"Vividness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a large picture representing the battle of Zuellichau, in 1759, where the Germans under General Wedel were defeated by the Russians under Soltikoff. The work is highly praised, and its author even compared with Horace Vernet for vividness of narrative, truth in detail, and force and harmony ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... away from me, and it don't seem much to strain a man, after all. But it really was pretty bad: what with the shadowy light in the state-room, for even with the port uncovered it still was dusky; and the horrid smell there; and the vividness with which the fellow somehow managed to make me feel those days and weeks of his half-crazy half-drunken life, while he and the other man stared at each other until neither of them could bear it any longer—and so took ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... thoroughly disappointed. Her thoughts wandered continually from the services. With almost the vividness of bodily presence, three faces were looking upon her—her father's with an infinite reproach; Sibley's, with smiling lips and wolfish eyes; and Van Berg's, first coolly questioning and exploring in its expression, and then coldly averted and scornful in consequence of what he had discovered. ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... believe anything. Nothing surprises them long. They enter into the spirit of each new conceit, and can always discover fresh analogies to bear it out. The very plots of his plays are realized metaphors or embodied conceits. And the same concrete vividness of imagination is displayed in single scenes and episodes. The Better and the Worse Reason plead the causes of the old and new education in person. Cleon and Brasidas are the pestles with which War proposes to bray Greece in a mortar; the triremes of Athens in council assembled declare that ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lapse of ages, been encumbered with fictitious detail; and their various historians seem to have considered the exercise of their imagination innocent, and even meritorious, if they could increase either the vividness of conception or the sincerity of belief in their readers. A due consideration of that well-known weakness of the popular mind, which renders a statement credible in proportion to the multitude of local and circumstantial details which accompany it, may lead ...
— Giotto and his works in Padua • John Ruskin
... the way religious authority has employed the secular power to obstruct the progress of knowledge and crush out the spirit of investigation. While there is not in his book a word of disrespect for things sacred, he writes with a directness of speech, and a vividness of characterization and an unflinching fidelity to the facts, which show him to be in thorough earnest with his work. The 'History of the Conflict between Religion and Science' is a fitting sequel to the 'History of the Intellectual ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... and many others whom it would be tedious to mention, differing in intelligence and capability, were alike in the vividness of their Fetich-worship and the feebleness of their spiritual sentiments.[H] They brought over the local superstitions, the grotesque or revolting habits, the twilight exaggerations of their great pagan fatherland, into a practical paganism, which struck at their rights, and violated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... glides across—the sweep of a gown or of a priest's cassock is audible—and we shiver! La Grande Breteche, with its rank grasses, its shuttered windows, its rusty iron-work, its locked doors, its deserted rooms, suddenly rose before me in fantastic vividness. I tried to get into the mysterious dwelling to search out the heart of this solemn story, this drama which ...
— La Grande Breteche • Honore de Balzac
... original, and fresh American type. David Harum is a character whose qualities of mind and heart, eccentricities, and dry humor will win for his creator noble distinction. Buoyancy, life, and cheerfulness are dominant notes. In its vividness and force the story is a strong, fresh picture of American life. Original and true, it is worth the same distinction which is accorded the genre pictures of peculiar types and places sketched by Mr. George W. Cable, Mr. Joel Chandler ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... donned their brightest and gayest tints, as if bidding a last good-by before they fell from the trees. The undergrowth was gorgeous: bramble, elder, honeysuckle, briony, rowan, and alder vied with one another in the vividness of their crimson and orange, while the bracken was a sea of pale gold. There were all sorts of delightful things to be found—acorns lay so plentifully in the pathway that the girls could not help scrunching them underfoot. ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... glass, semi-opaque with dirt, occupied the space of the outer wall, and the glare from the dazzling snow outside brought out the whole interior with a sort of brutal vividness. A number of water-stained shelves; a few shallow boxes disintegrating and distributing their contents of earth over the floor; one or two crisp, brown, desiccated plant-stalks: such was the interior ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... I must add, was an odd recollection which gathered vividness as I listened to it—a mental association evoked by the name of Mr. Porterfield. Surely I had a personal impression, over- smeared and confused, of the gentleman who was waiting at Liverpool, or who presently ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... gone at intervals, but would rally feebly: and with his consciousness returned his love, his simplicity, his sweetness. He would talk French with Madame de Florac; at which time his memory appeared to awaken with surprizing vividness, his cheek flushed, and he was a youth again—a youth all love and hope—a stricken old man, with a beard as white as snow covering the noble careworn face. At such times he called her by her Christian name of Leonore; he addrest ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... not particularly interesting, but nevertheless everyone at the table listened with delight. The man's vividness, his simple certainty of their sympathy, ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... The vividness with which the author describes scenes and events and people, as if he had them before his eyes, is one of his greatest charms as a writer. Those who know him best place him second only to Shakespeare as ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)
... mentally over-tired sleeps either dreamlessly, or dreams with a vividness greater than that characterising the dreams of normal slumber. Dr. ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... corner of the table and crossed his arms. But for the touch of black-guardism in his appearance, Bob would have been a very good-looking fellow; his face was healthy, by no means commonplace in its mould, and had the peculiar vividness which indicates ability—so impressive, because so rarely seen, in men of his level. Unfortunately his hair was cropped all but to the scalp, in the fashionable manner; it was greased, too, and curled up on one side of his forehead with a peculiarly offensive perkishness. ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... extreme vividness. The water was boiling, and everything was prepared, and the sound of his "zuzzoo" had brought me out upon the verandah. His active little figure was black against the autumnal sunset, and to the right the chimneys of his house just ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... been exhibited, and since it passed into our hands a few years ago some very beautiful colours not to be found among the ordinary Stellata varieties have been added to it. The distinctive feature of the flowers is the white centre, which greatly enhances the vividness of the colouring of the petals. For the Intermediate section the same methods of culture as advised for the other ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... the pain it gave her to retrace the scenes, and begged her to desist till time should have, in some degree, assuaged the poignancy of her feelings. 'That,' cried she, embracing me, I can never be! Never, never will that horrid circumstance of my life lose its vividness in my recollection. What agony, to have seen those faithful servants tied before us on the carriage, like common criminals! All, all may be attributed to the King's goodness of heart, which produces want ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... to give an idea of the vividness of the descriptions in these stories without making extracts which would be entirely too long. It is safe to say, however, that no one could possibly fail to be carried along by the torrent of fiery narration which marks these wonderful ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl
... toward the Memorial Library, standing rapt before the Stuart Washington, or drinking in, from some obscure corner of an academic drawing-room, the President's reminiscences of the Concord group—this vividness of self-projection into the emotions awaiting her made her glad of any delay that prolonged so exquisite ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... the writing-table—the same one at which he had written the cheque the last time he saw Percy. The scene comes back to him with a strange vividness as he dips his pen in the ink. He hesitates a moment before beginning the letter. Was there anything he could say that would please Percy? He has a curious and at the same time a strong desire to do something now—at ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... how forcible, Borrow's descriptions are. As to incident, one often, as before, suspects him of romancing, and it stands to reason that his dialogue, written long after the event, must be full of the "cocked-hat-and-cane" style of narrative. But his description, while it has all the vividness, has also all the faithfulness and sobriety of the best landscape-painting. See a place which Kingsley or Mr. Ruskin, or some other master of our decorative school, has described—much more one which has fallen into the hands ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... wondering whether he remembered, as she now remembered with a kind of sickening vividness, the last time they had been together in this room—for it was here, in the dining-room of Old Place, that they had spent their last miserable, heart-broken moment together, a moment when all the angry bitterness had been merged in wild, ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... of romantic realism which was founded by Merimee and Balzac found its culmination in De Maupassant. He surpassed his mentor, Flaubert, in the breadth and vividness of his work, and one of the greatest of modern French critics has recorded the deliberate opinion, that of all Taine's pupils Maupassant had the greatest command of language and the most finished and incisive style. Robust in imagination and fired with natural passion, ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... the individual, however, the flux is not absolute; for through memory we preserve something of the unique value of our past. Its vividness, its fullness, the sharp bite of its reality go; but a subtilized essence remains. And the worth that we attach to our personality depends largely upon it; for the instinct of self- preservation penetrates the inner world; we strive not only to maintain our physical existence in ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... upon her with the vividness of a lightning flash. It was the way of revelation to her also, but how? She sat up in bed, propping herself back against the pillows, her mind groping eagerly for ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... cycle of mere anarchy, disruption, and dictatorships, into which we shall all follow. The motto "noblesse oblige" applies as much to democracy as ever it did to the old-time aristocrat. It applies with terrific vividness to America. Ancestry and Nature have bestowed on her great gifts. Behind her stand Conscience, Enterprise, Independence, and Ability—such were the companions of the first Americans, and are the comrades of American citizens to this day. She has abounding energy, an unequalled ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... in music, is derived from reflection upon the peculiarly vague and intangible nature of its art-material—tone, sound. The words of a language (also sounds, it is true) have established meanings, so familiar and definite that they recall and re-awaken impressions of thought and action with a vividness but little short of the actual experience. Tones, on the contrary, are not and cannot be associated with any definite ideas or impressions; they are as impalpable as they are transient, and, taken separately, leave ...
— Lessons in Music Form - A Manual of Analysis of All the Structural Factors and - Designs Employed in Musical Composition • Percy Goetschius
... thy image to my mind returns, Aspasia. In the crowded streets it gleams Upon me, for an instant, as I pass, In other faces; or in lonely fields, At noon-tide bright, beneath the silent stars, With sudden and with startling vividness, As if awakened by sweet harmony, The splendid vision rises in my soul. How worshipped once, ye gods, what a delight To me, what torture, too! Nor do I e'er The odor of the flowery fields inhale, Or ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... themselves to the Prophet's mind with extraordinary vividness and force. His resolve was taken in a moment, and, turning to his eager grandmother and to the still slightly inflated astronomer, he exclaimed without ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... season when the abundant sap exudes in a white foam from the trunk of the willow; when between the plant world and ourselves a magnetic current seems to exist, which seeks to wed their fraternizing emanations with our own personality. He was oppressed by the vividness of the verdure, intoxicated with the odor of vegetation, agitated by the confused music of the birds, and in this May fever of excitement, his thoughts wandered with secret delight to Reine Vincart, to this queen of the woods, who was the personification ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Darwin as a young man, though he had, like his grandson, an indomitable love of hard mental work. Benevolence and sympathy with others, and a great personal charm of manner, were common to the two. Charles Darwin possessed, in the highest degree, that "vividness of imagination" of which he speaks as strongly characteristic of Erasmus, and as leading "to his overpowering tendency to theorise and generalise." This tendency, in the case of Charles Darwin, was fully kept in check by the determination to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... She knew the order of their going, to the minutest detail. A vision of it all was photographed upon her brain as she had witnessed it these many times within the past ten years; and perhaps owing to the mental vividness of her race, custom had not yet ground the edge off ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... play. Many hands were concerned in its growth, but its increase in scenic effect as well as in dialogue was a stage one, rather than prompted by literary fervour. No dramatization of Washington Irving's immortal story has approached the original in art of expression or in vividness of scene. But, if historical record can be believed, it is the actor, rather than the dramatist, who has vied with Irving in the vitality of characterization and in the romantic ideality of figure and speech. Some of our best comedians found ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... feet high. These were occasionally broken by smaller tributary arroyos of the same sort. It would have been impossible to reach the level of the upper country. The bed of the main arroyo was flat, and grown with grasses and herbage of an extraordinary vividness, due, I supposed, to the sulphur water. The stream itself meandered aimlessly through the broader bed. It steadily grew warmer and the sulphur smell more noticeable. Above us we could see the sky and the sharp clay ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... date of writing may have been as early as 1611. It is based on a story in Painter's "Palace of Pleasure," translated from the Italian novelist, Bandello; and it is entirely possible that it has a foundation in fact. In any case, it portrays with a terrible vividness one side of the court life of the Italian Renaissance; and its picture of the fierce quest of pleasure, the recklessness of crime, and the worldliness of the great princes of the Church finds only too ready corroboration in the annals of ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... was not to be so easily consoled. He lay awake that night, a prey to poignant self-disgust, remembering in turn his happy childhood at the Mission, his love for the Sitt Hilda, and his recent frowardness, each with a vividness that hurt his brain. Even the patronage of a great Emir seemed nothing worth as compared with the affection of those who had brought him up. The Emir spoke lightly of religion; he despised the missionaries; it might well be he was wicked, a servant ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... awoke to higher and worthier aims; and once, when Russell, whose intelligent interest in his work exceeded that of any other boy, had pointed out to him that solemn question—[Here appears a three-line Greek quotation] he had entered into its meaning with wonderful vividness. So that, without losing any of that winning gracefulness of address which made him so great a favourite with the school, it became evident to all that he combined with it a touching earnestness. Sometimes when he read the Bible to Edwin ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... short, the scene seemed to Tientietnikov strange, and his former pursuits more important than his present, and his preparation for the Service preferable to the Service itself. Yes, suddenly he felt a longing for his old school; and as suddenly, and with all the vividness of life, there appeared before his vision the figure of Alexander Petrovitch. He almost burst into tears as he beheld his old master, and the room seemed to swim before his eyes, and the tchinovniks and ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... Gospel of Vividness and Details. He shows the effect of awe and wonder produced upon those present by the works and teaching of Jesus. He tells the details of the actions of Jesus and his disciples and the multitudes. Jesus "looks around," ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... sufficiently scholarly atmosphere to make the picture life like. There is wisdom too, in the attitude of the author toward his characters; and the entire atmosphere of the book is of fine quality. The general accuracy and vividness of the portraiture are likely to impress everyone. * * * It contains passages and characterizations that some readers will find it difficult to forget.—The ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... "Drum-Taps" is the only literature of the war thus far entirely characteristic and worthy of serious mention. There are in particular two passages in the "Memoranda" that have amazing dramatic power, vividness, and rapid action, like some quick painter covering a large canvas. I refer to the account of the assassination of President Lincoln, and to that of the scenes in Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. What may be called the mass-movement of Whitman's ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... gave a touch of mild poetry to the evening. Sisters of Charity in white cambric caps told their beads through the mazes of the lancers. Night and Morning, attired respectively in black and white tarletan, and both profusely adorned with silver paper stars, combined their forces to add romance and vividness to ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... lower, the most gorgeous hues came into the sky. But, while every one was on deck gazing on its almost tropical vividness, a film stole between, a shivering dampness pervaded the air, and soon a dense fog drove the chagrined passengers back into ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... equal vividness hearing Lowell read some of his Biglow Papers in the drawing-room of my valued friend Arthur Dexter, of Boston, when there were no others present save him and his mother and my wife and myself. And that also was ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... drawn them all from the same model, as painters say. They are, every one of them, descended from Clarissa Harlowe. And returning continually, as he did, to the same idea of woman, how could he do otherwise than produce a single type, varied only by degrees of vividness in the coloring? Woman brings confusion into Society through passion. Passion gives infinite possibilities. Therefore depict passion; you have one great resource open to you, foregone by the great genius for ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... legacy to Mavis—the cursed money that he hated, that threw him back into the earlier distress concerning his wife's shame, that restored vividness to the thoughts which had faded in presence of the one overpowering thought of ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... experiences in this new world. It was her first real letter to him, although she had written him a few short notes from Malpura. It was interesting and clever, without any attempt to be so, and Dermot was surprised at the accuracy of her judgment of men and things and the vividness of her descriptions. He noticed, moreover, that the social gaieties of Darjeeling did not engross her. She enjoyed dancing, but the many balls, At Homes, and other social functions did not attract her so much as the riding and tennis, the sight-seeing, the glimpses ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... impressed upon her childish recollection by terror, that scene had never been entirely forgotten. Having no clue to its reality, she had always supposed it to be a dream; but now as it came back with some degree of vividness, she saw plainly the face which was neither that of the likeness nor that of her assailant, but might well be a link between the two—the same ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 1 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... exception will Show,—he does it with perfect accuracy; and often with vital profit to his measures. "If the Austrian cooking-tents are a-smoke before eight in the morning," notes he, "you may calculate, in such case, the Austrians will march that day." [MILITARY INSTRUCTIONS.] With a surprising vividness of eye and mind (beautiful to rival, if one could), he watches the signs of the times, of the hours and the days and the places; and prophesies from them; reads men and their procedures, as if they were mere handwriting, not too cramp for him.—The Austrians ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... of the first two of these works. The "Germany," the full title of which is "Concerning the situation, manners and inhabitants of Germany," contains little of value from a historical standpoint. It describes with vividness the fierce and independent spirit of the German nations, with many suggestions as to the dangers in which the empire stood of these people. The "Agricola" is a biographical sketch of the writer's father-in-law, who, as has been ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... word of Pilkington, and you may be asking where he was all this time. Ah, my friends, he was very busy fishing, though I was as yet unaware of his existence. Most suddenly I heard the whirr of his hated reel, as he struck a fish. I remember that grim day with painful vividness, it was a wet day, indeed I think it has rained for me more or less ever since. As soon as they joined me I saw from the manner of the two boys that they had something to communicate. Oliver nudged David and retired a few paces, whereupon David said ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... was true, that the Republican party in that section was under the domination of northern "carpet baggers," a few worthless southern whites and a number of dishonest and incompetent colored men. This, no doubt, is the false, deceptive and misleading picture which had been painted from the vividness of his partial, mistaken, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... I should say it consists in their simple statement and explanation of scientific facts and laws. The biographical details are compiled from all readily available sources, there is no novelty or originality about them; though it is hoped that there may be some vividness. I have simply tried to present a living figure of each Pioneer in turn, and to trace his influence on the ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... the separated self, that the abandoning of the separated self has meant the realising of the Self in man, and that the resignation of the limit which alone seemed to make life possible has meant the pouring out into myriad forms, an undreamed vividness and fulness, "the power ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... With passionate vividness he saw the years of his youth and desire slipping away in the round of trivial "jobs" in the city; he saw the slow decay of resolves under the ever increasing demands to "make good" by earning money. And he shrank from it as ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... he is constructing his Plots, and engaged on the Diction in which they are worked out, the poet should remember (1) to put the actual scenes as far as possible before his eyes. In this way, seeing everything with the vividness of an eye-witness as it were, he will devise what is appropriate, and be least likely to overlook incongruities. This is shown by what was censured in Carcinus, the return of Amphiaraus from the sanctuary; it would have passed unnoticed, ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... Panurge, with equal obstinacy and ingenuity, invariably twists the oracles according to his own wishes. But what no reader, who came fresh to Rabelais and fasting from criticism on him, could anticipate, is the astonishing spontaneity of the various dealings with the same problem, the zest and vividness of the whole thing, and the unceasing shower of satire on everything human—general, professional, and individual—which is kept up throughout. There is less pure extravagance, less mere farce, and (despite the subject) even less "sculduddery" ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... estimate of Scott, declares that "much of the interest of these novels results from contrasts of costume. The phraseology, fashion of arms, of dress, of life belonging to one age is brought suddenly with singular vividness before the eyes of another. A great effect this; yet by the very nature of it an altogether temporary one. Consider, brethren, shall not we too one day be antiques and grow to have as quaint a costume as the rest? . . . Not ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... rows of silent, grinning dwarfs, nor the black, motionless lake, nor the leaping tongues of flame. We forgot these when we followed the gaze of that terrifying audience and saw a sight that printed itself on my brain with a vividness which time can never erase. Closing my eyes, I see it even ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... novel, in which the extraordinary dramatic and descriptive powers of the great Magyar writer have full play. As a picture of feudal life in Hungary it has never been surpassed for fidelity and vividness. The translation is ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... "their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched," is a part of the imagery naturally suggested by the scene in the Valley of Hinnom, and was used to give greater vividness and force to the moral impression of the discourse. By an interpretation resulting either from prejudice or ignorance, it is generally held to teach the doctrine of literal fire torments enduring forever. It is a direct quotation from a passage in Isaiah which signifies that, in a ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... sketch and criticism even, have been made truly charming of late years by the vividness in which actions have been depicted and characters portrayed, as well as by clearness and beauty in expression. We turn to an historical work with as much zest as to a romance, and find in it, now, that enthusiasm, that liveliness, that interest ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... broad sparkling white beach of sand curving round its blue sea-mirror, and studded thickly with gold and silver shells. She saw the boat of Captain Kittridge upon the stocks, and his tar-kettle with the smouldering fires flickering under it; but, as often happens in dreams, a certain rainbow vividness and clearness invested everything, and she and Sally were jumping for joy at the beautiful things they ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... poignant in its effect upon her because it was unconscious on his part. In that one moment the instinct of motherhood leapt full within her, a sudden bewildering emotion, totally new to her in its aliveness, its vividness. And then cold truth swept in on her that by some act she had wiped from his young heart in one moment his ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... styled himself "Sir," is a fascinating figure. Thanks to his chatty explanations on all subjects, bits of the daily life of this little Devonshire parish from Henry VIII's, from Edward VI's, from Mary's, and from Elizabeth's reigns are brought down to us with great vividness. Cf. James Stockdale, Annals of Cartmel (1872), 58-9 (Custom of addressing minister as "Sir" lingering down to nineteenth ...
— The Elizabethan Parish in its Ecclesiastical and Financial Aspects • Sedley Lynch Ware
... Search"), which to me is Baroja's best work, and one of the most interesting things published in Europe in the last decade. It deals with the lowest and most miserable life in Madrid and is written with a cold acidity which Maupassant would have envied and is permeated by a human vividness that I do not think Maupassant could have achieved. All three novels, La Busca, Mala Hierba, and Aurora Roja, deal with the drifting of a typical uneducated Spanish boy, son of a maid of all work in a boarding house, through different strata of Madrid ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... in these volumes been content to restrict himself to an endeavour to win and instruct the young. He has done this with admirable skill, with great transparency of meaning, vividness of treatment and nicety of discrimination, combined with a befitting freedom and an impressive ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... The Commandant, Donna Anna's father, appears with drawn sword and challenges the intruder. Don Giovanni hesitates to draw against so old a man, but the Commandant will not parley. They fight. At first the attacks and defences are deliberate (the music depicts it all with wonderful vividness), but at the last it is thrust and parry, thrust and parry, swiftly, mercilessly. The Commandant is no match for his powerful young opponent, and falls, dying. A few broken ejaculations, and all is ended. The orchestra sings a slow descending chromatic ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gone at intervals, but would rally feebly; and with his consciousness returned his love, his simplicity, his sweetness. He would talk French with Madame de Florac, at which time, his memory appeared to awaken with surprising vividness, his cheek flushed, and he was a youth again,—a youth all love and hope,—a stricken old man, with a beard as white as snow covering the noble careworn face. At such times he called her by her Christian name of Leonore; he addressed ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... law of association of ideas.'[517] The synchronous sensations produce synchronous ideas and the successive sensations successive ideas. Finally, the strength of the association between the ideas depends upon 'the vividness of the associated feelings, and the frequency of the association.'[518] Hume had said that association depended upon three principles, 'contiguity in time and place,' 'causation,' and 'resemblance.' Contiguity in time corresponds to the successive, and contiguity in place to the synchronous, order. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Washington, and although the time passed monotonously, I saw many persons and events which have much to do with the history of the Rebellion. The story of "Washington During the War" has yet to be written in all its vividness of enterprise, devotion, and infamy. It has been, in periods of peace, a dull, dolorous town, of mammoth hotels, paltry dwellings, empty lots, prodigiously wide avenues, a fossil population, and a series of gigantic public buildings, which ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... in the strict sense of the word in this particular reappearance of Samuel Pickwick and Samuel Weller. In the original Pickwick Papers Dickens had with quite remarkable delicacy and vividness contrived to suggest a certain fundamental sturdiness and spirit in that corpulent and complacent old gentleman. Mr. Pickwick was a mild man, a respectable man, a placid man; but he was very decidedly a man. He could ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... I again experienced a shock as of a galvanic battery, the sense of weight, of volition, of substance, returned. I became my original self, and bent my steps eagerly homeward—but the past had not lost the vividness of the real—and not now, even for an instant, can I compel my understanding to regard it as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... literature, so Carlyle taught English people to read German literature. He steeped himself so thoroughly in German that he himself came to write English, if I may so express it, with a German accent. Carlyle's style is harsh and rugged. It has a vividness and picturesqueness all his own, but when Carlyle began to write people cared neither for his style nor for his subjects. He found publishers hard to persuade, and life ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... or live metaphor being to add vividness to what is being conveyed, it need hardly be said that accuracy of detail is even more necessary in metaphorical than in literal expressions; the habit of metaphor, however, and the habit of accuracy do ...
— Tract XI: Three Articles on Metaphor • Society for Pure English
... plucked up courage and made bold to express to him the surprise I had felt, not only at the marvellous vividness with which the actions had been repeated before my eyes, like life itself in form and in color and in motion, but also at the startling fact that some of the things I had been shown were true and some were false. Some of them had happened actually ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... which is sometimes to be seen in it. Spenser was a learned poet; and his poem has the character of the work of a man of wide reading, but without books to verify or correct. It cannot be doubted that his life in Ireland added to the force and vividness with which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... character drawing of "Pompilia," are incomparable in their impressiveness and beauty, and must live so long as poetry is enshrined in life. The vital drama, the splendor of movement, the color, the impassioned exaltation of feeling, the pictorial vividness that are in these poems grouped under "Dramatic Romances" and "Dramatis Personae," give them claim to the first rank in the poet's creations. Curiously, during this period, the change in Browning's habits of work, which his ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... which these words were said, and the look with which they were accompanied, impressed Ormond at once with a conviction of the danger, fortitude, and magnanimity of the person who spoke to him. The hectic colour, the brilliant eye, the vividness of fancy, the superiority of intellectual powers, the warmth of the affections, and the amiable gentleness of the disposition of this young man, were, alas! but so many fatal indications of his disease. The energy with which, with decreasing bodily and increasing ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... promptly on the hour, Conscience saw in the doorway the back and shoulders of a man who seemed to be searching the place for an acquaintance. In the bearing and erectness of the figure was something so familiar that it stabbed her with a sharp vividness of memory. She started and just then the man turned and she found herself face to face with ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... far more vague to me. Compared with the vividness of that one initial Picture, the events of the next few months have only the blurred indistinctness of all childish memories. For I was a child once more, in all save stature, and had to learn to remember things just ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... best thing; I gathered from the hotel-keepers of the Bay an account of the wreck on the beach that lacked nothing in vividness, thanks to their laudable desire not to see an enterprising reporter cheated out of his rightful "space." Then I hired a sleigh and drove home through the storm, wet through—"I can hear the water yet running out of your boots," says my wife—wet through ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in her demands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... although they looked slightly swollen. They seemed fixedly open, but were not wide apart. Of course I did not REMARK these lineaments at the time: I was too horrified for that. I noted them afterwards, when the form returned on my inward sight with a vividness too intense to admit of my doubting the accuracy of the reflex. But the most awful of the features were the eyes. These were alive, yet not ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... distinguished from the rest by a slightly military air, and by a certain vividness of costume and a bristling feather in his hat, bowed ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... an order all his own that has developed, it is likely, from the old "Saints' Lives," but to which he has given a ring of authenticity that makes them seem descended from an antiquity as remote as that of folk-tale or hero-tale. "The Flight of the Culdees" brings before you with vividness what must have been the life of the Celtic missionaries in the days when the men out of Lochlin began to seek the Summer Isles; and "The Annir Choile" and "The Woman with the Net," what was the fate they meted out ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... herself to a problem like this without a feeling of bitterness. To consider what woman of any standing could be induced to eat her salt brought her true social position before her with painful vividness. She could not, in face of the facts which then forced themselves upon her, shut her eyes to the truth that her painful struggles for position had been pretty nearly fruitless. She did now and then get an invitation to a crush in a desirable ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates
... in curious contrast to the lurid yellow and black clouds hurrying on behind him. The old castle was bathed for a moment in a sea of purple light,—every line of it, and the huge rock which it crowned, standing out with peculiar vividness against the empty background. But it was a brief glory. Even while Paul was gazing, the colouring faded away, and it resumed its former aspect. Fair weather ahead! Every moment, as memories of his former visit to the place thronged in upon him, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... In terseness of phrase, vividness of fancy, and keenness of insight into the motives that sway mankind, this passage is worthy of Napoleon. He knew that his exile at St. Helena would dull the memory of the wrongs which he had done to the cause ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... prophecy; the instinctive and burning language, which would express less if it uttered more; which is indistinct only by its fulness, and dark with its abundant meaning. He feels now, with long-trained vividness and keenness of sense, too bitterly, the impotence of the hand and the vainness of the colour to catch one shadow or one image of the glory which God has revealed to him. He has dwelt and communed ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... There are depths of human feeling I should never have suspected in this lazy panther of a woman, and although she openly avows having no more education than a tinker's dog, she can talk with considerable force and vividness of expression. ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Millamant in vividness. An air of bewitching whimsicality hovers over the graces of this Comic heroine, like the lively conversational play ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... came back to me with the vividness which childish recollections sometimes have, as I sat there in the pew at my mother's side. Only I could not quite believe that this little wrinkled old man was the same who looked so proudly from Kneller's canvas. But when the service ended and ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... the course of this work, are received as undisputed opinions. They are fulfilled again when the relics of these opinions, and the memories of the mythical events believed in accordance with such opinions, are still operative in the mind, though no longer with the vividness of primitive times; when some of them still hold together, but for the most part they are decaying and falling to pieces, and are only like the faded rags of a once splendid robe which a child may gather round its puny form and make believe for the moment that it is a king. ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... than he had followed when a boy. He halted his pony at last by the great boulder where Tige lay buried. The tragedy of his grief on that long-ago morning when he had touched the stiffened body of his old friend came back to him with such vividness that, in spite of "Time's long caressing hand," he could not "smile beholding it." He hitched his horse close by with a sense of the old dog's nearness and protection, for he meant to camp on that spot during his stay ...
— The Boy from Hollow Hut - A Story of the Kentucky Mountains • Isla May Mullins
... near the wall. There was a fine, warm, benignant smile on his old face, yet his powerful shoulders drooped as if weighted down with a heavy load. Hamilton was aware when he entered, and instantly the scene of their conflict came into his memory with awful vividness, and he saw Alice lying outstretched, stark and, cold, the shining strand of hair fluttering across her pallid cheek. Her ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... face of the woman in the bed—even now with something of the peace of sleep still shadowing its brilliancy—gave by contrast an impression of vividness and eager sympathies. The mistress, too, looked younger than her years. She did not seem to wonder at the dull presence that seemed to be held there, prisoner-like, behind the brass bars at the foot of the bed. Wark sometimes gave herself this five minutes' tete-a-tete ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... thumping a lump of saturated linen; brown old crones, the tone of whose facial hide makes their nightcaps (worn by day) look dazzling; little alleys perforating the thick- ness of a row of cottages, and showing you behind, as a glimpse, the vividness of a green garden. In the rear of the castle rises a hill which must formerly have been occupied by some of its appurtenances, and which indeed is still partly enclosed within its court. You may walk round this eminence, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... he took his place on the footstool, and told her what had passed. At first, she listened with a divided mind, for so strongly was she still impressed with the vividness of the dream, she half expected Warwick to rise like Banquo, and claim the seat that a single occupancy seemed to have made his own. An expression of intense relief replaced that of fear, when she had heard ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... be made before any one else was up. He let himself out of the house very quietly and crossed the empty, silent garden. He had forgotten how beautiful a garden could be in the early morning with the dew shining on every grass tip and with the flowers all radiant in the vividness of color of newly created things. There were gay-colored beds below the terrace and long borders at each side of the house, then a wide stretch of grass behind the garage, and beyond that, back of ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... air? Did you ever see the fitful light among the tree-depths, at one moment opening vast shadowy vistas into the forest, at the next dying downward and leaving it all in sombre mystery? It came to me that night with the wonderful vividness of ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... various then as now. But, paradoxical as it may seem, this is nevertheless true, not only for this Class, but for many others in the Animal Kingdom. The same numerical proportions, the same richness and vividness of conception were manifested in the early creation as now; and though many of the groups were wanting that are most prominent in modern geological periods, those that existed were expressed in such endless variety that the Animal Kingdom seems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was dark again, and from the skies fell a deluge of rain. In a minute the burning creepers were quenched, and the whole world was one pit of ink, with the roar as of a thousand torrents about our ears. As the vividness of the lightning, so was the weight of the rain. Ringan cried to us to stand to our places, for now was the likely occasion for attack; but no human being could have fought in such weather. Indeed, we could not ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... act in the sight of God. All his labor was sin, while he was in a state of sin, whether it was at the plow, or in the shop, or store, or office, or counting-room. She warned him of the wrath to come, and she explained to him with minute vividness the everlasting despair and tortures of the damned. Hiram was a good deal affected. He began to feel that his position personally was perilous. He wanted to get out of it, especially as his mother assured him if he should be taken away—and he was liable to ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... full-grown into being, it is nevertheless true that there are no marks of positive immaturity to be detected even in the earliest public displays of his art. His work grows, indeed, most marvellously in vividness and symmetry as he proceeds, but there are no visible signs of growth in the workman's skill. Even when the highest point of finish is attained we cannot say that the hand is any more cunning than it was from the ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... and hardly have hope to see. I have traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Amsterdam, Paris, Lisbon—their churches, palaces, squares, market-places, shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight—a map-like distinctness of trace—and a day-light vividness of vision, that was all but being awake.—I have formerly travelled among the Westmoreland fells—my highest Alps,—but they are objects too mighty for the grasp of my dreaming recognition; and I have again and again awoke with ineffectual struggles of the inner eye, to make out a shape in any way ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... of the most intimate and fertile union between biographer and his subject which has ever occurred, and it gives us in consequence more of the essence of both than any other biography. Boswell brought to it his own bustling activity and curiosity from which it draws its vividness and variety: he brought to it also his warm-hearted, half-morbid emotionalism from which it derives its many moving pages: he brought to it his reverence for Johnson, which enabled him to exhibit, as no other man could, that kingship and priesthood ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... address of the bereaved man had been given, and Bud's heart had given a flop when he read it. The details of the theft had not been told, but Bud never noticed their absence. His memory supplied all that for him with sufficient vividness. ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... accordance with this idea, threw about all cures, even those which resulted from scientific effort, an atmosphere of supernaturalism. The vividness with which the accounts of miracles in the sacred books were realized in the early Church continued the idea of miraculous intervention throughout the Middle Ages. The testimony of the great fathers of the Church to the continuance of miracles is overwhelming; but everything shows ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... feeling of loss of self, of being a stranger to herself, and the world in which she moved seemed a vague and shrouded world. It lacked sharpness of definition. Its customary vividness was gone. She had lapses of memory, and was continually finding herself doing unplanned things. Thus, to her astonishment, she came to in the back yard hanging up the week's wash. She had no recollection of having done it, yet it had been done precisely as it ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... tighter on some sort of screwing peg. She felt her eyes opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously, something within oppressing her breathing, while all shapes and sounds seemed in the uncertain half-light to strike her with unaccustomed vividness. Moments of doubt were continually coming upon her, when she was uncertain whether the train were going forwards or backwards, or were standing still altogether; whether it were Annushka at her side or a stranger. "What's ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... constructed camera her faculties, in an instant no longer than the time required for the clicking of the shutter, photographed a hawk circling high up in the sky, a waving branch, with no less truth and vividness than the body sprawling there in the grass. Emotions, scents, sounds, objects blended into a strange mental snap-shot, no one detail less ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... spirit, which in the eagerness of youthful living and thinking had already been his own. No man, in fact, was ever less inclined to take anything at second-hand. The root of all originality was in him, in the shape of an extreme natural vividness of perception, imagination, and feeling. An instinctive and inbred unwillingness to accept the accepted and conform to the conventional was of the essence of his character, whether in life or art, and was a source to him both of strength and weakness. He would not follow a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sixes in the date of the Great Fire in London, viz., 1666. The "three sixes" are generally resorted to as a signal for fire companies to turn out in full force; yet such a coincidence of figures in a distant date makes a slight impression compared to the vividness of events that happened in the year of our birth, the year of graduation from school, the year of marriage, and the year of the death of relatives, &c., &c. Keep a small blank book for such entries, not to help ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... and interpreted for us by his skill. By his magic, the moon throws her light far out of the picture, and the crimson of the summer night absolutely glimmers on the beholder's face. Or we might indicate a poet-painter, whose song has the vividness of picture, and whose canvas is peopled with angels, fairies, and water sprites, done to the ethereal life, because he saw them face to face in his poetic mood. Or we might bow before an artist, who has wrought too sincerely, too ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which we thus acknowledge as appropriate to the passion and the scene. And yet they had never stamped themselves upon our minds, when witnessed in actual life, from which the actor himself had copied them, with half that force and vividness which they receive from his delineation. In like manner, the historian—one to whom history is a genuine vocation—applies to the facts with which he has to deal, to the evidence which he has to sift, to the relations which he has to peruse, a faculty which shall detect a meaning where ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... long as no punishment was inflicted, must have been felt in the same manner. But other nations, though they found it no easier to forgive, nevertheless forgot more easily, while the Italian imagination kept the picture of the wrong alive with frightful vividness. The fact that, according to the popular morality, the avenging of blood is a duty—a duty often performed in a way to make us shudder—gives to this passion a peculiar and still firmer basis. The government and the tribunals recognize its existence and justification, and only attempt to keep ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... power, mingle with her tears and glow in her fondest hopes. Though time and distance and vicissitudes may calm her troubled heart, and cause her to settle down into tranquility of feeling; but these can never destroy the tenacity and vividness of her memory. Even then those objects to which it fondly clings, become the theme of her holiest and her happiest thoughts; and she retains them with a passionate ardor, exceeded only by that with which she clung to the living ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips
... end had been to her also a fearful blow. All night Diane had seen visions of the beautiful youth, so charming, so poetical, who had been so delightful a lover—painted as Leontine depicted him, with the vividness of wild delirium. She had letters from Lucien that she had kept, intoxicating letters worthy to compare with Mirabeau's to Sophie, but more literary, more elaborate, for Lucien's letters had been dictated by the most powerful of passions—Vanity. Having the most bewitching of duchesses for his mistress, ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... what she must have felt, and I heartily wished, when the moment came for leaving, that I could have remained to comfort and protect her. My going away must have brought back to her recollection with painful vividness the time when my kind father last sailed I suspect she thought that she might never see me again; still she knew that I must work for my livelihood, as I did myself, and I was going to begin the profession I had chosen, and for which I had long had a desire. For dangers ...
— The Mate of the Lily - Notes from Harry Musgrave's Log Book • W. H. G. Kingston
... departement' (The Departmental Muse). Of these 'Eugenie Grandet' is of course easily first in interest, pathos, and power. The character of old Grandet, the miserly father, is presented to us with Shakespearean vividness, although Eugenie herself has, less than the Shakespearean charm. Any lesser artist would have made the tyrant himself and his yielding wife and daughters seem caricatures rather than living people. It is only the Shakespeares ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength—when the imagination is a mirror imparting vividness to all ideas without the power of selecting or controlling them—then pray that your griefs may slumber and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. It is too late. A funeral train comes gliding by your bed in which passion and feeling assume bodily shape and things of the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I cannot tell how many thousands of men who voluntarily accepted this burden, and who were not crushed by it—that is a problem which one might have been pardoned for thinking insoluble. We have not sufficiently considered it. We have not pictured to ourselves with sufficient vividness the Templars and the Hospitallers in the midst of one of those great battles in the Holy Land in which the fate of the world ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... how far he had come on the road to recovery that he was able, when he woke in his bed at the Britania, to allow full play to the suggestion that he had experienced nothing more than the natural reversion of age to the bright vividness of the past. "Though I didn't expect," he admitted as he lay fronting in the wide old mirrors, interminable reflections of a pillow dinted by his too-early whitened head, "I really did not expect to have it begin ...
— The Lovely Lady • Mary Austin
... should be a matter for general congratulation, as scrupulous care is evidently observed in excluding from its pages everything that could be considered as in any way tending to vitiate the minds of the young. On the other hand, its contents are far superior in vividness of interest for the little ones to those sensational publications which are the source of so much anxiety to all who have children to educate. GOLDEN DAYS, in fact, appears to have struck the golden mean in juvenile literature, and it affords us ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... keen the women were in light attire, and the flowered waistcoats of the men had a pleasing vividness of pattern. Each of the gentler ones clung to the arm of her partner so tightly as to have with him one step, rise, swing, gait, almost one centre of gravity. In the buxom bride Fitzpiers recognized no ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... upon images is hardly indifferent. We have to distinguish the time necessary for the construction of an image, and the time during which an image lasts with uniform vividness. Maudsley believes the first question difficult to answer. He leans on Darwin, who points out that musicians play as quickly as they can apprehend the notes. The question will affect the lawyer ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the course of her rambles through the city Betty had lost herself one morning in the slums. The experience had impressed itself on her mind with an extraordinary vividness. Her lot had always been cast in pleasant places, and she had never before been brought into close touch with this side of life. The sight of actual raw misery had come home to her with an added force from that circumstance. Wandering on, she had ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... 'The two prestis and George Brooke vaire the principall plotteris and intisairs of all the rest to the embracing of the saiddis treasonabill machinations.' He had kept it back to the last, as well to multiply the chances of eliciting confessions of guilt, as for the sake of the vividness of the stage play. He admired greatly his own ingenuity, and his courtiers applauded enthusiastically. Of the detestable feline cruelty he and they had no shame. Ralegh's window in the Castle overlooked the scaffold. He would be sensible ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... The vigor and vividness of the tale and its sustained interest are not its only or its chief merits. It is a study of American life of to-day, possessed with shrewd ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... lose flesh, and acknowledged to himself that the one result was to make her look lovelier than ever, to take on an almost spiritual delicacy under her natural vividness of ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... was a realist in that he copied life. But his realism is that of Dickens and Bret Harte and Kipling rather than that of Mrs. Freeman and Arthur Morrison and the Russian story-tellers. He cared less for the accuracy of details than for the vividness of his general impressions and the force of his moral lessons. Like Bret Harte he idealized life. Like Harte, too, he was fond of dramatic situations and striking contrasts, of mixing the bitter and the sweet and the rough ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... critical and literary subjects. These were, indeed, her principal interests at this time; the revision of her sister's works, and writing a short memoir of them, was the painful employment of every day during the dreary autumn of 1850. Wearied out by the vividness of her sorrowful recollections, she sought relief in long walks on the moors. A friend of hers, who wrote to me on the appearance of the eloquent article in the Daily News upon the "Death of Currer Bell," gives an anecdote which may ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Yet even the faint glimmer of so alluring a possibility brings home to one with vividness the truth of Humboldt's perspicuous observation that meteorology can be properly comprehended only when studied in connection with the companion sciences. There are no isolated ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... were beyond recall. A somnambulistic state or even a dream may show us memory extending far further back than we could ordinarily imagine. The facing of death in battle, we know, recalls to many, with extreme vividness, scenes of early childhood which they had deemed long since forgotten. "There is nothing," says Bergson, "more instructive in this regard than what happens in cases of sudden suffocation—in men drowned or hanged. The man, when brought to life again, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... that Francis awaited the return of the secretary. Stories that she had heard regarding the tortures inflicted upon prisoners in the Tower came to her mind with such vividness and force as to cause her soul ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison
... before the Greeks at the Olympic Games, and the people hung hour after hour and day after day upon his words, it was not merely because he glorified their victories that they listened with delight, but because he told the story with such vividness that every hearer beheld the on-goings of the tale pictured in his own Imagination. It was no dull recital of dry facts, the mere bone and muscle of History that he offered them, but the living story, the warm blood pulsating through it all, and every nerve instinct with life, In our own ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... some purely imaginative manner with thoughts derived from study, or impressions made by nature; yet the stranger will henceforth become the meeting-point of many memories, the central figure in a composition which derives from him its vividness. Unconsciously and innocently he has lent himself to the creation of a picture, and round him, as around the hero of a myth, have gathered thoughts and sentiments of which he had himself no knowledge. On one of these nights I had been threading ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... view of the old ladies of The Chase, and then Halcyone's silence and stiffness. He felt excluded from the place which he recollected he had held in the child's regard. His memory had jumped the brief glimpse of her during her fledgling period, and had gone back with distinct vividness to the summer morning in the tree, almost ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn |
