"Volatile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fief he was young, and content with the unbounded indulgence of those bodily faculties with which he was largely endowed. He is described as extremely handsome, and above the average stature; with an acute mind, somewhat too volatile; and more prone by nature to the exercises of the field than to the deliberations of the cabinet. But neither was the son of Safdar Jang likely to be brought up wholly without lessons in that base and tortuous selfishness which, ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... the Philosophal Stone, is to have discovered the Absolute, as all the Masters say. But the Absolute is that which admits of no errors, is the Fixed from the Volatile, is the Law of the Imagination, is the very necessity of Being, is the immutable Law of Reason and Truth. The ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... he is represented as surrounded with intimates. Not without the power of impressing men with his dignity and seriousness of purpose, we nevertheless hear of him sitting on the knee of an eminent judge during a recess of the court; dancing from end to end of a dinner-table with the volatile Shields—the same who won laurels in the Mexican War, a seat in the United States Senate, and the closest approach anybody ever won to victory in battle over Stonewall Jackson; and engaging, despite his height of five feet and his weight of a hundred pounds, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... to do her justice, there was a sense of bitter pain in her heart, as she sat with her head bowed down, while the Brownes and Lord Hardy stood around trying to comfort her. Mrs. Browne offered her sal-volatile and called her "my poor dear;" Augusta put her arms around her neck; Allen fanned her gently, and Lord Hardy asked what he could do, while Mr. Browne said it was "plaguey hard on her, but somebody must go and see to them confounded custom-house chaps, or they would have every dud ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... messenger and half-brother, Fadrique, had played the role of Sir Tristram as he brought the lady back, and that she had been a somewhat willing Isolde. There were others who said that Blanche, knowing the king's volatile disposition and of his relations with the notorious Maria, had endeavored upon the eve of her marriage to seek aid from the arts of magic in her effort to win the love of her husband, and had obtained from a Jewish sorcerer a belt ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... induced last summer to do rather a foolish thing for a middle-aged spinster—I undertook to chaperon a volatile young niece upon a continental tour. We travelled the usual course up the Rhine into Switzerland, which we enjoyed rapturously. Then passing the Alps, we spent a few days at Milan, and next proceeded to Verona. In all this journey, nothing occurred to mar our English frankness, or disturb ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 440 - Volume 17, New Series, June 5, 1852 • Various
... the gas had been light and volatile. It caused terrible suffering to those caught by it, but it did not hover long over any given place and a gust of wind was sufficient to ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... true that the poet paints a life which does not exist. He only extracts and concentrates, as it were, life's ethereal essence, arrests and condenses its volatile fragrance, brings together its scattered beauties, and prolongs its more refined but evanescent joys: and in this he does well; for it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratifications, ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... had gone never to come back. In after years, when Annie had magnified it to herself and him, accusing him of throwing her love back in her face when she had offered it, he was wont to reproach himself bitterly. But Annie was so volatile in emotion, except where Archelaus was concerned, that her new flow would, in all likelihood, not have held its course for more than a few weeks at the best. Ishmael knew this, but Annie, by dint of telling herself ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... taste in trifles, but always the undisputed master of his house, her worst offences had been impertinent jokes, white lies, and short fits of pettishness ending in sunny good humour. But he was gone; and she was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment. She soon fell in love with a music-master from Brescia, in whom nobody but herself could discover anything to admire. Her pride, and perhaps some better feelings, struggled hard against this degrading ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... who amid the feverish world would wear 'a body free of pain, of cares a mind; 'fly the rank city, shun its turbid air; 'breathe not the chaos of eternal smoke, 'and volatile corruption, from the dead, 'the dying, sick'ning, and the living world 'exhaled, to sully heaven's transparent ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... toiling by the hour at shop needlework, or hawking fruit and vegetables about the Liverpool streets, she did a little better than anybody else; but as she would never sell her gift of song, and as her nature was in several respects, notwithstanding its real depth and earnestness, volatile, she could never keep very long to the same mode of earning her bread. A month or two of needlework would be followed by a month or two of hawking: she did not earn more than enough to keep soul and body together by either ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... spent his life in such an occupation, replied, that he was very sorry to part with me, as he had no doubt I should some day make as clever, and he hoped as good, a man as my father. The only fault in me of which he had to complain was, that I was too volatile, and inattentive to my books; but he added, that he could already discover sufficient capacity to enable me, with a little steadiness, to become a very good scholar. Then, addressing himself particularly to my mother, he said, that he was bound in justice to declare, that he ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 1 • Henry Hunt
... the other Secretary of State, from whom Swift could never "work out a dinner." There is Marlborough, "covetous as Hell, and ambitious as the prince of it," yet a great general and unduly pressed by the Tories; and the volatile Earl of Peterborough, "above fifty, and as active as one of five-and-twenty"—"the ramblingest lying rogue on earth." We meet poor Congreve, nearly blind, and in fear of losing his commissionership; the kindly Arbuthnot, the Queen's physician; Addison, ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... is de fortune of war. Why you so sad?" exclaimed the volatile Frenchman. "Another day we take two English ship, and then make all right. Have you never been in England? Fine country, but not equal to 'la belle France;' too much fog ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... taking the latch-key of the street-door, he went to his chemist's in Dover Street and bought some potassium bromide and sal volatile. When he came back Marthe whispered ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... fickle, frivolous, volatile character of so many divinity students is excellently hit off by Bunyan in our pilgrim's impatience to be out of the Interpreter's House. No sooner had he seen one or two of the significant rooms than this easily satisfied student was as eager to get out of that house as he had been to ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... Compounds: Protocol to the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Concerning the Control of Emissions of Volatile Organic Compounds ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... preferred to omit. It was easier, and far more agreeable to expatiate in a general field of controversy,—than to remain tethered to distinct points. It was particularly in these confused conferences, where neither party was entirely sincere, that the volatile word was thought preferable to the permanent letter. Already so many watery lines had been traced, in the course of these fluctuating negotiations, that a few additional records would be if necessary, as rapidly effaced ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... but also more thousands of failures to fathom her deep mysteries. They have proved thought material, since it is the evolution of the gray tissue of the brain, and a recent German experimentalist, Professor Dr. Jaeger, claims to have proved that man's soul is "a volatile odoriferous principle, capable of solution in glycerine". Psychogen is the name he gives to it, and his experiments show that it is present not merely in the body as a whole, but in every individual cell, in the ovum, and even ...
— The Life of Buddha and Its Lessons • H.S. Olcott
... heavy with an odor of damp and mould that had seeped into the atmosphere as moisture will seep through cellar walls. One would have said that the door of some hideous vault had been opened into my bedchamber. This stench struggled, as it were, with the volatile perfume that clung about the braid; so that my senses were thrust back and forth between disgust and delight in the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... we cannot eradicate the desire for this gratification, we may degrade its tendency, and corrupt its effects. We may substitute stimulants to the senses for elevation to the principle, or softening of the heart. By abandoning its direction to the most volatile and licentious of the community, we may render it an instrument of evil instead of good, and pervert the powers of genius, the magic of art, the fascinations of beauty, to the destruction instead of the elevation of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... find their followers less warm than they were, and think it necessary to stimulate them by these shows, or whether the shows themselves, by too frequent repetition, have rendered the people indifferent about the objects of them.—Perhaps both these suppositions are true. The French are volatile and material; they are not very capable of attachment to principles. External objects are requisite for them, even in a slight degree; and the momentary enthusiasm that is obtained by affecting their senses subsides with the conclusion ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... the dark he could see that a diaphanous gauze of dust overhung it and the air was heavy with the most volatile particles. The sandy earth had been ground and worked to the depth of over a foot. How difficult had it been for the rearmost ranks to cover this ploughed soil! The track was a mile in width, and by the ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... chocolates; or he may turn a jolly hurdy-gurdy or grind scissors. In spite of his native sociability, the south Italian is very slow to take to American ways. As a rule, he comes here intending to go back when he has made enough money. He has the air of a sojourner. He is picturesque, volatile, and incapable ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... beauty and coquette, promised to Marcel, a young soldier, but attached to Pascal, a peasant, whose poverty and pride prevent his declaring the passion he feels for the volatile ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... the spectroscope the smallest quantity of a gaseous or very volatile hydrocarbon, the Messrs. Negri introduce a small quantity of the gaseous mixture into a tube. This mixture should not contain oxygen, carbonic oxide, or carbonic acid; and the pressure is to be reduced to not more than twenty millimetres. Then if a hydrocarbon is present, the passage of a spark ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... the reader ever considered the relations of commonest forms of volatile substance? The invisible particles which cause the scent of a rose-leaf, how minute, how multitudinous, passing richly away into ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... qualities which promised to afford a very much more solid support to the everyday life of this world, than the constant carnival brilliance of her sister; and she found it oppressive to have to appear perpetually in carnival spirits, when she craved for those more sober moods in which her less volatile virtues ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... men at Washington, one who could play the guitar and touch the banjo lightly, and who had an eye for a pretty girl, and knew the language of flattery, was welcome everywhere in Hawkeye. Even Miss Laura Hawkins thought it worth while to use her fascinations upon him, and to endeavor to entangle the volatile fellow in the meshes of ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... worldly, light, and vain, whom adversity had not broken, and could not sour; an Abbe, bland and double, but gentle and kindly in his way; a soldier, volatile, hot-headed, brave as a lion, simple as a child; an older man, sad, sneering, indifferent to this world and the next, but with the wrecks of a noble head, and, God help ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... abroad, and when she returned to England, in the midst of a winter storm, bringing all the aid she could to her unfortunate consort, those who witnessed this appearance of energy imagined that her character was equally powerful in the cabinet. Yet Henrietta, after all, was nothing more than a volatile woman; one who had never studied, never reflected, and whom nature had formed to be charming and haughty, but whose vivacity could not retain even a state-secret for an hour, and whose talents were quite opposite to those ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... degeneration. The heredity is also bad; the father is a man of reckless and irregular conduct; the mother was at one time in a lunatic asylum. The patient was brought up in an orphanage, and was a troublesome, volatile child; she treated household occupations with contempt, but was fond of study. Even at an early age her lively imagination attracted attention, and the pleasure which she took in building castles in the air. From the age of seven to ten she masturbated. At her ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of separation, which a savage dreamer or seer would feel after a dream or vision in which he visited remote places, would satisfy him that his soul, at least, was volatile. But some experience of what he would take to be visits from the spirits of others, would be needed before he recognised that other men, as well as he, had the faculty of ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... not approve of Chris, or indeed of any of the family, including her own brother, who was its head. She had not approved of his gay young wife, Irish and volatile, who had died at the birth of little Noel. She doubted the stability of each one of them in turn, and plainly told her brother that he must attend to the launching of his children for himself. She was willing to do her best for them as children, ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... name for a girl. Martha herself fixed all that by the simple process of signing herself Marcia in her twelfth year and forever after. Marcia was a throw-back to her grandmother Winter—quick-tongued, restless, volatile. The boy was an admirable mixture of the best qualities of his father and mother; slow-going, like Hermie Slocum, but arriving surely at his goal, like his mother. With something of her driving force mixed with anything his father had of gentleness. ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... in the light of future events, to note that young Morse's parents were fearful lest his volatile nature and lack of steadfastness of purpose should mar his future career. His dominating characteristic in later life was a bulldog tenacity, which led him to stick to one idea through discouragements and disappointments which would have ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... fluid it contained for a moment, she took out the glass stopper, and, smelling at it, perceived it to be a very subtle and volatile spirit. ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the first projectors of the Royal Society, who, among many enlarged and useful notions, entertained the extravagant hope of a possibility to fly to the moon; which has put some volatile geniuses upon making wings ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... with ecstasy the delicious, the heavenly odour of "the Atar Gul, more precious than gold?" Who hath not in fancy wandered, as he inspired it, to the terrestrial paradise from whence it is procured? And who that knew not how so volatile an essence was collected, hath not marvelled, over the enjoyment of Otto of Roses? Persia, Turkey, and Egypt, are the principal countries in which it is manufactured, and the Atar of Persia is generally allowed to be the most ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... cried the volatile Fanny, laughing—"Ralph and myself just called by; we are past our time now. That horrid old Miss Sallianna will scold me, though she does talk about the beauties of nature—I wonder if she considers her front ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... Psmith had confided to Mike, meeting him at the station in the family motor on the Monday, 'is a man of vast but volatile brain. He has not that calm, dispassionate outlook on life which marks your true ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... to the maid. "Go to my room, and bring me another bonnet and a veil. Stop!" She tried to rise, and sank back. "I must have something to strengthen me. Get the sal volatile." ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... is young, volatile, capricious, but generous as the day. Be open with her; tell her why you leave Oakhurst and how impossible ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... an Instrument, whereby the Watery steams, volatile in the Air, are discerned, which the Nose it self is not able to find. Which is by him fully described in the Observation touching the Beard of a wild Oate, by the means ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... until after the initial lines had been drawn. It looked then as if there might be several codes, but before recessing several hours later some concessions had been made, and discussion on the more volatile points had been deferred. The differences of opinion were well founded and held with good reason. Some reflected an unawareness of situations in an unrelated horticultural field, e.g., a nurseryman did not know the problems ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... haste, had in his seventeenth year eloped with Martha, daughter of Major-General Richard Holmes, and married her in the Fleet on March 2, 1715. As was only to be expected from a person so volatile he from the beginning neglected his wife; but, as is put quaintly in that unreliable work, Memoirs of a Certain Island adjacent to the Kingdom of Utopia, which was concocted by Mrs. Eliza Haywood, "after some years of continu'd extravagance, the Duke, either through the natural ...
— Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Her Life and Letters (1689-1762) • Lewis Melville
... of furfural by boiling with condensing acids is a quantitative measure of only a portion, i.e. certain members of the group. The hydroxyfurfurals, not being volatile, are not measured in this way. By secondary reactions they may yield some furfural, but as they are highly reactive compounds, and most readily condensed, they are for the most part converted into complex 'tarry' products. Hence we have no means, ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... with bronze hummocks of moss. In this moment of pause it had assumed a look of what we call antiquity. The valley was not abundant with vegetation, but enamelled and jewelled. A more concentrated, hectic, and volatile essence sent up stalks, blades, and sprays, with that direction and restraint which perfection needs. More than in a likelier and fecund spot, in this valley the ichor showed the ardour and flush of its early vitality. Even ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... horses!" said the volatile Pepper, forgetting everything else, as he thrust his hands in his pockets, and felt the gains of the night; "let us ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... men of letters actively concerned with the present condition of literary criticism. This is a novel preoccupation for them and one which is, we believe, symptomatic of a general hesitancy and expectation. In the world of letters everything is a little up in the air, volatile and uncrystallised. It is a world of rejections and velleities; in spite of outward similarities, a strangely different world from that of half a dozen years ago. Then one had a tolerable certainty that the new star, if the new star was to appear, would burst ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... let us all drink it together. Aimee, my love to you, dear. Let me congratulate you upon the fortitude and courage with which you ignored those lying reports of my death. I had fears that I might find you alone in a darkened room, with tear-stained eyes and sal volatile by your side. This is infinitely ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... authors I have gathered that this same sea-unicorn's horn was in ancient days regarded as the great antidote against poison, and as such, preparations of it brought immense prices. It was also distilled to a volatile salts for fainting ladies, the same way that the horns of the male deer are manufactured into hartshorn. Originally it was in itself accounted an object of great curiosity. Black Letter tells me that Sir Martin Frobisher on his ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... agreements: party to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Nitrogen Oxides, Air Pollution-Persistent Organic Pollutants, Air Pollution-Sulfur 85, Air Pollution-Sulphur 94, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Antarctic Treaty, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Climate Change-Kyoto Protocol, Desertification, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Tropical Timber 83, Tropical ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... horseshoe, Willock believed she ran little danger from Indians. He, himself, had ceased to preserve his unrelaxing watchfulness; after all, it had been the highwaymen rather than the red men whom he had most feared—and after two years it did not seem likely that such volatile men would pre serve the feeling ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... diamonds, there would be nothing but poverty and distress. There was no reason for supposing that the diamonds would be especially short-lived, or that John Gordon would probably be a spendthrift. But diamonds as a source of income are volatile,—not trustworthy, as were the funds to Mrs Baggett. And then the nature of the source of income offered, enabled him to say so much as a plea to himself. Could he give the girl to a man who had nothing but diamonds with which to pay his weekly bills? He did ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... your rights depended wholly on Miss Vernor's choice. Fair lady, two hearts and four arms are at your immediate disposal. If you could make up your volatile mind ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... must be!' exclaimed Arthur. 'But we shall never see a human being in these backwoods;' and over his handsome face came an expression of ennui and weariness which Robert disliked and dreaded. 'Come, Holt, I'm longing to have a try at the snow-shoes:' and his white volatile nature brightened ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... had too much tenderness for their volatile offspring to subject her to either of the schemes of the equally unscrupulous philosophers. Indeed the most complete knowledge of the laws of nature would have been unserviceable in her case; for it was impossible to classify her. She was a fifth imponderable body, sharing ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... she, 'I won't be your friend, for that's too cold; I won't be your sister, for that's too familiar. Let me see—what ought I to be? I can't be your guardian, for I'm too volatile—what, then, can I be? Oh, I see! I'll tell you, Captain Randolph, what I'll be. I'll pretend that I'm your aunt. ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... grief; and eager longing is a sign of as much levity in desiring as immoderate joy is in possessing; and, as those who are too dejected are said to be effeminate, so they who are too elated with joy are properly called volatile; and as feeling envy is a part of grief, and the being pleased with another's misfortune is a kind of joy both these feelings are usually corrected by showing the wildness and insensibility of them: and as it becomes a man to be cautious, but it is unbecoming in him to be fearful; so to be pleased ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... manufacturers of illuminating oil, "Standard Oil" had early become familiar with the problems of supplying large communities—cities—with gas light; and with the advent of water-gas, as sellers of petroleum they controlled an important factor in the production of that volatile commodity. All the talent of the "System," trained in "handling" municipal authorities, came into play in this big new business of lighting cities—a business which perforce became a monopoly as soon as the powerful tentacles grasping it were ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... was going to die, and expected no other result, the same effect was produced on his own mind. As soon as hope sprang up in the breasts of all around him, his spirit also caught the contagion. As a rule, he would now make an effort to articulate. I would then administer a good dose of sal volatile, brandy, eau-de-luce, or other strong stimulant, cut into the supposed bite, and apply strong nitric acid to the wound. This generally made him wince, and I would hail it as a token of certain ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... health to these fortunate lovers Who, on this thrice blessed day, Have singed with the torch of chaste Hymen, The wings with which Cupid doth stray. And now, little volatile boy-god, You must keep yourself quiet at home— Enchained there by this happy marriage Where Genius and Beauty ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... of a people who, though now in their decadence, have played an immense and still play a not wholly insignificant part in the complex drama of Asiatic politics. It is the picture of a people, light-hearted, nimble-witted, and volatile, but subtle, hypocritical, and insincere; metaphysicians and casuists, courtiers and rogues, gentlemen and liars, hommes d'esprit and yet incurable cowards. To explain the history and to elucidate the character of this composite people great tomes have been written. I am conscious myself of ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... passed before Wallace managed to kill a deer. The animals were plenty enough; but the young man's volatile and eager attention stole his patience. And what few running shots offered, he missed, mainly because of buck fever. Finally, by a lucky chance, he broke a four-year-old's neck, dropping him in his tracks. The hunter was delighted. He insisted on doing everything for himself—cruel ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... little amazed when, just as he found himself midstream in those tariff studies to which Richard had invited him, that volatile individual arose in the utmost excitement and ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... with keeping everything to herself, and trying to spare us pain,' Mrs. Ross said to her husband, as she recounted this little scene to him. 'I never knew Audrey hysterical before; I was obliged to give her some sal volatile. I think she ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of horses may be blocked by a mob and have much difficulty in fighting its way through; but if every one of the mob could be changed suddenly into a ghost, there would be little to retard it. And as each interior entity is more rare, active, and volatile than the outer and as each has relation with different elements, spaces, and properties of the Kosmos which are treated of in other articles on Occultism, the mind of the reader may conceive—though the pen of the writer could not express it in a dozen volumes—the magnificent possibilities ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... not how to wish them wiser at the expense of gayety. They play before me like motes in a sunbeam, enjoying the passing ray; whilst an English head, searching for more solid happiness, loses in the analysis of pleasure the volatile sweets of the moment. Their chief enjoyment, it is true, rises from vanity; but it is not the vanity that engenders vexation of spirit: on the contrary, it lightens the heavy burden of life, which reason ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... times and circumstances, as the human race itself; and to identify them and pin them down on a specimen card, one must be another Pastor Aristaeus, alert and skilful, in pursuit of a lightning Proteus, infinitely various and hopelessly volatile. ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... all natural products a certain volatile and ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... Leonato governor of Messina, lively and light-hearted, affectionate and impulsive. Though wilful she is not wayward, though volatile she is not unfeeling, though teeming with wit and gaiety she is affectionate and energetic. At first she dislikes Benedick, and thinks him a flippant conceited coxcomb; but overhearing a conversation between her cousin Hero and her gentlewoman, in which Hero ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... France. In the midst stood the stately Marquis, gorgeous in vice-regal robes and attended by a suite of nobles and gallants from the court of Fontainebleau. The mysteries and wonders of the West had stirred the romantic minds of the volatile courtiers, and the mission to convert New France to the Catholic faith gave to De Tracy's expedition the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... than the starch of wheat or potatoes, and the flavor is purer. The fresh, root consists, according to Benzon, of 0.07 of volatile oil; 26 of starch (23 of which are obtained in the form of powder, while the other 3 must be extracted from the parenchyma in a paste, by boiling water); 1.48 of vegetable albumen; 0.6 of a gummy extract; 0.25 of chloride of calcium; 6 of ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... violent demonstrations of surprise and joy over, Mrs Gaff dragged her husband into a small closet, which was regarded by the household in the light of a spare room, and there compelled him to change his garments. While this change was being made the volatile Bu'ster, indignant at being bolted out, kicked the door with his heel until he became convinced that no good or evil could result from the process. Then his active mind reverted to the forbidden loaf, and he forthwith drew a ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... which side he was taking. Previous to the tragedy of yesterday he had got on well enough with both of the cousins, without being in the least intimate with either. Indeed, of the two he preferred, perhaps, the silent, solid Cayley to the more volatile Mark. Cayley's qualities, as they appeared to Bill, may have been chiefly negative; but even if this merit lay in the fact that he never exposed whatever weaknesses he may have had, this is an excellent quality in a fellow-guest (or, if you like, fellow-host) in a house where one ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... the floor,' said Mrs. Dusautoy, rising with full energy, and laying a cushion under Sophy's head, reaching a scent-bottle, and sending her husband for cold water and sal volatile; with readiness that astonished Albinia, unused to illness, and especially to faintings, and remorseful at having taken Sophy out. 'Was it the pain of her ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of mind did not last very long with the volatile youth; for, truth to say, the sudden dereliction of mortality on the part of his quarrelsome old father, did not come altogether amiss to him. What hindered him now from wedding the girl of his heart, and leading as jolly a life as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... "the princess is very handsome; but flatterers, poets, and painters always overstep the truth. Her portrait has deceived me: its large blue eyes bear assuredly some resemblance to those of Papillette, but they bespeak an ardent and feeling heart, while hers is frivolous, volatile, and incapable of love. Her smile would be charming, but for its satirical irony. And what is the value of the loveliest lips in the world, if they open but ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... Christian life that he has the respect and confidence of everybody. What if he can't preach? He can practice. However, I am willing to admit that the dear old man would be more edifying if he would study his lesson a little. Wasn't it funny to think of calling that 'teaching?'" And then this volatile young lady laughed. But her ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... refrigerater, the whole mass is permeated with putrefactive bacteria. Refrigeration even to a point close to freezing delays but does not prevent the growth of putrefactive organisms although at lower temperatures the usual volatile products which give notice of the presence of putrefaction by an odor of decay are not produced. Persons whose stomachs manufacture a liberal amount of hydrochloric acid, an essential constituent of healthy gastric juice, are able to disinfect ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... young fellow, about twenty-five years of age, and keeps house with two maiden sisters, who are professed devotees. The brother is a little libertine, good natured and obliging; but a true Frenchman in vanity, which is undoubtedly the ruling passion of this volatile people. He has an inconsiderable place under the government, in consequence of which he is permitted to wear a sword, a privilege which he does not fail to use. He is likewise receiver of the tythes of the clergy in this district, an office ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... a fanciful picture? Not at all. I know it is so with many, I do not say all, but with many. They disregard evil thoughts because they are such trifling things—like flies, so easily brushed away; like flies, so light and volatile; like flies, so little. And yet they utterly degrade and corrupt the heart. "The land was corrupted by reason ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... Senator's in savage leash, and a slight tremble presently began to shake the old man. Atkinson and Meyers and even the volatile Mexican lawyer, Martinez, remained unstirring, for in the situation they suddenly sensed something beyond their ken, some current of deep unknown forces, some play of fierce, obscure and ...
— In the Shadow of the Hills • George C. Shedd
... did not get into the papers as a consequence of being blown up, although his daily life was certainly a continuous exposure to that risk. Destiny has a constant passion for the incongruous, and it was George's lot to manipulate wholesale quantities of terrific and volatile explosives in safety, and to be laid low by an accident so commonplace and inconsequent that it was a comedy. Fate had reserved for him the final insult of riding him down under the wheels of one of those juggernauts ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... of the earth is composed mainly of very volatile elements, known as nitrogen and argon. This is commingled with oxygen, also a volatile element. Into this mass a number of other substances enter in varying but always relatively very small proportions. Of these the most considerable ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... Example of Purity to the Writers of a neighbouring Nation; which now shall have an Opportunity to receive English Bullion in Exchange for its own Dross, which has so long passed current among us in Pieces abounding with all the Levities of its volatile Inhabitants.} The reigning Depravity of the Times has yet left Virtue many Votaries. Of their Protection you need not despair. May every head-strong Libertine whose Hands you reach, be reclaimed; and every ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... administration was not the first to wrestle with the problem of applying a single racial policy to both the regulars and the guard. It was aware that too much tampering with the politically influential and volatile guard could produce an explosion. At the same time any appearance of timidity courted antagonism ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... cheap oxygen which might be realized in the near future. The greatest illuminating effect from a given bulk of gas is obtained by mixing it with the requisite proportion of oxygen, and holding in the flame of the burning mixture a piece of some solid infusible and non-volatile substance, such as lime. This becomes heated to whiteness, and emits an intense light know as the Drummond light, used already for special purposes of illumination. By supplying oxygen in pipes laid by the side of the ordinary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 623, December 10, 1887 • Various
... drought, the country received substantial rainfall from 2001-03 alleviating immediate concerns. The Turkish Cypriot economy has roughly one-third of the per capita GDP of the south, and economic growth tends to be volatile, given north Cyprus's relative isolation, bloated public sector, reliance on the Turkish lira, and small market size. The Turkish Cypriot economy grew 15.4% in 2004, fueled by growth in the construction and education ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... like his friend's allusions, though they were much too subtle for his ready comprehension, for the intellect of the Swiss was a little frosted by constant residence among snows and in full view of glaciers, and it wanted the volatile play of the Genoese's fancy, which was apt to expand like air rarefied by the warmth of the sun. This difference of temperament, however, so far from lessening their mutual kindness, was, most probably, the real cause of its existence, since it is well known that friendship, like ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... was prolonged and repeated from one end to the other by command and obedience. The subordination, regularity, silence, and serious deportment so remarkable on this ship, formed a system of social order rigid and free, in contrast with the city of Naples, so volatile, so passionate, and tumultuous. Oswald was occupied with Corinne and the impressions she received; but his attention was sometimes diverted from her by the pleasure he felt in finding himself in his native country. And indeed are not ships and the open sea a second ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... right as to the sap being in it, but it is too volatile, somewhat crackling in its burning, yet far more steady in its flame, not spending its energy in fireworks, nor giving great cracks, like a whip, and a jump afterwards as No. 1, so we will lay aside ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... indolence fortunately preserved me from exposing myself, like these volatile tourists. I was at least secure from the danger of making mistakes in telling what I ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... voyage somewhat chastened in spirit. But her volatile nature soon survived the shocks it had received. By the time the Kansas put her ashore at Tilbury, to be clasped in the arms of a timid and tearful aunt, she was ready as ever for the campaign of glory she had mapped ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... views therein expressed were ignored both by their own and the succeeding generation. In place of the relative molecular weights, attention was concentrated on relative atomic or equivalent weights. This may be due in some measure to the small number of gaseous and easily volatile substances then known, to the attention which the study of the organic compounds received, and especially to the energetic investigations of J. J. Berzelius, who, fired with enthusiasm by the original theory of Dalton and the law of multiple proportions, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... adoration. While he could not pay sufficient tribute to Washington's magnanimity and generosity, he had by now seen him in too many tempers, had been ground too fine in his greedy machine, to think on him always with unqualified enthusiasm. Lafayette, brilliant, volatile, accomplished, bubbling with enthusiasm for the cause of Liberty, and his own age within a few months, he liked sincerely and always. There was no end to the favours he did him, and Lafayette loved no one better in his long and various ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... my young, volatile reader, "I shall never have patience to get through these volumes, there are so many ahs! and ohs! so much fainting, tears, and distress, I am sick to death of the subject." My dear, cheerful, innocent girl, for innocent I will suppose ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... course of an aerial voyage of discovery among the stars, should chance to alight upon this outlandish planet. And here I beg my readers will not have the uncharitableness to smile, as is too frequently the fault of volatile readers, when perusing the grave speculations of philosophers. I am far from indulging in any sportive vein at present; nor is the supposition I have been making so wild as many may deem it. It has long been a ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... sympathy, wrung out of a heart naturally obdurate, by the anguish of a personal experience of the pain he himself had produced in another, who had the strongest claims on his protection and love. His mind, though volatile and wandering, and not far from verging on delirium, was not yet deranged; and I was about to put a question to him concerning his wife, whom he had not directly mentioned to me, when the door opened, and the still ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... critical dissection should not be able to extract again, as his confidence in it was such, that he conceived it exhausted every thing which pleases and charms us in poetry. He was not aware that, in the chemical retort of the critic, what is most valuable, the volatile living spirit of a poem, evaporates. His pieces are in general deficient in soul, in that nameless something which never ceases to attract and enchant us, even because it is indefinable. In the lyrical pieces, his Masques, we feel the want of a certain mental music of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... which she was placed. Without education enough to value the resources of wealth and leisure, she was so circumstanced as to command both. It would have done her more good than all the ether and sal-volatile she was daily in the habit of swallowing, if she might have taken the work of one of her own housemaids for a week; made beds, rubbed tables, shaken carpets, and gone out into the fresh morning air, without all the paraphernalia ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... manner of growth to the preceding, is another importation from Europe now thoroughly at home here in wet soil. The volatile oil obtained by distilling its leaves has long been an important item of trade in Wayne County, New York. One has only to crush the leaves in one's ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... England upon the restoration of the Edict of Nantes (1685). He soon mixed with the gayest society, and became well known as a prolific writer of songs, prologues, epilogues, masques, and the lighter dramatic fare. Much of this work is not lacking in wit and volatile smartness, but it is all far too ephemeral to have any permanent value as literature. He edited The Gentleman's Journal, but is perhaps best remembered for his translation of Don Quixote, and his concluding ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... knows not their possibilities. Or, we may call it stored energy he has; for such is money, the finest, subtlest, most potent form of stored energy; it may command the highest fruits of genius, the lowest fruits of animality; it is also volatile, elusive. Our young friend has many powerful batteries of it. But he is no electrician. Some he will happily waste without harm to himself. Much of it, apparently, he will convert into that champagne he now drinks. For a week since I had the pleasure of becoming ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... of contradictions to those who do not understand her—now in the clouds, now in the depths. Bad weather depresses her; so does a sad story, the death of a kitten, solemn music. She is correspondingly volatile in the opposite direction and often laughs at real calamities with wonderful courage. She has a fund of romance in her nature which has led her to the pass she now is in. She is clever, too, at introspection ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... to close her worldly and volatile career with some brilliant and final triumph, as a great actress knows the proper time to withdraw from the stage so as to leave regrets behind. Desirous of offering up this final incense to her own vanity, the princess skillfully selected her victims. She spied out in ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... the wound was neither deep nor dangerous. The court surgeon was as consoling as he was complimentary, and by the time that messengers from the palace had arrived with inquiries from the Emperor and invitations to the Emperor's ball, the mother of the heroine could dispense with her sal volatile. ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... cheapness, acetic acid distilled from wood (besides being employed for pickling and other purposes, for which it is well adapted), diluted and treated with volatile oils, is every year superseding to a larger extent the vinegars in general use. That this bears no comparison as regards the agreeable qualities, even with the ordinary vinegars, need scarcely be ...
— The Production of Vinegar from Honey • Gerard W Bancks
... the men hardly spoke to each other, but the homely one where they told stories of an afternoon, and were not ashamed to confess among themselves to personal weaknesses and follies, knowing well that such secrets would go no further. But he could not tell this. So volatile and intangible was the story that to convey it in words would have been as hard as to ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... for which the soil has no retentive power; and in the second place, from the porosity of the soil, the air has too great access, so that the vegetable and animal matters of manures decay too rapidly, their volatile portions, ammonia and carbonic acid, escape into the atmosphere, and are in measure lost to the crops. From these combined causes we find that a heavy dressing of well-rotted stable manure, almost if not ...
— Peat and its Uses as Fertilizer and Fuel • Samuel William Johnson
... drained his glass at a gulp, and his lips pressed together as though he were unwilling that even the volatile essence might ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... by caricature merely, as volatile, fickle, deceitful, full of artifice, should sit in judgment upon them. He has the least heart of all who thinks that there is not some heart everywhere! The charity which tarrieth long and suffereth much wrong, has been that ...
— Bohemian Days - Three American Tales • Geo. Alfred Townsend
... by cause the traveller Leopold came there to be healed for he was sore wounded in his breast by a spear wherewith a horrible and dreadful dragon was smitten him for which he did do make a salve of volatile salt and chrism as much as he might suffice. And he said now that he should go in to that castle for to make merry with them that were there. And the traveller Leopold said that he should go otherwhither for he was a man of cautels and a subtile. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to understand the nature of the Frenchman, volatile, moody, chivalrous, unreasonable, the slave of ideas, the victim of sentiment. Not understanding, when he began to see that he could not attain the object of his visit, which was to secure some relics of the late Seigneur's household, he chose ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... environment;—good for no Kingly use. On one royal person, on the Queen only, can Mirabeau perhaps place dependance. It is possible, the greatness of this man, not unskilled too in blandishments, courtiership, and graceful adroitness, might, with most legitimate sorcery, fascinate the volatile Queen, and fix her to him. She has courage for all noble daring; an eye and a heart: the soul of Theresa's Daughter. 'Faut il-donc, Is it fated then,' she passionately writes to her Brother, 'that I with the blood I am come of, with the sentiments I have, must live and die among such mortals?' ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... nicknames to the king and queen. Victoire, Princess. Vienna, Marie Antoinette, leaving, April 26th, 1770. Ville de Paris, ship. Villette, Marquis de. Vincennes, castle at, attacked by the mob. Violence of the Parliament. Viscount Matthieu de Montmorency. Volatile character of the queen. Voltaire's remark about the maritime superiority of England; return to France, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... consoling her, probably, and at the same time obtaining a better view of her downcast face, he took a seat beside her. He even refrained from making an observation which he had in petto, upon the volatile character and manners of Miss Taylor, reserving it for the future; determining that when they were man and wife, Jane should have the full benefit of his opinion ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... is caused by parts of the body floating in the air, and acting on the nerves of the nose. This is an invariable rule; and, when we perceive an odor, we may be sure that parts of the material, from which it emanates, are escaping. If we perceive the odor of an apple, it is because parts of the volatile oils of the apple enter the nose. The same is true when we smell hartshorn, ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... secretion, of a purgative and rather dangerous quality, than which nothing can be more distinct from the gum. The fruit is replete, not only with acid, mucilage, and sugar, but with its own peculiar aromatic and highly volatile secretion, elaborated within itself, on which its fine flavour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 529, January 14, 1832 • Various
... this short lesson from the god of bays, And let my friend apply it as he please: Beat not the dirty paths where vulgar feet have trod, But give the vigorous fancy room. For when, like stupid alchymists, you try To fix this nimble god, This volatile mercury, The subtile spirit all flies up in fume; Nor shall the bubbled virtuoso find More than fade insipid mixture left behind.[6] While thus I write, vast shoals of critics come, And on my verse pronounce their saucy doom; The Muse like some bright country virgin shows Fallen ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... The gay, volatile, willful, warm-hearted Erminia was less earnest in all things. Her childhood had been passed amid the distractions of wealth; and passionately bent upon the attainment of some object at one moment, the next found ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... being wrecked by a moderate amount of heat of the proper quality: let us examine this point for a moment. There is a liquid called nitrite of amyl—frequently administered to patients suffering from heart disease. The liquid is volatile, and its vapor is usually inhaled by the patient. Let a quantity of this vapor be introduced into a wide glass tube, and let a concentrated beam of solar light be sent through the tube along its axis. Prior to the entry of the beam, the vapor is as invisible as ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various
... was guessed, the volatile Van Dusen broke out into, "Here's a how d'e do!" One of the Ashley girls in the next wagon caught up the word with, "Here's a state of things!" and the two buckboards went rattling down the hill to Eagle Lake in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and he could never understand why all women should not feel in the same way. Then he was fond of solitude, and looked upon a visitor as an emissary of the devil; and he failed to see that a gay, pleasure-loving, volatile, sparkling girl could not share his feelings. So he shut her up remorselessly,—never dreaming that he was cruel. That she was fond of admiration was nothing to him, though he was fond of it himself in ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... to rig up a coiled bi-metallic strip. You're trying to boil off your various fractions, and unless you keep an even and controlled temperature you are going to have a mixed brew. The thing you want for your engines are the most volatile fractions, the liquids that boil off first like gasoline and benzene. After that you raise the temperature and collect kerosene for your lamps and so forth right on down the line until you ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... are in a way responsible for the old man, perhaps that is your duty," replied Trenholme, secretly thinking that on such roads and under such skies the volatile youth would not ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... fiend in a worse shape.' I was relieved at last by a long fit of weeping; and all night good Mary Quince sat by me, and Milly slept by my side. Starting and screaming, and drugged with sal-volatile, I got through that night of supernatural terror, and saw the blessed ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... long since subsided and much of what was then seething has gone off in vapor or other volatile products. But some very solid matters also have been precipitated, some crystals of poetry translucent, symmetrical, enduring. The immediate practical outcome was disappointing, and the external history ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... dear," answered her father, "you'd better bring some sal volatile or something. Mrs Negus has fainted; and I'm afraid poor Mr Lathrope is in ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... volatile, a sportive bird, By social glee inspired; Ambitious to be seen or heard, And pleased to ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... will have nothing denied that I have done,—nor will I be ashamed of anything. I did do so,—even after this infatuation. I thought then that one so volatile might perhaps fly ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... taking their evening's repast on the side of the highway, opposite to the field through which she was flying. They were her countrymen, and she knew that her sex would be respected by the Eastern militia, who composed this body; but in the volatile and reckless character of the Southern horse she had less confidence. Outrages of any description were seldom committed by the really American soldiery; but she recoiled, with exquisite delicacy, from even the appearance of humiliation. When, therefore, she heard the footsteps of a ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... Florian. Not that, as an obedient daughter should, she held her father's consent to be an indispensable preliminary to her settlement in life. The latter, early left a widower, and a man of a self-indulgent, volatile temper, as enterprising with women as he was in business, had never paid much heed to her and had left her to develop at her own sweet will, untrammelled whether by parental advice or parental affection, more careful to ignore than to safeguard the girl's behaviour, ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... in the master's studio considerably longer than his more volatile companions, who had gladly availed themselves of the excuse which the dusk of evening afforded, to withdraw from their several tasks, in order to finish a day of labour in the jollity ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... his characters, being made up out of many people, were composite, and never individual. That the chair (for table) and other matters were undoubtedly from her, but that other traits were not hers at all; and that in Miss Moucher's "Ain't I volatile" his friends had quite correctly recognized the favourite utterance of a different person. That he felt nevertheless he had done wrong, and would now do anything to repair it. That he had intended to employ the character in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our estimates are loose and floating. We must work and affirm, but we have no guess of the value of what we say or do. The cloud is now as big as your hand, and now it covers a county. That story of Thor, who was set to drain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... or Morrison," continued the Colonel, "or Drummond, of Wrayford's; but he is too volatile. Roberts would be a splendid fellow for the task, for, like Drummond, he is strong amongst ice and snow, and my messenger will have to take to the snow nearly all the ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... the intercourse which had for him nothing but distress, and his volatile acquaintances were perhaps the first to set him the example. Often in his solitary walks he stopped afar off to gaze upon the sports which none ever solicited him to share; and as the shout of laughter and of happy hearts ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of Lady Frances on the score of her friend's indisposition, and it is but justice to admit she loved her with all the constancy of which her volatile nature was capable, her affection was nearly overpowered by her curiosity—curiosity to discover how Constance obtained the locket, and how she lost her most admired tress. Yet, to neither of these perplexities had she the slightest clue. Intimate as they had been from childhood; ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... her aunt and her cousins, who ridiculed her studies and teased her about her unwillingness for society, which they attributed to a lack of the power of pleasing, Felicite resolved on making herself coquettish, gay, volatile,—a woman, in short. But she expected in return an exchange of ideas, seductions, and pleasures in harmony with the elevation of her own mind and the extent of its knowledge. Instead of that, she was filled with disgust for the ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... shall deprive ourselves, among other things, of the pleasures which it is the province of memory to give; and the exercise of memory is called for by music much more urgently than by any other art, because of its volatile nature and the role which repetition plays ...
— How to Listen to Music, 7th ed. - Hints and Suggestions to Untaught Lovers of the Art • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... to: Air Pollution, Air Pollution-Volatile Organic Compounds, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Desertification, Endangered Species, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution, Wetlands, Whaling signed, but not ratified: ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... death had shocked him considerably by its suddenness, but he was too much of a volatile Frenchman to be morbidly anxious about securing ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... ten days allowed her for preparation Kitty continued charmed with Hayden's idea of a butterfly dinner. It suited her volatile fancy. Her enthusiasm remained at high pitch, and she exerted herself to the utmost in behalf of her favorite cousin. As a consequence, although she made a pretense of consulting Hayden about the various arrangements, the final results were almost as much of a surprise to him as to the rest ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... the city, commonly called the French quarter, so purely French are the people, with temperaments as gay and volatile as in Le Beau Paris itself, is a gem of architecture in the church of "Our Lady of Lourdes." This chapel, reared as a visible expression of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, is of the Byzantine and Renaissance type, ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... For, sooner than expected, the volatile fluid— or whatever it may be—passes out of their veins, and their nervous strength returns; even Ludwig saying he is himself again, though he is not quite ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... person, did not offer compensation for his domestic misfortunes. Hard work and protracted vigils soon aged the high functionary, who was ever unable to win his wife's heart; but he loved her and sheltered her none the less constantly. It was chiefly to avenge her for the indiscretion of the volatile young Oscar Husson, Moreau's godson, that he discharged the not overhonest steward of Presles. [A Start in Life.] The system of government that succeeded the Empire increased Serizy's influence and renown; he was an intimate ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... bad, and indifferent. The stubborn and irreclaimable imp of evil nature peers out sullenly and doggedly, or sparkles on you a pair of small snake-eyes, fruitful of deceit and cunning. The better boy, easily moved, that might become anything, mercurial and volatile, "most ignorant of what he's most assured," reflects on his face the pleasure of having his picture taken, and smiles good-humoredly, standing in this worst of pillories, to be pelted along a lifetime with unforgetting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... wondering why Molly paid so poor a compliment to her own denomination as to suppose that the natural gravitation of piety was towards Dissent. But Molly's volatile nature passed to a different subject ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... the "Spider" was desperately in love with Heathcote. As long as that volatile youth had owned his allegiance and proved amenable to his influence, so long had Pledge liked the boy and set store ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse intruders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength. The French language has visibly changed under the inspection of the Academy; ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... was oral, the volatile Mitchell made use of his voice in a manner of heathenish boisterousness, and presently reclined upon a lounge to laugh the better. His stricken comrade, meanwhile, recovered so far as to pace the floor. "I'm goin' to pack up and light out for home!" he declared, over and over. And ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... of inducing so volatile a people to persevere in so steady a system of conduct as that which you had laid down—a system attended with much inconvenience and loss to particulars, while it presented but little to strike or inflame the imagination ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... and instructive phenomena of nature; the resolutions and combinations that are formed during the process of the vinous and acetous stages of fermentation, are interesting, beyond comparison, to the brewer, malt and molasses distillers, vintager, cider and vinegar maker, &c. The elastic fluids and volatile principles that are extricated and escape, formerly so little attended to, are now better understood. The method of commodiously saving, and advantageously applying them, and other volatile products, to ...
— The American Practical Brewer and Tanner • Joseph Coppinger
... vanity there's nothing harder hearted; For thoughtless of all sufferings unseen, Of all save those which touch upon the round Of the day's palpable doings, the vain man, And oftener still the volatile woman vain, Is busiest at heart with restless cares, Poor pains and paltry joys, that make within ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. 577 - Volume 20, Number 577, Saturday, November 24, 1832 • Various
... answer; but I thought I knew. I changed the conversation as soon as possible, and my volatile American friend was soon absorbed in a discussion on dress and jewellery. That night was a blessed one for me; I was free from all suffering, and slept as calmly as a child, while in my dreams the face of Cellini's "Angel of life" smiled at me, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... thank my Lord for my escape and for the loosing of my prosperity from the trap of trouble." Now when the Birder heard these words of the Birdie he repented and regretted his folly, and he cried, "O my sorrow for what failed me of the slaughter of this volatile," and as he sank on the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton |
