"Spontaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so From love's mere selfishness. But much I fear Such virtue—well I know it: know how little It hath the power to soar to that ideal, Which, first conceived in sweet and stately grace, From the pure soul's maternal soil, puts forth Spontaneous shoots, nor asks the gardener's aid To nurse its lavish blossoms into life. 'Tis but a foreign plant, with labor reared, And warmth that poorly imitates the south, In a cold soil and an unfriendly clime. Call it what name you will—or education, Or principle, or ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took from the pocket ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are much given to writing letters to persons whom they only know indirectly, for the most part through their books, and especially to romancers and poets. Nothing can be more innocent and simple-hearted than most of these letters. They are the spontaneous outflow of young hearts easily excited to gratitude for the pleasure which some story or poem has given them, and recognizing their own thoughts, their own feelings, in those expressed by the author, as if on purpose for them to read. Undoubtedly they give ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... danger of smelting coal, as a ship's cargo, besides its special liability to spontaneous combustion, appears to be that the fire may smoulder in the very centre of the mass for so long that, when the smoke is at last discovered, it is impossible to know how far the mischief has advanced. ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the situation now with all his dramatic nature, with his eyes wide open, repeated to me some of the tales of horror which they had palmed off upon innocent Auguste as spontaneous truth, I could see, myself, the rigging covered with ice an inch thick; sailors climbing up ("Ah! comme ils grimpent,—ils grimpent!") bare-handed, their hands freezing to the ropes at every touch, and leaving flesh behind, "comme if you put your tongue to a lam'post in the winter." I could ...
— In Madeira Place - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... for Wilson's mediation still impossible, in view of favor hitherto shown to Entente, and after last speeches of Asquith and Lloyd George. Spontaneous appeal for peace, towards which I again ask you to encourage him, would be gladly accepted by us. You should point out Wilson's power, and consequently his duty, to put a stop to slaughter. If he cannot make up his mind to act alone he should get into communication with Pope, King of Spain ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... though dry as dust; but if Dante had finished his Banquet, he might never have had time for his "Divine Comedy"; so perhaps, after all, we shall be well content to be without Watts' "Cosmos," remembering what we have gained thereby. Besides, the continuous and spontaneous self-revelation of an artist or a poet is sometimes truer ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... for sacrificing or destroying property on occasion of death will be referred to in treating of their religious ideas. Wailing for the dead is continued for a long time, and seems to be rather a ceremonial performance than an act of spontaneous grief. The duty, of course, belongs to the woman, and the early morning is usually chosen for the purpose. They go out alone to some place a little distant from the lodge or camp, and in a loud, sobbing ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... Commissioner of Indian Affairs, gave his permission to assemble eminent chiefs from the prominent Indian Reservations of the United States, and complemented his courtesy by helpful interest and cooperation. The Superintendents of the various Indian Reservations gave spontaneous and willing service; Major S. G. Reynolds, Superintendent of the Crow Reservation by sympathetic and efficient interest made possible the achievement of the Last Great Indian Council; Hon. Frederick Webb Hodge, in charge ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... hard to say, but the truth is that a declaration from a man is not usually quite spontaneous. He looks for some tacit encouragement, a sign that one is not altogether indifferent to him. Now it has struck me that during the past year you have rather ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... very sedulous in manipulating certain notes, he now was careful to show not a scrap of paper; and I must do him the justice to declare that he spun out the words from the reel of his memory as though they all came spontaneous and pat to ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... Manjanga chief had invited the bishop to settle in his country near Magomero, adding that there was room enough for both. This spontaneous invitation seemed to decide ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... prayers and actions, to us at the moment perfectly spontaneous, are eternally foreseen and included within the all-embracing Predestination of God, as factors and causes, working out that final result which, beyond all dispute, is the product of ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... a slowly extorted tribute to excellence, but a spontaneous bestowal. Unlike evil spirits, which, according to popular superstition, need urging over the threshold before they can enter and possess the hearthstone. Love leaps in unsolicited at any unguarded aperture, and becomes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... call, ready to run swiftly towards us without relaxing the attention they give to their own movements and to all the external objects they encounter—and compare them with the torpid children in the ordinary schools—clumsy in their movements, indifferent to stimuli, incapable of spontaneous association of ideas—we are led to think of the civilization of our own days as compared with that of olden times. The civil environment of bygone years, as compared with our own, was more leisurely: we have learnt how to save time. The stage-coach was once the means of transport, whereas ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... or the palm, were sufficient to maintain an inhabitant, the race of men in the warmer climates might become as numerous as the trees of the forest. But in many, parts of the earth, from the nature of the climate, and the soil, the spontaneous produce being next to nothing, the means of subsistence are the fruits only of labour and skill. If a people, while they retain their frugality, increase their industry, and improve their arts, their numbers must grow in proportion. Hence it is, that the cultivated fields of Europe are more ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... dialect. There have long been reports of a black tribe with woolly hair in the unknown interior of the Great Nicobar, and my friend Colonel H. Man, when Superintendent of our Andaman Settlements, received spontaneous corroboration of this from natives of the former island, who were on a visit to Port Blair. Since this has been in type I have seen in the F. of India (28th July, 1874) notice of a valuable work by F.A. de Roepstorff ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... perfunctory applause, but Colonel Mapleson had resolved that the scene should be enacted, of which we have often read, in which the devotees of the prima donna unhitch the horses from her carriage, and themselves drag it, with wild rejoicings, through the streets. To make sure of such a spontaneous ovation in staid New York was a question which Mapleson solved by hiring fifty or more Italians (choristers, probably) from the familiar haunts in Third Avenue, and providing them with torches, to ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... who examined each phrase and word with the minutest critical care before pronouncing their verdict. As might be expected, the poetry produced in those circumstances is of a more or less artificial type, and is wanting in the spontaneous vigour of the earlier essays of the Japanese muse. Conceits, acrostics, and untranslatable word-plays hold much too prominent a place, but for perfection of form the poems of this time are unrivalled. It is no doubt to this quality that the great popularity of the Kokin-shu is due. Sei Shonagon, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of all defectives, within or without our public institutions, is defective inhibition,—they are unable to control the spontaneous impulses that continually arise, and ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... satisfactory idea of the labors of the fathers and of their subject Indians. At the outset, it must be confessed that while the fathers understood well the principles of architecture and created a natural, spontaneous style, meeting all obstacles of time and place which presented themselves, they showed little skill in matters of interior decoration, possessing neither originality in design, the taste which would ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... for a time their own private ends and consider themselves part of a whole, in which there is, after all, the spirit of divinity, nay, God Himself—to me every popular festival is a real soul-festival, a pilgrimage, an act of devotion. Even in my capacity as dramatic poet, I always find the spontaneous outburst of an overcrowded theatre ten times more interesting, even more instructive, than the sophisticated judgment of some literary matador, who is crippled in body and soul and swollen up, spider-like, with the blood of authors whom he has sucked dry. As from a huge open volume ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... remove. She seldom smiled, and when she did, the smile played over her countenance like the sickly gleam of a wintry clay through clouds, and seemed rather to chill than to warm what before was cold. It was a formal tribute to the customs of society, not the spontaneous outburst of joy. She presented the tips of her fingers with all the grace of an accomplished lady, to Holden, and meant that her reception of him should be kind, but the hand was cold, and apparently as unfeeling as marble, and ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... delightful. He spoke with good sense, good humour and good breeding, and it was all spontaneous. I wish that a phonograph had been in existence that night, and that a record had been taken of the speech. It would be so good for the people who have asserted that Henry Irving always employed journalists (when he could not get Poets Laureate!) ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... flattered him: and, moreover, she had acted on his advice to carry resistance a outrance. There are many good Shelleyan reasons why he should elope with Harriet; but among them all I do not find that spontaneous and unsophisticated feeling, which is the substance ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... eliminating his difficulties before they could begin, but he couldn't help admiring the way the big cruiser was handled. When the hatch opened and Captain Strong stepped out, resplendent in his black-and-gold uniform, there was a spontaneous roar of welcome from the ground. Vidac stepped forward immediately to ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... is the attempt to prevent children from knowing what life really is maintained for long; the spontaneous impetuosity of the parents breaks it down. Nevertheless the Russian boy and girl, when they come to the awkward age, have not the least idea of what life really is. Dear me, no! They possess simply a bundle of incoherent ideas, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... repeat these rumours, but nevertheless they ran up and down the land. The Jena and now the Liberte! True, the Board of Inquiry, which had investigated the destruction of the Jena, had decided that that catastrophe was due to the spontaneous combustion of the powder in her magazines. France had accepted the verdict; but now a second battleship was gone. It would be too much to ask any one to believe that this was spontaneous combustion, also! Such ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... order to induce him to befriend them. It is the rarest thing in the world for them to experience disinterested friendship for him. As I have said elsewhere in this paper, a few instances of disinterested and spontaneous affection of animals, other than dogs, for human beings are, however, on record, and I am happy in ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... its fists; but the fists are tightening slowly—and the voice behind them speaks not French, but the jargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer, closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle of spontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies comes—and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the dunghill. I must believe it. For they—we—may kill the laughter of Berlin's streets—as we have ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 2. The spontaneous and unanimous political action of the Czecho-Slovaks abroad became co-ordinated when Professor Masaryk escaped from Austria and placed himself at the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... to abolish and prohibit peon slavery elicited an apparently spontaneous and sincere expression of detestation from Douglas of "this revolting system." Black slavery was not abhorrent to him; but a species of slavery not confined to any color or race, which might, because of a trifling debt, condemn the free white man and his posterity to an endless ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... exercise to keep him sturdy and strong, his mother superintended his lessons, as well as those of his sister, Therese. Although Marie Antoinette was young and pleasure-loving and was often called frivolous because of the spontaneous gaiety into which her nature often led her, yet she was a devoted mother, and every morning at ten o'clock, Therese, the Dauphin, and their teachers went to the queen's rooms, and there learned ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... muse's favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingratitude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation. He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company. It is not probable that ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... lose my liberty and my property at a blow. The course I mean to take has been advised by no one but myself—is known to no other. I now disclose it, and the causes of it, to you, a gentleman, and my professional adviser, in the expectation that you will guard with the strictest secrecy my spontaneous revelations; this ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant, the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the niggardly gifts of nature. Spontaneous vegetation supplied us with the long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wilding, as found, according to the botanists, on the ocean cliffs. He had need of a rare inspiration who first showed faith in this rustic clown and proposed to improve it in ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... quick surcharge of spirits that makes their race what it is, they threw themselves on their knees begging his blessing. The Bishop bared his head and raised his hand slowly. He was infinitely humbled by the quick, spontaneous outburst of their faith. He had done nothing for them; could do nothing for them. They were homeless, pitiable, without a hope or a stick of shelter. Yet it had needed but the sight of his face to bring out their cheery unbounded confidence ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... those. We are a practical people, but we are fighting for practical paradoxes. Do we expect any massive concentration of results? Our wavering, anaconda system of warfare is typical of our moral status as a people. It is the spontaneous and legitimate exponent of our aims and motives. Many or decisive victories I despair of, till we are better educated in the early lesson of the fathers. But from the President—God bless him that he seems to be more teachable than many others—down to the youngest drummer-boy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the popular feeling, absolutely spontaneous, broke out in one of the least expected places. Louise was encored for her wonderful solo in a modern opera of bellicose trend, and instead of repeating it she came alone on the stage after a few minutes' absence, dressed in Servian national dress. For a ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... become hurtful to the whole, when their removal is called for because society is in need of the energies thus set free, then takes place a more or less general uprising of the oppressed and restricted ones, apparently entirely spontaneous and voluntary, in reality having its origin partly at least in the claim which society is making upon the hitherto restricted class to take ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in spontaneous abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or nourishing. A new language, characterised by simple sweetness and simple energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the spontaneous act of the Prince and his father; the decisive influence was the fear lest the enmity of Napoleon might endanger the position of the Prince of Roumania. Everyone was delighted; the cloud of war was dispelled; two men only were dissatisfied—Bismarck and Grammont. It was the ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the Sun" of St. Francis d'Assisi gives naive and spontaneous expression to the same truth. Natural objects, for this purest of mystics, were no bare symbols, nor did they gain their significance by suggesting beyond themselves. He addressed them as beings who shared with him the joy of existence. "My Brother the Sun"—"my Sister the Moon"—"our ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt's optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature's most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Tippengray's spontaneous exhibition of tender affection, Mr. Petter involuntarily and reverently took off his hat, while Mrs. Cristie and Lodloe clapped their hands. The lover, with radiant face, now descended the ladder and received congratulations from everybody ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, whilst the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready spontaneous language of our souls! Devotion is the favourite employment of your heart; so it is of mine: what incentives then to, and powers for reverence, 'gratitude, faith, and hope, in all the fervours of adoration and praise to that Being, whose unsearchable wisdom, power, and goodness, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... right condition and proper proportion of these humours, disease being due to changes in their quality or distribution. Thus inflammation is regarded as the passing of blood into parts not previously containing it. In the course of a disorder proceeding favourably, these humours undergo spontaneous changes in quality. This process is spoken of as coction, and is the sign of returning health, as preparing the way for the expulsion of the morbid matters—a state described as the crisis. These crises have a tendency to occur at certain periods, which are hence called ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... press, would argue a much greater degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... A spontaneous regret came from all. Some of the women, who certainly could not be accused of any amatory love for him, shed tears to think that he should go, for he was full of kindness to them. Constantly in contact with their department, he was as gentle as a child, never complaining and yet full of work. Industrious ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... than in the Ramayan. But in the fine arts perfection is no proof of a recent age: while the experience and the continuous labour of successive ages are necessary to extend and perfect the physical or natural sciences, art which is spontaneous in its nature can produce and has produced in remote times works of such perfection as later ages have ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... denunciation for having hailed a child of six as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods—nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Argus of that day for having initiated, with his friend Dr. Cairns, a meeting of that kind. The chairman of the meeting was also the chairman of the meeting at which it was resolved to present a testimonial to Mr. Landsborough; and he was aware that this meeting originated in a spontaneous suggestion made on Friday by Dr. Cairns, who thought that, while it might be convenient to the Exploration Committee to meet in an afternoon, it would be a great pleasure to the community at large to hold an evening meeting at ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... with all my girlish heart. I loved you as I loved my own father—almost as much; and one day, while I sat on your knee, and you were kissing me, I called you 'Father' in spite of myself. It was a cry of the heart, instinctive, spontaneous. Indeed, you were to me a father, nothing but a father. You laughed, and you said to me, 'Address me always in that way, my child; it gives ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... veiled hostility dropped from the girl like a mask, and she laughed—a spontaneous outburst of mirth that kindled new lights in the blue-black eyes, and caused a fanlike array of little wrinkles to radiate from their corners: "I'll answer your question now," she said. "I'm Mrs. Nobody, thank you—I'm Janet McWhorter. But what are you ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... key in her hand, and looking about the room while he watched her. The woman's enormous power of deception showed itself in the spontaneous facility with which she went through a complicated little scene, quite improvised, in order to mislead her husband. She knew that he himself would suggest some place for ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... of his way to hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in that he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always careful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous. He wrote as a very prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated English with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition, peculiar to the century ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... with those that are least known, or perhaps not known at all. Beginning with the doctrines of melancholia, of tenderness, of suffering, of exalted pietism, and of social despair—which, whether spontaneous or inspired, demoniac or divine, undoubtedly embody many of the mysterious aspirations of the human soul—we shall find ourselves in a strange and moving world, peopled by those who accomplish, as a matter of course, acts of faith, courage and endurance, foreign to ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... town, stopped with their water-jugs, and looked on with satisfaction. The Kaid was the best man of his men; but Yusuf afterwards dressed and beat the victor, riding with great dexterity, and attracting the spontaneous applause of all the spectators. The Kaid trembled whilst contending with Yusuf, who was set down as a marabout in consequence ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Colonel Davenport will join in Black Hawk's spontaneous tribute to his character as a brave, and a gentleman ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... expression of cordiality, and an entreaty from their kind friends to find their way back again as soon as possible. They then proceeded on their way, Kate more than ever delighted with her prospect. In the spontaneous ebullition of her youthful and innocent feelings, and charmed beyond measure at the kind reception she had met with from the amiable people she had just left, she was in the highest spirits, and gave frequent vent to her joy. Her merry peals ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve, which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending through every vein and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... assent which leads to marriage should no doubt be spontaneous. Who does not feel that? Young love should speak from its first doubtful unconscious spark,—a spark which any breath of air may quench or cherish,—till it becomes a flame which nothing can satisfy but the union of the two lovers. No one should ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... received him coldly, and without the least regret he held aloof from me. I took a hatred to him. His success in the regiment and in the society of ladies brought me to the verge of despair. I began to seek a quarrel with him; to my epigrams he replied with epigrams which always seemed to me more spontaneous and more cutting than mine, and which were decidedly more amusing, for he joked while I fumed. At last, at a ball given by a Polish landed proprietor, seeing him the object of the attention of all the ladies, and especially of the mistress ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... spontaneous and ringing, proving a devotion that few men have ever been able to command. Stern and unflinching as Jackson invariably was in inflicting punishment, his soldiers always regarded him as one of themselves, the best man among them, one fitted by ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... it can be said without hesitation that the intellectual work of theological students has quite justified the course that the affections of Christendom have taken in their spontaneous appreciation of Mary, the Ever-Virgin Mother of Our Lord. What the heart of Christendom has discovered, the mind of Christendom has justified. But here more than in any other doctrinal development it is love that ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... as that of master, but as that of leader. Readers of the dean's report for the Sabbatical year of Miss Hazard's absence, in which Miss Pendleton was acting president, will not have failed to notice the spontaneous expression of this sense of comradeship in Miss Pendleton's reference to ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... happy love, or of condoling commiseration, wherever his gentle footsteps move. And when I rejoin him this autumn, at his father's house in Scotland, and shall tell him that the never-forgotten chief mourner at that simple bier, with whom his own young tears fell in spontaneous sympathy, was the Count Sobieski—a kinsman of his own, whose character was already known to him in its youthful fame and by its honored name—what will be that ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... taste, uniformity of aim will be impossible, and consequently the system must remain artificial. It can never, under any circumstances, entirely replace that more natural one adopted by our ancestors. How can its methods compare for a moment with the spontaneous and hearty interest that guided the tools of those more happily placed craftsmen, whose subjects lay around them, of daily familiarity; whose artistic language was ready to hand and without confusion, affording an endless ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... So now—when a most crucial question was coming to her for decision—for she no longer needed to be informed of the Prince's mind in the matter—she did not allow its serious character to weigh upon her spirits or make her less ready and spontaneous in the bestowal of her liking. On the contrary, if anything, it hastened her verdict of approval. "I do believe that I am going to fall in love with him!" she said to herself after an acquaintance of only twenty-four hours; and having so determined, she set forth with ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... when she was blown up, on Feb. 15, 1898, and 260 American seamen murdered. There was an official investigation to determine the cause of the explosion, but it found no solution of the disaster. Various theories were advanced of internal spontaneous explosion, but no one was misled. The general sentiment of Americans was that the Spanish in Cuba deliberately exploded a submarine torpedo under her, to accomplish the result that followed. Previous to this cowardly act there was much difference ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... vineyard at a distance of about a mile and a half from the place of its ascension. So memorable a feat lighted up the glow of national vanity, and the two Montgolfiers were hailed and exalted by the spontaneous ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... American observers, men who had been educated in Germany and those who had not, never saw anything of this danger that was boiling in the breasts of even the humblest classes of Teutons? Yes, Anderson was correct. The Germans were, after all, frank enough about it. All was spontaneous and bold. Egged on by their military, political, educational, religious masters, the populace could easily, at any time, work themselves up like this into a frantic state about conquest. And yet Americans heard nothing of it. It was as if their channels of information ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... been seen, moreover, that this recent exodus was a sort of spontaneous movement of the masses of the Negro population and not one composed of its leading elements. This fact has been marveled at, because in this migration the rank and file of Negroes, accustomed to being led, showed some initiative by acting of their own accord, and thereby abandoned the old policy ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... is usually an honored custom in the case of happy marriages, where children grow up who take delight in making much of the days which are sacred to their parents. Where this observance is not a matter of form or done with any ulterior motive, but is spontaneous and joyous, it adds much to the family happiness and strengthens the bonds, not only between parents but between parents ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... destruction: one flaming and almost invisibly incandescent violet which tore at the eyes and excruciatingly disintegrated brain and nervous tissues; the other dully glowing an equally invisible red, at the touch of which body temperature soared to lethal heights and foliage burst cracklingly into spontaneous flame. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... from over-luxuriance of imagination. But this occasional defect has been unduly exaggerated. Thus Mr. Gosse*1* declares that Lanier is "never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza," — a statement so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to call for notice. As a matter of fact, Lanier has written numerous poems that offer little or no difficulty to the reader of average intelligence, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... men into protoplasms, and integrates protoplasms into monkeys, and shows the caudal appendage to be the independent variable, a small factor in man, a large factor in monkey. And has not the idea of successive development supplanted the early conception of spontaneous perfection? Take an illustration from India—the new system of competition, which the natives can never understand. Formerly the members of the Civil Service received their warrants by divine authority, so to speak. They were born ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... wind lifted the two flags before the anxious spectators, who saw that one was a British and the other their own ensign. As soon as the eager watchers grasped the fact that the red cross of St. George was beneath the stars and stripes, they broke into spontaneous cheers of rejoicing. Immediately after, the field-gun on the quarterdeck was fired, and the report reverberated over the water and across the island on the one side, and through the streets of the town on the other, with sufficient volume ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... among those kinds of soil which are favorable to the cultivation of tobacco; but I do not recollect one single instance where I have met with tobacco growing wild in the woods, although I have often found a few spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of deserted habitations. This circumstance, as well as that of its being now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at the period of European discoveries, inclines towards ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... To these spontaneous eliminations through which the club deteriorates, add the constant pressure through which the Committee of Public Safety frightens and degrades it. The lower the revolutionary government sinks, and the more it concentrates its power, the more servile and sanguinary do its agents and employees ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... reputation of Goldsmith had greatly risen, his finances were often at a very low ebb, owing to his heedlessness as to expense, his liability to be imposed upon, and a spontaneous and irresistible propensity to give to every one who asked. The very rise in his reputation had increased these embarrassments. It had enlarged his circle of needy acquaintances, authors poorer in pocket than himself, who came in search ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... (except that of Norfolk)—a spot where shipwrecks have been numbered literally by thousands—there was no lifeboat nor any means of taking a line to the ship. The secret of these failures lies in the fact that the institution relies for its work on spontaneous service and emotion, and is not, like ours, a legalized, systematic business. No permanent force or watch is kept at the stations: a reward of seven shillings is paid to anybody who gives notice of a wreck to the coxswain of the boat. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... leading men of science are in this difficulty; on the one hand their experiments and their theories alike teach them that spontaneous generation ought not to be accepted; on the other, they must have an origin for the life of the living forms, which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present get this origin in no other way than by Deus ex machina method, which they reject ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... expected to live many days, he put his prayer-book under his arm, and went off doggedly, feeling that now was the crisis. He went through it in as exemplary a manner as could have been desired, but it was dreadful work to the Rector. If nobody else suspected him, he suspected himself. He had no spontaneous word of encouragement or consolation to offer; he went through it as his duty with a horrible abstractness. That night he went home disgusted beyond all possible power of self-reconciliation. He could not continue this. ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... word; so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost. And far from that: These semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go forth again to teach them offer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... burial hymn—serves as a nebulous buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of the poet—ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow, ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels where the slag covers ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... been a homage-surfeited ruler in your land who has known the joy that comes with the knowledge that he has earned the right to be cheered from one end of the country to the other? Is there not a difference between your hereditary 'Long live the Prince' and our wild, enthusiastic, spontaneous 'Hurrah for Cleveland!' Miss Guggenslocker? All men are equal at the beginning in our land. The man who wins the highest gift that can be bestowed by seventy millions of people is the man who had brains and not title as a birthright." He was a ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... trained observation had made him aware of the existence of a thousand social solecisms, his sensitive character shrank from their possible committal, and he employed his mimetic genius as an instrument of salvation. And then his English—his drawing-room English—was not spontaneous. It was thought out, phrased, excellent academic English, not the horrible ordinary lingo that we sling at each other across a dinner-table; the English, though without a trace of foreign accent, yet of one who has spent a lifetime in alien lands and has not met his own tongue save ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... great pleasure in the spontaneous accent she contrived to fling into the words. "I ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... follow various methods, almost any listener can unerringly pick the memorized efforts. Let the speaker in delivery strive for variety, pauses, emphasis; let him be actor enough to simulate the feeling of spontaneous composition as he talks, yet no matter how successful he may be in his attempts there will still be slight inconsistencies, trifling incongruities, which will disturb a listener even if he cannot describe his mental reaction. The secret lies in the fact that written and spoken composition differ ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... consumed than in any other country,) is now at the enormous price of eighteen sous (nine-pence sterling) for the loaf of four pounds. Besides, the Parisians have gone through so much during the revolution, that I apprehend they are, to a certain degree, become callous to the spontaneous sensations of joy and pleasure. Be the cause what it may, I am positively assured that the people expressed not so much hilarity at this fete as at the last, I mean that of the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... chosen a wet day to pay us a visit, Miss Hilton," she said, with a hospitality too effusive to be spontaneous. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... the 'black earth' and the monks of monasteries, whose hospitality he enjoyed, and with his fellow-comrades of the road. It is life that interests the author. Here we can get it, and it is like splashing about in a clear pool on a warm summer's day, spontaneous in inspiration, mature in philosophic contemplation. This sort of book gives a man honest pleasure. More, it sets his heart beating in unison with the author, in harmony with the awe and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... jumping out of the window he always dropped from when the police came. After that we saw the house where Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock's lawyer, used to live, and also the house where old Krook was burned up by spontaneous combustion. Then we went to Bolt Court, where old Samuel Johnson lived, walked about, and talked, and then to another court where he lived when he wrote the dictionary, and after that to the "Cheshire Cheese" Inn, where he and Oliver ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... esteem, which your name and your works have evoked at this meeting of the Academy. The legitimate applause which you everywhere receive in your beautiful country finds its echo on this side of the Loire; and if the spontaneous adoption of you by the French Academy adds nothing to your glory, it will at least serve to ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... sylvan hills with the sea glimmering in the distance. Lothair was pleased with the approaches to the sacred grove: now and then a single tree with gray branches and a green head, then a great spread of underwood, all laurel, and then spontaneous ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... that Greece itself never excelled,' resumed Arbaces. 'But that is not all: she has a soul worthy to match with mine. She has a genius beyond that of woman—keen—dazzling—bold. Poetry flows spontaneous to her lips: utter but a truth, and, however intricate and profound, her mind seizes and commands it. Her imagination and her reason are not at war with each other; they harmonize and direct her course as the winds and the waves direct some lofty bark. With ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... that, for mere shame, foreign countries could hardly persist in maintaining a traffic which those who had derived the greatest profit from it had on such grounds renounced; though our ministers did not trust to their spontaneous sympathies, but made the abolition of the traffic by our various allies, or those who wished to become so, a constant object of diplomatic negotiations, even purchasing the co-operation of some by important ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... thrust its nose instantly between her outstretched arms, and as she patted him delightedly the crowd rippled with spontaneous applause. ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... to assert a preference for that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or qualities or circumstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous, magnetic power over them—whether they really value supremely rank or position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent tendencies ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... effect this training is one of the purposes of Mental Science. When once we recognize the position of the subjective mind as the supporter of the whole individuality we cannot doubt that much of what we take to be the spontaneous movement of the objective mind has its origin in the subjective mind prompting the objective mind in the right direction without our being consciously aware of it. But at times when the urgency of the case seems to demand it, ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Another child of six years was disciplined because she had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,—a natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... principle of the demanding opposite. He had always been in bondage through his affections, first to his mother, then Aunt Anne, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, but most gloriously because this was the only wildly spontaneous thing of all, to the strange woman in the hut. He was innocent there, he was unthinking, he didn't know what tale his eyes told of him. It wasn't earthly passion they told. She had seen many things in her tumultuous life of the last few years, this woman he called a child. The eyes told how ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the snow-clad peaks, the deep gorges through which rushed roaring torrents, and the mountain ranges of Ararat or Taurus, where the force of the subterranean fires was manifested by so many startling exhibitions of spontaneous conflagration.* The same spiritualising tendency which had already considerably modified the essential concept of Ahura-mazda, affected also that of the inferior deities, and tended to tone down in them the grosser traits of their character. It had already placed at their head six genii of a superior ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... touches of local colour, revision of choice of words, heart-rending erasions. And here, my child," I concluded, bringing out the beautiful, clean, smooth typed copy—"here is the finished work itself, light, pleasant, fluent, humorous and, most important of all, spontaneous." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... anxious about as making the best possible appointments, and no case in which the best men are more liable to mislead us, by yielding to the solicitations of applicants. For this reason your own spontaneous recommendation would be desirable. Now to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... decided against it as too like 'Les Precieuses Ridicules,' a play she had never read. A second novel, 'Cecilia,' appeared in 1782, and was as successful as its predecessor. Later readers find it less spontaneous, and after it she never resumed her early style except in her journal and correspondence. Her ambition was fully astir. She had every incentive from her family and friends. But the old zest in composition had departed. The self-consciousness which had always tormented her in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... certain than in other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a golden friendship; but only on a desert island ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... "ancient fount of inspiration"[1] was dry. He had delivered his message to his generation, and wisely avoided last words. Then it seems indisputable that he wrote with difficulty. His poetry has little ease, fluency, or spontaneous movement. In every line it bears traces of the laborious file. He had the poet's heart and mind, but they did not readily express themselves in the poetic medium. He longed for poetic utterance, as his only adequate vent, and sought it earnestly with tears. Often ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... human character, to justify me in thrusting in my awkward agency among the intricate and unintelligible machinery of Providence. I have always hated to give advice, especially when there is a prospect of its being taken. It is only one-eyed people who love to advise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action. When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons for acting in any one way as in any other, and quite as many for acting in neither; and is therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate their own conduct, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... law for men, in a society where the lawyer was considered the greatest citizen, and subtle technicality paramount to justice or commonsense, this was a tremendous step. At that moment, and by that spontaneous and unconsidered statement, Keith, unknown to himself, passed from one side to the other in the great social struggle that ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White |
