"Vitality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the morbidly excited vitality having been rendered prominent by tarantism in different individuals, it could not but happen that other derangements of the nerves would assume the form of this whenever circumstances favoured such a transition. This was more especially the ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... resist. He may by that strange power have drawn her toward him—he never knew. Neither of them could have given evidence on that marvellous instant when the current bridged the space between them. He could not say whether this woman whom he had seized by force before had shown alike vitality in her surrender. He only knew that her arms were woven about his neck, and that the kiss of which he had dreamed was again on his lips, and that he felt once more her wonderful, supple body pressed against his, and her heart beating, and her breast heaving. And he knew that the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... in one thing: she was much stronger than Dr. Wells guessed, and though the next week proved an anxious one for every member of the household except herself, it was not a dismal one. Even if she were flat on her back, her spirit and her vitality remained contagious. Thomas, whose state of mind was by this time quite apparent to the family, though he imagined it to be a well-concealed secret, hung about outside her door, positive that she was going to die, and brought offerings in the shape of flowers, early apples, and pet animals ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... molding which was at the same time human—intensely human. It was a face filled with character and strength and femininity—the face of one who was created to love and to be loved. The cheeks were flushed to the hue of life and health and vitality, and yet she lay there upon the bosom of the sea, dead. I felt something rise in my throat as I looked down upon that radiant vision, and I swore that I should live to ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Gower Street, London, on the 30th of March 1834, and he left in his will two hundred pounds to Sir Anthony Carlisle 'requesting him either to sever my head or extract the heart from my body, so as to prevent the possibility of the return of vitality.' His valuable collection of printed books, which consisted of sixteen thousand four hundred and eighty volumes, with a quantity of fragments of early English works, including two printed by Caxton, which ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... would elicit, and it is only by the total sum of the impression which he produces that he ultimately resolves these conflicting emotions into a harmonious tone of feeling. As he stands in such close proximity to real life, and endeavours to endue his own imaginary creations with vitality, the equanimity of the epic poet would in him be indifference; he must decidedly take part with one or other of the leading views of human life, and constrain his audience also to participate ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... at the same time and in the same way; and in condemning all reduction of import duties that was not based on "reciprocity," he certainly added all the weight of his authority to prop up a system whose injurious influence has affected the very vitality of our social state, and whose overthrow will yet require no small amount of ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... from the legacy of political separation in the eighteenth century, and of economic disunion in the nineteenth. It is the business of Unionists not only to maintain the legal framework of the Union, but to give it a vitality and fulness of content which it has ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... sickness of heart and brain, so that when Prosper came softly in at her door she saw him through a mist. He moved quickly to her side, knelt by her, took her hands. His touch at all times had a tingling charge of vitality and will. ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... I had chosen was of a dull red tint, not unlike that of Leighton's picture, but I had no fear of seeming to copy Leighton. What true artist ever fears he may be considered a copyist? He knows the strength and vitality of his conception will need ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... or stuttering upon the physical structure is problematical. In some cases examined, a noticeable lack of vitality has been found, together with an almost total loss of active appetite, a marked inclination toward insomnia and a generally debilitated condition resulting from the nervous strain and continued fear brought on ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... be said that he was sustained by his utter despair. He felt so feeble and generally imbecile, that he had not vitality enough ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... music dimly sounding in our ears is struck. A melody emerges, clear in form and excellent in rhythm. The landscapes we have painted on our brain, no longer lack their central figure. The life proper to the complex conditions we have studied is discovered, and every detail, judged by this standard of vitality, falls ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... precipices of the surrounding mountains. Now, as I scrutinized them with greater intentness, my mind began to reach out to fresh conclusions. There was something about them, an indescribable sort of silent vitality that suggested, to my broadening consciousness, a state of life-in-death—a something that was by no means life, as we understand it; but rather an inhuman form of existence, that well might be likened to a deathless trance—a condition in which it was possible ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... At day-break Major Teimer had entered the guard-house with a detachment of Tyrolese; and while he repaired with some of them to General Kinkel, the other Tyrolese had entered Colonel Dittfurt's room, to see the miracle of a man whose head had been pierced by a bullet having vitality enough left to rave, swear, ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... huntress at work. The sting most certainly has played its part; but where? And how often? This is what we do not know. What we are able to declare is that the torpor is not very deep, inasmuch as the patient sometimes retains enough vitality to shed its skin and become a chrysalid. Everything thus tends to make us ask by what stratagem the egg is ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was further advanced. Hogg says ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... Zuleika perhaps takes Morison's pills, Byronism becomes absurd instead of sublime, and is only a foolish expression of Cockney wonder. They still occasionally beat a man for going into a mosque, but this is almost the only sign of ferocious vitality left in the Turk of the Mediterranean coast, and strangers may enter scores of mosques without molestation. The paddle-wheel is the great conqueror. Wherever the captain cries "Stop her!" Civilisation stops, and lands ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... FUNCTION.—Breeders of animals have discovered that to breed from very young stock is not good. The quality and stamina of the progeny is lowered and the vitality of the parent stock is reduced. It is not ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... employed as lecture secretary, and arranged in the year 1891-2 600 lectures, 300 of them in the provinces. In all 3339 lectures by members during the year were recorded. All this activity imparted for a time considerable vitality to the local societies, and on February 6th and 7th, 1892, the first (and for twenty years the last) Annual Conference was held in London, at Essex Hall. Only fourteen provincial societies were represented, but they claimed a membership of ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease
... Spanish hands was an intolerable offence to Spaniards. They refused to be dismembered without even having been consulted. With all her dominions, with the united crowns of twenty-two kingdoms, Spain was unprosperous and insecure. Her vitality was kept up by her foreign possessions. Brabant, the Milanese, Campania, Apulia, were the richest portions of Europe, and neither France, nor the empire, nor England possessed the like. Deprived of these, the monarchy would decline quickly; for with all her pride, and her fame, and her unsetting ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... made to occur at regular times and under fixed conditions, as in the Christian Lent, the Moslem Ramadan, and the Creek Busk. Such arrangements give orderliness to outward religious life, but are likely to diminish or destroy spontaneity in observances. Ceremonies of this sort have great vitality—they are handed on from age to age, the later religion adopting and modifying and reinterpreting the forms of the earlier. In such cases the lower conceptions survive in the minds of the masses, and are moralized by the more spiritual natures, and their influence on society is therefore ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... suppositions. I only related it to the Captain in order to show the power and integrity of our law, and how South Carolinians frequently sacrifice their own interests to maintain it intact. Nothing could be more fatal to its vitality than to make provisions which would entail legal preferences. The law in regard to free niggers leaving the State should be looked upon in the light of protection rather than alienation, for it is made to protect property ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... whose admirable text-books of geology have already secured him a position of importance in the scientific world, will add considerably to his reputation by the present sketch, as he modestly terms it, of the Life-System, or gradual evolution of the vitality of our globe. In no manual that we are aware of have the facts and phenomena of biology been presented in at once so systematic and succinct a form, the successive manifestations of life on the earth set forth in so clear an order, or traced so vividly from the earliest organisms deep-buried ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... shown how the death of Rebecca was the inevitable outcome of the situation—the one conclusive proof of her "ennoblement"—and how it was almost equally inevitable that Rosmer should accompany her to her end. Hedda Gabler was constitutionally fated to suicide: a woman of low vitality, overmastering egoism, and acute supersensitiveness, placed in a predicament which left her nothing to expect from life but tedium and humiliation. The one case left—that of Hedvig—is the only one in which Ibsen can possibly be accused of wanton bloodshed. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... as if by miracle. Hunger, cold, dirt, abuse, still left him a feeble vitality. At six years old his big dark eyes wore so sad a look that mothers of merry children often stopped to sigh over him, frightening the child, for he did not understand sympathy. So unresponsive and dumb was he that they called ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... Bet of the Banister, as he had called her, this young wildwoods creature with all the instincts and none of the experience of his own class, gave an effect of warmth, of vitality, that thrilled him. His gaze kindled as he watched her. She promised to be even lovelier than she was, never as beautiful as the mother, perhaps, but quite beautiful enough to be disturbing, with her soft, thick-lashed eyes, ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... most heart-rending sobs at intervals, yet but rarely conversing. The feelings of both were too much oppressed to admit of the utterance of their grief. The vampire of despair had banqueted on their hearts. Their vitality had been sucked, as it were, by its cold and bloodless lips; and little more than the withered rind, that had contained the seeds of so many affections, had been left. Often had Sir Everard and De Haldimar paused ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... a feature in art which seems to have come in with the Italians. Your old Greek statues have scarce enough vitality in them to keep their monstrous bodies fresh withal. A shrewd country attorney, in a turned white neckcloth and rusty blacks, would just take one of these Agamemnons and Ajaxes quietly by his beautiful, strong arm, trot the unresisting statue down a little gallery of legal shams, and turn ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... nor read well, nor express himself in exactly suitable actions. He could only express himself at the end of a brush. He could only paint extremely beautiful pictures. That was the major part of his vitality. In minor ways he may have been, upon occasions, a fool. But he was never a fool on canvas. He said everything there, and said it to perfection, for those who could read, for those who can read, and for those who will ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... under the forefinger, on the left hand of your honorable spouse," proceeded the Doctor, "is deep and agitated; the left hand pulse, under the second finger, is deep and faint. The pulse, under the forefinger, of the right hand, is gentle and lacks vitality. The right hand pulse, under my second finger, is superficial, and has lost all energy. The deep and agitated beating of the forepulse of the left hand arises from the febrile state, due to the weak action of the heart. The deep and delicate condition of the second part ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... his achievement. Both as attorney and as judge, he preferred the quest of broad, underlying principles, and, with plenty of time for recuperation from each exertion, he was able to bring to each successive task undiminished vitality and unclouded attention. What the author of the "Leviathan" remarks of himself may well be repeated of Marshall—that he made more use of his brains than of his bookshelves and that, if he had read as much as most men, he would have been as ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... that they have become darker than when put into the bed, which means that they have perished. Then the question will arise as to whether the bed or the spawn is at fault, and the former must either be spawned again or broken up. Supposing the spawn to show signs of vitality, the time has come for covering the bed with a layer of rather moist soil, pressed lightly but firmly on to the manure with the spade or fork, so that the earth will not slip down. At once restore the covering of litter, &c., and wait patiently for about seven or eight ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... relative strength and positions of the belligerents as modified by the vicissitudes of the campaign was realistic and statesmanlike. Starting from the principle that a people of about a hundred millions, animated by a lively faith in its own vitality and mental equipment, can neither be destroyed nor permanently crippled, they argued that the worst that Fate could have in store for them would be a draw. But before that end could be achieved the Teutonic armies must have been pulverized and Germany and Austria occupied by the ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... "His vitality—he ought to be in bed, half-dying, with those bruises, and starved as he is. But you saw how he struggled to get away from me. Well, I'll write you a prescription for as strong a tonic as ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... great human beast. He was far stronger than Mr. Dootleby, but not nearly so quick and dexterous. The blow on his right arm placed him at a great disadvantage. Mr. Dootleby knew he could not fight long. Every second drew heavily upon his vitality. But he made no useless expenditure of his strength. His blows were intelligently directed toward the accomplishment of a specific object in the disabling of his enemy, and each of them did its appointed work. At last exposing himself ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... do not differ greatly from the class they come from. Their abundance has often been regretted; yet in one sense it is an interesting sign, for wherever the labourer of a country has preserved his vitality, and begets an occasional temperament of distinction, a certain number of vagrants are to be looked for. In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest—usually a writer or artist with no sense for ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... in blood, in aims, ambition, and future expectations, only an imaginary line separating them—with glaring eyes, their hands at each others throat, neither willing to submit or yield as long as there was a vestige of vitality in either. Even the most considerate and thoughtful of the North began to contemplate the wreck and ruin of their common country, and stood aghast at the rivers of blood that had flown, the widows and orphans made, and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... proved of surprising fertility; and she calculated the probable operations for weeks in advance with the detailed and precise knowledge of rural cultivation which is the characteristic of the Italian aristocracy and the permanent cause of its vitality. ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... should have principally in view. With those the immoderate use of spirituous liquors is a long contracted disease, which it is perhaps past the skill of legislation to cure. It is like an old inveterate ulcer, whose roots have penetrated into the seats of vitality, and are so intimately interwoven with the very principles of existence, that the knife cannot be applied to the extirpation of the one, without occasioning the destruction of the other. But though this gangrene can never be entirely eradicated, the experience of late years has shewn that ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... force, the wind Roared till we shouted with it, roared until Its vast vitality of wrath was thinned, Had beat its fury ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... desiccation; another lives upon strychnine; others bear without injury great extremes of heat and cold; and if this is the case with the mature creatures, it is probable that the germ possesses still stronger powers of vitality. If one acarus can live upon strychnine, then it is not impossible that mineral acids should be harmless to others; the germs might be carried through sulphuric acid in air without coming into contact with ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... M.D., of the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons: "All of our curative agents are poisons, and as a consequence, every dose diminishes the patient's vitality." ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... as he motioned us into the next room, the Swami seated us on a circular divan with piles of cushions upon it. There were clusters of flowers in vases about the room, which gave it the odour of the renewed vitality of the year. ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... stood, endured and done business for almost two thousand years," he answered quietly. "It is in some ways all you say of it, but it has at least proved its vitality. Why seek to found a new organization with a new head and a new scheme of immortality if you recognize this scheme as good? The place to reorganize a business is from the inside, not the outside. These people must ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a few brief months, the harvest seemed, as by a miracle, to be approaching simultaneously over the whole surface of the extended field. The grains of truth long since lodged in an arid soil, and apparently destitute of all vitality, had suddenly developed all the energy of life. France to the reformers, whose longing eyes were at length permitted to see this day, was "white unto the harvest," and only the reapers were needed to put forth the sickle and gather the wheat into the ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... before. Rome fell because she could no longer resist with her earlier power. If the barbarians were not growing stronger, the Romans themselves were steadily growing weaker. The form of the empire was still the same, but it had lost its vigor and its vitality. [3] ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... beer. Is there, you may ask, any organism to be detected in the putrefying pus? Yes, gentlemen, there is. If any drop of the putrid matter is examined with a good glass, it is found to be teeming with myriads of minute jointed bodies, called vibrios, which indubitably proclaim their vitality by the energy of their movements. It is not an affair of probability, but a fact, that the entire mass of that quart of pus has become peopled with living organisms as the result of the introduction of the canula and trocar; for the matter ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... upward by means of it, slowly, slowly, through a storm of battering hands. It seemed to him that, in rising, he was shouldering aside the entire weight, the forces, of a universe, bent on his destruction, and against which he was determined to prevail. It was as though his will, the vitality which animated him, which was his soul, stood aside from his beaten and suffering body, and, with a cold, a cruel, ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... said that he did more. His Movement reached dimensions of which he probably never dreamed in its early days, yet the extraordinary results made him ever hungrier for conquest. In a way the latter years of his life were perhaps the most notable of his whole career. He displayed a vitality and enthusiasm which seemed to increase with the weight of time. At a time when most men seek a greater measure of repose, General Booth worked on with all the freshness of early years. And it can be said that he has died in harness. He did not lift ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... from California and they are all to be two and three years old. I have put in rows of 100 with large two year scions and you could count 100 and not find one dead among them and some of the scions were almost as big as my wrist. It's a job to cut them. You see that scion, being large, has enough vitality to hold it until it can ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... idea of real religion was, may be rather a difficult matter to settle. Probably it was an obscure idea to himself,—an idea of certain sentiment and no vitality. ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... scenery and traditions of the country. In the beginnings of Australian poetry the names of two other men stand with his—Adam Lindsay Gordon, of English parentage and education, and Charles Harpur, born in Australia a generation earlier than Kendall. Harpur's work, though lacking vitality, shows fitful gleams of poetic fire suggestive of greater achievement had the circumstances of his life been more favourable. Kendall, whose lot was scarcely more fortunate, is a true singer; his songs remain, and are likely long to ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... the prose pictures of the historian who so admired them. He was himself a colorist in language, and called up the image of a great personage or a splendid pageant of the past with the same affluence, the same rich vitality, that floods and warms the vast areas of canvas over which the full-fed genius of Rubens disported itself in the ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... revolt, and in fostering among those who remained, and among those whom circumstances exiled, the dangerous spirit of resentment and rebellion which is the outcome of the sense of injustice. It has also served, even to this day, to give vitality to those associations that have from time to time arisen in Ireland for the object of realizing that ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... distance he would be called upon to cover this night. Senor Johnson managed him well. By long experience and a natural instinct he knew just how hard to push his mount, just how to keep inside the point where too rapid exhaustion of vitality begins. ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... wonderful chemical process, the details of which chemists do not yet understand, though they are near foreshadowing them, it combines them into one substance, which is known to us as 'Protein,' a complex compound of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which alone possesses the property of manifesting vitality and of permanently supporting animal life. So that, you see, the waste products of the animal economy, the effete materials which are continually being thrown off by all living beings, in the form of organic matters, are constantly replaced by supplies of the necessary repairing ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... for those who are engaged in the biological sciences and those who are given to literary pursuits to realize that they are alike interested in the manifestations of one and the same thing, the principle of life. In Agassiz himself the vitality of his studies and the vitality of the man ...
— Louis Agassiz as a Teacher • Lane Cooper
... unbroken continuity of God's gifts to the higher region of our spiritual experience? His supplies of wisdom, love, joy, peace, power, to our souls are always enough and more than enough for our wants. If ever men complain of languishing vitality in their religious emotions, or of a stinted supply of food for their truest self, it is their own fault, not His. He means that there should be no parentheses of famine in our Christian life. It is not His doing if times of torpor alternate with seasons of quick energy and joyful fullness ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... and acts on the vocal cords and mucous membrane as does an astringent; a brilliant and clear quality of voice is the result. Grief or Fear, on the other hand, being depressing emotions, lower the vitality, and the debilitating influence communicates to the voice a ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... lands. Still the blows, however recklessly distributed, had not struck every head. The inhabitants had been decimated, not annihilated, and the productive energy of the country, which for centuries had possessed so much vitality, was even yet not totally extinct. In the wreck of their social happiness, in the utter overthrow of their political freedom, they had still preserved the shadow, at least, of one great bulwark against despotism. The king could impose ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... foundations for it in the fact that the Van Eycks, though they did not create the art, yet were the first to enable it for its function; that having found it in servile office and with dormant power—laid like the dead Adonis on his lettuce-bed—they gave it vitality and dominion. And fortunate it is for those who look for another such reanimation, that the method of the Van Eycks was not altogether their own discovery. Had it been so, that method might still have remained a subject of conjecture; but after ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... whose leaves have a healing virtue (cp. Ezek. xlvii. 12). The oil-tree should doubtless be grouped with the river of oil in later writings (see PARADISE). Originally it was enough that there should be one tree of life, i.e. that heightened and preserved vitality. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... or supporting Smith-Oldwick and now, to his chagrin, he saw that the girl was faltering. He had realized well how much she had undergone and how greatly the hardships and dangers and the fatigue of the past weeks must have told upon her vitality. He saw how bravely she attempted to keep up, yet how often she stumbled and staggered as she labored through the sand and gravel of the gorge. Nor could he help but admire her fortitude and the uncomplaining effort she was ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Serbia, and became a dependency of Germany. To-day it has recovered a little under the direction of Berlin, but that desperate strain of forces does not deceive us: it is only a proof of the abdication of Austria-Hungary. We have lost all confidence in the vitality of Austria-Hungary, and we no more recognise its right to existence. Through its incapability and dependence it has proved to the whole world that the assumption of the necessity of Austria has passed, and has through this war been proved to be wrong. Those who have defended the possibility and necessity ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... saw increased vitality, but in shapes that were either useless or antagonistic to himself, and all that was harsh and saturnine in his nature awakened. We see Ibsen, at this moment of his life, like Shakespeare in his darkest hour, "in disgrace with fortune ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... sky was totally obscured by clouds of smoke. He amused himself with watching a lizard who was investigating a folded piece of paper, whose elasticity gave the little creature lively apprehensions of its vitality. At last he could stand the stillness of his retreat and his supine position no longer, and rolled himself out of the bed of leaves that Teresa had so carefully prepared for him. He rose to his ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... flame dishevelled itself in red and sanguine rays like the crest of a comet. Far back in the dimly lighted corners loomed the monstrous forms of the Lares and Lemures. The mantles hanging from their hooks seemed animated by a factitious life, and assumed a human aspect of vitality; and when Nyssia stripped of her last garment, approached the bed, all white and naked as a shade, he thought that Death herself had broken the diamond fetters wherewith Hercules of old enchained her at the gates of hell when he delivered Alcestes, and had come in person ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... monarchy on the decline of the Italian nation; it was completely consistent that the men, in whom the republic was still living, should continue to give to the living language its rights, and for the sake of its comparative vitality and nationality should tolerate its aesthetic defects. Thus then the linguistic opinions and tendencies of this epoch are everywhere divergent; by the side of the old-fashioned poetry of Lucretius appears the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... subjects, very daring in colour, are exhaustively beautiful. The spacing of the design, the relative distribution of the few daring colours against a gold background of wonderful texture, combine in a picture of great vitality. The art of no people is so scientific as that of these people, whose every effort, no matter how insignificant, is technically always sound. Our modern art schools could very profitably imitate the Japanese principle of teaching their young students how ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... far more responsive to the call and the thought. We are learning to realize the literal truth of the phrase in the Bible, "dead in trespasses and sins." So far as one is in sins and faults and defects he is dead. Spiritual vitality is in goodness alone. So far as one endeavors to follow after righteousness, to achieve and live in truth, honor, and love, he is alive; so far as he fails in this he is dead, and this, quite irrespective ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... with manly stupidity that they might be friends. But what he wondered more than anything else at present was whether Kitty Sherard would allow him to go and say good-bye to her. Toffy was feeling ill, and his vitality was low; in his weakness he thought with an insistence that was almost homesick in its intensity how beautiful it would be to see her in this ugly old house of his, in one of her rose-coloured gowns, and with her brown curls ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... for the Japanese and the Japanese for Japan." We all knew what he meant but the servants were greatly pleased. Jack London turned up to-day on his way home. I liked him very much. He is very simple and modest and gave you a tremendous impression of vitality and power. He is very bitter against the wonderful little people and says he carries away with him only a feeling of irritation. But I told him that probably would soon wear off and he would remember only the pleasant things. I did envy ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... merit. I am not sure that you would understand what the poet intended to convey, any more than the Earl of Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne, or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. Young minds invariably display their vitality by attacking the accepted forms of expression, and then they look about for novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be in the future, we ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... financially. The most active season in over 25 years was instigated and many new faces were seen chasing the fast green covered ball about the court. Innumerable converts came over from Squash Racquets and new life and vitality was breathed ...
— Squash Tennis • Richard C. Squires
... to the evils of passive absorption and of competition for external standing come, perhaps, those which result from the eternal emphasis upon preparation for a remote future. I do not refer here to the waste of energy and vitality that accrues when children, who live so largely in the immediate present, are appealed to in the name of a dim and uncertain future which means little or nothing to them. I have in mind rather the habitual procrastination that develops when the motive for work is future, not ...
— Moral Principles in Education • John Dewey
... popular trees, and corn is grown in the orchards too, possibly in order that it may have the benefit of the trees' shade. The soil that can raise corn and fruit trees together must have exceptional vitality and richness, particularly in view of the fact that it is in no way fed, and is rather scraped or scratched ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... the way, and the principles of the "Monroe Doctrine" imprinted as a legend upon our banners, we should have stood on unassailable ground; have exhibited a national importance and vitality—an uncompromising firmness, courage and dignity that would have carried conviction, achieved immediate and honorable success, and commanded the respect of the civilized world. But fettered, tantalized, and weakened, by the ambiguities and inconsistencies of this co-partnership ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... flaw in the marble, but we don't know this. The weight of evidence, in my mind, is against it. His course toward Strahan—one whom he might easily regard as a rival—is significant. He gave him far more than money; he drained his own vitality in seeking to restore his friend to health. A coarse, selfish man always cuts a sorry figure in a sick-room, and shuns its trying duties even in spite of the strongest obligations. You remember Mrs. Strahan's tribute to ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... cures which depend, I think, upon his own personal magnetism. He is so robust and loud-voiced and hearty that a weak nervous patient goes away from him recharged with vitality. He is so perfectly confident that he can cure them, that he makes them perfectly confident that they can be cured; and you know how in nervous cases the mind reacts upon the body. If he chose to preserve crutches and sticks, as ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... hands over his back and shoulders, tapped his chest, and noted his big bare knees. "Heavens!" exclaimed the old doctor, "what a magnificent boy! He will grow to be a glorious man. I have never seen such physique or such vitality." This expert opinion was borne out by our son's physical growth in the next three years. Athletic exercises assisted in the development of a physique that was naturally strong. In his nineteenth year he was six feet in height, ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... interesting than the young. It seemed as though age and youth had changed parts. The Colonel was two years older than her father, but could there be any importance in that if, honestly speaking, there were infinitely more vitality, go, and freshness in him than in herself, though ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... oh my beloved, I think almost from the first moment my soul flew to you, as to its unquestioned mate! Your vitality became my source of vigour; your strength filled and upheld everything in me which had been weak and faltering. I owed you much, before we had really spoken. Afterwards, I owed you life itself, ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... which have led the great body of whites to vote together in this age, must augment in force in the age to follow. To day the rapid increase of the black population constitutes a greater danger to the stability of our government than any that is sapping the vitality of the European monarchies. The partial disfranchisement of the Negro in the future would appear to be inevitable, essential, if not to the existence of the South, then to the prosperity of the Union." This is a temperate ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... made them otherwise without ceasing to be himself. Instead of the language of Chaucer and Shakespeare, its warp fresh from field and market, if the woof were learned, his age offered him a speech, exhausted from abstraction, that only returned to its full vitality when written learnedly and slowly. The roots of his antithetical dream were visible enough: a never idle man of great physical strength and extremely irascible—did he not fling a badly baked plum pudding through the window upon Xmas Day?—a man more joyous ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... room a wonderful girl. She had shining, abundant hair, and a face rendered superlatively beautiful by the glowing of vivacity, understanding, feminine vitality behind it and through it, like a lamp held up within. She was absorbed in the new exhibit of Gresham's that hung on the walls of the guest room ... she wore a short, bouncing, riding skirt, and carried a quirt in ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... Germans by Boniface (A.D. 718-755), of the Saxons (A.D. 803), and the universal downfall of German heathenism, was a condition sine qua non of that union of Latin and Greek culture with the German vitality, which was at the root of modern European civilization. Previous to this the Visigoths were converted, as we have seen; then the Ostrogoths; then the Vandals and Gepidae,—all in the fourth century. The Franks became Christians in the fifth century, the Alemanni and Lombards in the sixth. All ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... their vitality for planting for any considerable length of time; and, if they are thoroughly dried, or are kept for longer than three or four months, they are useless for that purpose. It takes the seed about six weeks to germinate and to appear above ground. Trees raised from seed begin to ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... is said to keep for seven years at the longest. The statements as to mummy Wheat are wholly devoid of authenticity, as are those of the Raspberry seeds taken from a Roman tomb."—HOOKER, "Botany" in Science Primers. The oft-repeated stories about the vitality of mummy Wheat were effectually disposed of when it was discovered that much of the so-called Wheat ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... James Watt, the crude steam engines of the time were known as "fire engines," not in the sense in which we now apply the term to machines for the extinguishing of fires, but as indicating the source from which the power was derived, motive power engines deriving their vitality and strength from fire. The modern name—steam engine—to some extent is a misleading one, distracting the mind from the source of power to the medium which conveys the power. Similarly the name "Gas Engine" masks the fact of the motors so called being really ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various
... possibilities. Still, it would be a very sweet relation in a lonely life—a women of this quality, this desirability, this understanding, able to travel the wilderness of Africa, eager for the life, young, beautiful, tingling with vitality. In spite of himself Kingozi played with the thought. The fever was in his brain, the magic of the tropic moon was flooding ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... avoid the penalties of the Act of Elizabeth, all strolling and unattached players made haste to join regular companies, or to shelter themselves under noble patronage. And now the Church raised its voice, and a controversy which still possesses some vitality touching the morality or immorality of playhouses, plays and players, was fairly and formally entered upon. A sermon preached at Paul's Cross, November, 1577, "in the time of the plague," by the Rev. T. Wilcocks, denounced ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... speaking of. Here is a copy of Turner's vignette of "Martigny." This is wholly a design of the colored school. Here is a bit of vine in the foreground with purple grapes; the grapes, so far from being drawn as round, are struck in with angular flat spots; but they are vividly purple spots, their whole vitality and use in the design is in their Tyrian nature. Here, on the contrary, is Duerer's "Flight into Egypt," with grapes and palm fruit above. Both are white; but both engraved so as to look ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... government, or rather of imperial control supervising such government, would be tested to the very utmost. Men who had heard the old Major maunder on for years past on his pet subject, hardly knew how much vitality would be found in him when his maundering had succeeded in giving him ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which gives law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled, grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village-greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shouted for chota hazri[28] and shaving water; drank thirstily; ate hungrily; and had just cleared his face of lather when Lance came in, booted and spurred, bringing with him his magnetic atmosphere of vitality and vigour. ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... marriage the only strange thing Leopold has done. He is a man to keep the world's tongue wagging, not too musically always; though himself of very unvocal nature. Perhaps the biggest mass of inarticulate human vitality, certainly one of the biggest, then going about in the world. A man of vast dumb faculty; dumb, but fertile, deep; no end of ingenuities in the rough head of him:—as much mother-wit, there, I often guess, as could be found in whole talking parliaments, ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... close by the sheep in which I was incarnated—as if for greater security—rustled the skirts of my nurse. "Death's dark vale" was a certain archway in the Warriston Cemetery: a formidable yet beloved spot, for children love to be afraid,—in measure as they love all experience of vitality. Here I beheld myself some paces ahead (seeing myself, I mean, from behind) utterly alone in that uncanny passage: on the one side of me a rude, knobby shepherd's staff, such as cheers the heart of the cockney tourist, on the other a rod like a billiard ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... may be assuming upon myself more than I have a right to do in saying now that Barchester Towers has become one of those novels which do not die quite at once, which live and are read for perhaps a quarter of a century; but if that be so, its life has been so far prolonged by the vitality of some of its younger brothers. Barchester Towers would hardly be so well known as it is had there been no Framley Parsonage and no ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... girls full of vitality and enthusiasm. There is a real plot and the girls introduced are sure to be interesting to ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... are some: Cosmogony, miracles (in chief Joshua's sun and moon), the circulation of the blood revealed in Ecclesiastes, magnetism as mentioned by Job, "He spreadeth out the north over the empty space and hangeth the world upon nothing," the blood's innate vitality—"which is the life thereof," the earth's centre, or orbit, and inclination, astronomy, spirits, the rainbow, the final conflagration of our atmosphere to purify the globe, and many other matters terrestrial and celestial. Some day a patient scribe ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... snow in great quantities had blown in at his neck, had partially melted with the warmth of his body, and had then frozen again in a mass of ice along his whole spine, and in that condition he had lived to be driven twenty versts. Nothing but a strong will and the most intense vitality enabled him to hold out during these last six dismal hours. When we had warmed, rested, and dried ourselves at the camp-fire of the Yakuts, we resumed our journey, and late in the afternoon we drove into the settlement of Yamsk, after thirteen days of harder experience than usually falls ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... they do at New York, at Paris, at Rome, at Berlin,' are still in the minority. The doctrinaires who would split her up and destroy her unity waste their breath upon her. She divines the snare laid for her, and turns away. I like this proof of vitality." ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of courtship. What this is I have tried to make clear. During the excitement of pairing the male birds are in a condition of the most perfect development, and possess an enormous store of superabundant vitality; this, as may readily be understood, may well express itself in brilliant colours and superfluities of ornamental plumage, as also in song, in dancing, in love tournaments and in battles. The fact that we have to remember is that the female is most easily won ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the church and state tended for a while to perpetuate secular institutions. But the pagan schools passed away; the philosophy of the age had run its course until it had become a hollow assumption, a desert of words, a weary round of speculation without vitality of expression; and the activity of the sophists in these later times narrowed all literary courses until they dwindled into mere matters of form. Perhaps, owing to its force, power, and dignity, the Roman law retained a vital {358} position in the educational curriculum. The school at Athens was ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... engineering marvels higher up the East River. A fleet of bustling vessels, for the most part ferry-boats and tugs of every possible size and shape, scudded across the spacious waterways, and lent to the picture exactly that semblance of vitality, of energetic purpose, of relentless effort to be up and doing—whether the New Yorker was going home from his office, or his wife was coming into town for dinner and a theater—which one, at least, of the city's uncounted ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... we have said, are more organic, sympathetic, and really creative, than her men, and make their vitality evident by becoming, quite naturally, the centres of very [62] life-like and dramatic groups of people, family or social; while her men are the very genii of isolation and division. It is depressing to see so really noble a character as Catherine soured, as we feel, and lowered, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... us, or if not actively against, then inert and valueless. Caste feeling will come in and shield and circumvent and get behind the law. The Indian sensitiveness concerning Custom will be all awake and tingling with a hidden but intense vitality; and this, which is inevitable because natural, will have to be taken into account in every attempt made to enforce the law. The whole situation bristles with difficulties; but are difficulties an ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... although he trusts that the present production has more vitality than the Greek gentleman's child, still feels that in these days of philosophical fiction, metaphysical romance, and novels with a purpose, some apology may perhaps be needed for a tale which has the unambitious and frivolous aim of ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... Present Social Life. The segregation which kills the vitality of history is divorce from present modes and concerns of social life. The past just as past is no longer our affair. If it were wholly gone and done with, there would be only one reasonable attitude toward it. Let the dead bury their dead. But knowledge of the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... and began walking to and fro about the room, both hands plunged deep into the pockets of his shooting-jacket. Tremendous vitality streamed from him. I never took my eyes off the small, moving figure; small yes,—and yet somehow making me think of a giant plotting the destruction of worlds. And his manner was gentle, as always, soothing almost, and his words uttered quietly without emphasis or emotion. Most of what ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... immensity, for which all direct speech was felt to be inadequate. But what doubtless supplied this taste with continual nutriment was that all-pervading and unspeakable sweetness of Christ's teaching by parables. The Phoenix was used upon Roman coins to express the aspiration for renewed vitality in the empire; it was used by early Christian writers[5] as an emblem of the Resurrection; and in the Anglo-Saxon poem the ...
— Anglo-Saxon Literature • John Earle
... years before, a boy of twenty-two, she had found a vicarious maternity and gloried in it. Recently she had been very happy. The war was over and he was safely back; again she could sew on his buttons and darn his socks, and turn down his bed at night. He filled the old house with cheer and with vitality. And, as David gave up more and more of the work, he took it on his broad shoulders, efficient, ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... they turned, he appeared on the porch and came eagerly forward. Her first impression was that he had grown handsomer than she had ever believed possible; and the next minute she asked herself how in the world he had managed to exercise his vitality in Matoaca City. He was one of those men, she saw, in whom the spirit of youth burned like a flame. Every year would pass as a blessing, not as a curse, to him, and already, because of her intenser emotions and her narrower interests, Virginia was beginning ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... the conservative side of French society in spite of the fact that her abounding mental vitality often broke through the stiff boundaries of old traditions. It was not because she did not still respect them, but she had the defiant attitude of a princess whose will is an unwritten law superior to all traditions. The tone of her salon was ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... there is the boom of a gun, and he comes into collision with the man in front of him, who has stopped dead at the sound. A strange tingling feeling goes up his spine. There is a hush! No one speaks. The whole essence of vitality strains to listen. A faint whir crescendoes rapidly into the shrill whoop of a steam-siren, and a great balloon-shaped cloud of smoke and dust has already arisen from amidst the marching mass of men ahead. There is no sign whence came the shot. ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" The strong epithet he used of them suggests that they came as critics, because they were unwilling to surrender the leadership of the religious life of Israel, and were anxious to keep in touch with the new movement, until they could sap its vitality, or divert its force into the channels ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... was a shabby great elephant whose look of general discouragement went to my heart, for it seemed as if he were miserably conscious of a misspent life. He stood dejected and motionless at one side of the tent, and it was hard to believe that there was a spark of vitality left in him. A great number of the people had never seen an elephant before, and we heard a thin little old man, who stood near us, say delightedly, "There's the old creatur', and no mistake, Ann 'Liza. I wanted to see him most of anything. My sakes ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... all through the luncheon, and Douglass was carried out of his dark gravity by her splendid vitality, her humor, ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... individual with whom the object was associated. I should like to know if a dog would trace a pair of quite new shoes which had merely been dragged at the end of a string. That is, does he follow the smell of the leather itself, or the vibration track of the individual whose vitality ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... authors. We may see that in Jupiter they represented the ether, and in Apollo, and sometimes even in Hercules, the sun. But these authors, while, perhaps unconsciously, they hinted at the symbolical, fixed, by the vitality and nature of their descriptions, the actual images of the gods and, reversing the order of things, Homer ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... be on the stronger side, how can a State be established? May the Great President encourage principle, and virtue, stimulate purity of character, reject men of covetous and mean character, and grant wise tolerance to those who know no fear in defending the right. Only then will the vitality of the country be retained in some degree; and in time of emergency, there will be a reserve of strength to be drawn upon in support of the State. All these considerations are of the order of obvious truths and it must be assumed that ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... deepest eagerness to see them grow. In springtime, her interest is alike divided between the opening buds of her daffodils, and the breaking of the eggs of the first little chickens, for she has a fine poultry yard too, and is very successful in her management of it. She is full of vitality, and is the pivot on which every member of the house turns. Blessed with an adoring husband, and healthy, handsome, obedient children, who come to her for everything and tell her anything, her life ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of a small female figure, without ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... neighbours. They had been five years married before she brought him an heir to his poverty, and she lived five years more to train him—then, after a short illness, departed, and left the now aging man virtually alone with his little child, coruscating spark of fresh vitality amidst the ancient surroundings. This was the Cosmo who now, somewhat sore at heart from the result of his cogitations, entered the kitchen in search ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... boughs for ten miles around. The angel took some basil plant, and sprinkled the four quarters of the earth with water that had been consecrated in Paradise nine years before. The pools of blood all gathered into one spot, the heads lost their vitality, and the ground opened, swallowing them up with all the blood, so that the wood once more became pure and bright as God meant ...
— Roumanian Fairy Tales • Various
... of action have operated upon you, and given to certain of your measures a vitality that authorizes me to hope ...
— Speeches of His Majesty Kamehameha IV. To the Hawaiian Legislature • Kamehameha IV
... the overpowering vitality which evil things seem always to possess, and the woman felt helpless against it; so utterly, so completely helpless that it was useless to protest by any word or gesture. She could have gotten up and explained the ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... features in the main to one, namely, automatism on the part of the comical person or thing. This automatism is of a special kind; especially is it an automatism that is out of place, that occurs at the expense of spontaneity, vitality, and freshness. It may thus be defined as "something mechanical in something living," "a kind of absentmindedness on the part of life." "The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... was not doomed to die; the indestructible vitality, the irrepressible elasticity of his delicate and sensitive organization, bore him through and above his terrible illness, and he passed the crisis safely and lived. After that turning point his recovery ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... and Haldor, straining until their oars cracked again. The foam hissed from the blades, and the Swan rushed as if she had been suddenly endued with true vitality. ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne |
