"Explicable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one motive why she should make herself instrumental in the accomplishment of my ruin. It was explicable only on the presumption that she was attached to Ijurra—that Rafael Ijurra was the lord of her heart. If so, he could easily bend it to his will—for this is but the sequence of the other—could influence ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... second stanza of the poem in the last edition revised by the poet, that of 1849, when she was a confirmed invalid at Rydal Mount. Those "smiles to earth unknown," had then ceased for ever. The reason why Wordsworth erased so delightful and wonderful a stanza, is to me only explicable on the supposition, that it was his sister he referred to, she who had accompanied him in former days, in so many of his "long walks in the country." His wife never did this; she had not the physical strength to do it; and, if she had been the person referred to, Wordsworth ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... of a wedding-garment. The coffin is not too strait for lawless nuptial bed; and the sweet clods of the valley will prove no barren bridegroom of a writhing progeny. There is, however, nothing specially mysterious in the operation of a pestilence of this nature: it is as conceivable, if not yet as explicable, as the contagion of cholera, mind being at least as sensitive to the touch of mind as body to ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... dissect. But knowledge proceeds by analysis, and gains by a study of origins and causes. And the temporary emotional loss should be more than balanced by the value of the insight won. We need not linger too long at our dissecting. The discovery that conscience is an explicable and natural development does not preclude a realization of the awfulness of obligation, the sacredness of duty, any more than a geologist must cease to thrill at the grandeur and beauty of the Grand Canyon because he has studied the composition of the rocks ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... office and cafe adjoining. The happy scenes by the sea are, of course, pleasant recollections from Heligoland, and the many discussions about money matters in the midst of the honeymoon are quite explicable when we know how the dramatist was continually haunted by money troubles, even if occasionally he received a big fee, and that this very financial insecurity was one of the chief reasons why Frida Uhl's father ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... explicable contradiction of the American birthright that to some of our people the military establishment is at best a necessary evil, and military service is an extraordinary hardship rather than an inherent obligation. Yet these ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... near each other, and adhering to coal, or mixed with bitumen, etc. are found; circumstances that cannot be explained in the hypothesis of solution in the moist way.—He then answers;—"Not exactly, nor with certainty; which is not wonderful: But they are still less explicable in the hypothesis of dry solution, as must be apparent from what has been already said. How coal, an infusible substance, could be spread into strata by mere heat, is to me incomprehensible."—It is only upon the last sentence that ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... the serf populations of the countries of the Mediterranean just before the second great outbreak in Sicily which darkens the close of the second century. The evil fate which made this island the theatre of the two greatest of the servile wars is explicable on many grounds. The opportunity offered by the sense of superiority in numbers was far ampler here than in any area of Italy of equal size. For Sicily was a wheat-growing country, and the cultivated plains demanded a mass of labour which was not needed ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... silence with his curious metallic clack, and others quickly joined the chorus, keeping up their strange music till morning. Like many Batrachians, this has a voice singularly unlike that of any other organised creature. The cries of beasts, birds, and insects are all explicable to our senses, and we can recognise most of them as belonging to such or such an order of animal; but the voices of many frogs are like nothing else, and allied species utter totally dissimilar noises. In some, as this, the sound ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... mutual relations of species, can be shown to be deducible from the general doctrine of their origin, which he propounds, combined with the known facts of geological change; and that, even if all these phenomena are not at present explicable by it, none are necessarily ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... ever to pardon impersonal thinking it is only in the cases of men who begin by effacing themselves. The Lincoln who accepted Stanton as a Cabinet officer, who was always more or less overshadowed by the belief that in saving the government he was himself to perish, is explicable, at least, when individual men became for him, as at times they did, impersonal factors in ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... window. It was a photograph of Isabel Perry, an Isabel somewhat younger than the girl he knew, but Isabel—indubitably Isabel! Another dive into the bag's recesses brought up the photograph of Edith Congdon that had been snatched from the frame in the Bailey Harbor cottage. This was explicable enough, but the likeness of Isabel in Congdon's satchel was utterly inexplicable and astounding. He groped for the bottle and crept back to the ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... spite of illustrations, the literature of woman has fallen short of its function, owing to a very natural and a very explicable weakness—it has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write, is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as women, is the real office they have to perform. Our definition of literature includes this necessity. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... whatever else represents success in the case in question. Then the successful movement always occurs during the animal's attempts, whereas each of the others, on the average, occurs in only half the attempts. Thus the tendency to repeat a previous performance (which is easily explicable without the intervention of "consciousness") leads to a greater emphasis on the successful movement than on any other, and in time causes it alone to be performed. The objection to this view, if taken as the sole explanation, is that on improvement ought to set in till after the SECOND trial, whereas ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... German arms; that, where the German spirit obtains supremacy, there freedom reigns; that in regard to England's downfall, there can be but one opinion—it is the very highest mission of German culture; that Germany's war is a holy war—such expressions as these, which are psychologically explicable without questioning their sincerity, seem out of harmony, to say the least, with what we know of Germany's political aspirations. Germany's desire for England's downfall does not appear to us to be based upon a moral motive; Germany's ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... that the provisions of the Articles of War, of the Geneva Convention and the Fifth Amendment apply."[95] And the adherence of the United States to the Charter of London in August 1945, under which the Nazi leaders were brought to trial, is explicable by the same theory. These individuals were charged with the crime of instigating aggressive war, which at the time of its commission was not a crime either under International Law or under the laws of the ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... liquor that he could not intelligently weigh the consequences of his acts. It is reasonably conceivable that a drunk and angry rabbit might commit a rash deed. Upon no other hypothesis is the thing that Bu-lot now did explicable. He rose suddenly from the seat to which he had sunk after delivering his toast and seizing the knife from the sheath of the warrior upon his right hurled it with terrific force at Ko-tan. Skilled in the art of throwing both their knives and their clubs are the warriors of Pal-ul-don ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... greatest dramatic sopranos that ever sing Brunhilde and Kundry enjoy no such popularity. It belongs exclusively to the nightingale primadonnas, whose voices enchant the ear if they do not always stir the blood. It may be explicable, but no explanation is at all necessary, since the ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... the brain and body of his subject as though they were his own. All unconsciously to himself, he has called into play four-dimensional mechanics. Many cases of so-called dual personality are more easily explicable as possession by an alien will than on the less credible hypothesis that the character, habits, and language of a person can change utterly in a ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... soon observed that Carwin adopted, in some degree, a similar distinction. A tale of this kind, related by others, he would believe, provided it was explicable upon known principles; but that such notices were actually communicated by beings of a higher order he would believe only when his own ears were assailed in a manner which could not be otherwise accounted for. Civility forbade ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... were not actually against Luis de Leon, they combined to reveal him in his least attractive posture. His comparative promptitude in accepting Mancio as patrono, his unwillingness to abide by his choice, his sudden hostility to Mancio, his final acceptance of Mancio, are all explicable variations. Nevertheless they showed a disregard for superficial consistency which might easily be misinterpreted as caprice. The bias of the court had been veering away from the prisoner for some time. His series of actions with respect to Mancio lost him all judicial favour. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... part of the body is seen, and chatter away for hours, telling long stories. If in daylight they thus voluntarily deprive themselves of the possibility of making signs, it is clear that their preference for talks around the fire at night is explicable by very natural reasons wholly distinct from the one attributed. The inference, once carelessly made from the free use of gesture by some of the Shoshonian stock, that their tongue was too meager for use without signs, is ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... two things: 1. Either to assign real and adequate causes, the natural or necessary result of which must be to produce the present diversity of species and their actual relations; or, 2. To show the general conformity of the whole body of facts to such assumption, and also to adduce instances explicable by it and inexplicable by the received view, so perhaps winning our assent to the doctrine, through its competency to harmonize all the facts, even though the cause of the assumed variation remain as occult as that of the transformation of tadpoles ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... lying still, her hands lax, her thoughts taking unto themselves something of the character of the listless, songless brown bird's flight. She had come here to-day following in the footsteps of other men and a few women. Her own selection of San Juan was explicable; the thing to wonder at was what had given the hardihood to the first men to stop here and make houses and then homes? Later she would know; the one magic word of the desert lands: water. For San Juan, ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... desire, but he does not realize it, or he might discontinue his inefficacious leaps. The man tormented by his unworthy act in the past is quite aware of the futility of his longings. His condition is psychologically explicable, but to a rational being, in so far as rational, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived; that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in Time and Space, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... easily explicable in the light of what Plutina had to tell. Hodges, undoubtedly, had knowledge of some secret, hazardous path down the face of the precipice past the Devil's Cauldron, and on to the valley. He had meant to flee by it with Plutina, ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... not theorise, much less should the historian theorise, whose obligations to be true to fact are even greater than the poet's. If the drama is grandest when the action is least explicable by laws, because then it best resembles life, then history will be grandest also under the same conditions. 'Macbeth,' were it literally true, would be perfect history; and so far as the historian can approach to that kind of model, so far as he can let his story tell itself in the deeds ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... between a Modern Utopia and those finite compact settlements of the older school of dreamers? It is not to be a unanimous world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental contrariety we find in the world of the real; it is no longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrelevant to such a scheme, and ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... not A, is shown by the bar being quite perpendicular, and not oblique or slanting, as in the two other A's in the inscription. Besides, the middle cross stroke of the A is wanting; and the second descending bar of the letter is quite deficient in length—a deficiency not explicable by mutilation from the weathering of the stone, as the stone happens to be still perfectly entire both at the uppermost and the lowest end of this bar or line. This last reason is also in itself a strong if not a sufficient ground for rejecting the idea that the letter is an R; inasmuch as ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... must be consistent with the attributes of the Deity, if such a Being exists, Evolution must be consistent with those attributes. And, if so, the evolution of the universe, which is neither more nor less explicable than that of a chicken, must also be consistent with them. The doctrine of Evolution, therefore, does not even come into contact with Theism, considered as a philosophical doctrine. That with which it does collide, and with which it is absolutely inconsistent, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... of the photograph was explicable by several surmises: zu Pfeiffer might have met Lucille at Washington, Paris, or Berlin: she might have given him the photograph or he might have bought it, or even stolen it. But—the signature "a toi, Lucille"! There lay the sting which ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... pathologically, between man and man. Here was a brawny inhabitant of rural fields, leading the healthiest of lives, not conscious of the faculty we call imagination, stricken down almost to Death's door by his fright at an optical illusion, explicable, if examined, by the same simple causes which had impressed me the night before with a moment's belief in a sound and a spectre,—me who, thanks to sublime education, went so quietly to sleep a few minutes after, convinced hat no phantom, the ghostliest that ear ever ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The original is at Assisi with Datum apud Urbem Veterem X. Kal. Oct. pont. nostri anno quinto (September 22, 1220). It is therefore by an error that Sbaralea and Wadding make it date from Viterbo, which is the less explicable that all the bulls of this epoch are dated from Orvieto. Wadding, ann. 1220, 57; Sbaralea, vol. i., ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... considerations seriously to concern him, he might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, and an occasional gambling flyer, his balance was precarious, so to ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ice may affect the forms of stratification in drift, so as to cause bendings and foldings in which the underlying or over-lying strata do not participate, a subject to which I shall have occasion again to allude in the sequel, I will state in this place that such contortions, whether explicable or not, are very characteristic of glacial formations. They have also no necessary connection with the transportation of large blocks of stone, and they therefore afford, as Mr. Prestwich remarks, independent proof of ice-action in the Pleistocene ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... impulse was explicable. She had often thought over the tales told of visits to the habitation of the "Good Folk" on Borough Hill, and the transfer of the pilgrimage to Thor's Stone. She had, of late, repeatedly asked herself whether, by a visit thither, she might not gain what ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... little story when a dozen of her neighbors rush forward to replace her. This eagerness is quite explicable, for this chapel is the one in which the Abbe Gelon hears confessions, and I need not tell you that when the Abbe Gelon confesses it is the same as if he were ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... Tragedy, and wherefore they have become so common. I believe, however, that in the present case, the whole is here psychologically true and accurate. Prophetical dreams are things of nature, and explicable by that law of the mind in which where dim ideas are connected with vivid feelings, Perception and Imagination insinuate themselves and mix with the forms of Recollection, till the Present appears ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... called as yet non-existent. It is for this very reason possible that the examination of it may be of the very greatest importance. To explain what has hitherto received no explanation constitutes the very essence of scientific progress. The observation may be imperfect, and may at once become explicable as soon as it is made complete; or, what is of far more value, it may be an instance of the operation of a new law not previously known, modifying and perhaps absorbing the law up to that time accepted. ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... forsooth!—the people one meets by chance—the things one happens to overhear them say, veritable enodioi symboloi, or omens by the wayside, as the old Greeks fancied—to push on the unreasonable prepossessions of the moment into weighty motives. It was doubtless a quite explicable, physical fatigue that presented me to myself, on awaking this morning, so lack-lustre and trite. But I must needs take my petulance, contrasting it with my accustomed morning hopefulness, as a sign of the ageing of appetite, of a decay ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume Two • Walter Horatio Pater
... What this secret compact was can only be a matter of conjecture; but I would suggest that Stilicho had already formed the plan of creating his son Eucherius emperor, and that he designed the Balkan peninsula to be the dominion over which Eucherius should hold sway. His conduct becomes perfectly explicable if we assume that by a secret agreement he secured Alaric's assistance for the execution of this scheme, which the preponderance of Gothic power in Illyricum and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... was certain lay in the domain of the explicable, could be resolved into normality once the basic facts ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... have been directed more to the encouragement than the suppression of drinking. The earliest interference with commerce in liquors appearing among the Scottish acts of parliament is very imperious and comprehensive, but not very explicable in its objects. Statutes at that time were short, and it will cost the reader little trouble to peruse that which was passed in the year 1436, and the reign of James I., 'anent Flemish wines.' 'It is statute and ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... 'ransom for His soul,' which, being translated, is but this: the purity and the innocence of Jesus Christ, which is a manifest fact in His biography, is only explicable when we believe that we have before us the Incarnate God, and therefore the Perfect Man. And the Son needs no temple for His worship. His whole life, as human, was a life of communion and prayer with His Father in heaven. And just because He 'dwelt in' God's 'bosom all the year,' for Him ritual ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... and Catanzaro, an average white man will seldom find, in any Calabrian hostelry, what he is accustomed to consider as ordinary necessities of life. The thing is easily explicable. These men are not yet in the habit of "handling" civilized travellers; they fail to realize that hotel-keeping is a business to be learnt, like tailoring or politics. They are still in the patriarchal stage, wealthy proprietors for the most ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... the sort." Simpson's answer was very testy. "What call have you to interfere with the Magdalens?" His anger rose from a cause perhaps more explicable to an onlooker than ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... moment the bailiff got away from Grizzie, and made at him, calling to the mastiff. But the dog, only half recovered from the effects of Cosmo's blow, either mistaking through bewilderment, or moved by some influence ill explicable, instead of attacking Cosmo, rushed at his master. Rage recalls dislike, and it may be he remembered bygone irritations and teasings. His lordship, however, suddenly became aware of his treacherous intent, and in a moment his legs had SAVED ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... accepted it, as solving a host of difficulties that have all his life embarrassed him. And not these only, but similar moraines and detritus of moraines, that cover half of the adjoining counties are explicable on your theory, and he has consented to my proposal that he should immediately lay them all down on a map of the county and describe them in a paper to be read the day after yours at the Geological Society. I propose to give in my adhesion ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... also placed in company with the Galilean women; elsewhere (Gospel, chap. ii. 35), Luke predicts that a sword of grief will pierce her soul. But this renders his omission of her at the cross the less explicable.] ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... images,—stick, fire, water, cow, and the rest; but the wonder enters with the fact that these usually inanimate or dumb objects of nature enter so humanly into the contest of wills. So it is, also, with the doings of the three little pigs. Every image is explicable to the youngest hearer, while none suggests actual familiarity, because the actors are not children, but pigs. Simplicity, with mystery, is the keynote of all the pictures, and these are clear ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... conduct of Aileen had been a great strain on him. From the time Cowperwood had been sentenced, and more particularly after the time he had cried on Aileen's shoulder in prison, she had turned on her father in an almost brutal way. Her attitude, unnatural for a child, was quite explicable as that of a tortured sweetheart. Cowperwood had told her that he thought Butler was using his influence to withhold a pardon for him, even though one were granted to Stener, whose life in prison he had been following with ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... facts are, as it seems to me, explicable on this theory. How strange it is that a bird, under the form of a woodpecker, should prey on insects on the ground; that upland geese which rarely or never swim, would possess webbed feet; that a thrush-like bird should dive and feed on sub-aquatic ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... most considerable bodies would unite together, while the third would revolve around their common centre of gravity. Attraction would thus become the cause of a sort of movement which would seem to be explicable solely by an ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... study the exact point on which parallelism has amended materialism. We have seen that every materialist doctrine is the expression of this idea, that physical phenomena are the only ones that are determined, measurable, explicable, and scientific. This idea does wonders in the natural sciences, but is at fault when, from the physical, we pass into the moral world, and we have seen how the materialistic doctrine fails when it endeavours to attach the physical to the mental. There are then two great ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... underestimation or overestimation of a given standard is determined, among other factors, by the intensity of the stimulation employed. The apparently anomalous results obtained in the early investigations are in part probably explicable ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... the example of the war. It is explicable as a challenge to the tradition of Europe. It is inexplicable on any other ground. The Catholic alone is in possession of the tradition of Europe: he alone can see and judge ...
— Europe and the Faith - "Sine auctoritate nulla vita" • Hilaire Belloc
... emotion from withdrawing the beholder from the artistic shapes, but, on the contrary, as employing these artistic shapes for the sole purpose of that representation or emotional expression. And this most explicable inversion of the real state of affairs ends by making the beholder believe that what he cares for in a masterpiece is not the beauty of shape which only a masterpiece could have, but the efficacy of bringing home a subject or expressing an emotion which could be just as efficaciously represented ...
— The Beautiful - An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics • Vernon Lee
... put together, seasoned with wisdom and wit and most capably played; Miss FAY COMPTON, admirable example of a pretty actress who won't let herself be captured by stage tricks, making everything explicable except her continued love for her intolerable bore (and Turk) of a husband; Mr. A.E. MATTHEWS handling a desperately unsympathetic part, which was already beginning to look impossible, with great adroitness; and Mr. STANLEY LOGAN, though badly hampered by a shocking cold and fighting a coughing audience, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 11, 1920 • Various
... neither sort of Chymists seem to have duly consider'd how great Variety there is in the Textures and Consistences of Compound Bodie; sand [Errata: Bodies; and] how little the consistence and Duration of many of them seem to accommodate and be explicable by the propos'd Notion. And not to mention those almost incorruptible Substances obtainable by the Fire, which I have prov'd to be somewhat compounded, and which the Chymists will readily grant not to be perfectly mixt Bodies: (Not to mention these, I say) If you will but recall to mind some ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... to extricate them from the consequences of their own mistakes. It is only by giving Government credit, as I have been doing throughout, for the complete sincerity of their expressions and conduct, that their behaviour is explicable. Assume that their policy was a war policy, and it is quite intelligible. Whenever difficulties arise, their resolution is instantly to have recourse to violence. Every word they utter, every dispatch they write, seems always to look to a scene of collision. What is the state ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... side ought to be, if what they write be true, and if such a thing is possible. "Spirits" they persistently insist upon being called. In this paper I can give only a statement of some things which do not seem explicable on the hypothesis of mind-reading, thought transference, hypnotism, or subconsciousness. In all these experiments I have been in a perfectly normal state. The only physical indication of any outside influence is an occasional slight thrill as of an electric current ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... untenable." And on page 170, vol. I, he even says: "If, as we maintain, natural selection is the great active cause which has produced the whole wonderful variety of organic life on the earth, all the interesting phenomena of human life must also be explicable from the same cause. For man is after all {238} only a most highly-developed vertebrate animal, and all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. The whole history of nations, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... just and merciful, Morse writes to Vail on May 1: "Rogers is here. I have had a good deal of conversation with him, and the result is that I think that some circumstances which seemed to inculpate him are explicable on other grounds than ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... nervousness was the policy of the balance of power, which had split Europe into two armed camps full of distrust of each other. The Ambassadors of the Great Powers knew the Kaiser intimately enough to realize what his intentions, in spite of everything, were, and it required an untruthfulness only explicable by the psychological effect of war to permit the suggestion of a hateful and distorted picture of him as a tyrant seeking for the domination of the world and for war ...
— Before the War • Viscount Richard Burton Haldane
... another point of view, are we not continually finding in schools and educational establishments pupils who, for no explicable reason, show a disposition for one branch of instruction only? They shine in this, but are dunces in every ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... be explained that "W.S." is a condensation of "Writers to the Signet"—a species of beatified solicitor holding a position so esteemed, so enviable, and so intensely reputable that the only scandal previously whispered in connection with a member of this class proved innocently explicable upon the discovery that he was affianced to the lady's aunt. The building in which the firm had their office formed one end of an austere range of dark stone houses overlooking a street paved with cubes of granite ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not any virtue the exercise of ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... barbarism that leads people periodically to throw aside the habits of civilization, and seek the freedom and discomfort of the woods, is explicable enough; but it is not so easy to understand why this passion should be strongest in those who are most refined, and most trained in intellectual and social fastidiousness. Philistinism and shoddy do not like the woods, unless it becomes fashionable to do so; and then, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... significance upon the glorious substructure of the novels. They also are complete in themselves. We recognise the relation between the achievements, and discern that they are the work of a single mind; but they are separate works, having separate and unique excellences. The one is only approximately explicable in terms of the other. We incline, therefore, to attach a signal importance to what has always seemed to us the most important sentence in Who's Who?—namely, that in which Mr Hardy confesses that in 1868 he was compelled—that ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... the knowledge of gunpowder back to the most remote times, and to the different races which were descended from Atlantis, we are not surprised to find in the legends of Greek mythology events described which are only explicable by supposing that the Atlanteans possessed the secret of this ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... from La Bourboule a letter (received on July 9th), in which he said: "To judge by the French newspapers, you are as popular in France as Pitt at the height of the great war." A note from the Memoir renders this state of feeling explicable: [Footnote: A very different current in French opinion from that of the newspapers found outlet in this ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... puts right before might, self-surrender before the struggle for existence, and the law of pity in place of the survival of the fittest? Is conscience a development of the cosmic process? And, if so, how is such a volta face in nature explicable on purely mechanical grounds, even if the process itself were so explicable? And how striking a fact that the last words Mr. Huxley[2] spoke in public should have been devoted to prove that so opposed were the cosmic and ethical processes—in other words, so completely at variance are the law of ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... transferred into Greek, as is proved by the synonymous [Greek: dounai ten psuchen hautou] in Mark x. 45; Matt. xx. 28.—2. The fact that the same uncommon expression occurs not fewer than five times in the same discourse of Christ, and that so intentionally and emphatically, is explicable only when it was thereby intended to point to an important fundamental passage of the Old Testament.—3. In the discourses of our Lord, the expression is, no less than in the passage before us, used of His sacrificial death.—If, then, it be established that those ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... chronicled; as a heart that certainly beats, but with no pulsation of humanity. It lies beyond everything: Nature, with all her cruelty, comes nearer to us than do these crowds of men. A friend explains himself: the earth is explicable—from her we came, and we must return to her. But who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street in the morning—the city inhaling—or the same thoroughfares in the evening—the city exhaling her exhausted air? We reach in desperation ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... ‘Jim Bludso’ and other specimens of Yankee humour. And yet it is a common remark, and one that cannot be gainsaid, that there is no spark of humour in the published poems of either of these two friends. Did it never occur to any critic to ask whether the anomaly was not explicable by some theory of poetic art that they held in common? It is no disparagement to say of Morris that when he began to write poetry the influence of Rossetti’s canons of criticism upon him was enormous, notwithstanding the influence upon ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... are upon a deserted island and have no boats to take us from star to star, not only upon a deserted island but upon a deserted universe, for even the stars are familiar; they are worlds not unlike our own. The whole universe is our world and it is all explained by the scientists, or is explicable. But beyond the universe, no scientist, not any of us, knows anything. On all shores of the universe washes the ocean of ignorance, the ocean of the inexplicable. We stand upon the confines of an explored world and gaze at many ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... forte. In another company was a lady who had conquered all the easy attitudes of young men of the second or third fashion, and who must have been at something of a loss to identify herself when personating a woman off the stage. But Nature asserted herself in a way that gave a curious and scarcely explicable shock in the case of that dancer whose impudent song required the action of fondling a child, and who rendered the passage with an instinctive tenderness and grace, all the more pathetic for the profaning ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... profuse in thanks, and announced that his mind was now at ease. By some mysterious process, not clearly explicable to himself, he contrived to lay aside a portion of his dress, and to dispose himself within the folds of balmy bedclothes that awaited him. In forty seconds ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... someone else. His father was honourable; could the same be said of Mrs. Rossall? He remembered his conversation with her on the lake of Thun; it had left an unpleasant impression on his mind—under the circumstances, explicable enough. Was his aunt capable of dastardly behaviour? The word could scarcely be applied to a woman's conduct, and the fact that it could not made disagreeably evident the latitude conceded to women in consideration of their being compelled ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... Smyrna, addressed more immediately to the Church of Philomelium but challenging at the same time a wider circulation [103:2]. The simplicity with which the narrators record omens and occurrences easily explicable in themselves, but invested by their surcharged feelings with a miraculous character, is highly natural. The whole narrative is eminently touching and instructive; but the details have little or no bearing on my immediate purpose. It is sufficient ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... Stafford and Lois loved each other—with a love which was all too natural and explicable in the light of our present knowledge. It was necessary that he should be made aware that marriage between them was impossible—that they were, in fact, the children of the ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... me that at Yellowstone Park, in America, visitors are carefully watched to see that they do not make the geysers work artificially by means of soap. [Footnote: Hardly explicable in such small quantities by chemistry or physics.] Remembering this experience the last time he went to Iceland, he packed some 2lb. bars of common soap ...
— A Girl's Ride in Iceland • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... procession, of which the central figure was identical with that familiar to us at Coventry. But such a procession, terminating in a sacred feast, would have had no meaning if the naked lady represented a creature merely of flesh and blood. It is only explicable on the hypothesis that she was the goddess of a heathen cult, such as Hertha (or Nerthus), whose periodical progress among her subject tribes is described in a well-known passage by Tacitus,[57] and yet survives, as we have seen, in the folklore of Ruegen. Now the historian tells us that Hertha ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... a Latin or a Greek root is always given in Webster and other received lexicographic authorities. It is a curious fact, that, in all the school etymologies, the present indicative should have been given as the root, and is explicable only from the accident that it is the key-form in the Latin dictionaries. The change into conformity with our English dictionaries needs no defense, and will probably hereafter be imitated by all authors ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... to follow up my translation of the Odes of Horace by a version of the Satires and Epistles, I feel that I am in no way entitled to refer to the former as a justification of my boldness in undertaking the latter. Both classes of works are doubtless explicable as products of the same original genius: but they differ so widely in many of their characteristics, that success in rendering the one, though greater than any which I can hope to have attained, would afford no presumption that ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... amalgamate. It is easy to speak of a vague union of spirit, of the antique idea having permeated the modern; but all this explains but little; art is not a metaphysical figment, and all its phases and revolutions are concrete, and, so to speak, physically explicable and definable. The union of the antique with the modern meant simply the absorption by the art of the Renaissance of elements of civilization necessary for its perfection, but not existing in the mediaeval civilization of the fifteenth ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... ages, and singularly quiescent in later ages. Such differences as exist between the Aryan, the Turanian, the negro, the red man, and the Australian, are differences greater—altogether than any causes now active are capable of creating in present men, at least in any way explicable by us. And there is, therefore, a strong presumption that (as great authorities now hold) these differences were created before the nature of men, especially before the mind and the adaptive nature of men had taken their existing constitution. ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... diagrammatic. One saw the expropriator and the expropriated—as if Marx had arranged the picture. It was as jumbled and far more dingy and disastrous than any of the confusions of building and development that had surrounded my youth at Bromstead and Penge, but it had a novel quality of being explicable. I found great ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... revolution—that is, once in 88 days—on an axis sensibly perpendicular to its orbital plane. No certain signs of a Mercurian atmosphere are visible. The globe is seamed and furrowed with long narrow markings, explicable as cracks in cooling. It is, and always was, a dead world. From micrometrical measures, moreover, the inferences were drawn that the planet's mass has a probable value about 1/20 that of the earth, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... other theory they are all isolated facts having no connection with each other and as utterly inexplicable and confusing as fossils are on the theory that they are special creations and are not the remains of animals that have once lived. It is the vast chaos of facts, which are explicable and fall into beautiful order on the one theory, which are inexplicable and remain a chaos on the other, which I think must ultimately force Darwin's views on any and every reflecting mind. Isolated difficulties and objections ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... is no record. It was, perhaps, too obvious. Ormuzd, god of light and, in the Orient, god of the day, was, in the darker and duller Occident, menaced there also by Ahriman. Politically the expedition is not very explicable. Considered from a religious standpoint the motive is clear. But though the Persian forces could not uphold their light in Greece, higher forces projected it far beyond, to the remote north, to a south ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... other phaenomena are consequences of the affections of other beings, more or less like itself. And having thus good evidence for believing that many of the most interesting occurrences about it are explicable on the hypothesis that they are the work of intelligences like itself—having discovered a vera causa for many phaenomena—why should the child limit the application of so fruitful an hypothesis? The dog has a sort of intelligence, so has the cat; why should not the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... improbable that under the influence of the custom of exchanging sisters there may be a tendency for the control of the kin in this respect to diminish; in fact the Boulia example is only explicable on this hypothesis. At the same time we cannot overlook the fact that elopement, or real marriage by capture, as distinguished from formal abduction, would, so far as we can see, have a similar effect, and the rise of the custom of exchange of sisters would in that ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... is more explicable still. It is a remark we all make in childhood, in some form or another. I remember quite well at the age of six or seven asking my mother: 'Which is me, my soul or my body?' I was brought up on the Church ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... which have imperfect margins (for otherwise their disseverment would be scarcely possible), and which are exposed to strong currents, is far from being an improbable event; and the several stages, from close relation to entire isolation in the atolls of the Maldiva Archipelago, are readily explicable. ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... my dear, explicable but unexplained. The most formidable men are her friends, and why? Nobody dares to fathom the mystery. Then is this person ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... the Palestinian schools of exegesis. Examine your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of St. John, your Apocalypse, in the light of these. You have no other chance of understanding them. But so examined, they fall into place, become explicable and rational; such material as science can make full use of. The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, Christian eschatology, and Christian views of prophecy will also have found their place ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to that in which these had their origin. Individual customs may be preserved simply as a matter of thoughtless habit; yet in general it is essential that these usages should be related to conscious intellectual life; so soon as they cease to be so explicable, they begin to ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various
... hardly believe that the death of so hard a father could have been felt otherwise than as an inexpressible relief, and yet I was deeply affected by his loss. The kindest of fathers could hardly have been wept for more. My aunt's tears were more explicable; she was old enough to understand the frightful waste of the best gifts involved in that premature ending; as for my grief, perhaps the true explanation of it may be that I mourned rather the father who had been kind to me in Wales, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... twentyfold that of 1789, and three times that of 1807; when, on the other hand, it exceeded in the ratio of fourteen to twelve that of 1829, twenty-two years later. This interest is peculiarly subject to fluctuations; some of which in the past have been less explicable than the one it is now undergoing. Another decade may turn the tables, and restore the flag of the old Liverpool liners to their fleeter but less shapely supplanters. The steamer and the clipper are both American ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... when his young opinions were more mystical than they were now. The spot was deserted, but the door was certainly unfastened; he lifted the latch without noise, and pushing to the door behind him, stood absolutely still inside. The prevalent silence seemed to contain a faint sound, explicable as a breathing, or a sobbing, which came from the other end of the building. The floor-cloth deadened his footsteps as he moved in that direction through the obscurity, which was broken only by the faintest reflected night-light ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... is," he returned genially, her guilty tremor not escaping his observation, but having at the same time no explicable significance to him. "It's frisking around a mighty ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... his Memoirs tells of an incident during the trial of Glengarry, in Scotland, for murder in a duel, which is, perhaps, explicable by this extraordinary attitude: A lady of great beauty was called as a witness and came into court heavily veiled. Before administering the oath, Lord Eskgrove, the judge (to whom this function belongs in Scotland), gave her this exposition ...
— Courts and Criminals • Arthur Train
... Segistan, to which Mechran appears to have been then joined, from the circumstance before related of the Polos having gone from China by sea to this kingdom. The strange application of Timochaim is probably corrupt, and may perhaps be explicable on the republication of the Trevigi edition of these travels; till then, we must rest satisfied ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... random by the early Greeks, or they may have vaguely connected their legend with the Egyptian myth of the slaying of Osiris (as king of Egypt) by his mighty brother Seth, who was in certain aspects a patron of foreigners. Phrasius, Chalbes and Epaphus (for the grandfather of Busiris) are all explicable as Graecized Egyptian names, but other names in the legend are purely Greek. The sacrifice of foreign prisoners before a god, a regular scene on temple walls, is perhaps only symbolical, at any rate for the later ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... by his chart was no more than an arm of the ocean could make so much ado; but when he found the incoming tide fretted here and there by black rocks, and elsewhere, in little bays, the beaches strewn with massive boulders, the high rumour of the sea-breakers in that breezy weather seemed more explicable. And still, for him, it was above all a country of appalling silence in spite of the tide thundering. Fresh from the pleasant rabble of Paris, the tumult of the streets, the unending gossip of the faubourgs that were at once his vexation and his joy, and from the eager ride that had brought ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... constant reference to tradition. The system has grown up without any reference to abstract principles or symmetrical plan. The legal order supposes a traditional common law, as the ecclesiastical order a traditional creed, and the organisation is explicable only by historical causes. The system represents a series of compromises, not the elaboration of a theory. If the squire undertook by way of supererogation to justify his position he appealed to tradition ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... excellent opportunity for the study of sedimentation in the sand, and the data in Table 30 are presented to show that certain of the phenomena of filter operation observed during this period seem to be fairly explicable by the physical theory of purification. These data are given only for the period of operation before the summer of 1907. At that time the experiments in filter cleaning already described were begun. Before that ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXXII, June, 1911 • E. D. Hardy
... "camelopard" (probably turning on some private jest then intelligible enough to the persons concerned, but dark to others) is not particularly worth illuminating. The italicised words describing Peacock's wit are more legitimate subjects of discussion. They seem to me, though not perhaps literally explicable after the fashion of the duller kind of commentator, to contain both a very happy description of Peacock's peculiar humour, and a very sufficient explanation of the causes which have, both then and since, made that ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... was easily explicable, and it was hardly possible to quarrel with the military judgment it discloses. To the world Verdun is a great fortress, a second Gibraltar, encircled by great forts, furnished with huge guns, the gateway to Paris and the key to the French eastern frontier. And this is just what ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... poisonous by-products. These troubles occur most frequently during the summer months, especially with infants and children, as in cholera infantum and summer complaint. The higher mortality of bottle-fed infants[119] in comparison with those that are nursed directly is explicable on the theory that cows' milk is the carrier of the infection, because in many cases it is not consumed until there has been ample time for the development of organisms in it. Where milk is pasteurized or boiled it is found that the mortality among children is ...
— Outlines of Dairy Bacteriology, 8th edition - A Concise Manual for the Use of Students in Dairying • H. L. Russell
... which are, nevertheless, probably very old, since the words of which they are composed are in many cases not retained in the colloquial tongue, in which they must once have been included, and are in some instances lost from the language altogether, so much so as to be only partially explicable even by scholars. The argument applies likewise, in their degree, to camps, barrows, and other ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... conduct of a case there are rules analogous to those which distinguish between honourable and dishonourable war, but they are less clearly defined and less universally accepted. In criminal prosecutions a remarkable though very explicable distinction is drawn between the prosecutor and the defender. It is the etiquette of the profession that the former is bound to aim only at truth, neither straining any point against the prisoner nor keeping back any fact ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... by the uncanny sounds of the wind in the chinks and crannies of the ancient chamber. Had not Scott's Demonology and Witchcraft, which we studied hard on that day, proved all such phantoms to be explicable? The only person we told was Griff, who was amused and incredulous. He had heard the noises—oh yes! and objected to having his sleep broken by them. It was too had to expose Clarence to them—poor Bill—on whom ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his hand forward, and projected his lips in the direction he sought to indicate,—a mode of indication, I may add, almost universal in Central America, and explicable only on the assumption that it costs less effort than to ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... things, is either a simple appearance of permanence and quietness, as in the massy forms of a mountain or rock, accompanied by the lulling effect of all mighty sight and sound, which all feel and none define, (it would be less sacred if more explicable,) [Greek: heudousin dioreon koruphai te kai pharanges], or else it is repose proper, the rest of things in which there is vitality or capability of motion actual or imagined; and with respect to these the expression of repose is greater in proportion to the amount and sublimity ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... at rest, and enable the modern student distinctly to grasp and understand the great work of Amenemhat. Whatever may be the truth regarding "Lake Moeris," as this great reservoir was called, it is certain that it furnished the ancients one of the least explicable of all the many problems that the remarkable land of the Nile presented to them. Herodotus added to the other marvels of the place a story about two sitting statues based upon pyramids, which stood three hundred feet above ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... with eyes as yet uncovered by partisan glasses. Turgenef the realist, Turgenef the idealist, is enigmatic enough; but once understood that Turgenef was the literary warrior against what was to him a mortal enemy, and his whole life and all his important works at once become explicable, consistent. ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... "find instinct making mistakes." Passing over the fact that instinct is again personified, the statement is still incorrect. Instinctive actions are certainly, as a general rule, performed with less uncertainty than deliberative ones; this is explicable by the fact that they have been more often practised, and thus reduced more completely to a matter of routine; but nothing is more certain than that animals acting under the guidance of inherited ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... neighbour in such a sense as to be able to neglect his own duties; in which there may be normally a reciprocity of good services, and the reciprocity not be (as has been said) all on one side. There is a very explicable tendency at present to ask for such one-sided reciprocity. It is natural enough, for reasons too obvious to be mentioned, that reformers should dwell exclusively upon the right of every one to support, ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... religion, the people invented legend as a substitute for the folklore of all the little gods condemned by the Church; so that the fairy tale is in all Europe the link between Christianity and paganism, and to the weakness of vanquished Rome her departed empire seemed only explicable as the result of magic. The Capitol, in the imagination of such tales, became a tower of wizards. High above all, a golden sphere reflected the sun's rays far out across the distant sea by day, and at night a huge lamp took its place as a beacon for the sailors of the Mediterranean, even to ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... further that the necessity for taking out a license in India can inflict no greater slur than is cast on the English in England by their having to take out gun licenses, it is evident that the vehemently expressed desire for the repeal of this Act is only explicable when read along with the previously quoted remarks with reference to the native volunteering and the armed population in sympathy with them at their back, and with the detonating matter which appears in those seditious pamphlets to which ...
— Gold, Sport, And Coffee Planting In Mysore • Robert H. Elliot
... be deserving of moral approbation and really good, who that has ever had a dog of his own will deny that animals are capable of such actions? Mr. Mivart indeed says:—"It may be safely affirmed, however, that there is no trace in brutes of any actions simulating morality which are not explicable by the fear of punishment, by the hope of pleasure, or by personal affection" (p. 221). But it may be affirmed, with equal truth, that there is no trace in men of any actions which are not traceable to the same motives. If a man does anything, he does it either because he fears to be punished if ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... naively, "The result of a first view of these passages is striking." Very striking, indeed; for, "of the seven, five agree verbally with the text of St. Matthew or St. Luke, exhibiting, indeed, three slight various readings not elsewhere found, but such as are easily explicable. The sixth is a condensed summary of words related by St. Matthew; the seventh alone presents an important variation in the text of a verse, which is, however, otherwise very uncertain" (pp. 130, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... thirty-one degrees: two minutes, south and one hundred twenty-one: thirty-seven west," he said curtly, and turned away. There was pride and sorrow in his Scandinavian voice, and a reticence not quite explicable. The three, as they stood a moment before they walked off, made a striking group. Their sturdy figures, in their worn and torn clothes, their hairy chests, their faces framed in bushes of hair, their bronzed skins, and their general air of fighters who had won a battle in which ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... no better or more explicable reason. It might have been imagined that Donatello's unsophisticated heart would be more readily attracted to a feminine nature of clear simplicity like his own, than to one already turbid with grief ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne |
