of wisdom came to him far more lucidity than in his sober moments, as, for instance, one night, when he sat on the edge of the bed with one shoe in his hand and meditated on Dede's aphorism to the effect that he could not sleep in more than one bed at a time. Still holding the shoe, he looked ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... the larger section of the public, to whom the series of Great Writers is addressed, no record of Emerson's life and work could be more desirable, both in breadth of treatment and lucidity of style, than ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Ghost. (Why had he gone there to lunch? That was the key to it. WHY had he gone there to lunch?)... He began to have remorse for everything, for everything he had ever done, for everything he had ever not done, for everything in the world. In a moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd If birth proceeds, if things subsist; The life of plants, and stones, and rain, The life he craves—if not in vain Fate gave, what chance shall not control, His sad lucidity ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... the assumption and the probability, have in contrast to their position among other sciences only a heuristic interest to us criminalists. Even assumptions, when they become hypotheses, have in various disciplines a various value, and the greatest lucidity and the best work occur mainly in the quarrel about an acutely ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... was spent in seeing more visitors and in philosophical and moral talks, in which Sand developed his social and religious theories with a lucidity of expression and an elevation of thought such as he had, perhaps, never before shown. The governor of the prison from whom I heard these details, told me that he should all his life regret that he did not know shorthand, so that he might have noted all these thoughts, which would have formed ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... in a renewed communion with nature. The waters of the Rhone and the Arve, the murmur of the river, the austerity of its banks, the brilliancy of the foliage, the play of the leaves, the splendor of the July sunlight, the rich fertility of the fields, the lucidity of the distant mountains, the whiteness of the glaciers under the azure serenity of the sky, the sparkle and foam of the mingling rivers, the leafy masses of the La Batie woods,—all and everything delighted me. It seemed to me as though the years of strength had come back to me. I was overwhelmed ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... difficult, she knew, for persons like Stephen or herself to be heroic in appropriate circumstances; the difficulty began when one was compelled to sustain the heroic role long after the appropriate circumstances had passed away. Yet, in spite of the cynical lucidity of her judgment, the romantic in her heart longed to have Stephen, by one generous act of devotion, prove her theory fallacious. Her strongest impulse, the impulse to create happiness, to repair, as her father had once described it, crippled destinies; this ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow |
