"Naturalness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... THE EARLY AND SACRED THEORIES OF DISEASE. Naturalness of the idea of supernatural intervention in causing and curing disease Prevalence of this idea in ancient civilizations Beginnings of a scientific theory of medicine The twofold influence of Christianity ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the Stuarts in 1660 came naturally the restoration of the Prayer Book, and with equal naturalness a revision of it. But of what sort should the revision be, and under whose auspices conducted? This was an anxious question for the advisers, civil and ecclesiastical, of the restored king. Should the second Charles take up ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... by the unaffected naturalness of his words, was unfeignedly relieved at finding him restored to the normal. Usually his supply of light-hearted badinage was unceasing. He knew exactly when and how to season it with more serious statements. It is this rare quality that makes tolerable a long ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... been the handmaid of Poetry; and in our modern languages, even, which are so artificial and removed from primitive enthusiasm and naturalness, no composer of opera would consent to adapt his inspirations to a prose libretto. It was far more so in primitive times; and it maybe said that in those days poetry was never composed unless to be sung or played on instruments. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... qualities belong. One day, perhaps, we may come to forget the distant horizon, with full knowledge of the situation, to be content with "what is here and now"; and herein is the essence of classical feeling. But by us of the present moment, certainly—by us for whom the Greek spirit, with its engaging naturalness, simple, chastened, debonair, tryphes, habrotetos, khlides, khariton, himerou, pothou pater, is itself the Sangrail of an endless pilgrimage, Coleridge, with his passion for the absolute, for something fixed where all is moving, his ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... consent, as it is termed, has ever been esteemed one of the foremost testimonies, if not indeed the most convincing testimony, to the truth of the doctrine. Unless the belief can be shown to be artificial or sinful, it must seem conclusive. Its innocence is self evident, and its naturalness is evidenced ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... perfect instances of it. De Quincey and Coleridge are two of the best illustrations whom I can recall, while certain analytical character-sifters in modern novels seem the farthest remote from such genial naturalness. ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... for any oratory whatever, should be as likely to applaud theirs as our own. When an English speaker sits down, you feel that you have been listening to a real man, and not to an actor; his sentiments have a wholesome earth-smell in them, though, very likely, this apparent naturalness is as much an art as what we expend in rounding a sentence or elaborating ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... valuable is it as a reminder of the essential constructive task of which the two primary generalizations of Socialism we have so far been developing are but the outward and visible forms. There is no untutored naturalness in Socialism, no uneducated blind force on our side. Socialism is made of struggling Good Will, made out of a conflict of wills. I have tried to let it become apparent that while I do firmly believe not only in the splendour and nobility of the Socialist dream but in its ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and watch the marked way in which He co-operates with the setting free of every seed as it ripens—how He brings across our path the soul who needs the very lesson He has just been teaching us—how the chance comes with perfect naturalness of reaching another over whom we have been longing. If our eyes are up, and our hands are off—if we learn to "wait on our ministering" like the seeds, in utter dependence on Him, we shall be able ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... personifies the Deity with the greatest ease and naturalness. The primitive man interprets the whole world about him by the analogy of his own activity. He sees in all the phenomena of nature the presence of personal beings,—beings who act and suffer and enjoy and love and hate as he does himself. ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... with a fine naturalness the little group knelt by the chairs, and two of the four, he who was pastor of the whole flock and he who with simple dignity was priest in his own household, gave thanks to God for the manifold goodness of Christian people, of which they ...
— John Wesley, Jr. - The Story of an Experiment • Dan B. Brummitt
... The Professor gave a gasp of astonishment at his altered appearance. His tweed suit seemed to have been turned inside out. There were no lapels now and it was buttoned up to his neck. He wore a long white apron; a peaked cap and a chin-piece of astonishing naturalness had transformed him into the semblance ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Here, of course, different voices give very different advantages; but there are some common secrets, so to speak, which all—who will make a sacred business of it—may profitably and effectively use. Above all, there is the secret of quiet naturalness; the watchful avoidance (do not forget this) of tricks and mannerisms in delivery;[30] the watchful cultivation of the sort of utterance which we should use in an earnest conversation on grave subjects, with only such differences ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... is, how we may best cast a literary sentence into logical form, good grounds for a definite answer may perhaps be found. We must not try to stand upon the naturalness of expression, for Dark is the fate of man is quite as natural as Man is mortal. When the purpose is not merely to state a fact, but also to express our feelings about it, to place the grammatical predicate first may be perfectly natural ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Knowledge, power, and action are of his nature. [Footnote: Svabhavikijnana bala kriya cha.] It is because this naturalness has not yet been born in us that we tend to divide joy from work. Our day of work is not our day of joy— for that we require a holiday; for, miserable that we are, we cannot find our holiday in our work. The river finds its holiday in its onward flow, the fire ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... did not seem to be aware of it, for he greeted Maria Clara and her friends with naturalness and sat down at their side. The only ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... prisoner turned from his steadfast contemplation of the throng, a psychic wave overflowed and lifted all the great assembly. This was spectacle, this was drama! The oldest of all the first principles stirred under the stimulus, and with savage naturalness sucked in the ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... discontents and intrigues that are the concomitants of an overwhelming party advantage broke against him as waves break against a cliff. He foresaw so far in these matters that it seemed he scarcely troubled to foresee. He brought political art to the last triumph of naturalness. Always for me he has been the typical aristocrat, so typical and above the mere forms of aristocracy, that he remained a commoner to ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... that it was not her power of saying things of this sort that kindled Rousseau's flame, but rather the sprightly naturalness, frankness, and kindly softness of a character which in his opinion united every virtue except prudence and strength, the two which Rousseau would be least likely to miss. The bond of union between them was subtle. She found in Rousseau a sympathetic listener while she told the story of her ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... But he is a genuine poet, and a generous, warm-hearted man, and in our opinion by far the greatest master of the pentameter that Rome ever produced. Its rhythm in his hands rises at times almost into grandeur. There are passages in the elegy on Cornelia (which concludes the series) whose noble naturalness and stirring emphasis bespeak a great and patriotic inspiration; and no small part of this effect is due to his vigorous handling of a somewhat feeble metre. [26] Mechanically speaking, he is a disciple in the same school ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... intensities of self, which had been a conscious religious end for thousands of years, which men had sought in mortifications, in the wilderness, in meditation, and by innumerable strange paths, was coming at last with the effect of naturalness into the talk of men, into the books they read, into their unconscious gestures, into their newspapers and daily purposes and everyday acts. The broad horizons, the magic possibilities that the spirit of the seeker had revealed to them, were charming them out of those ancient and instinctive ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... until his successor was installed In that subsequent ceremony "the horns" were said to be taken from the grave of the deceased ruler and placed upon the head of his successor The social and religious functions of the phratry, and its naturalness in the organic system of ancient society, are rendered apparent by this ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... examining and wondering at the various canvases. A woman who had just left her bath passed her arms into the sleeves of a long white wrapper. There was something peculiarly attractive in the picture. The picture said something that had not been said before, and Mildred admired its naturalness. But she was still more interested in the fact that the picture had been painted from the woman who had ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... which underlies this particular phase of the theory of the theatre. The successive changes in the physical aspect of the English theatre during the last three centuries have all tended toward greater naturalness, intimacy, and subtlety, in the drama itself and in the physical aids to its presentment. This progress, with its constant illustration of the interdependence of the drama and the stage, may most conveniently be studied in historical review; and to such a review ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... the American colony. Following a fashion, which Tom was sure had been made for his benefit, she had cut off her obnoxious red hair and substituted in its place a wig of reddish brown, which for naturalness and beauty was a marvel of art and skill, and became her so well that Tom really thought her handsome, or at least very stylish and stunning, which was better than mere beauty. They had a suite of rooms at the Continental, and there Harold and ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... the great Papal ring, not merely trembling, but even a sign of constriction or tenseness, it might well have been, thought the priest afterwards, that the scene would have ended very differently. But the naturalness and ease of the pose were absolute. He stood there, the hands lightly laid one upon the other, his face palish certainly, but not colourless. There was even a slight flush in his cheeks from his quick walk up the long hall. It was a situation in which the weight of a hair would ...
— Dawn of All • Robert Hugh Benson
... perspective ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place. Ethelberta's plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair—as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends. By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed. She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near her or not, and, in her fear ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... child is filled with any strong emotion by a surprising event or intelligence, it runs to discharge it on others, impatient of their sympathy; and it marks, I fancy, the simplicity and greater naturalness of this period (Jacob's), that the grown-up men and women ran to meet each other, giving way to their ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a deep current of melancholy was under your Mother's Humour. Not 'under,' neither: for it came up as naturally to the surface as her Humour. My mother always said that one great charm in her was, her Naturalness. ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... may be compared to a ghost since it is something we talk about but have never seen, and Lichtenberg, in his essay Ueber die Macht der Liebe, disputes and denies its reality and naturalness—but both are in the wrong. For if it were foreign to and contradicted human nature—in other words, if it were merely an imaginary caricature, it would not have been depicted with such zeal by the poets of all ages, or accepted ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... between Pope and his friends exhibit an interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care. Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... meal, and little, after all, was eaten, though brave attempts at cheerfulness and naturalness were made by all three. Bertram, especially, talked, and tried to make sure that the shadow on Billy's face was at least not the one his own conduct ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter
... of character, in the perfect naturalness with which all his personages act out their respective parts, no novelist is more realistic than Thackeray. But realism has a broader application. A novelist who takes every-day life for his subject has not only to give the stamp of nature to all his ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... get them of any truthful sort whatsoever, for the babies regarded the photographer—the kindest and mildest of men—with the gravest suspicion: and the moment he appeared, little faces, all animation before, would stiffen into shyness, and the light would slip out of them, and the naturalness, so that all the camera saw, and therefore all it could show, was a ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... visited Italy will be reminded of more than one picture by this gorgeous Vision of Beauty, equally sublime and pure in its Paradisaical naturalness. Lodge wrote it on a voyage to "the Islands of Terceras and the Canaries"; and he seems to have caught, in those southern seas, no small portion of the qualities which marked the almost contemporary Art of Venice,—the glory and the glow of Veronese, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and breaks fresh ground in fiction.... All the leading characters in the book—Almayer, his wife, his daughter, and Dain, the daughter's native lover—are well drawn, and the parting between father and daughter has a pathetic naturalness about it, unspoiled by straining after effect. There are, too, some admirably graphic passages in the book. The approach of a monsoon is most effectively described.... The name of Mr. Joseph Conrad is new to us, but it appears to us as if he might ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the departure of the traitor comes this singular burst of triumph in our text. The Evangelist emphasises the connection by that: 'Therefore, when he was gone out, Jesus said.' There is a wonderful touch of truth and naturalness in that connection. The traitor was gone. His presence had been a restraint; and now that that 'spot in their feast of charity' had disappeared, the Master felt at ease; and like some stream, out of the bed of which a black rock has been taken, His words flow more freely. How intensely ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... angel, or keeping an unsavory spirit at arm's length with that "gold-headed cane" which his London host describes as his inseparable companion in walking. His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness and probability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almost bordering on the ludicrous. In his Memorable Relations he manifests nothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates of paradise, or following the "pained fiend" in his flight ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... will any pupil write over three hundred words. One hundred are often better. The short composition gives an opportunity for the study of accuracy of expression. What details to include; in what order to arrange them that they produce the best effect, both of vividness and naturalness; and the influence of the point of view and the purpose of the author on the unity of description should be kept constantly present in the exercises. Careful attention should be paid to choice of words, for on right words depends ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... feet in the centre of a group of men, discussing some question as though she were in her studio, and watching the duke come towards her, while tranquilly taking her sherbet. She greeted him with perfect naturalness. Those near had discreetly retired to a little distance. There seemed to exist between them, however, notwithstanding what de Gery had overheard with regard to their presumed relations, nothing more than a quite intellectual intimacy, a ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... by reason of his extreme naturalness, but his unbecoming conduct at the time of the Fouquet trial proved painful to his Majesty, who considered the following ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy to embody them."—North ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... assumed for the occasion and those who wear them habitually. The former are apt to forget themselves occasionally, or they overact their part, or if they succeed in sustaining a perfect elegance of deportment that is really pleasing as an effort of art, they always want the grace of naturalness and simplicity which belongs to the Manners of those who have made courtesy and refinement their own by loving them. It is only when we act as we love to act, that our Manners are truly our own. If we cultivate the external forms of politeness ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... the Spectateur he replies to the accusation that he attempted in his writings to display his wit at the expense of naturalness. "Combien croit-on, par exemple, qu'il y ait d'ecrivains, qui, pour eviter le reproche de n'etre pas naturels font justement tout ce qu'il faut pour ne l'etre pas, et d'autres qui se rendent fades, de crainte qu'on ne leur dise qu'ils courent apres l'esprit! Courir apres l'esprit, ...
— A Selection from the Comedies of Marivaux • Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux
... Jane set out from Stirling "with a small train" to avert suspicion, and appeared at the gates of Edinburgh Castle suddenly, without warning as would seem, asking to be admitted to see her son. The Chancellor, wise and wily as he was, would appear to have acknowledged the naturalness of this request, and "received her," the chronicler says, "with gladness, and gave her entrance to visit her young son, and gave command that whensoever the Queen came to the castle it should be patent to Her Grace." Jane entered the castle accordingly, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... frame; through the palings I could see double rows of hyacinths, tulips, and butter-and-eggs, edging the walks, and bushes of lilacs and snowballs almost in bloom, just as they had looked before I went up to the lumber-room. The serene naturalness of it all restored my wits to me; I unrolled the apron which I had wrapped about the bonnet, and reawakened, as from a nightmare, to the ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... large-minded, large-hearted comprehension of humankind, an insistence on spiritual tests, yet with the will to tell the truth and present impartially the darkest shadows. It is because George Eliot's people are compounded with beautiful naturalness of good and bad—not hopelessly bad with Hetty, nor hopelessly good with Adam—that we understand them and love them. Here is an element of her effectiveness. Even her Dinah walks with her feet firmly planted upon the earth, though her mystic ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... placed the other pistol and the knife in their places in Danby's belt. He took Danby's right hand while it was still warm and closed the fingers around the butt of the revolver from which he had fired, placing the forefinger on the trigger of the cocked six-shooter. To give effect and naturalness to the tableau he was arranging for the benefit of the next traveller by that trail, he drew up the right knee and put revolver and closed hand on it as if Danby had been killed while just about to fire his ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... as we find them are artificial products; and for better or for worse they must always be such. Nature has made us: social action and our own efforts must continually remake us. Any attempt to reject art for "nature" can only result in an artificial naturalness which is far less genuine and less pleasing than the natural work ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... rather for some one to admire, some one whose ideals and personality were congenial, whatever their position or occupation. I have also, on the whole, always preferred comfort to show, simple to elaborate living. This I trace to the simple comfort and naturalness of my old home. ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... intelligent ape till he seems it. With such naturalness can a being endowed with an immortal spirit enter into that of a monkey. But where's your tail? In the pantomime, Marzetti, no hypocrite in his monkery, prides ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... for themselves. Their naturalness, their clearness, their force and their general soundness of doctrine, and wholesomeness of sentiment, commend them to sensible and pious people. I have found them ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... twigs do perforce in these chronicles, you can almost feel the presence of the savage buck who snaps it. Then there are situations of force and effect everywhere through the pages, an intensity of action, a certain naturalness of dialogue and 'human nature' in the incidents. But over all is the glamor of the Chambers fancy, the gauzy woof of an artist's imagination which glories in tints, in poesies, in the little whims of the brush and pencil, so that you have ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... vitality: we are commanded to glorify God, not simply in our spirits, but in our bodies and spirits. The only example of perfect manhood the world ever saw impresses us more than anything else by an atmosphere of perfect healthiness. There is a calmness, a steadiness, in the character of Jesus, a naturalness in his evolution of the sublimest truths under the strain of the most absorbing and intense excitement, that could come only from the one perfectly trained and developed body, bearing as a pure and sacred ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... said Dona Perfecta, smiling with more naturalness than before, "I shall always be the same for my dear nephew; in spite of his extravagant and anti-religious ideas. In what way do you suppose I am going to spend this evening? Well, in trying to make Uncle Licurgo give up those obstinate notions which would otherwise cause you ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... fresh, sweet simplicity and naturalness quite took the audience by storm, and the curtain was rung down at length amid the wildest storm of applause that that ...
— Kidnapped at the Altar - or, The Romance of that Saucy Jessie Bain • Laura Jean Libbey
... appropriate attire, and the brown and green of their costumes harmonised exquisitely with the ferns through which they wandered, the trees beneath which they lay, and the lovely English landscape that surrounded the Pastoral Players. The perfect naturalness of the scene was due to the absolute accuracy and appropriateness of everything that was worn. Nor could archaeology have been put to a severer test, or come out of it more triumphantly. The whole production ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... she laid her little cream-gloved hand on the Duke's arm and went with him, shyly at first, yet with a pretty stateliness which was all her own, and moving slowly among the crowd of guests, gradually recovered her ease and self-possession, and began to talk to him with a delightful naturalness and candour which fairly captivated His Grace, in fact, "bowled him over," as he afterwards declared. She was blissfully unaware that his manner of escorting her on his arm through the long vista of ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... attitude of the audience was at first, they soon followed her with eager interest as she told them, in her easy way, simple stories of the people she knew so well and so lovingly understood. There was no art in the telling, only a sweet naturalness and an apparent honesty—the honesty of purpose that comes to people in lonely places. Her stories were all of the class that magazine editors call "homely, heart-interest stuff," not deep or clever or problematical— the commonplace doings of common ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... it is the sense of striking down through, of having the lid of one's smaller consciousness lifted off. In the long run his inspiration can be had or not as he wills. He knows that it is the supreme reasonableness in him, the primeval, underlying naturalness in him, rising to its rights. What he feels when he is inspired is that the larger laws, the laws above the other laws, have taken hold of him. He knows that the one law of inspiration is that a man shall have the freedom of himself. Most problems and ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... RINGING conclusion possible when we compare these types of thinking, with a view to telling which is the more absolutely true. Their naturalness, their intellectual economy, their fruitfulness for practice, all start up as distinct tests of their veracity, and as a result we get confused. Common sense is BETTER for one sphere of life, science for another, philosophic criticism for a third; ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... moments with one skilled in this accomplishment, without earnest attention. You will thus not only gather knowledge, but observe how this great art may be practised. You will perceive that no affectation and no insincerity are needed to enable you to improve in this precious power. Simplicity, naturalness, a truthful air and manner are, indeed, more frequently the result of labor than their opposites. It is hard, in this world of artifice, ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... was a man of five-and-thirty, and she could not get over the feeling that her impulsive exclamation had been presumptuous. He saw her uncertainty, and perhaps liked her the better for it, though the delicious naturalness, the child-like recognition of a real though scarcely known friend, had ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... shall, continue, and that must be in a state of retirement and rustication. It is therefore good for me to have a run of society, and that, various, and consisting of marked characters. Likewise, by being obliged to write without much elaboration, I shall greatly improve myself in naturalness and facility of style, and the particular subjects on which I write for money are nearly connected with my future schemes. My mornings I give to compilations which I am sure cannot be wholly useless, and for which, by the beginning of April I ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... work on which he is now engaged, which will bear the title of The Browns of Brixton, is a tender sketch of English domesticity. This new vein of Mr. Hatton's will, doubtless, be distinguished by the naturalness of dialogue and sanity of characterisation of his first novel. Messrs. Prodder and Way are to publish ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... of a whole is exemplified by the anecdote of a child going through a gallery of old portraits. She paid very little attention to the finishing, or naturalness of drapery, but put herself at once to mimic the awkward attitudes. "The censure of nature uninformed, fastened upon the greatest fault that could be in a picture, because it related to the character and management of the whole." What he would condemn is that substitute for deep and proper ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... Rachael," said she, with an evident effort at brightness and naturalness, "I came here to see you about something to-day, but I—I don't quite know how to begin. Only, whatever you think about it, I want you to remember that your opinion is what counts; you're the one person who—who can really advise me, ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... a picture of Our Lady, a most excellent work, which was in the possession of Pope Clement VII; and, among other things painted therein, he counterfeited a glass vase full of water, containing some flowers, in which, besides its marvellous naturalness, he had imitated the dew-drops on the flowers, so that it seemed more real than the reality. For Antonio Segni, who was very much his friend, he made, on a sheet of paper, a Neptune executed with such careful draughtsmanship that it seemed absolutely ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... contrary, people of uncommonly honest bearing and frank speech. Their offences evidently impose small burden on their conscience, and they have the air of those who have never known what it is to have the Furies on one's track. Rosalind was struck with the charming naturalness and gaiety of every one we met in our first ramble on that delicious and never-to-be-forgotten morning when we arrived in Arden. There was neither assumption nor diffidence; there was rather an entire absence of any kind of self-consciousness. ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... before I became satisfied that the book had more truth than fiction in it. To have assumed it wholly the work of imagination, I should have had to admit that the author was an artist of artists, exceeding, through his artfulness, in naturalness, all other fiction-writers. No; there was truth behind the statements in the little book—truth at second or third hand, but truth. Now this little book pretended to tell, and I believe did tell, the story of a sailor under Sir Francis Drake, who accompanied this English ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... sort, arranged in ten successive grades, and intended to advance from the simple study of objects, forms, colors, etc., gradually to the prosecution of the regular and higher studies. The greater naturalness, life-likeness, and interest of this kind of mental occupation for young learners, over the old plan of restricting them mainly to the bare alphabet, with barren spelling, reading, definitions, and so on, is at once obvious in principle and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... immortalise every step of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed! I remember but one other topic of discourse in this walk. He mentioned Paley, praised the naturalness and clearness of his style, but condemned his sentiments, thought him a mere time-serving casuist, and said that "the fact of his work on Moral and Political Philosophy being made a text-book in our Universities ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... published in 1581 and the third in 1588. In 1582 he visited Italy and was made a Roman citizen, and the next year he was chosen Mayor of Bordeaux. Always a lover of books and a student of men, his writings are a rich mine of scholarly wit and worldly wisdom, consummate in the naturalness that conceals literary art. Like most works of the time, they contain passages which modern taste does not approve, but, taken as a whole, they are among the most interesting of books ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... you will never again be as you were, flinging all body and soul into the fire of passion, and yearning for motherhood! Such times can never be the same. We burn, even desire, and consume our dreams. Child of aristocracy, you found in this South Sea eyot the freedom your atavism, or shall I say, naturalness, craved, and you drank your cup to the lees and thought it good. I shall not be the one to point a finger at you, nor even to think too vivid the scarlet of my toilet set. That flamboyant outside my window, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... Ferran, Becquer has written likewise the apology for his own verse. His was a poetry of "rapid, elemental impressions." He strikes but one chord at a time on his lyre, but he leaves you thrilled. This extreme simplicity and naturalness of expression may be well illustrated by the ...
— Legends, Tales and Poems • Gustavo Adolfo Becquer
... ivory and pearl was presented to us, containing engrossed copies of the addresses delivered by the students. There was singing of hymns, both in English and in Telugu, by choir and congregation. The beauty of it all was its spontaneity and naturalness, for the pupils themselves had planned and executed ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... advantage, that few men dared to grapple with him "in a pitched field of long and serious debate." His general tone and style in debate were marked by an intense earnestness, whilst his narrative, possessing, from its striking naturalness and simplicity, a high degree of dramatic interest, was occasionally relieved with splendid passages of impassioned and stirring eloquence. Intrepid self-reliance, unwearied activity, far-reaching sagacity, clearness, ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... time the evening meal was announced, and, to maintain appearances, she went out and joined the family; the naturalness of her part was very difficult to sustain. Gerhardt observed her subdued condition without guessing the depth of emotion which it covered. Bass was too much interested in his own affairs to pay particular attention ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may safely ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... * * The charm of the story is in its naturalness. It is perfectly quiet, domestic, and truthful. In the calm force and homely realities of its scenes it reminds ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... so inornate, though by no means correspondingly simple, as to render any comparison between it and the dramatic work of Shakspere out of the question. But when acted, the artistry of the play is revealed. Its intense naturalness is due in great part to the stern concision of the lines, where no word is wasted, where every sentence is fraught with the utmost it can convey. The outlines which disturbed us by their vagueness become ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... Resurrection could have been an invention or that the account of it could be a work of the imagination. The last is almost as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. In detail, in naturalness, even in the presence of difficulties and hindrances to easy belief of the story, the narrative seems that of an eye-witness. No reasoning can bring faith, however, to one who denies the miraculous. As a fact, ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... fantastic-romantic poem, "Ruslan and Liudmila" (which Glinka afterwards made the subject of a charming opera), and here, for the first time in Russian literary history, a thoroughly national theme was handled with a freedom and naturalness which dealt the death-blow to the prevailing inflated, rhetorical style. The subject of the poem was one of the folk-legends, of which he had been fond as a child; and when it was published, in 1820, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... I want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... course rendered with varying degrees of felicity, and this we think one of the happiest versions; though few in their literality lack that ease and naturalness of movement supposed to be the gift solely of those wonder-workers who render the "spirit" of an author, while disdaining a "slavish fidelity" to his words,—who as painters would portray a man's expression without troubling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... story, the motive of which is the growth of love between the young chief and heroine, is delineated with a sweetness and a freshness, a naturalness and a certainty, which places 'The Lilac Sunbonnet' among the best stories of the time."—New York Mail ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... "The naturalness of his style, the skill with which he uses seemingly indifferent incidents and sayings to trick out and light up his pictures, the apparently unintentional and therefore most effective touches ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner. This "ease" or naturalness, in a literary style, it has long been the fashion to regard as ease in appearance alone—as a point of really difficult attainment. But not so:—a natural manner is difficult only to him who should never meddle with it—to the unnatural. It is ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... guard against the tendency to think that there is anything rigid or formal in the natural order of monogamy. Some sociologists would even limit the naturalness of monogamy still further. Thus Tarde ("La Morale Sexuelle," Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, Jan., 1907), while accepting as natural under present conditions the tendency for monogamy, mitigated ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... i.e., the simple folksong. In the fall of the year Goethe met Friederike Brion in the parsonage at Sesenheim, a village near Strassburg. Now Herder's teaching bore fruit in an outburst of real song (1, 2 and 4). The influence of the Volkslied is clearly discernible in the unaffected naturalness, spontaneity, and simplicity of these lyrics. Thus das Heidenrslein, which symbolizes the tragic close of the sweet idyll of Sesenheim, is to all ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... absolutely natural, extraordinary in its naturalness; and the reactions of its various persons upon each other are traced with fine perception. There is not much of the outward expression of love—in this Balzac did not excel—but there is a good deal of its hidden tragedy. Moreover, the miser's ruling ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... meet Claude Heath, so now she caught at Claude Heath himself. She had come to the cafe with a purpose, and, as she forgot it, she carried it out. Never before had Claude understood completely why she had gained her position in London and Paris, realized fully her fascination. Her delightful naturalness, her pleasure, her almost boyish gaiety, her simplicity, her humor took him captive for the moment. She explained that she had left her companions and stolen away to ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... books lies in their freshness, naturalness, and sympathy with the feelings and pursuits of boys and girls. She says of herself, "I was born with a boy's spirit under my bib and tucker," and she never lost it. Her style is often careless, never elegant, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The names of more than thirty fables are given in the list. Comparative study of these fables, considering the animals most frequently mentioned, the correctness and naturalness of the traits ascribed to the different animals, the moral precepts inculcated by the fables, etc., will be ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... his native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest. It is to writers of this kind of "English in shirt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see shirt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, sturdiness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless conformity ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Rossetti, both of whom have left behind them jets of pure emotional melody which compare to advantage with the most perfect specimens of Greek and Elizabethan song. Tennyson did not very often essay this class of writing, but when he did, he rarely failed; his songs combine, with extreme naturalness and something of a familiar sweetness, a felicity of workmanship hardly to be excelled. In her best songs, Miss Rossetti is scarcely, if at all, his inferior; but her judgment was far less sure, and she was more ready to look with complacency on her failures. ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... a fine vengeance upon them for their sin; one not unworthy of Him who wrought it. It had come so insidiously, with such apparent naturalness, little by little—a settler here, a settler there; here an acre of gray desert charmed to yellow wheat; there a pouch of shining gold washed from the burning sands; another wagon-train with hopeful men ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... feverish interview with the cabinet officer, is a marvel of psychological subtlety. Both scenes illustrate Signor Fogazzaro's power to achieve the highest artistic results without exaggeration. This naturalness is the more remarkable because the character of a saint is unnatural according to our modern point of view. We have a healthy distrust of ascetics, whose anxiety over their soul's condition we properly regard as a form ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... character of the theme forbids much indulgence in conceits such as Tennyson sometimes falls into, and the execution is more finished than his volumes always are: there are very few prosaic lines, and few instances of that excess of naturalness which degenerates into the mawkish. The nature of the plan—which, after all, is substantially though not in form a set of sonnets on a single theme—is favorable to those pictures of common landscape and of daily life, redeemed from triviality by genial feeling and a perception ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... ivory-clear complexion and deep sea-blue eyes that looked upon the world with the ingenuous calmness of a mermaid or the pixie of an undiscovered mountain stream. Her frame was strong and yet possessed the grace of absolute naturalness. And yet with all her Northern clearness and frankness of line and colouring, there seemed to be something of the tropics in her—something of languor in the droop of her pose, of love of ease in her ingenious complacency of satisfaction and comfort in ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... at the old man. There he was, the arch enemy of law and order! The man whose name it was bad form to mention at their afternoon teas! Who would have supposed he had such a kindly, harmless face? How easily, with what naturalness and grace, he wore his frock coat! Incredible!... In the diplomatic gallery a solitary lady! She was extravagantly attired in a huge picture hat with black plumes. Almost hidden behind her was a fair haired youth, his hair parted in the middle, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... vocabulary, and perfect correctness (except that she does not pronounce the letter 'r'); she has also read, or rather devoured, a good many books; and can write, draw, and play the harp. And all she does without effort: rather with the flighty naturalness with which a bird takes to ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... is a naturalness about the story that makes it of decided interest, and every one who reads it will lay the book down with a feeling of regret that the end has been ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... common to speak of the naturalness and ease of Cardinal Newman's style in writing. It is, of course, the first thing that attracts notice when we open one of his books; and there are people who think it bald and thin and dry. They look ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... as Henriette Fuerth truly says ("Erotik und Elternpflicht," Am Lebensquell, p. 11), "have not yet attained that beautiful naturalness out of which in these matters simplicity and freedom grow. And however willing we may be to learn afresh, most of us have so far lost our inward freedom from prejudice—the standpoint of the pure to whom all things are pure—that we cannot acquire it again. We parents of to-day have been altogether ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of their preconceived notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, she at once began to ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Chatellerault's; or else no more than an assumption, an invention of the imaginative La Fosse. Far, indeed, from it, I found no arrogance or coldness in her. All unversed in the artifices of her sex, all unacquainted with the wiles of coquetry, she was the very incarnation of naturalness and maidenly simplicity. To the tales that—with many expurgations—I told her of Court life, to the pictures that I drew of Paris, the Luxembourg, the Louvre, the Palais Cardinal, and the courtiers ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds that cannot, by right methods applied early, be led to prefer good literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its sincerity, naturalness, verity, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the impression of a vast mental capacity turned to the lifelong study of a fascinating subject and acquiring in it the dignity of attitude and the naturalness which mastery inevitably produces. War has been the constant meditation of this powerful brain. In "La Conduite de la Guerre" this meditation is the minute historical examination of the battles of the First Empire and ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... them"—he is speaking of figures and ornament in language—"from translations, because it is impossible to reproduce them with the same grace with which the original author used them. For each language has I know not what peculiarity of its own; and if you force yourself to express the naturalness (le naif) of this in another language, observing the law of translation,—not to expatiate beyond the limits of the author himself, your words will be constrained, [163] cold and ungraceful." Then he fixes ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... The naturalness of his announcement, as the only and complete reply to her question, forbade resentment. Yet her face turned scarlet, and when she spoke, after a few moments, it ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner. This "ease," or naturalness, in a literary style, it has long been the fashion to regard as ease in appearance alone—as a point of really difficult attainment. But not so; a natural manner is difficult only to him who should never meddle with it—to the unnatural. It is but the result of writing with the understanding, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... blanket step upon the deck, attended by a very ordinary, austere, and shabbily-dressed Scotswoman. But immediately behind them were Edward Lambert and Mrs. Townley, and these, with their simple tact, naturalness, and freedom from any sort of embarrassment, acted as foils, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... above, where Alice took them, there was peace and naturalness. The dead man lay very straight beneath the sheet, his fleshy body shrunken after its struggle to its bony stature. Isabelle had always thought Steve a homely man,—phlegmatic and ordinary in feature. She had often said, "How can Alice be so romantic over old Steve!" But as the dead ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... which I am fortunate in having.... What one saw of him was always the actual Mark Twain, acting out of his own nature simply, frankly, without pretense, and almost without reserve. It was that simplicity and naturalness in the man which carried his ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to a slight frown and an air of defiance. But the Baron saw in a moment that behind the lips so sternly set, and the straight look of the eyes, there was a frightened expression which she was trying to conceal. He greeted her with his accustomed calm and naturalness, kissed her hand, offered her the flower from his button-hole, put her to sit in the arm-chair with its back to the window, took his own seat on the couch in front of it, and leisurely drew off ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... station and stood upon the pavement of Piccadilly Circus. Side by side with a sense of immeasurable relief, an odd kind of pain was gripping his heart. Something that had belonged to him had been wrenched away. A wave of meretricious sentiment, false yet with a curious base of naturalness, swept in upon him for a moment and tugged at his heart-strings. She had been his woman; the little boy with the sticky mouth was child of his. The bald humanity of his affections for them joined forces for a moment with the ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that she is not," answered Rose, with spirit; "her sweet childish simplicity and perfect naturalness are very charming in these days, when they are so rarely found in a girl ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... where the nightingales are singing and the roses bloom the year through, and the doves gather with low murmurs amid the white stones of the sacred enclosure. The poets of nature, the mystical pantheist, the joyous troubadour of life, Hafiz, in the naturalness and spontaneity of his poetry, and in the winning sweetness of his imagery, occupies a unique place in the literature of the world, and has no rival in his ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... have a different meaning from what appears before you at its sound. Were I to call it truth, you would scarcely understand me, but when I conjure before my soul the image of Alexandria, with all that springs from it, all that is moving, creating, and thriving with such marvellous freedom, naturalness, and variety within it, it is not alone the beauty that pleases the eye which delights me; I value more the sound natural growth, the genuine, abundant life. To truth, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... others are The Batson Cottage (November, 1846, Godey's Lady's Book) and Juliet Irwin; or, the Carriage People (June, 1847, Godey's Lady's Book). One of her chief collections of stories is Pencil Sketches (1833-1837). "Miss Leslie," wrote Edgar Allan Poe, "is celebrated for the homely naturalness of her stories and for the broad satire of her comic style." She was the editor of The Gift one of the best annuals of the time, and in that position perhaps exerted her chief influence on American literature When one has ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... the geological ramble with Dr. Buckland's class,—or the botanic searchings for wild rarities with some naturalist pundit whose name I have forgotten; and so forth. In matters theological, I was strongly opposed to the Tractarians, especially denouncing Newman and Pusey for their dishonest "non-naturalness" and Number Ninety: and I favoured with my approval (valeat quantum) Dr. Hampden. I attended Dr. Kidd's anatomical lectures, and dabbled with some chemical experiments—which when Knighton and I repeated at his father's house, 9 Hanover Square, the baronet in future blew us up to the astonishment ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural. Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... of the theologian was bent to setting this majestic figure apart from mankind to secure Him sovereignty over us by separation from us. How different is that from the simple pictures drawn of Him, from the naturalness of His life, from the love which He had for homes and human friendships, from the life which earned the illuminating rebuke of being called a ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... were a man, accept him, Watson, as a spirit? Solid flesh was not exactly in line with his idea of the unearthly. How to explain it? He had to go back to Holcomb again. The doctor had accepted without question Avec's naturalness, his body, his appetite. Reasonably enough, Geos, with some smattering of his superior's wisdom, should accept Watson in the ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... and inherent in universal nature; the Dutch, on the contrary, to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of nature modified by accident. The attention to these petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much admired in the Dutch pictures, which, if we suppose it to be a beauty, is certainly of a lower order, which ought to give place to a beauty of a superior kind, since one cannot be obtained but by ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... already known to the readers of the Sunday-school Times as one of our best writers of stories for children. His style is marked by a simplicity, naturalness and lack of sensationalism; and his stories move with the freedom of boyish nature and of ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... When you speak lines from a play inject as much naturalness and sincerity into your delivery as you can command. Speak the words as though they really express your own ideas and feelings. If you feel that you must exaggerate slightly because of the impression the remark is intended to make, rely more upon emphasis ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... became set, and her eyes—she looked—" She hesitated for a word, and dropped to the homely, "She looked as if she would bite with annoyance that he should be here. The expression was gone in a moment; she spoke with an ease and naturalness that was astonishing, even disgusting; but it had been there. ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... in boyhood. He went to Oxford, he travelled a good deal, he was held in great favor and affection by the County matrons and the long-nosed young ladies of the County. Another, dwelling on such heights as he, might have become haughty; but there was in this young man a cheery naturalness and love of mirth which often drove him from the society of his equals, and took him into that of attorneys' daughters. Fate drew him one day to an archery meeting at Chipping Carby, and there he beheld Miss Widdicombe. With her he paced the level turf, her "points" he counted, and he found that ...
— The Mark Of Cain • Andrew Lang
... poem, "Think of Times Yet Coming", shows the same innate sense of rhyme and metre that has distinguished his earlier work. Only the conclusion lacks perfect ease and naturalness. Mr. Schaffman has so far confined his Muse to optimistic opinions and moral maxims; we hope that in the near future he will vary his efforts and attempt to reflect more of his general reading in his poetry. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... embittered by their consciousness of it. It never occurred to Mrs. McQuinch, an excellent mother to her two eldest daughters, that she was no more fit to have charge of the youngest than a turtle is to rear a young eagle. The discomfort of their relations never shook her faith in their "naturalness." Like her husband and the vicar, she believed that when God sent children he made their parents fit to rule them. And Elinor resented her parents' tyranny, as she felt it to be, without dreaming of making any allowances for their being in ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... balderdash now," he said; "but it seems to me there is some good stuff in it, Pen, my boy. There's a certain greenness and freshness in it which I like somehow. The bloom disappears off the face of poetry after you begin to shave. You can't get up that naturalness and artless rosy tint in after days. Your cheeks are pale, and have got faded by exposure to evening parties, and you are obliged to take curling-irons, and macassar, and the deuce-knows-what to your whiskers; they curl ambrosially, ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of service with prayer, Scripture reading, and song, he passed with apparent naturalness to the collection, the ceremony to which everything seemed ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... method of presentment. Idealisation, in the narrower sense of the word, could add nothing to the loveliness of such a land, to the stateliness, the splendid sensuousness devoid of the grosser elements of offence, to the genuine naturalness of such a mode of life. Art itself could only add to it the right accent, the right emphasis, the larger scope in truth, the colouring and illumination best suited to give the fullest expression to the beauties of the land, to ...
— The Earlier Work of Titian • Claude Phillips
... them. The steep path down to the Eperquerie landing, and the tumbling about in a small boat until the steamer came, did not greatly appeal to them. Moreover, Lady Elspeth's clear eyes had noticed the signs of their clouding, in spite of their efforts after naturalness, for to experienced eyes there is nothing so unnatural as the attempt to be natural. If Mrs. Pixley noticed nothing it was probably because her faculties had not yet fully recovered from the shock to which they had been subjected. If she ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... some old romanceros. His descriptions glow with the fresh and ever-varying delight of the observant traveler, who seems to see before him for the first time the cities which, with a few vigorous and simple strokes, he transfers to big pages. His pictures have the charm of naturalness and a simplicity that is more effective than the most ornate diffuseness. Thus he says of the picturesque little city of Namur: 'Seated at the confluence of the Sambre with the Meuse, and throwing over each river a bridge of solid but graceful structure, it lay ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... away to the house. The perfect naturalness and simplicity of the boy appealed to her. She was pleased, too, that he had not told all this to Vere. It showed a true feeling of delicacy. And she was sure he was a good son. She went up to her room, got ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own college days, when he had ridden his grandfather's horses in the famous hunting valley not a hundred miles ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton |
