"Capricious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... food. Parents observe this habit of little eating and begin to coax and bribe the child to eat more at meal time, and to eat between meals. In this way the child really overeats, the appetite becomes capricious, and the stomach rebels. In a very short time the condition of "loss of appetite" is established as a consequence. Another cause is the drinking of too much milk, and yet another and very common cause is indiscriminate eating of candy, cakes crackers, and fruit ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... Piankeshaw much behind the juniors in good humour; though, it must be confessed, his feelings were far more capricious and evanescent. One while he would stop his horse, and dragging Roland to his side, pat him affectionately on the shoulder, and tell him, as well as his broken language could express his intentions, that he would take him ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... feelings, I walked rapidly on, without deigning to look at one so heartless and capricious. Mr. Regulus was right. He was not a proper companion. I would never allow him to ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... last. "Fortune, I am convinced, dwells here; for I have seen her the guest now of this one and now of that one. How is it that I cannot entertain the capricious creature? I must try her elsewhere. I have already been told that the people of this place are exceedingly ambitious. Evidently there is no room for me here. So, adieu! gentleman of the court, and follow to the bitter end this will-o'-the-wisp! They tell me that Dame Fortune ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine
... of the dominion of his passions, was uncertain and capricious. He was easily engaged, and easily disgusted; but he is accused of retaining his hatred more tenaciously than his benevolence. He was compassionate both by nature and principle, and always ready to perform offices of humanity; but when he ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... scholastic philosophy that it went on one brazen leg and one of an ass. This seems to be our plight to-day. Our scientific leg is lusty and grows in strength daily; its fellow member—our thought of man and his sorry estate—is capricious and halting. We have not realized the hopes of the eighteenth-century "illumination", when confident philosophers believed that humanity was shaking off its ancient chains; that the clouds of superstition ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... lofty banks of the Erie, on the placid lake beneath his feet, mirroring the bright starred heavens on its unbroken surface, or throwing into full and soft relief the snow white sail, and dark hull of some stately war-ship, becalmed in the offing, and only waiting the rising of the capricious breeze, to waft her onward on her THEN peaceful mission of dispatch. Lost indeed to all perception of the natural must he have been, who could have listened, without a feeling of voluptuous melancholy, to the plaintive ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... right as every other man in society, as the merchant, the mechanic, or the farmer, to prosecute his business unmolested; shielded by the same laws which protect them from the attacks of malicious libellers out of the theatre, and the insults of capricious Ignorance or stupid Malevolence within. "Reproof," says Dr. Johnson, "should not exhaust its power upon petty failings;" and "the care of the critic should be to distinguish error from inability, faults of inexperience from ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... order to liberate Papillette, who was very inconveniently cramped, and almost suffocated with anger. Disagreeable truths seldom reach the ear of princesses; her resentment, therefore, was to be expected. Meanwhile, her heart being equally capricious as her understanding, she felt ready to pardon, and even, on reflection, to justify Patipata. But pride soon combated this weakness; and she determined to send him away. She complained to her father; assured ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... were drawn up and passed through the tunnel to the blockhouse. Greatly exhausted, the soldiers held out until next day, when, having surrendered honorably, they were all taken prisoners as they left the scorched and battered log tower. For savages were such capricious and cruel victors that they could rarely be depended upon to keep faith. Pontiac himself was superior to his people in such matters. If he had been at Presqu' Isle, the garrison would not have been seized after surrendering on honorable terms. However, these soldiers were not instantly ...
— Heroes of the Middle West - The French • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... for Oddo's trick,—your master and I," said Madame Erlingsen; "but we are not in the least afraid of any further harm happening. You know we do not believe that God permits his children to be at the mercy of evil or capricious spirits. Indeed, Erica, we could not love God as we should wish to love Him, if we could not trust in Him as a just and kind protector. Go to rest now, Erica. You have done quite enough since you left your bed. Go to rest now. Rest your heart upon Him who has blessed ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... capricious, Sir," said she, "that after telling you but yesterday I could not be of your party, I shall tell you ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... particularly at Koummeh, Semneh, Napata, Denderah, and Ombos. Altogether, Thothmes III. is pronounced to have left behind him more monuments than any other Pharaoh excepting Rameses II., and though occasionally showing himself, as a builder, somewhat capricious and whimsical, still, on the whole, to have worked in a pure style and proved that he was not ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... piece of furniture; because she knew it was not to be purchased; and the lady's character, which was none of the most amiable in point of humanity and condescension, forbad all hopes of borrowing it for a season: she therefore attempted to reason down this capricious appetite, as an extravagance of imagination which ought to be combated and repressed; and Mrs. Pickle, to all appearance was convinced and satisfied by her arguments and advice; but, nevertheless, could make use of no other convenience, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... peculiarities retained without affectation; that quaintness, the unavoidable companion of neologism, is as needless to genius, as hostile to grace; the hexameter, until it is familiar, must repel, and, when it is familiar, may annoy; that it wants a musical orderliness of sound; and that its cantering capricious movement opposes the grave march of solemn majesty, and better suits the ordinary scenery of Theocritus than ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... at his friend. He was funny, he was pathetic, so prone to be cast down one moment and the next raised aloft to the skies, according to the whim of the capricious young lady. Many times Pan had ridden and worked with a boy afflicted with ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... remote from the ordinary haunts of man, our young hunters found their new environment one free from monotony, after all. The sea was never twice the same, and even the weather was capricious enough to afford variety. As spring wore on the region seemed to teem with wild life, whether on the earth, in the water, or the air. The gulls, crows, ravens, and eagles were continually passing, with clouds ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... the sun descended, the breeze sprung up, first playing along the waters in capricious and tantalising airs, as if uncertain and indifferent in its infancy to which quarter of the compass it should direct its course. The ship again answered her helm; her head was put the right way, and the sails were trimmed to ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... barbaric King Theodore of Abyssinia, "a compound of savage virtue and more than savage ambition and cruelty," who, imagining himself wronged and slighted by England, had seized a number of British subjects, held them in hard captivity, and treated them with such capricious cruelty as made it very manifest that their lives were not worth an hour's purchase. It fell to the Ministry of Mr. Disraeli, Premier on the resignation of his colleague Lord Derby, who had displaced Earl Russell in that ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... orange and either a lemon or citron produced, on the same tree, leaves, flowers, and fruit of both pure parent-forms, as well as of a mixed or crossed nature. A bud taken from any one of the branches and grafted on another tree produces either one of the pure kinds or a capricious tree reproducing the three kinds. Whether the sweet lemon, which includes within the same fruit segments of differently flavoured pulp,[634] is an analogous case, I know not. But to this subject I shall ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the same time believes him to be cruel, hard to please, and terrible to Human Nature. For my own part, says he, I would rather it should be said of me, that there was never any such Man as Plutarch, than that Plutarch was ill-natured, capricious, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... this particular case it wasn't. Capricious as fashion is, people liked the shelf clock much better than they did a tall clock that stood on the floor, and they would no doubt have continued to buy these clocks with wooden works had not sheet metal began to be manufactured about the year 1840. Instantly clockmakers saw the advantage ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... fonder of its pleasures. The months thus spent have been most wearisome to me; I like better the calm retreat where I have spent my summers, with only a few servants to disturb the quiet of the house, and faithful Ben Benson, who has never left us, to gratify, as if by magic, every wish of his capricious mistress. But there is to be a change—henceforth we are to reside wholly at the North, and he is coming home to ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... with those speakers. As illustrating, more pointedly, the arbitrary powers committed to these Chiefs, they may import into the debate a fresh and hitherto unbroached line of discussion, and, following it, may argue from a quite novel standpoint, and formulate a decision based upon some utterly capricious leaning of their own. I have not been able to learn whether the decision of these Chiefs, to be valid, requires to be established by their unanimous voice, or simply by a majority ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Guy remained quietly at Summerley. Agnes, though nearly sixteen, was still but a young girl, while Katarina had grown still more womanly during the last six months. The former always treated him as a brother, but the latter was changeable and capricious. Occasionally she would laugh and chat when the three were alone, as she had done of old in Paris, but more often she would tease and laugh at him, while sometimes she would be ...
— At Agincourt • G. A. Henty
... intervals between Caesars and Napoleons. Nations have, in obedience to some law of Nature, to pass through periods of mediocre rule, and when men of great genius and dominating qualities come to clear up the mess, they are only tolerated possibly by fear, and never for long by appreciation. A capricious public soon tires of these living heroes. It is after they are dead that they become abiding examples of human greatness, not so much to their contemporaries as to those generations that follow them. The historian has a great deal to do with the manner ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... before, during the preceding century, the tongue of land now occupied by the Nameless Castle was part of the lake; and it may have been true, for Neusiedl Lake is a very capricious body of water. During the past two decades we ourselves have seen a greater portion of the lake suddenly recede, leaving dry land where once had been several feet of water. The owners of what had once been the shore took ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... board the schooner must have begun to realise some part, but not yet the twentieth, of the dangers that environed their doomed ship. At every lull of the capricious wind they must have seen how fast the current swept them back. Each tack was made shorter, as they saw how little it prevailed. Every moment the rising swell began to boom and foam upon another sunken reef; and ever and again a breaker would fall in sounding ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... containing some curiosities. A valuable horse was ordered to be beheaded, in presence of his other horses, because he did not stop when he checked him. A tiger that did not immediately seize a criminal thrown to him, was ordered to be beheaded as a coward. Yet had this cruel and capricious tyrant many estimable virtues. He kept his word inviolable; was rigorous in the execution of justice; liberal in his gifts; and often merciful to those who offended him. Having at one time sent a Portuguese to Malacca ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... lived well. Sometimes there had been a carriage, sometimes there had been none. And then there came a time in which she was grown woman enough to understand that her father was being much talked about. Her father to her had always been alternately capricious and indifferent rather than cross or cruel, but, just at this period he was cruel both to her and to his wife. And Madame Melmotte would weep at times and declare that they were all ruined. Then, at a moment, they burst out into sudden splendour at Paris. There ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... be in making a trip down these inland waters, where one is at the mercy of a capricious current save when a favorite of fortune chances to own a motor boat that scorns the usual drifting process, and speeds along at a ten-mile-an-hour clip, regardless of ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... Lord Morley, now wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: "A weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was." This, strange to say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England, and perhaps later America, to ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... commerce—namely, the transforming of the material gain into the capital which produces and works, would become impossible. The national achievement would be dragged down. All the dangers which threaten bureaucratic industrialism everywhere—political party influences with their capricious zigzag courses, favouritism, protection and graft, waste and indifference, small men with inflated importance in great positions, and great men with crushed wings in narrow places—all would naturally increase, and weaken the nation in ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... the animals, the rifle in the crook of his arm, ready for use, and all his senses alert and vivacious. Day was broad above them now and bitter with the forenoon heat. At their side the bay was rippled with a capricious breeze, and in all the far prospect of earth and sea none moved save themselves, detached in ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... Such capricious and temporary waters cannot be expected to produce many fish. The rapidity of the wintry deluge sweeps them away, and the scantiness of the summer stream would hardly sustain them above the ground. This ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... for the first time after the death of our friend, you desired me to produce what you were kind enough to call "one of my portraits." But the art of the portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent charm ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... this our voyage was monotonous. The deadly secret shared by Edith Metford and myself drew us gradually nearer to each other as time passed. She understood me, or, at least, gave me the impression that she understood me. Little by little that capricious mood which I have heretofore described changed into one of enduring sympathy. With one trivial exception, this lasted until the end. But for her help my mind would hardly have stood the strain of events which were now at hand, whose livid shadows were projected in the rising ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... and truthfulness. Less accustomed to leading-strings, they walk more firmly on their own feet, and, breathing in the universal spirit of free inquiry, they are less in danger of becoming unreasonable and capricious. ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... attractiveness in more or less superficial studies of radical socialism. Many of these radical women frankly say that they would like to marry the "right man," but failing to find that rare species, they claim their right to sexual freedom in more or less capricious liaisons. Others of these women are so highly individualized that marriage is beneath their contempt, either because it will "interfere with a career" or because the legal aspects and ecclesiastical ceremonies still suggest the old-time subjection of the wife to the husband. ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... with every emotion, were fixed and hollow, and her frame, once remarkable for symmetry, was thin and feeble. But, her heart was buoyant still, and when I talked of past scenes and recollections, her eye sparkled once more. Still, her manner was changed—it was softer and less capricious; her language, even her voice, was subdued; and more than once I saw a tear stealing on her eye. At length, after hearing some slight detail of her wanderings, and her fears that the troubles of Spain might drive her from a country in whose genial climate and flowery fields ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... but alas! not so: if the despotic Government has its good side, Prince Louis Napoleon must acknowledge that it has its bad, and it is for this that the civilized world is compelled to substitute for it something more orderly and less capricious. Good as the Imperial Government might have been, it must be recollected, too, that since its first fall, both the Emperor and his admirer and would-be successor have had their chance of re-establishing it. "Fly from steeple to steeple" the eagles of the former did actually, and according ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... struck Carthew as unsound; and he was at times altogether thrown out by the capricious startings of the prophet's mind. These plunges seemed to be gone into for exercise and by the way, like the curvets of a willing horse. Gradually the thing took shape; the glittering if baseless edifice arose; ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Art.—Suggestion does not act only in the sexual sphere, but on the whole mental life. In aesthetics and in art it has an immense and irresistible influence, which gives rise to all the capricious exaltations of fashion. The average artist is more or less the slave of the aesthetic suggestions which are in fashion, but the average members of the public are absolutely dominated by them. Originating in a correct idea of certain effects of light, the most absurd ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... conditional Expectance of fifteen Pounds more on the three following Editions, should the Public ever call for 'em. And truly, when one considers how much Meat and Drink One may buy for Twenty Pounds, and how capricious is the Taste of the critikal World, 'tis no mean Venture of a Bookseller on a Manuscript of which he knows the actual value as little as a Salvage of the Gold-dust he parts with for a Handful of ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... gratified and all her hard work and careful planning rewarded, the anxious lines would leave her face and the sweeter, softer expression that she had worn in September would come back. But though Eleanor professed the greatest pleasure in the election, it did not seem to make her any less haughty or capricious, or any better content with life. She still snubbed or patronized her train of adoring freshmen by turns, according to her mood. She was still a devoted admirer of Beatrice Egerton, and a member of her very exclusive set. She received Betty's congratulations just as cordially as she had ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... apology for a side-rail, so that you look straight down into the dark water, over which you seem wafted with no visible support beneath. The effect is sufficiently startling, especially seen as I saw it, under a bright, capricious moon. From Baltimore, the cars were less crowded, and I encountered ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... her sables more closely about her and pressed nearer to my side. The capricious moon here suddenly leaped forth like the pale ghost of a frenzied dancer, standing tiptoe on the edge of a precipitous chasm of black clouds. Her rays, pallidly green and cold, fell full on the dreary ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... dulled by the shock of seeing her, so that it was unable to attach any real importance or significance to her return. He knew her to be both callous and capricious; therefore, he told himself that there was no need to take her seriously now. The thing was to get rid of her as soon as possible. He smothered the instinct that had warned him of his danger, and persuaded ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... forest rests upon most of the details of his history and the traits of his character. The truth about him seems to be that he had really become a savage, and it would not be strange if he felt all the ferocity of a savage, together with the rare and capricious emotions of pity and generosity which are apt to visit the savage heart. There have always been good Indians and bad Indians, and Simon Girty ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... colonist may settle on the banks of a navigable river, and enjoy all the advantages of sending his produce to market by water, without running the constant hazard of having the fruits of his labour, the golden promise of the year, swept away in an hour by a capricious and domineering element. Secondly, The seasons are more regular and defined, and those great droughts which have been so frequent at Port Jackson, are altogether unknown. In the years 1813, 1814, and 1815, when the whole face of the country there was literally ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... his children? Why should he send pestilence and famine to China, and health and plenty to us? Why give us corn, and Egypt cholera? All these proclamations grow out of egotism and selfishness, of ignorance and superstition, and are based upon the idea that God is a capricious monster; that he loves flattery; that he can ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... for it, they had to take the wind and weather as it came, and the crew had a busy time of it "box-hauling" the yards, now this way, now that; trimming the sails to every passing breath of the capricious air, and, after all their trouble, accomplishing only some half-a-dozen miles ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... father's sister—was a widow, rich and a notable manager, but capricious to a degree, capable of being generous one day and grasping the next. It was the sorrow of her life that she had no children of her own, but she had not yet decided who ...
— The Great Hunger • Johan Bojer
... garden, laughter and gaiety, and incongruous with serious thought, grief, and repose; and it seemed as though a gust of wind blowing over the platform, or a fall of rain, would be enough to wither the fragile body and scatter the capricious beauty like the ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... flow, with unusual pain and persistent ovarian tenderness. Very soon she began to drop her work for a day at a time. Then came an increasing asthenopia, with evening headaches, until her temper changed and became capricious and irritable. When I saw her, she had been forced to abandon all labor, and had been treated by an accomplished gynaecologist, and was said to be cured of a prolapsus uteri and of extensive ulceration, despite which relief ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... the tender grace and gentleness of that condescending love, has impressed upon it the seal of permanence when we say: 'Grace and Truth, Mercy and Faithfulness, are met together.' No longer is love mere sentiment, which may be capricious and may be transient. We can reckon on it, we know the law of its being. The love is lifted up above the suspicion of being arbitrary, or of ever changing or fluctuating. We do not know all the limits of the orbit, but we know enough to calculate it for all practical purposes. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for the first time, that she had a strong beating heart, and that she loved this violent capricious man with every strong pulse of it. There was more about him now that was lovable by such a woman as Caroline Waddington than when he had first spoken of his love on the side of Mount Olivet. Then he had been ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... sex he was unusually attractive, and he became a lover of women, but as subjects for enthusiasm rather than desire. In passion he was curious but capricious, seldom rapidly roused, nor long held. In his relations with women emotion came second to mental stimulation, so that he never sought one whose mere sex was her main attraction. This saved him from much—he was ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... who, if not a profound, is generally an acute and liberal critic, confesses himself to be thus confounded. "Pulci," he says, "commences all his cantos by a sacred invocation; and the interests of religion are constantly intermingled with the adventures of his story, in a manner capricious and little instructive. We know not how to reconcile this monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under Lorenzo di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of gross bigotry or of profane ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Hush! If I could but describe her! Languorous, slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were /her/ lover, my boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and sudden, how hostile, ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... regarded me with a fixed, relentless gaze. 'No, I do not. Here, with none to overhear us, I will tell you truly that I do not believe you guilty of this crime which I am about to charge against you, and to prove before the world. You were a spoiled, capricious beauty when I met with you, and I, merely a fortune hunter. Our marriage was a fatal mistake. But you have discharged your duties faithfully, and I know it will be a satisfaction in the future to have this ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... near the earth about the haunts of men; for these errant birds have strange uncertainties, and many a mysterious anxiety in the course of their airy flight. Sometimes they lose the wind when the capricious gusts battle, or come and go in the upper regions. When this confusion comes by day, you can see the leader of the file fluttering aimlessly in the air, then turn about and take his place at the tail of the triangular phalanx, while a skilful manoeuver of his companions forms them soon ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... such sterility cannot be produced by proper experimentation. For my own part, I see every reason to believe that it may, and will be so produced. For, as Mr. Darwin has very properly urged, when we consider the phenomena of sterility, we find they are most capricious; we do not know what it is that the sterility depends on. There are some animals which will not breed in captivity; whether it arises from the simple fact of their being shut up and deprived of their liberty, or not, we do not ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... still further removed from ordinary life, we find the dialogue fettered not only by metre, but by rhyme. We need not go to Dryden, and others, of our own middle stage, or to the French stage for this: even in Shakspeare, as for example, in parts of Romeo and Juliet (and for no capricious purpose), we may see effects sought from the use of rhyme. There is another illustration of the idealizing effect to be obtained from a particular treatment of the dialogue, seen in the Hamlet of Shakspeare. In that drama there arises a necessity ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... for her a reputation of respectability which, at her age, would have been held as ridiculous and even insulting by any other woman belonging to the same profession, and many ladies of the highest rank honoured her with her friendship more even than with their patronage. Never did the capricious audience of a Parisian pit dare to hiss Silvia, not even in her performance of characters which the public disliked, and it was the general opinion that she was in every ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... capricious tyrant, which usurps the place of reason, doth not most cruelly torment and delude those poor men, the usurers, stockjobbers, and projectors, of content to themselves from heaping up riches, that is, from gathering ...
— The Querist • George Berkeley
... endeavoured to get the mastery of those headstrong passions which ran away with his understanding. And when he had once taken upon him the charge of rector, he began to govern by the dictates of his own capricious humour, even before the face of Xavier, ere he departed from the Indies for Japan; and the Father, who easily perceived that the government of Gomez was not in the least conformable to the spirit of their Institute, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... physical condition? After making all abatement for insurmountable hereditary influences upon organization,—after granting to that remorseless law of genealogical transmission its proper weight,—after admitting the seemingly capricious facts of what the modern French physiologists call atavism, under which we are made drunkards or consumptives, lunatics or wise men, short or tall, because of certain dominant traits in some remote ancestor,—after conceding all this, does ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... and of extraordinary thickness; the rest are circular and plain, and not very unlike the columns of our earliest Norman or Saxon churches, though of greater proportionate altitude. The capitals of those in the choir are singularly capricious, with figures, scrolls, &c.; but it is the capriciousness of the gothic verging into Grecian, not of the Norman. On the pendants of the nave are painted various ornaments, each accompanied by a mitre. The eastern has only a mitre and cross, with the date ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... its shimmering waters rimmed with velvety green. Every raindrop on the pines was a prism; the mountain a brocade of blossom. To the right Fuji, the graceful, ever lovely Fuji; capricious as a coquette and bewitching in her mystery, with a thumbnail moon over her peak, like a silver tiara on the head of a proud beauty; at her base the last fleecy clouds of the day, gathered like worshipers at the ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... complaint is that the greater part of our Public School-girls are not fit to be good wives, mothers and housekeepers. As wives, they forget what they owe to their husbands, are capricious and vain, often light and frivolous, extravagant and foolish, bent on having their own way, though ruinous to the family, and generally contriving, by coaxings, blandishments, or poutings, to get it. They hold ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... however, at a distance from the scene of operations, as the good Talavera, for instance, and the count of Tendilla, who saw with much concern the prospect of changing the steady and well-tried hand, which had held the helm for more than thirty years, for the capricious guidance of Philip and ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... to the present guards the portals of our celestial system; we will leave him to watch over the distant frontier; but before returning to the Earth, we must glance at certain eccentric orbs, at the mad, capricious comets, which imprint their airy flight upon the realms ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... forwards, and were spared some trips to market, for the sale of vegetables to pay, as would then be necessary, for the work done by others. Besides, the tailor who was most convenient to them, and who, it was admitted, was a very good one, was insolent and capricious; would sometimes extort extravagant prices, or turn them into ridicule; and occasionally went so far as to set his water-dogs upon them, of which he kept a great number. He declared, that for his part he would incur a little more expense, rather than ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... ambition of its rulers gradually concentrated around the unpromising domain those elements of ecclesiastical prestige, knightly valor, artistic and literary resources which enriched and signalized the Italian cities of the Middle Ages. Enlightened, though capricious patronage made this halting-place between Bologna and Venice, Padua and Rome, the nucleus of talent, enterprise, and diplomacy, the fruits whereof are permanent. But there are two hallowed associations which in a remarkable degree consecrated Ferrara and endeared her to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... the ardor of their pious wishes, Julian ingenuously confessed, that he was ambitious to attain a situation in which he might be useful to his country and to his religion. But this religion was viewed with a hostile eye by the successor of Constantine, whose capricious passions alternately saved and threatened the life of Julian. The arts of magic and divination were strictly prohibited under a despotic government, which condescended to fear them; and if the Pagans were reluctantly indulged in the exercise of their superstition, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... for its own sake— towards pain, as though pain were really beautiful and desirable in itself. One element in all this is undoubtedly due to the desire of the will to assert its freedom and the integrity of its being; in other words to the desire of the will towards the irrational, the capricious, the destructive, the chaotic. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... of land, which the people of the neighborhood called the "plain," a small but very bright light was seen describing the most capricious evolutions. It moved here and there without any apparent aim, tracing the most inexplicable zigzags, sometimes sinking to the earth, sometimes rising to a height of four or five feet, at others remaining quite motionless, and the next second flying ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... with my hair, and cooled my face. After a while, I left the alley, passed out, closed the door behind me, and went straying through the broken ground of the wilderness, among the low bushes, meandering, as if with some frolicsome brook for a companion—a brook of capricious windings—but still coming nearer to the fence that parted the wilderness from the heath, my eyes bent down, partly to avoid the hillocks and bushes, and partly from shyness of the moment when first I should see ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... these apartments, which none may enter without permission, I shall tell Boges to keep you twelve days in confinement. Remember this, thoughtless child, and tell our mother, Bartja and I are coming to visit her. Now give me a kiss. You will not? We shall see, capricious little one!" And so saying the king sprang towards his refractory little sister, and seizing both her hands in one of his own, bent back her charming head with the other and kissed her in spite of her resistance. She screamed from the violence of his ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... twisted tunnel forms a skylight overhead, and the blue heavens look down through it like a far-off eye. You cannot number the caverns and niches. Everywhere the sea has bored alleys and galleries, or hewn out solemn aisles, with arches intersecting each other, and running off into capricious furrows and mouldings. There are innumerable refts, and channels, and crescents, and cupolas, half-finished or only hinted at. There are chambers of every height and shape, leading into one another by irregular portals, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... In being compelled to labor, not for himself, but for a master; in being vendible by one master to another master; and in being subject at all times to be restrained in his liberty and chastised in his body, by the capricious will of another—the slave may appear to be degraded from the human rank, and classed with those irrational animals which fall under the legal denomination of property. In being protected, on the other hand, in his life and in his limbs, ...
— The Federalist Papers • Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison
... service which is capricious and voluntary (the administration of justice by knights-errant, for instance), precisely because it is capricious and voluntary. Such service presupposes acting according to subjective opinion, and also the possibility of neglect and of the realization of private ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... that debt, which amounted now to L140,000,000, near $700,000,000. Even in the midst of the struggle, in the success of which they had so direct an interest, the military contributions of the colonial assemblies had been sometimes reluctant and capricious, and always irregular and unequal. They might, perhaps, refuse to contribute at all towards a standing army in time of peace, of which they would naturally soon become jealous. It seemed necessary, therefore, by some ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... in ourselves, the mystery has been too commonly explained by the very easy process of setting it down as in fact inexplicable, and by resolving the phenomenon into a misgrowth or 'lusus' of the capricious and irregular genius of Shakspeare. The shallow and stupid arrogance of these vulgar and indolent decisions I would fain do my best to expose. I believe the character of Hamlet may be traced to Shakspeare's deep and accurate science in mental philosophy. Indeed, that this character must have ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... averaging 15 inches, and extremely capricious. No other district suffers so much from famine as Hissar. The crops are extraordinarily insecure, with a large surplus in a good season and practically nothing when the rains fail badly. They consist mainly of the cheap pulses and millets. With such fluctuating harvests it is impossible to collect ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... in your marriage, I hear; but that need not make you as downcast as this. A woman as capricious as Miss Leighton might easily imagine she was too ill to go through the ceremony to-day. But she must have repented of her folly by this time, and in a week will reward you as your patience deserves. But what ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... his senses became as cold as the statue of Andromeda on the pedestal at his hand. He looked at her. He did not for the moment realize that she was in reality only a girl, a child in so much; wilful, capricious, unregulated in some ways, with the hereditary taint of a distorted moral sense, and yet able, intuitive and wise, in so many aspects of life and conversation. Looking, he determined that she should never have that absolution ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... creatures, for they mean well, they really mean well at bottom, in their blundering, formal, pettifogging way. They think they can take the kingdom of Heaven, not by storm, but by petty compliances, like servile servants who have to deal with a capricious, exacting master. Poor souls, they know no better. They measure the universe by the reflection in their muddy mill-pond. Nasty pious people is what I always call them; nasty pious people: little narrow souls, trying hard to be Christians after their lights, and only attaining, ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... the professor. He was not habitually interested in the affairs of his family, but this proclamation that something important could be connected with them, filled his mind with a capricious interest. "Well, what is ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... himself knew her? Lovely radiant creations are not thrown off like How-d'ye-do's. The men to whom it is committed to father them must weep wretched tears, as Oleron did, must swell with vain presumptuous hopes, as Oleron did, must pursue, as Oleron pursued, the capricious, fair, mocking, slippery, eager Spirit that, ever eluding, ever sees to it that the chase does not slacken. Let Oleron but hunt this Huntress a little longer... he would have her sparkling and panting in his arms yet.... Oh no: they were very far from the truth who supposed ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... formed a quadrangle, surrounded by the cloisters, and in this inner court was a curious fountain, carved with exquisite skill by some gothic artist in one of those capricious moods of sportive invention that produced those grotesque medleys for which the feudal sculptor was celebrated. Not a sound was heard except the fall of the fountain and the light echoes ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... live in it are like the keepers of a cemetery. That donjon, whose dark form seems to stand amidst the stars, only serves to mark one of the many tombs of feudalism which rise above the smiling but capricious Dordogne like menhirs—monuments of older illusions—along ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... I have shown a wretched temper, Pa. I am afraid I have been very complaining, and very capricious. I seldom or never thought of it before. But when I sat in the carriage just now and saw you coming along the pavement, I ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... He never read, therefore, all her graphic details of Ray's mysterious flirtation with Mrs. Truscott, or of the thrilling evidence in Mrs. Turner's possession of his guilt. A good fellow was Turner, a loyal soldier and husband, who loved his pretty and capricious better half, and ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the sudden warm breeze eddying from a capricious fan, the mourning thrill of the violins emphasised the emphasis ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... synonym for an echo—"son of the rock"; and in a later letter he said that all doubts which he might once have entertained as to their genuineness had disappeared. But Walpole's literary judgments were notoriously capricious. In his subsequent correspondence with Mason and others, he became very contemptuous of MacPherson's "cold skeleton of an epic poem, that is more insipid than 'Leonidas.'" "Ossian," he tells Mason, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... whether He was the Christ. But the presence of Pilate prevented the council from executing their sentence (as doubtless they would have done if he had been away at Caesarea), in defiance of the law, which was entrusted to a weak and capricious governor. Accordingly they brought their Prisoner to the procurator's residence—probably Herod's palace, a magnificent building with two marble wings, containing large rooms sumptuously furnished, and spacious porticos surrounded by gardens and enclosed in a lofty wall with towers, situated in ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... Micheline grew up amid this colossal prosperity. The one, tall, brown-haired, with blue eyes changing like the sea; the other, fragile, fair, with dark dreamy eyes. Jeanne, proud, capricious, and inconstant; Micheline, simple, sweet, and tenacious. The brunette inherited from her reckless father and her fanciful mother a violent and passionate nature; the blonde was tractable and good like Michel, but resolute and firm like ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... entered the fort. He was furious at hearing that only five lacs of rupees had been found in the treasury, as he had expected to become possessed of a vastly larger sum. Kissendas, the first cause of the present calamities, was brought before him; but the capricious tyrant, contrary to expectation, received him courteously, and told him he might return to Dacca. The whole of the Eurasians, or half castes, and natives found in the fort were also allowed ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... his friends said of him at this time that he was "self-willed, capricious, inclined to be imperious, and though of generous impulses, not steadily kind, nor even amiable." Part of this temper on his part may have come from the fact that the aristocratic boys of the school hinted that his father and mother had not been of the best people. They knew, however, ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... open press which held her wardrobe, were some soft white folds of stuff. Her eye gleamed: she ran to the cupboard and took out the Maenad's dress. During the last few days she had somewhat tired of the sittings—she had at any rate been capricious and tiresome about them; and Montjoie, who was more in earnest about this statue than he had been about any work for years, was at his wit's end, first to control his own temper, and next so to lure or drive his strange sitter as to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gout know, by sad experience, that they suffer under one of the most capricious of maladies. An attack of this disease will shift, in the most unaccountable manner, from one part of the body to another; or, it will release the victim when there is every reason to fear that it is about to strengthen its hold on ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like them; and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because they are dedicated to death, because on genial days they will have passed into ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... are besides local symptoms: flatulence, abdominal pain, abdominal distention, constipation, or looseness of the bowels with mucus in the stools, foul breath, coated tongue, loss of appetite, or an abnormal capricious appetite. Such symptoms are often ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... I—it is I who must talk, if I am to teach," faltered Von Barwig in a low voice. He didn't want to go too far, for he had heard that American heiresses were capricious and whimsical and that they took likes and dislikes very suddenly. He did not want her to dislike him, so he would humour her; but he also wanted to ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... 'John Vane Tempest: a Romance,' 'Herbert and Henrietta: or the Nemesis of Sentiment,' 'The Life and Adventures of Colonel Bludyer Fortescue,' 'Happy Homes and Hairy Faces,' 'A Pound of Feathers and a Pound of Lead,' part author of 'Minn's Complete Capricious Correspondent: a Manual of Natty, Natural, and Knowing Letters,' and editor of the 'Poetical Remains of Samuel Burt Crabbe, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beams upon our world, flooding it with joy. But—we must not rejoice too quickly! This splendid blaze will not endure. The flaming star will pale once more; fade back to its minimum; and then again revive. Such is the nature of this capricious sun. It varies in three hundred and thirty-one days, and from yellow at the maximum, turns red at the minimum. This star, Mira Ceti, which is one of the most curious of its type, varies from the second to the ninth magnitudes: we cite it as one example; hundreds ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... years before had said that the penniless young Englishman, Lord Ripon, wished to make a rich marriage, and that the capricious Miss Windsor, after having broken, cracked or temporarily discouraged a sufficient number of hearts, was at last ready to accept a lord and perhaps a master. But in the middle of the season the British Legation was recalled, and Geoffrey, after a few words of farewell, disappeared, and from ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... to show him that she was equal to the common surface of living,—a comrade to do her part? Or, rather, was the act symbolical,—woman serving joyfully where she yields real mastery? The woman, so often capricious and disdainful, was submissive, as if she would say: "This man is my mate. I am forever his. It is my best joy to be ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... auld, capricious carlin, Nature, To mak amends for scrimpit stature, She's turn'd you off, a human creature On her first plan, And in her freaks, on ev'ry feature ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... changed, she ceased to resist; but when I asked her to go to a house with me, she said, "No, no, I am not coming to that." Now, though tranquil, she was more capricious, sometimes letting me feel her, or do it to her with impatience; at other times with evident desire to please; but I was so often baulked, and I plagued her so incessantly to meet me somewhere, that at length ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... invites to the same studies, copy partly them, and partly nature, till the books of one age gain such authority, as to stand in the place of nature to another, and imitation, always deviating a little, becomes at last capricious and casual. Shakespeare, whether life or nature be his subject, shews plainly that he has seen with his own eyes; he gives the image which he receives, not weakened or distorted by the intervention of any other mind; the ignorant feel his representations ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... the penalty I had to suffer? Well then, the rest of my life must be devoted to slavish subjection. Miserable sentence! And, if it were, what security had I against the injustice of a man, vigilant, capricious, and criminal? I envied the condemned wretch upon the scaffold; I envied the victim of the inquisition in the midst of his torture. They know what they have to suffer. I had only to imagine every thing ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... our civilised human morality. In our arrogance we often assume that Morality is the master of Nature. Yet except when it is so elementary or fundamental as to be part of Nature, it is but a guide, and a guide that is only a child, so young, so capricious, that in every age its wayward hand has sought to pull Nature in a different direction. Even only in order to guide we must first ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis
... statue of Francesco, the first duke. As for Leonardo himself he came not as an artist at all, or careful of the fame of one; but as a player on the harp, a strange harp of silver of his own construction, shaped in some curious likeness to a horse's skull. The capricious spirit of Ludovico was susceptible to the charm of music, and Leonardo's nature had a kind of spell in it. Fascination is always the word descriptive of him. No portrait of his youth remains; but all tends to make us believe that up to this ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... that time, a great favorite in the house. All the old people cared for me especially, and I was kept often in the parlor, and, when I was cold, the children were allowed to sit upon me, but never to abuse me. But this is a capricious, changing, cheating, vain world, and foot stoves are not thought much of nowadays. The churches are warmed all over, so that foot stoves are not needed, and so I never go to church; indeed, in my broken-down state of health, it would hardly be safe for me to do so. I am not even used ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... Maude was a queen who had a right to tyrannize over and command her if she pleased; and as the tyranny was never very severe, and was usually followed by some generous act of contrition, she did not mind it at all, and was always ready to make up and be friends whenever it suited the capricious little lady. ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... its winds and storms, slipped away as though glad to whisk such trying days off the calendar, and, ere the girls realized it, Easter vacation was upon them, and capricious April was playing the schoolgirl herself, with one day a smile and the next a frown. But, like the schoolgirl, her smiles were all ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... too ambitious, do you, Miss Kingston?" asked Barbara, anxiously. Barbara knew Jean well and the prospect of managing the play with her capricious, selfish temperament to be catered to at every turn ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... hand. Perhaps, after all, some Samoyede had been here collecting moss for his reindeer; but it must have been long ago; for the moss looked quite black and rotten. The heap was quite possibly only one of Nature's freaks—she is often capricious. ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... the Geelong side, and one of the obliging officials placed a plan before him, showing the lands on which he was free to choose a future home. The selector looked vacantly at the map, but at length became attracted by a bright green allotment, which at once won his capricious fancy, indicating as it did such luxurious herbage; but, much to his disgust, he found that 'the green lot' had already been selected. At length he fixed on a yellow section, and declared his intention of resting satisfied with the choice. The description and area of land chosen were called ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... rules of perfect mechanism, cannot be made without some industry; and that artless matter alone cannot perform what argues so much knowledge. Hence it appears that sound reason naturally concludes that matter alone cannot, either by the simple laws of motion, or by the capricious strokes of chance, make even animals that are mere machines. Those philosophers themselves, who will not allow beasts to have any reasoning faculty, cannot avoid acknowledging that what they suppose to be blind and artless in these machines ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... Spain, married to a pretty Andalusian, and entirely Mexicanized, his heart where his interests are. He is very gentlemanlike and distinguished-looking, with good manners, and extremely eloquent in conversation. I hear him called "inconsecuente," and capricious, but he has welcomed C—-n, who knew him intimately in Madrid, with all the warmth ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... to the capricious gentleman what we intended to do, and pacified him by promising that he should have his share in ready money before night, if he desired it; and I will do Mike the justice of saying that he did, most emphatically, and other men would have ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was rather a naval and engineering exploit than ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... indignation and wrath, while the eyes of the handsome brown Bedouins who use it remain unsearchable in their Oriental languor and pride; Jerusalem becomes to us more and more a symbol and epitome of that which is changeless and transient, capricious and inevitable, necessary and insignificant, interesting and unsatisfying, in the unfinished tragi-comedy of human life. There are times when it fascinates us with its whirling charm. There are other times when we are glad to ride away from it, to seek communion with the ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... the capricious wind drove them fairly past Copper Island, and they plunged into the foggy, ill-charted reaches of the Bering, their jubilation was tempered with a note of pessimism. They debated, in the Cohasset's cabin, whether the adventurer of the Dawn had been beforehand; and Captain Dabney discussed ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... reasonable. If only Kitty—But no—in her own right as Queen of Love and of his heart, she was above all criticism and blame. It was a madness, deeper than his anger against the sheep, mightier than his fiercest resentment—he could not help it; he loved her. Changeable, capricious, untamed, she held him by her faults where virtues would hardly have sufficed in another. He had tried, and failed; so long as she was in the world he must love her. But what a life! He cast the letter ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge |
