"Saturnine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man stiffened, and his eyes glittered malignantly. He moved his feet slightly apart and let his body fall into a crouch. He held that position, though, not moving a finger, when he saw a saturnine smile wreathe Sanderson's lips, noted the slight motion with which Sanderson edged Streak around a little, caught the slow, gradual lifting of Sanderson's shoulder—the right; which presaged the drawing of the heavy pistol that ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... face at the speaker, and recognized him for one of those I had seen in the garden. He had the air of a secretary or—as he stood rubbing his smooth chin and looking down at me with a saturnine smile—of a physician. I read in his eyes something cold and not too human, yet it went no further. His manner was suave, and his voice, when he spoke again, as well calculated to reassure as his words were to ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... in his person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged harmony, in the tones of his voice. His manner of reading his own ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... mean it," Nicky-Nan assured him, with a saturnine frown. "If you can give over holdin' your belly an' listen, I don't mind tellin' you my opinion o' this here War; which is, that 'tis a put-up job from start to finish, with no other ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... his own. Where did he get his qualities? In the earlier times the fairies were supposed to have blessed him or cursed him in his cradle. A later age saw in the stars the rulers of man's destiny. He was jovial, or saturnine, or martial, depending on the planet which was in the ascendant at the time of his birth. Now we know "it is not in our stars but in ourselves that we are underlings." Everything a man is comes to him from within or from without; from nature or from nurture; from his heredity ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... Spinny in the post-office that morning, and he gave me a hard grip with one black hand. There was something grim and saturnine about his powerful body and bearded face and his strong, cold hands. I wondered what perverse fate had driven him for eight years to dog the footsteps of a girl whose charm was due to qualities naturally distasteful ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... tangible token, except a tiny pearl-colored glove, which Guy twisted rather pensively between his fingers as he stood on the hall steps, and watched the carriage disappear down the avenue. Mr. Bruce exulted after his saturnine fashion, and Isabel Raymond trembled; the one had lost a strong, unscrupulous ally, ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... her pretty well and bade her think no more about the man, I very soon had reason to be of her opinion. Two or three days later, as I was sawing planks in the yard, to make a trellis, that saturnine person came in, resplendently dressed, and filled the wholesome place with the reek of his essences. He saluted me with extravagant politeness, telling me that he had words for my private ear which he was sure would interest me. When I took little or no notice of him he came to closer quarters. ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... God's name why do you mix with us, Hernan Pereira?" asked the saturnine Meyer, thrusting his face forward till the Newgate fringe he wore by way of a beard literally seemed to curl with wrath. "When we were hungry you did not wish it, for you slunk away and left us, taking all the powder. ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... A saturnine crowd, soon to be forgotten, we silently pass away from the world and leave no trace behind, without having handed down to the ages to come a single work of genius, or even a solitary thought ...
— Liza - "A nest of nobles" • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... parts of the Spirit together with some parts of the Lead may constitute a Chymical Oyle, which therefore though it pass for Homogeneous, may be a very compounded Body: or at least that by the action of the Distill'd Vinager and the Saturnine Calx one upon another, part of the Liquor may be so alter'd as to be transmuted from an Acid Spirit into an Oyle. And though the truth of either of the two former conjectures would make the example I have reflected on more ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... resolution to go on; the very gesture I had assumed for vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With a bold effort, I flung open my door, hurried down the stairs, and reached the hall. The first person I met was a kind of pantry boy, a beast only lately emancipated from the plough, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... replied Hornby, with his usual saturnine sneer, "would prevent my acceptance of your obliging offer, even if I had the present means, which I have not. My spare cash happens just now to ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... I really don't know which I cared for most, in those early days, the man or the woman. It had been with him that I first made acquaintance; we were both engaged on journalistic work, reporting, you know, on different papers—and we came across each other once or twice in that way. He was a saturnine, queer-tempered fellow, taciturn at times, and at other times possessed by a wry sense of humour which made him excellent company, though it kept one in a state of alert disquiet. He would say things with that particular twist to them which made ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... way of religion, save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the drama of the Mass! This is the contingent which civilization detaches for the settlement of another world. It effaces a smiling barbarism by a saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height over a wild gay meadow. These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried to behave at first as men do among artless children ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... real notoriety among a certain class in Christminster who knew not the colleges, nor their works, nor their ways. Jude was asked if he could suggest any guest in addition to those named by Arabella and her father, and in a saturnine humour of perfect recklessness mentioned Uncle Joe, and Stagg, and the decayed auctioneer, and others whom he remembered as having been frequenters of the well-known tavern during his bout therein years before. He also suggested ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... knowing him. Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man- haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause. In talk, he is ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Arezzo, With the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) 220 Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding it does you but ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... The climate had played Old Gooseberry with the fine primordial stock. Physically, the Suffolk Punch had degenerated into the steeplechaser; psychologically, the chasm between the stolid English peasant and the saturnine, sensitive Australian had been spanned with that facilis ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... of Hazon's saturnine mouth drooped in ever so faint a grin as his keen eyes fixed themselves for a moment full upon the other's face. Laurence had forgotten the tell-tale imprint left in the centre of his forehead by the muzzle. "So? See here, Stanninghame, don't be at the trouble ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... we are informed, is not only shining in his starry sphere of the heavens, but is also buried in the ocean depths and embodied in the stratas of the earth. It is almost needless to add that, our author refers to those substances naturally Saturnine in their quality of life and expression, such as lead, clay, and coal, among the minerals, and various deadly plants among the flora, the chief of which is the aconite or monkshood, so significant of Saturn and the isolated, monkish hermit. After some repetition, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... came with a meal. The saturnine Hahn stood at my door with a weapon upon me while I ate. They were taking no chances—and they were wise ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... shrank back when the door opened: for the person who opened it was—Mr. George!—in pigtail and wooden leg unchanged, but in demeanour (so far as agitation allowed me to remark it) more saturnine than ever. ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Keyork. "When a man knows what he wants, knows where it is to be found, and goes thither to take it, he is not wandering. Moreover, I have no thought of removing myself or my goods from Prague. I live here. It is a city for old men. It is saturnine. The foundations of its houses rest on the silurian formation, which is more than can be said for any other capital, as far ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... sombre assembly. The chiefs were for the most part tall, well-built men, warriors and hunters from their youth up. There was something fierce and haughty in their bearing, something menacing, violent, and lawless in their saturnine faces and black, glittering eyes. Most of them wore their hair long; some plaited, others flowing loosely over their shoulders. Their ears were loaded with hiagua shells; their dress was composed of buckskin ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... raking angle, sang an idiotic song with patter interspersed between the verses. He described a visit received from Lord Off-his-Chump, Lady Off-her-Chump, and all the honourable Misses Off-their-Chumps. The witticisms convulsed Paul's neighbours and left him saturnine. He conceived a loathing and despite for the creature on the stage which he had never felt before for any living thing. The popular laughter and applause fed his personal hatred and disdain. He made an involuntary sound of contempt as the 'lion ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... sympathies, and offering to render whatever assistance might be in his power. To which the Spaniard returned for the present but grave and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national formality dusked by the saturnine ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... appealed to the gypsy streak in my makeup. Each Navajo buck that came to my door peddling his rugs and silver ornaments was led into the house and questioned. Precious little information I was able to abstract at first from my saturnine visitors. As we became better acquainted, and they learned to expect liberal draughts of coffee sweetened into a syrup, sometimes their tongues loosened; but still I couldn't get all the information I craved regarding those marvelous rugs and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... becometh in yeares. For nowe he can nowise understand what defecte of Judgmente (or effecte of insanitie rather) did leade him so to despise and, as it were, reject those Giftes and golden chaunces which come but once to mortal men. Experience (that saturnine Pedagogue) hath taught him what manner of man he is, and that, farre from enjoying that Deceptive Seeminge or mirage of Freedome which would persuade him that he may run hither and thither as the whim prompteth over the face of the Earthe—yea, take the ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... there is no serdab; or if discovering it I find no lamps in it, what then?' He smiled grimly with that saturnine smile of his, so rarely seen for years past, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... and a thin beard, They are in character austere and reserved, covetous, laborious, and revengeful; constant in friendship, and good haters. The most remarkable and certain characteristic of the Saturnine man is that, as an old author observes 'he will never look thee in the face.' 'If they have to love any one, these Saturnines,' says another old author, 'they love most constantly; and if they hate, they hate to the death.' The persons signified symbolically ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... immersed in what thoughts no one knew, and the scientists set out to obey his orders. Baxter, the British chemist, followed Penrose, the lantern-jawed, saturnine American engineer and inventor, as he made his way to the furthermost ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... thumb's out of joint," said one of the men, Parsons, a swarthy, saturnine man, boat-steerer in Standish's boat, in ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... extremely vulgar and disrespectful, that I cannot comprehend the Tories. The men who uphold the dignity of the Crown to treat their Sovereign in such a manner, on such an occasion! Even in private life the most sour and saturnine people relax and grow gay and mildly disposed on occasions like this. Clearly, as you are Queen Regnant, Albert's position is to all intents and purposes that of a male Queen Consort, and the same privileges and charges ought to be attached to it which were attached to Queen Adelaide's position. ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... reckoned his Catechisms among his most important books. In his letter to Wolfgang Capito, July 9, 1537, he writes: "I am quite cold and indifferent about arranging my books, for, incited by a Saturnine hunger, I would much rather have them all devoured, eo quod Saturnina fame percitus magis cuperem eos omnes devoratos. For none do I acknowledge as really my books, except perhaps De Servo Arbitrio and the Catechism." ...
— Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church • Friedrich Bente
... a saturnine spirit, full of bitterness and envy, an ambitious, unscrupulous, gloomy, crafty man, who had acquired a great empire over my son. Gilbert made the mistake of confiding in him and asking his advice. That was the origin of all the mischief. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... there were certain milestones to be passed, and one of the first was the payment of his father's debts. Having made up his mind on that point, he strode along without swerving, contracting some rather saturnine sternness, as a young man is likely to do who has a premature call upon him for self-reliance. Tom felt intensely that common cause with his father which springs from family pride, and was bent on being irreproachable as a son; but his growing experience caused him to pass much silent ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... somebody. And the story she had heard of the Rev. Charles Jacomb's assiduous, earnest, uncomplaining labour in that big parish had at the very outset won for him her great regard. He did not understand how he was destroying her childlike faith in him by his saturnine little jokes. ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... by fifteen years, confident, arrogant, a lean hard man and handsome in a gaunt-cheeked, saturnine way, lacked humility. For one thing, he treated the crew like dirt and had treated them that way since blastoff from Earth almost five months before. For another, he seemed impatient with Purcell's orders, although Purcell ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... brother of Caffal, was the major of the regiment—a cynical, saturnine man, between whom and Captain Madwell there was a natural antipathy which circumstances had nourished and strengthened to an active animosity. But for the restraining influence of their mutual relation to Caffal these two patriots would doubtless have endeavored to deprive their country ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... for the Congress. Elected to the House, he was immediately greeted by connoisseurs of the best stamp— President Martin van Buren, "prince of good fellows;" Webster, another intellect, saturnine in repose and mercurial in activity; the convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... scrape the moss from memory's pictured urn. Who, in these days when all things go by steam, Recalls the stage-coach with its four-horse team? Its sturdy driver,—who remembers him? Or the old landlord, saturnine and grim, Who left our hill-top for a new abode And reared his sign-post farther down the road? Still in the waters of the dark Shawshine Do the young bathers splash and think they're clean? Do pilgrims find their ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the tall figure standing in front of me and saw that he was watching the retreating figure of his henchman with a saturnine smile on his face. I thought swiftly. If I could yell a warning to Lucky, he could bolt the door of the pilot's chamber and then set the ship down at the Trans-Space base. It was the only way to save Lucky ...
— Larson's Luck • Gerald Vance
... distances. In about five minutes, he would have a programme worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could only be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and caught sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt, with a colonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in silver-paint. ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... gave an instant impression of capability. He stood on the threshold, entirely composed, saturnine, serene eyed, absolutely sure of himself. He was arrayed in high heeled boots, minus spurs; the bottoms of a pair of dust-covered overalls were tucked into the boot legs; a woolen shirt, open at the throat, covered a pair of admirable shoulders; ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... even by the Skipper, and the others watched him fascinated as he glared at his victim, and even the iron composure of the saturnine mate seemed to be moved partially aside. The Mexican began to whimper and moan as his eyes shifted to avoid the terrible ones of the Captain. He was not suffering any special violence, but a strange tremor filled the soul of the Mexican, in the grip ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... I. Hollandus, which is dated 1670, addresses the reader as follows: "Kind reader, the philosophers have written much about their lead, which as Basilus has taught, is prepared from antimony; and I am under the impression that this saturnine work of the present philosopher, Mr. Johann Isaak Hollandus, is not to be understood of common lead ... but of the ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... for some little time in watching them; and certainly no two individuals could have afforded a greater contrast. Gillooly went on eating, laughing, and drinking, diverting himself by quizzing his saturnine companion, who replied only ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... corner, propped against the leather upholstery, was Mr. Cortlandt, as pale, as reserved, and as saturnine as at breakfast. He was sipping Scotch-and-soda, and in all the time that Anthony remained he did not speak to a soul save the waiter, did not shift his position save to beckon for another drink. Something ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... they?" was Bert's saturnine comment. "There ain't no difference dyin' in battle or in the poorhouse. The thing is they're deado. I wouldn't care a rap if my father'd been hanged. It's all the same in a thousand years. This braggin' about folks makes me tired. Besides, my father couldn't a-fought. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... fatal cautiousness; Who never takes a step from his own door But he looks backward ere he looks before. When once he starts, it were too much to say He visibly gets farther on his way: But all allow, he ponders well his course— For future uses hoarding present force. The flippant deem him slow and saturnine, The summed-up phlegm of that illustrious line; But we, his honest adversaries, who More highly prize him than his false friends do, Frankly admire that simple mass and weight— A solid Roman pillar of the State, So inharmonious with the baser style Of neighbouring columns grafted ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... grotesque divinity, with a third eye, like that of the Cyclops, in the centre of his forehead. These two figures, again, are supported by gigantic guardians, one on either side, who have nothing absolutely monstrous about them, being distinguished by their saturnine expression. That to the right hand bears a striking likeness to Daniel Webster's stern and well-known features. The deep-set eye and compressed lip were ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a saturnine, lank, bibulous individual known as Rube Maloney. To him Terry explained. He was to charter a sloop, take the muskets aboard—and ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... obscure year 1598, while the star of Essex was setting, that of his natural rival did not burn more brightly. But although now, and for the brief remainder of Elizabeth's life, Raleigh was nominally in favour, the saturnine old woman had no longer any tenderness for her Captain of the Guard. Her old love, her old friendship, had quite passed away. There was no longer any excuse for excluding from her presence so valuable a soldier and so wise ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... fell upon the Puritans as a deposed and unpopular party found stinging literary expression in one of the most famous of English satires, Samuel Butler's 'Hudibras.' Butler, a reserved and saturnine man, spent much of his uneventful life in the employ (sometimes as steward) of gentlemen and nobles, one of whom, a Puritan officer, Sir Samuel Luke, was to serve as the central lay-figure for his lampoon. 'Hudibras,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... the town, although she remembered quite a number of others in the Directory. Even Vereker Sarle was there. Far down the long room she saw him sitting with two other men: one of them, Dick Nichols, looking very much at home; the other a distinguished, saturnine man with an English air to him, in spite of being burnt as black as the ace of spades. She was aware that Sarle saw her, and had a trembling fear that he might join her. It was almost a relief when Bellew came in towards the end of the meal, for she knew he would prove an effective barrier. ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... mouth into a faint smile—he was one of those saturnine people who smile with the corners of the mouth down,—and bowed his acknowledgment of my complaisance. The main entrance to the enclosure was passed; it was a heavy wooden gate, framed in iron and locked, with the cargo of the launch piled outside ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... in conversation with several leather-legging gentry like himself, whom I knew from their costume and appearance to be backwoodsmen. All at once these saturnine characters commenced moving about the room, and entering into conversation with men whom they had not hitherto ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... in torment. It was like the sudden opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him vividly—his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... descendant. This territory, nominally assigned for the maintenance of the troops under the adventurer's command, was valued in those days at six laths of rupees annually; so that the blood-stained miscreant, whose saturnine manners had given him a bad name, even among the rough Europeans of the Company's battalion, found his career of crime rewarded by an income corresponding to that of many such petty sovereigns as those of his ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... conversation that had just passed between Dominguez and myself; then, my gaze happening to wander aft to the solitary figure at the tiller, I sauntered aft and endeavoured to strike up a conversation with him. The fellow, however, proved to be so boorish and saturnine in his manner that I quickly abandoned the attempt and, pitching my half-smoked cigar over the rail, retired below and tumbled, "all standing," into the bunk that Dominguez had indicated as mine, where, despite the food for serious reflection that the occurrences of the ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... tissu de faiblesse et de duplicite," etc. "Voila l'allie que le ciel a mis entre nos mains, et dont nous avons a retablir les interets!" Ferdinand was guilty of such monstrous perjuries and cruelties that the reader ought to be warned not to think of him as a saturnine and Machiavellian Italian. He was a son of the Bourbon Charles III. of Spain. His character was that of a jovial, rather stupid farmer, whom a freak of fortune had made a king from infancy. A sort of grotesque comic element runs ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... for Champe. There entered in response a young man, large and muscular of build, saturnine of countenance; a grave, thoughtful, silent person, safe to trust with a secret, for his words were few, his sense of honor high. In all the army there was not his superior in courage and persistence in ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... Highlander, all tribes of Celtic descent, assigned to the Men of Peace, Good Neighbours, or by whatever other names they called these sylvan pigmies, more social habits, and a course of existence far more gay, than the sullen and heavy toils of the more saturnine Duergar. Their elves did not avoid the society of men, though they behaved to those who associated with them with caprice, which rendered it dangerous to displease them; and although their gifts were sometimes valuable, they were usually ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... perpendicular line, on the chapter of the first pillar, which was of sapphire, stood the image of Saturn in elutian (Motteux reads 'Eliacim.') lead, with his scythe in his hand, and at his feet a crane of gold, very artfully enamelled, according to the native hue of the saturnine bird. ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... upon his feet slowly and began pacing the length of the long room. Kent waited, and the shrill cries of the newsboys floated up and in through the open windows. When the judge finally came back to his chair the saturnine face was ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... broken him very much; he was seventy, but looked more. He had a servant, a Luganese, named Dominique, devoted to him. Nicholas Treffry had found him overworked in an hotel, and had engaged him with the caution: "Look—here, Dominique! I swear!" To which Dominique, dark of feature, saturnine and ironical, had only replied: "Tres ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to have any more to say to Dufarge, but encouraged the lover of his eldest girl, a man of twice her age, the grim and saturnine Bartholde, by birth seigneur of an estate near Lozere, where, however, he lived only on sufferance, for the title had been abated after the persecutions following the Edict of Nantes, and though Bartholde was rich, he had ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... I would make a very good peddler," he thought. Although his grace of address was involuntary, like any keenly intelligent and retrospective man, he could not avoid being aware of it. He felt that he could outstrip that saturnine Syrian ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... this belt was circulated far and wide by Indian runners, finding its way even to the Red River of the North. These, coupled with his oratory and mummeries, greatly enhanced an influence which was possibly added to by a gloomy and saturnine countenance, made more forbidding still by the loss of an eye. Unfortunately for Tecumseh's enterprise, the Prophet was more bent upon personal notoriety than upon the welfare of his people; and, whilst professing the latter, indulged his ambition, in Tecumseh's absence, by a precipitate attack ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... good as his word. He got a French Chief with an aristocratic saturnine countenance, and a moustache and imperial that recalled the late Napoleon III. No one knew where Mr. Smith got him. Some people in the town said he was a French marquis. Others said he was a count and ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... the freebooters of Pierre Lafitte, their heads bound with crimson kerchiefs, a group of American bluejackets, a battalion of blacks from San Domingo, a few grizzled old French soldiers serving a brass gun, long rows of tanned, saturnine Tennesseans, more regulars with a culverin, and rank upon rank of homespun hunting shirts and long rifles, John Adair and his savage Kentuckians, and, knee-deep in the swamp, the frontiersmen who followed General Coffee to ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... The saturnine features of the inspector wrinkled into as near a grin as they were capable of. "Some of them are rather sore, but the doctor thinks they can all appear in ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... his old lightness, coming out of his brooding like a man stepping into the sun. He laughed, pulling his hat down on the bridge of his nose in the peculiar way he had of wearing it. A little while he sat; then stretched himself back at ease on his elbow, drooling smoke through his nose in saturnine enjoyment. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... young wife and her sister Desiree accompanied him. Perhaps the new, variable impressions of the journey, perhaps her separation from Bonaparte, and her association with other officers less gloomy than the saturnine Napoleon, all this seemed to cool the love of Desiree Clary; she no more answered Napoleon's letters, and, in writing to his brother Joseph, he made bitter complaints: "It seems that to reach Genoa the River Lethe must first be crossed, and therefore Desiree writes no more." [Footnote: See ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... to enjoy this moving tale with its lovely and ardent heroine, its frank, fearless hero, its glowing love passages, and its variety of characters, captivating or engaging humorous or saturnine, villains, rascals, and men of good will. A tale strong and interesting in plot, faithful and vivid as a picture of wild mountain life, and in its characterization full ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... departments, having at their head the "Grand Wizard of the Empire." It was all in sport—a great jest, or at the worst designed only to induce the colored man to work somewhat more industriously from apprehension of ghostly displeasure. It was a funny thing—the gravest, most saturnine, and self-conscious people on the globe making themselves ridiculous, ghostly masqueraders by the hundred thousand! The world which had lately wept with sympathy for the misfortunes of the "Lost Cause," was suddenly convulsed with merriment at the midnight antics ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... B. had a less agreeable sequel. He was dying of diabetes during the latter months of his confinement; he was an incorrigible little thief, a man of extraordinarily acute mind, and a sort of saturnine humorist withal. He had been repeatedly convicted and imprisoned, but "I can't let it alone," he would say. He was plump and flabby, ghastly pale, with protruding eyes, very clear and penetrating. He ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... priests of the Gentiles, and also the Christians used them in their temples, and sacrifices: and on the contrary, evil spirits are pleased and allured and called up by suffumigations of Henbane, &c. stinking smells, &c. which the witches do use in their conjuration. Toads (saturnine animals) are killed by putting of salt upon them; I have seen the experiment. Magical writers say, that cedar-wood drives away evil spirits; it was, and is much used in ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the saturnine poet smile—"That is the man who goes to hell whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which her companion observed—"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good. There were not many big construction jobs on which the Chief's tribesmen were not to be found ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... true of a mere work of invention, sure it may well be so considered in a work founded, like this, on truth; and where the political reflections form so distinguishing a part. But perhaps I may hear, from some critic of the most saturnine complexion, that my vanity must have made a horrid dupe of my judgment, if it hath flattered me with an expectation of having anything here seen in a grave light, or of conveying any useful instruction to the public, or to their guardians. ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding
... humour also, in some measure, we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the drama till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who succeeded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such an height. Humour was his proper sphere, and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... to conciliate readers of so saturnine and gloomy a class, that they cannot enter with genial sympathy into any gaiety whatever, but, least of all, when the gaiety trespasses a little into the province of the extravagant. In such a case, not to sympathize ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... will probably be divided in their opinions concerning this action; some may applaud it perhaps as an act of extraordinary humanity, while those of a more saturnine temper will consider it as a want of regard to that justice which every man owes his country. Partridge certainly saw it in that light; for he testified much dissatisfaction on the occasion, quoted an old proverb, and said, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... man smiled and darted a triumphant glance at the saturnine-looking doctor, before turning to give Denis a look, his eyes sparkling ...
— The King's Esquires - The Jewel of France • George Manville Fenn
... Mr. Simlins," said Squire Deacon, watching Faith and her convoy with a certain saturnine satisfaction; "I say it seems to me, that the Judge aint making the thing right side upwards. The boys get all the prizes—without Dr. Harrison thinks he has, and the teacher don't seem to be much count. Now what ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... and looking down upon the little round lake that was once Regillus, and which dots the immense expanse below, I remembered my young enthusiasm and my old instructor. Afterwards I had a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man, named Paterson, for a tutor. He was the son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar, as is common with the Scotch. He was a rigid Presbyterian also. With him I began Latin in 'Ruddiman's Grammar,' and continued till I went to the 'Grammar School, (Scotice, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... verandah, the window was pushed open and a man of forty years or so, well-dressed, tall, thin, dark and saturnine stood before ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest men may have everything their own way." Our Duke could not answer this, and therefore for the moment he yielded. But he was unhappy, saturnine, and generally silent except when closeted with his ancient mentor. And he knew that he was saturnine and silent, and that it behoved him as a leader of men to be genial and communicative,—listening to counsel even if he did not follow it, and at any rate appearing ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Clint's bed, was left end and this year's captain; the short, sturdy youth in the Morris chair was Thursby, the centre; Tom Hall, broad of shoulders, was right guard; Harry Walton, slimmer and rangier, with a rather saturnine countenance, was a substitute for that position. Jim Morton was, as we know, manager, and only Amory—or "Amy"—Byrd and Leroy Draper, the tow-headed, tip-nosed youth sharing the Morris chair with Thursby, were, in ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Though he had known and worked with Old Jimmie for years, Barney had never been admitted to the inner chambers of the older man's character. He sensed that there were hidden rooms and twisting passages; and of this much he was certain, that Old Jimmie was sly and saturnine. ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... laughed so loud at my reply I could not understand, but I supposed that in spite of his saturnine appearance he was a man of jovial temperament and I ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... table, he could not help observing what a bad set they looked. The remembrance of Russell came back to him. Oh, if Edwin could have known that he was in such company at such a place! And by the door stood Billy, watching them all like an evil spirit, with a leer of saturnine malice ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... silent. The antique Clio gathers up her robe and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his face assumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors, the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his face you might know him, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... great money-temple. Very imposing to me has always appeared the army of clerks seated in saturnine silence at the desks, or gliding with grave celerity about the place, and variously employed in balancing enormous accounts, shovelling up heaps of sovereigns, receiving and distributing bank-paper of vast value as coolly and unconcernedly as if engaged ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... pleasant stream, and banked it up with philosophical doubts and objections at every interval of the speaker's joyous progress. But the unmitigated Hunt never ceased his overflowing anticipations, nor the saturnine Carlyle his infinite demurs to those finite flourishings. The listeners laughed and applauded by turns; and had now fairly pitted them against each other, as the philosopher of Hopefulness and of the Unhopeful. ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... a whole found little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the bluff King Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only partially. They thought much better of her than they had of her saturnine sister, the first ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... episodes which had linked them together. The man of mystery invariably exerts a peculiar fascination over the feminine mind. Hence the unmerited popularity not infrequently enjoyed by the dark, saturnine, brooding individual whose conversation ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... biographers of our poet have observed, that his father was a man of a grave disposition, and a gloomy turn of mind, which his son did not inherit from him, for he was as remarkably volatile, as his father was saturnine. The same biographers have celebrated our author's mother as very handsome, whose charms had the power of attracting the admiration of Shakespear, the highest compliment which ever was paid to beauty. As Mr. Davenant, our poet's father, kept a tavern, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... settle his awful score with unmitigated justice. It is this feeling, unrivalled for poetic beauty, that gives color and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. With little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come into happier latitudes. Every strange visitor breathes love and forgiveness. The shade we meet is only charged with tidings of joy to the living, and messages of good will. The heart lightens and brightens at ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... melancholy temperament, but defers his judgement to that of the physicians, who declare the Pope of a sanguine-choleric nature; or when we read that the same Gaston de Foix, the victor of Ravenna, whom Giorgione painted and Bambaia carved, and whom all the historians describe, had the saturnine temperament. No doubt those who use these expressions mean something by them; but the terms in which they tell us their meaning are strangely out of date in the Italy of ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... course he had not spared his garments, for they were so besmeared that it would have puzzled a conjurer to have defined the original color of the cloth. His wig was black, and contrasted with his saturnine complexion, and as long as he held his tongue he would have passed muster as a native ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... their powers. His reason, instead of giving way, like those of the men around him, rather brightened under the excitement, as if it foresaw the danger it incurred, and the greater necessity there existed for vigilance. Though born in a southern clime, he was saturnine and cold when unexcited, and such temperaments rather gain their tone than lose their powers by stimulants under which men of feebler organizations sink. He had passed his life amid wild adventure and in scenes of peril which suited such a disposition, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... on Dakota. He arose and noiselessly moved his chair back from the table and she saw a saturnine smile on his face, yet in his eyes there shone a glint of intolerance that mingled ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... were at the corner of Kearney and California streets. Thither, with some half-formed mission in his mind, Francisco took his way. A saturnine man took him up in a little box-like elevator, ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... at once all the signs of extreme nervous tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... shook hands warmly with a very small and saturnine clergyman decorated with a shock of ebon hair, who ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Arabin returned and professed himself a confirmed Protestant, the master of Lazarus again opened his arms to him, and gradually he became the pet of the college. For some little time he was saturnine, silent, and unwilling to take any prominent part in university broils; but gradually his mind recovered, or rather made its tone, and he became known as a man always ready at a moment's notice to take up the cudgels in opposition to anything which ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... one but Degas and the Japanese was seen at its best. His astonishing qualities of invention, draughtsmanship, and a diabolic ingenuity in sounding the sinister music of decayed souls have never been before assembled under one roof. Power there is and a saturnine hatred of his wretched sitters. Toulouse-Lautrec had not the impersonal vision of Zola nor the repressed and disenchanting irony of Degas. He loathed the crew of repulsive night birds that he pencilled and painted in old Montmartre before the foreign ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. "But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... possessed of a temper admirably adapted to the circumstances in which he was placed. Of a cold and saturnine, rather than an arden disposition, he was never either so much elevated by good fortune or depressed by bad, as to lose for an instant the full possession of all his faculties. He saw that immediate escape ...
— Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone • Cecil B. Harley
... on Pap Shaunbaum. The man was moving about amongst his customers, exchanging a word here and there, his dark, saturnine face smiling his carefully amiable business smile. To the elemental man of the trail there was something very fascinating in the way this one brain was pitting itself to plunder through the senses of the rest ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum |
