"Exquisite" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Snow. Illustrated with exquisite Engravings, printed in Tints, from Designs by Alfred Fredericks. Cloth, $5.00; ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... gather, hech gather around; And fill a' ye lugs wi' the exquisite sound. An air fra' the bagpipes—beat that if ye can! Hurrah ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... the third and fourth for pleasing beauty, and the fifth for deep poetical meaning, have never been equaled by those of any other composer. There remain the sonatas for pianoforte and for piano and violin, three large volumes, containing a multitude of exquisite strains, which the world would be poor indeed ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... indoors, leading an interior life of dim magnificence behind their warm, thick bark. Presently, when they were ready, something would happen, something they were preparing at their leisure, something so exquisite that all who saw it would dance and sing for gladness. They also believed in a Wonderful Stranger who was coming into their slow, steady lives. They fell to dreaming of the surprising pageant they would blazon forth upon the world a little later. ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... are born of good health rather than of creams and hair tonics. Health depends a good deal on wholesome diet and out-door exercise, which make pure blood. Pure air is invaluable. Country girls often have exquisite complexions because of the pure air they breathe—unless they eat too much ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... was in the press at the time of Jackson's death, but was not completed until 1806. The type used in this is a double pica, and the founder, it is said, declared that it should 'be the most exquisite performance of the kind in this or any other country.' He died before its completion, and the work was completed by Figgins; but the book is a lasting memorial to the skill both of the ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... the tombs of this ancient people. We cannot leave this subject without noticing the beauty and perfection of the filigree-work, executed about 2400 years ago, and equal to modern workmanship. Some exquisite specimens ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... were those masses of flowers without which her beauty never seemed quite complete. In her hair, which was piled high above her forehead, flashed a huge golden comb, and upon her arm gleamed two bracelets, whose exquisite workmanship was well known to me, for they had been an heirloom in my family for years. She was fair as a dream, proud as a queen, cold as a statue, but she was mine! Was not the minister waiting for us at the church? and were not the horses ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... done myself the honour of forwarding your lordship a splendid sample of exquisite Frontignac, trusting it will be approved of by your lordship. I remain, enclosing your lordship's small account, the payment of which will be most acceptable to your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various
... length of time that is desired. But a great official observatory, such as Greenwich Observatory or the Observatory at Paris, also has transit instruments, or telescopes smaller than the equatorials and without the same facility of movement, but which, by a number of exquisite refinements, are more adapted to accurate measurements. It is these instruments which are chiefly used in the compilation of the Nautical Almanac. They do not follow the apparent motions of the stars. Stars are allowed to drift across the field of vision, and as each star crosses ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... in doubt whether they're laughing at you, and so keep you in wholesome subjection; but you feel certain that they're GOOD, and that if they did hurt you by laughing at you, they'd look sorry for you afterward. When she walked you saw what an exquisite creature she was. It always made me mad to think I ...
— The Register • William D. Howells
... same joyousness prevailed in a thousand forms—in hospitality, in festivity, in merry customs, in an exquisite social sense, in the culture of the humorous and the imaginative, in impressibility to every touch of noble and useful enthusiasm. It would be easy to dilate upon the causes which seem to have produced this choice ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... dawn on your entranced sight. This entrance into a higher plane will repeat itself again and again, until your consciousness, centred on the buddhic plane and its splendouis having disappeared as your consciousness withdraws even from that exquisite sheath, you find yourself in the true cloud, the cloud on the sanctuary, the cloud that veils the Holiest, that hides the vision of the Self. Then comes what seems to be the draining away of the very life, the letting ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... know the rapture of his kiss, the exquisite security of his enfolding arm. The To-come was before her—bleak, grey and bereft; the roseate hues of love's delight lay all in the Gone-by. Her love was of no avail. It had fluttered back to her, a ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... and there should cultivate some accomplishment to a perfection that looks magical, just as it is fit that a man here and there should live in a house that cost a million of pounds to build, and round which a wide tract of country shows what may be made of trees and fields where unlimited wealth and exquisite taste have done their best to improve Nature to the fairest forms of which it is capable. But even if it were possible, it would not be desirable that all human beings should live in dwellings like Hamilton Palace ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... in hand. An old romancer tells quaintly in one of his tales how Love made himself of the party, and so it was with us that night. I found my answer at last without words. While the heavens wept our hearts sang. The wine of love ran through me in exquisite thrills. Every simple word she spoke went to my heart like sweetest music, and every unconscious touch of ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... among his comrades. They closed on the white man with a yell; a passing group of their compatriots joined the affray; the whole mass surged in around the tall fellow. Harrigan's head went back and his eyes half closed like a critic listening to an exquisite symphony. ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... days before I left I gave an entertainment to my friends at Catherinhoff, winding up with a fine display of fireworks, a present from my friend Melissino. My supper for thirty was exquisite, and my ball a brilliant one. In spite of the tenuity of my purse I felt obliged to give my friends this mark of my gratitude for the kindness ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty. ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... everywhere surrounded their isolated villages. They were acquainted with the use of bronze from the first period of their settlement in Europe, and some of the battle-axes or shields which they manufactured from this metal were beautifully chased with exquisite decorative patterns, equalling in taste the ornamental designs still employed by the Polynesian islanders. Such weapons, however, were doubtless intended for the use of the chieftains only, and were probably employed as ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... all, as being the man who loved her, sufficed to give him rank as a more elevated kind of criminal in Rhoda's sight, and exquisite torture of the highest form was administered to him. Her faith in her sister was so sure that she could half pardon him for the momentary harm he had done to Dahlia with her father; but, judging him by the lofty standard of one who craved to be her husband, she could not pardon his unmanly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... when he was padded into position with cushions she laid the tray across his knees. His head swam at sight of it. Forty-eight hours of fasting had sharpened his appetite, and the loaded tray whetted a razor edge, for a great bowl of broth steamed forth an exquisite fragrance on one side and beside it she lifted a napkin to let him peek at a slice of venison steak. Then there was butter, yellow as the gold for which he had been digging all winter, and real cream for his coffee—a whole pitcher of it—and snowy bread. Best of all, she ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... done already; of hanging the parrot of the under-mistress,—but they had given her so many frights, there would be nothing new in that. She saw, one evening, the door of the little chapel open;—its quiet, its exquisite cleanliness and simplicity attracted her. She had followed thither to mock at the awkward motions of a little hunch-backed sister at her devotions,—but once within she forgot this object. A veiled nun ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... has mentioned,' said Anne; 'I believe myself witty, and wise, and amiable, and useful, and agreeable, and I do not like taking advice, and I am very angry when my friends are abused, and I do believe I think I have the most exquisite brother in the world; and besides, if I said I was not conceited it would be the best possible proof of the contrary.—But, Mamma, there is a person whom we have not mentioned, who has no ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... this would not be difficult to find. But the tests of poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his own exquisite lyrics describing the exultation of a lover on the evening before his bridal day. This would be an occasion, if ever there was one, for falling back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the domed heaven and the flat earth in which generations of poets ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... and conducted from bench to bench until he had been introduced to all the young ladies and gentlemen in the room. Lincoln went through the ordeal countless times. If he took a serious view of the performance it must have put him to exquisite torture, for he was conscious that he was not a perfect type of manly beauty. If, however, it struck him as at all funny, it must have filled him with unspeakable mirth to be thus gravely led about, angular and gawky, under the eyes of the precise Crawford, to be introduced to the boys ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... a broiling afternoon in July 1812, and midway in a fortnight of exquisite weather, during which Wellington and Marmont faced each other across the Douro before opening the beautiful series of evolutions—or, rather, of circumvolutions—which ended suddenly on the 22nd, and locked the two ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... immense range of the moods in which Nature is seen in the Alps, as least by those who have fully absorbed all the forms, sights, sounds, wonders, and adventures they offer. An hour's walk will show them all in profound contrast and yet in exquisite harmony. The Alps form a book of Nature as wide and as ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... this exquisite and innocent affection she passed back into the tumult of her own thoughts and plans. Through the restless night her parents were often in her mind. She was the child of revolt, and as she thought of the meeting before her she seemed to be but entering upon a heritage inevitable from the ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and especially in Latin, the best instrument for the most precise and most perfect expression of thought. The Latin prose of Tacitus and Cicero, the verse of Virgil and Horace, are like a Greek statue, or an Italian cameo—you have not only exquisite beauty, but also exquisite precision. You get the thought into your mind with the accuracy and precision of the words that express numbers in the multiplication table. Ten times one are ten—not ten and one one-millionth. Having ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the plot subordinate to the character delineation of its quaint people and to the exquisite descriptions of picturesque spots and of ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... will pass over briefly. He was a young man of mild and modest demeanor, chaplain to a Pennsylvania regiment, which he was going to rejoin. He belonged to the Moravian Church, of which I had the misfortune to know little more than what I had learned from Southey's "Life of Wesley." and from the exquisite hymns we have borrowed from its rhapsodists. The other stranger was a New Englander of respectable appearance, with a grave, hard, honest, hay-bearded face, who had come to serve the sick and wounded ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... exhibition, and in some cases for raffle and sale. There were many fine paintings, statues, bronzes, engravings, gems, laces—in fact, heirlooms, and bric-a-brac of all sorts. There were many lovely Creole girls present, in exquisite toilets, passing to and fro through the decorated rooms, listening to the band ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... course I asked no questions. Both she and her husband looked well, however. It pleased me very much to hear her talk of you; all her natural tenderness and gladness came out; impossible to imagine a more exquisite sincerity of joy. She is a noble and beautiful creature; I do hope that the shadow on her life is passing away, and that we shall see her become as strong as she is lovable. She said she had written to you. Your letter at the time of your marriage ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... which is in this widening, and the piece of water, the banks of which are agreeably decorated, stands the Little Castle of which I have spoken. This edifice, and the ground about it, formerly belonged to the celebrated Le Brun, who amused himself in building and decorating it in the exquisite taste of architectual ornaments which that great painter had formed to himself. The castle has since been rebuilt, but still, according to the plan and design of its first master. It is little and simple, but elegant. As it stands in a hollow between the orangery ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... period over which we have travelled in this lecture, embracing the twofold crisis of free thought in the middle ages and the inauguration of the modern era, we cannot fail to be impressed with the grand idea of the permanent victory of truth, and the exquisite order according to which the fatherly providence of God makes all things conduce together for good. When the course of history is viewed in its true perspective, we perceive that Almighty love ruleth. The period has comprised most of the great movements, political ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... train is about to start—they are standing at the rear door of the sleeper. The band of the —th is playing some distance up the platform,—a thoughtful device of Mr. Lee's to draw the crowd that way,—and they are actually alone. An exquisite happiness is in her eyes as she peers up into the love-light in his strong, steadfast face. Something must have been said; for he draws her close to his side and bends over her as though all the world were wrapped up in this dainty little morsel of womanhood. ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... after the capture of the wood, three dead Germans were found there in mysterious, lifelike attitudes. The names of trenches on the French front often reflect that deep, native instinct to poetry possessed by simple peoples—the instinct that created the English ballads and the exquisite mediaeval French legends of the saints. Other trench names were symbolic, or patriotic, or political; we had the "Trench of the Great Revenge," the "Trench of France," the "Trench of Aristide" (meaning Briand), and ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... way back to the city after an afternoon ramble, I stopped just at dusk in a grove of hemlocks, and soon out of the tree-top overhead came a song,—a brief strain of about six notes, in a musical but rather rough voice, and in exquisite accord with the quiet solemnity of the hour. Again and again the sounds fell on my ear, and as often I endeavored to obtain a view of the singer; but he was in the thick of the upper branches, and I looked for him in vain. How delicious the music was! a perfect lullaby, drowsy and restful; like ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... will be one of the most beautiful that any American Magazine has ever published, and all subscribers are urged to date their subscriptions so as to include this exquisite number. ...
— Wholesale Price List of Newspapers and Periodicals • D. D. Cottrell's Subscription Agency
... levelled southward! Rustle, robes of Liberty, who art walking terribly over the land, with sombre countenance, and garments rolled in blood! See, she advances with one hand armed with Justice, while the other points to that exquisite symmetry half revealed, as if beckoning thitherward her children back again to the pure founts of life! "Be not afraid," she cries, "of the noise of my garments and their blood-stains; for this is the blood of a new covenant of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... a lady's gold watch, of very small size, and beautifully formed; a set of ornaments, consisting of necklace, bracelets, ring, and ear-rings of turquoise and pearls set in gold, of the most delicate and exquisite chasing; also, an antique diamond cross of great beauty, besides a number of rings and bracelets ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne
... beginning. He is said to have composed one hundred and twenty tragedies, to have gained the first prize twenty-four times, and on other occasions to have ranked second in the list of competing poets. So excellent was his conduct, so majestic his wisdom, so exquisite his poetical capacities, so rare his skill in all the fine arts, and so uninterrupted his prosperity, that the Greeks regarded him as the peculiar favorite of heaven. He lived in the first city of Greece, and throughout her best times, commanding an admiration and love amounting ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... was neither flat nor dull to me when I first beheld it. When I left Ostend on a mild February morning, and found myself on the road to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me. My sense of enjoyment possessed an edge whetted to the finest, untouched, keen, exquisite. I was young; I had good health; pleasure and I had never met; no indulgence of hers had enervated or sated one faculty of my nature. Liberty I clasped in my arms for the first time, and the influence of her smile and embrace revived my life like the sun and the west wind. Yes, at that ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... "Forest of Wild Thyme," of which the Argonaut says: "It is not only an exquisite piece of work, but it is a psychological analysis of the child-mind so daring and yet so convincing as to lift it to the plane where the masterpieces of literature dwell. It can be read with delight by a child of ten. It is put into the mouth of a child of about that age, ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... of throughout, in a series of exquisite and thrilling images, as being real sleep. In Shelley's own edition of Adonais, the lines which we are now considering are essentially ...
— Adonais • Shelley
... is silent. Next she asks him to seat himself beside her on the couch, but he will not. In some confusion she orders a repast to be brought. A table is spread with fragrant viands, but as the knight will partake of none of them, in chagrin the lady takes a lute, which she touches with exquisite skill. He listens unmoved, till, casting away her instrument, she dances to him, circling round and round about him, flitting about his chair like a butterfly, until at length she sinks down near him and lays her head upon his mailed bosom. Upward ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... perceiving one, in a costume of deep mourning. Her extreme beauty and the grace of her demeanour excited an immediate interest in her favour; and her sable suit only served to render yet more brilliant, the exquisite fairness and ...
— Theresa Marchmont • Mrs Charles Gore
... overt act, she evidently felt that duty demanded some further ceremony from her. She approached him very timidly, but with an exquisite, little elderly early-Victorian manner. She was of the most astonishingly perfect type, though Tembarom was not aware of the fact. The manner, a century earlier, would have ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... a new and exquisite scent to him, and through the myrtle bushes he could hear the streams singing their way down to the lake; and when he came to the lake's edge he heard the warble that came into his ear when he was a little child, which it retained always. He heard it in Egypt, ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... While our artists confess it almost a vain hope to rival the cameo brooch that fastened the scanty garment of the Argive charioteer, or the statue spattered with the foam of his horses and shrouded in the dust of his furious wheel—while they are content to be teachable, moreover, by the exquisite embroidery and lacework in gold and cotton thread displayed at another semi-religious and similarly ancient reunion at Benares,—they claim the alliance and support of many classes of craftsmen unrepresented on the Ganges or Ilissus. These were, in the old days, ranked ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... singing. Once only the serenity was broken by a tragedy, the death of the poet's wife, who was fatally burned before his eyes,—a tragedy which occasioned his translation of Dante's Divina Commedia (by which work he strove to keep his sorrow from overwhelming him) and the exquisite "Cross of Snow." The latter seemed too sacred for publication; it was found, after the poet's death, among ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... I could not hope successfully to argue against such a conviction. But I do not wish to do so. All I want to impress upon you is, that I am not to be blamed for doubting his innocence; and, at the same time, I wish to assure you that no one in this house would feel more exquisite satisfaction than I ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... sunrise at Tolchaco and Bauer had awakened from a restful sleep and from the place where he lay in the Council Hogan he noted with pure enjoyment the splendid colour of the sky framed in the opening, the exquisite blending from the pearly grey into the unpaintable, soft moving colours that he had looked at with growing awe during many wonderful mornings in July. He could not remove the impression that it was God's hand that moved over the sky, painting ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... Aubanel writes not, like Roumanille, for his own people alone. His Muse is more ambitious, and seeks to interest by appealing to the sentiments in a language polished with all the art of its sister, the French. There are innumerable exquisite passages scattered through the work, which make us ready to believe in the figurative comparison of the prefacer, when he tells us that "the coral-grains of the 'Opened Pomegranate' will become in Provence ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... of us, she lives surrounded by the black forest of the "facts of life" very much as the people in the heart of Africa live in their dense wilderness of nocturnal terrors, the mysteries and monstrosities that make them seal themselves up in the huts as soon as it gets dark. She, quite exquisite little Mother, would often understand, I believe, if she dared, if she knew how to dare; and the vague, dumb interchange then taking place between us, and from the silence of which we have never for an instant deviated, represents perhaps her wonder ...
— The Whole Family - A Novel by Twelve Authors • William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jo
... The exquisite taste and delicacy of this incident touched the bystanders as with an electric shock, and the place at once rang out with the most genuine and hearty applause The little balloon thrown up by Montgolfier sped away to the north-east, its beautiful ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... bosom of the silver Thames," one glides to Hampton Court amid youth and gayety and melting music; and for the nonce this realm of "airs, flounces, and furbelows," of merry chit-chat, and of pleasurable excitement, seems as important as it is to those exquisite creatures of fancy that hover about the heroine, assiduous guardians of her "graceful ease and sweetness void of pride." Of that admired world likewise are the lovers that Matthew Prior creates, who woo neither ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Homeward serenely she walked with God's benediction upon her. When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... than the sense of identity and harmony resulting from this exquisite organization. We have been told that there is a workman at the Gobelin manufactory who can select twenty-two thousand tints of the material employed in the construction of its famous tapestries. This ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... partially the principles of Radicals and Whigs coincide. But, for all that, the logic which distinguishes them is right; and the apparent error must be sought in the fact, that all cases (political or religious) being cases of life, are concretes, which never conform to the exquisite truth of abstractions. Practically, the Radical is opposed to the Whig, though casually the two are in conjunction continually; for, as acting partisans, they work from different centres, and finally, for different results.] 4, the ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... was equally characteristic in another way. This was a vicious child. "Quelle peste que cette Desiree! Quel poison que cet enfant la!" were the expressions dedicated to her, alike in kitchen and in schoolroom. Amongst her other endowments she boasted an exquisite skill in the art, of provocation, sometimes driving her bonne and the servants almost wild. She would steal to their attics, open their drawers and boxes, wantonly tear their best caps and soil their best shawls; ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... and I do not know any medicine more salutary, or any drink (except coffee) more agreeable, than this in a cold night and after a hard day's march. Mr. Preuss questioned whether the famed nectar ever possessed so exquisite a flavor. All felt it to be a ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... am always a willing wanderer. But in the end it really gave me nothing but a bare situation into which I had breathed a wholly new meaning. For in Eugenie de Pastourelles, who is Phoebe's unconscious rival, I tried to embody, not the sensuous intoxicating power of an Emma Hamilton, but those more exquisite and spiritual influences which many women have exercised over some of the strongest and most virile of men. Fenwick indeed possesses the painter's susceptibility to beauty. Beauty comes to him and beguiles him, but it is a ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a lazy sense of proprietorship in the man, as my chauffeur related the pretty legend of St. Agnes's ruined castle and the handsome Pagan who had loved the Christian maiden; while he described the exquisite walks to be found up hidden valleys among the serrated mountains behind Mentone; and enlarged upon the charms of picnics with donkeys and lunch-baskets under canopies of olives or pines, with a carpet of violets ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... were very grave, too, and grim and still against the even blue sky. Across their purplish gray a waterfall streaked down struck crystal by the sun. An eagle turned in great, swinging circles. Sheila had an exquisite lifting of heart, a sense of entire fusion, body blessed by spirit, spirit blessed by body. She felt a distinct pleasure in the flapping of her short, sun-filled hair against her neck, at the pony's motion between ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... the murmur of the stream, the breathing fragrance of spring, the soft voluptuousness of summer, the golden pomp of autumn; earth with its mantle of refreshing green, and heaven with its deep delicious blue and its cloudy magnificence—all fill us with mute but exquisite delight, and we revel in the luxury of mere sensation. But in the depth of winter, when Nature lies despoiled of every charm, and wrapped in her shroud of sheeted snow, we turn our gratifications to moral sources. The dreariness and desolation of the landscape, ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... the lovely sea-treasures, their beauty passed into her heart and mind, and she began to copy, spray by spray, the coral-foliage, the leaves of the sea-grasses, and the curves of the sea-shells, until after a time, in the meshes of her fish-nets, she had imprisoned forms of exquisite beauty, and one saw there reproduced, in dainty and artistic grouping, what her very soul had loved and fed upon. Her fish-nets became works ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... has only a certain capacity for battling with Fate. After this last episode Roland gave in. Not even the exquisite agony of hearing himself described in church as a bachelor of this parish, with the grim addition that this was for the second time of asking, could stir him to ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... gorse is extraordinary, I'll admit. You must have worked without ceasing. She will be exquisite. Where shall you get the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... Englishwoman alone in this wilderness—two days' drive from even a railway station—and at the mercy of Kossowski! But the next minute I reversed my judgment. Probably she adored her rufous lord, took his veneer of courtesy—a veneer of the most exquisite polish, I grant you, but perilously thin—for the very perfection of chivalry. Or perchance it was his inner savageness itself that charmed her; the most refined women often amaze one by the fascination which the preponderance of the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... die for it." I started out of bed; I stood before the looking-glass; I began to untwist, to unroll; I did the corkscrew movement; I jerked—I shook my hair out—ripple, ripple, ripple, it fell over my shoulders. Then I rested awhile, and winked my eyes with exquisite satisfaction—for freedom is sweet both to the head ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... the Many, but something else far beyond either. It approached Crystalman, and entered his body—if that bright mist could be called a body. It passed right through him, and the passage caused him the most exquisite pleasure. The Muspel-stream was Crystalman's food. The stream emerged from the other side on to the sphere, in a double condition. Part of it reappeared intrinsically unaltered, but shivered into a million fragments. These were the green corpuscles. In passing ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... Artie was taking Cary home. I looked to see how Flora took it, but her appealing blue eyes were fixed in their most appealing way upon the Also Ran, who was plainly undergoing thrills of exquisite torture therefrom. Jimmie gave one look at the tableau, and turned toward the door with his tongue in ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... through the romantic movement, and onwards, which are not ballads at all. Swinburne's ballads, which so shocked our grandparents, bore about as much relation to the true ballads as a vase of wax fruit to a hawker's barrow. They were lovely patterns of words, woven like some exquisite, foaming lace, but they were Swinburne, Swinburne all the time. They had nothing to do with the common people. The common people would not have understood ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... while Mitenka, too, standing in his presence, listened with evident satisfaction. Nicolas did not take his eyes off his sister's face, and only breathed when she took breath. Sonia was under the spell of that exquisite voice and thinking of the gulf of difference that lay between her and her friend, full conscious that she could never exercise such fascination. The old countess had paused in her "patience,"—a sad, fond smile played on her lips, her eyes were full of tears, and she shook her head, remembering ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... pink, yellow, white and red, fragile lilies of the valley, carnations and vivid orchids, no two alike, yet all expressions of plant life. Skilled gardeners from England and Germany were busy with these exquisite flower children, watering, pruning and training upon slender cords, that every bud might come to perfect unfolding. The laws of the plant world and the law of each individual flower were well known to them. They knew that all required sunshine and soil, warmth and ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... although his clothes always corresponded to the fashion of the times, he was not fond of silks, damasks, or velvets; but wore every thing plain and handsome. Instead of large chains of gold in which some delighted, he was satisfied with a small chain of exquisite workmanship, to which was appended a gold medal of the Virgin and child Jesus, with a Latin motto, and on the reverse St John the Baptist and another motto. On his finger he wore a very fine diamond ring; and in his cap, which was of velvet, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... may be said to owe its permanence in English literature to him. The first love of Paris is there told so prettily, with so pathetic a presentation of the heart-broken Oenone, that at once the deserted maiden won a place in English hearts and minds; Tennyson's poem is an exquisite wreath laid at the foot of the monument raised by Peele to her memory. On the other hand, the main plot, retelling the old legend of the Apple of Discord, is painted in the same neutral tints as coloured ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... much, to have the assurance of the enjoyment of more money than the palace-builder himself could have dreamed of? This was the element that bore him up and into which Maggie scattered, on occasion, her exquisite colouring drops. They were of the colour—of what on earth? of what but the extraordinary American good faith? They were of the colour of her innocence, and yet at the same time of her imagination, with which their relation, his and these people's, was all suffused. What ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... report of a gun. We therefore quickened our pace for eight miles farther, and, being about five miles from Grog Spring, now heard distinctly the noise of several rifles from the river. We hurried to the bank, and saw with exquisite satisfaction our friends descending the river. They landed to greet us, and after turning our horses loose, we embarked with our baggage, and went down to the spot where we had made a deposite. This, after reconnoitring the adjacent country, we opened; ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... hum of insects. Little darts of purple, that were running quail, crossed the glades. And a plaintive, sweet peeping came from the coverts. Bess's soft step disturbed a sleeping lizard that scampered away over the leaves. She gave chase and caught it, a slim creature of nameless color but of exquisite beauty. ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... fireplace are gone. But the faintly tinted walls are framed with just one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the member of a Greek capital; the door handles and the lines of the panels of the door, the two chairs, the framework of the bed, the writing table, have all that final simplicity, that exquisite finish of contour that is begotten of sustained artistic effort. The graciously shaped windows each frame a picture—since they are draughtless the window seats are no mere mockeries as are the window seats of earth—and on the sill, the sole thing to need attention in the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the body, and the same distance apart. These two ornaments, the breast fans and the spiral tipped tail wires, are altogether unique, not occurring on any other species of the eight thousand different birds that are known to exist upon the earth; and, combined with the most exquisite beauty of plumage, render this one of the most perfectly lovely of the many lovely productions of nature. My transports of admiration and delight quite amused my Aru hosts, who saw nothing more in the "Burong raja" than we do in the ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... went through the heart of the other youth. His prospective father and mother in-law appeared really a pair of exquisite scoundrels. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... his hand over my eyes as if to bid me to see nothing, and signed to me to take hold of the skirt of his coat. He went first out of the room, and I followed, not without a parting glance at my lady of an hour. She, seeing the Spaniard had gone out, snatched off her mask and showed me an exquisite face. ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... was Mr. Middleton's behavior. He seemed as surprised and delighted to see his wife appear at lunch, as fearful lest she overtax herself, as if she were her own very opposite. The girl couldn't comprehend how one so intelligent, so refined, of such exquisite taste, apparently, could be so blunt in this one particular. She couldn't understand how he could endure, much less care for, this ugly, withered, yellow, untidy woman. However, it made her own position somewhat easier. If he were really aware how impossibly ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... which Miss Anderson made her first appearance in England at the Lyceum Theater on Saturday evening, enables this delightful actress to exhibit in her fullest charms the exquisite grace of form and the simple elegance of gesture and movement by virtue of which she stands wholly without a rival on the stage. Whether in the alcove, where she is first discovered motionless upon the pedestal, or when ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar
... the Renaissance period, and explain the necessity of placing one's self at a writer's point of view, and entering into the spirit of the time. He will add, perhaps, that 'Lycidas' is a test of poetical feeling, and that he who does not appreciate its exquisite melody has no music in his soul. The same writer who will tell us all this, and doubtless with perfect truth, would probably have adopted Pope or Johnson's theory with equal confidence if he had lived in the last century. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the decoration on his coat. The blood rose and stained her clear cheek. With a gesture of exquisite grace and sensibility that thrilled Lane she touched the medal. "Oh! The Croix de Guerre.... Daren, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... scientific precision the instinct of sex attraction implanted in man's being for the most obvious and grossly practical of reasons: an illusive candle-glow easily lit, quickly extinguished when its uses were fulfilled. And lo, here was love tearing him by the throat till he choked; an exquisite torture, a rampant passion, a devastating flame, that most glorified when it burned most ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... morning-room at Cimicifugas House. These tapestries were to be hung during the absence of the duchess in Homburg, and were to greet her as a birthday surprise on her return. Hilda Mellifica, who is one of the most talented amateur artists in London, and who has exquisite taste in all matters of decoration, was to go down to the ducal residence to inspect the work, and she obtained permission from Lady Veratrum (the confidential companion of the duchess) to bring me with her. I started on this journey to ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... raving academies in which they are absent. There is touch more generalisation than there used to be as to the sittings in our Parish Church; but "birds of a feather flock together" still. The rich know their quarters; exquisite gentlemen and smart young ladies with morrocco-bound gilt-edged Prayer Books still cluster in special sections; and although it is said that the poor have the best part of the church allotted to them, the conspicuousness of its position gives a brand to it neither ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... to unpack the superb linen that Aunt Mary bought abroad—the heavy damask table-cloths with their beautiful designs, and the immense dinner napkins, protecting one's dress so admirably against possible accident—and to take out the exquisite silver and Sevres; everything is perfection, even to the little gold, lily-shaped hand-bell. Afterwards we go to gather flowers in all their morning freshness, and if it is ten o'clock, we walk down to the station to meet ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... who don't. Like Bach, Purcell depended much on rhythm for the effect of his pattern; unlike Bach, his patterns have a strangely picturesque quality; through the ear they suggest the forms of leaf and blossom, the trailing tendril,—suggest them only, and dimly, vaguely,—yet, one feels, with exquisite fidelity. Thus Purcell, following those who, in sending the voice part along the line, pressed it up at the word "high" and down at "low," and thus got an irregularly wavy line of tone or melody, solved the problem ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... sthetics. The whole thing is a very great masterpiece of childlike contortionism. To do things as irresponsibly as children and contortionists—what a happy discovery of the line of least resistance in art that was! Mark, by the way, this exquisite touch ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... burlesques on the fashionable manners of the day; whence grew "Northanger Abbey," with its anti- heroine, Catharine Morley, "roving and wild, hating constraint and cleanliness, and loving nothing so much as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house," and with its exquisite travestie of the "Mysteries of Udolpho." But she soon felt her higher power. Marvellous to say, she began "Pride and Prejudice" in 1796, before she was twenty- one years old, and completed it in the following year. "Sense and Sensibility" and "Northanger Abbey" immediately followed; ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... "What a pity that in this republic we have no laureateship. Here is a man who might truly fill it." Of the poem of this kind we should wish to quote, if our limits of space did not prevent it, Mr. Spudd's exquisite ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... 'Does as he is told by his principal! Not his capital that's invested in the business. Oh, that's good! Ha ha ha ha!' Mr Lammle joined in the laugh and looked knowing; and the more he did both, the more exquisite the secret joke became ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... age, that they are at last to see truth and human life represented in the incidents which concern heroes and heroines. The style of the play is such as becomes those of the first education, and the sentiments worthy those of the highest figure. It was a most exquisite pleasure to me, to observe real tears drop from the eyes of those who had long made it their profession to dissemble affliction; and the player, who read, frequently threw down the book, until he had given vent to the humanity which rose in him at some irresistible ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... rooms," exclaimed Madam, trailing languidly from one to the other, touching a book here, some exquisite curio there, the carved ivory toilet articles on the dresser. The morning sunlight, tempered by the green and white awnings at the great bowed-windows filled the tastefully decorated rooms with a restful ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... great Madonnas, the Virgin and Children are of surpassing loveliness. It is finished in such a soft, melting style that to see it in its exquisite coloring, one could easily imagine it vanishing imperceptibly into the blaze of some splendid sunset. While we are talking of Raphael's color it may be interesting to call your attention to a very remarkable ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... coarseness, grossness, or rudeness of character, is unseemly. This negative description of one of the characteristics of charity is sufficiently comprehensive, if exhibited in all its details, to fill a volume. It conveys the idea of an exquisite propriety of deportment, free from everything ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... time on his hands, he occupied it in becoming acquainted with his surroundings, and was especially interested in the curious markings on the black slate walls of the gangway near his door. Many of these were in the form of exquisite ferns, others of curious leaves such as he had never seen, quaint patterns like the scales and bones of queer fishes, or the ripplings of water on a smooth beach. In one place he found tiny tracks, as though a small bird had run quickly across it, and had stamped the ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... completed, for Mr. Higgs, the banker, of Washington, an exquisite picture which he calls The Greek Girl,—similar, but we think in all respects superior, to his beautiful Circassian Girl, engravings of which by a Parisian artist have some time formed one of the attractions of the print shops. Mr. Kellogg is also painting a full-length ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... forests, but rather bristling with a stubby growth of the few trees which might endure in precarious soil and bitter weather, but now they gathered the dignity of distance about them. The grass of the foothills was a faint green mist about their feet, cloaks of exquisite blue hung around the upper masses, but their heads were naked to the pale skies. And all day long, with deliberate alteration, the garb of the mountains changed. When the sudden morning came they leaped naked ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... to her enjoyment of the President's paper was more circumstantial. In the midst of this, as the listeners were besought to "dwell a moment on this exquisite delineation of Nature,"—expertly pronounced "Nate-your" by Mrs. Potts,—Miss Caroline turned her head aside as one deeply moved by the poet's magic. But Marcella Eubanks, glancing at that moment into a mirror on the opposite wall,—a mirror in a plush frame on which pansies had been painted,—caught ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... for $30,000. Everywhere air-ship flights are being made successfully, and it is only a question of time until the aeroplane becomes a common means of conveyance. Wilbur Wright declares that it is already safer than the automobile, and it would seem that there is in store for man a new and exquisite sensation, that of flight. ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... of the first decision of the Government arrived at Delhi, when all at that place were full of the wrong done to the army, a private soldier of the 60th Rifles, inspired by the most exquisite sense of humour as well as of bitter satire, wrote upon the walls of the palace where his regiment was quartered the following appropriate sentence: "Delhi taken and India saved for 36 rupees 10 annas." It is said ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... middle of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the walls of the main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity—a work much in the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years; and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I wondered who the priest was that wore ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... being was agitated, had developed an artistic feeling of peculiar lucidity. Since he had killed, his frame seemed lightened, his distracted mind appeared to him immense; and, in this abrupt expansion of his thoughts, he perceived exquisite creations, the reveries of a poet passing before his eyes. It was thus that his gestures had suddenly become elegant, that his works were beautiful, and were all at once rendered true to ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... of the shops, and the tempting array of the jewellery and trinkets of every description therein displayed, after a few days of sailing on the exquisite lake, and some walks and drives, Polly, down deep in her heart, was quite ready to move on from Geneva. And, although she didn't say anything, old Mr. King guessed as much, and broke out suddenly, "Well, are you ready to ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... MS., bound in blue velvet, whose uncial letters were written in purple ink, powdered with gold-dust, while the margins were stiff with gilded illuminations; and near the cushion, as if prepared to shed light on the curious cryptography, stood an exquisite white glass lamp, shaped like a vase, and richly ornamented with Arabic inscriptions in ultra-marine blue—a precious relic of some ruined Laura in the Nitrian desert, by the aid of whose rays the hoary ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... institutes and rules; that the Christian church is so happily increased; that devotion is so well received; and that justice is so uprightly administered? For, if one considers without prejudice, these are certain precious gems, so resplendent and so exquisite, that the crown of Espana can glory in adorning itself with them—even though it he, as is the fact, the Spaniards who shape those gems from justice. All this so ennobles these islands that they are reported as extraordinary among ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... "Ah, Still Jim, me boy!" And there was Pen—dear, dear Penelope, with her woman's eyes in her child's face—with her halo of hair. Pen's "Take me with you, Still," was the very peak of sorrow now to the boy. Jim was homesick. And he who has not known homesickness does not know one of life's most exquisite griefs. ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... long arms almost completely over that part of the wall, divided on either side for the window, and hung gracefully from beneath the eaves, embowering their lovely owner in a tangled mass of purple blossoms. It was an exquisite picture—the pretty wife sitting there, in the whitest of lawns, looking out over the hills from this frame of gorgeous flowers—all the more charming from her unconsciousness of its beauty. Behind her, at the opposite side of the room, sat her ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... people down in Herefordshire last May," said Ada, returning to the unfinished theme of the Canon; "such an exquisite rural retreat, and so restful and healing to the nerves. Real country scenery; ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... under the pen-name of "P. Boyzy." The perusal of them in their present form will serve to confirm the opinion of those who read them as they then appeared, that they possess in marked degree the unusual quality of a winning humor coupled with the pathos that is often humor's most exquisite accompaniment; and that they combine a shrewd if homely wit with a profound knowledge of the workings of ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley
... Gianbattista, as usual after working hours, was arrayed in clothes of fashionable cut, aiming at a distant imitation of the imaginary but traditional English tourist. A murderous collar supported his round young chin, and a very stiffly-constructed pasteboard-lined tie was adorned by an exquisite silver pin of his own workmanship—the only artistic thing ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... growing; for, as Professor Thurston well remarks: "Great inventions are never the work of any one mind." From Hero to Corliss is a stretch of nearly twenty centuries; during which, probably, a thousand inventive minds have contributed to make the steam-engine the exquisite thing it ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... they seen and recognised their soldier lads in that sorry state. Even the dashing officers and men of the Grenadier Guards ceased to be objects of admiration, and the War Office would have howled with exquisite torture at sight of their hair and clothes. Speak of wrapping clothes around head or body to keep out the dust? It is sheer nonsense to prate so. Why it is hard enough to gape and gasp and catch a mouthful of sanded breath, without that added worry. There is nothing for it, but to grin ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... lies the heart of the matter—a humorous man has the high gift of regarding an annoyance in the very stroke of it as another man shall regard it when the annoyance is long past. If a humorous person falls out of a canoe he knows the exquisite jest while his head is still bobbing in the cold water. A witty man, on the contrary, is sour until he is changed and dry: but in a week's time when company is about, he will make ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... she needed no finery to make her more beautiful in the eyes of all. You should have seen her, little mother! A wonderful woman indeed, straight and fairly tall, with frank, friendly eyes that always look straight at one. Her voice has also notes that can be of exquisite tenderness, as I heard them in that poor little hut of Frenchy's. Her hair is a great, fine, chestnut mass in which are blended the most perfect hues of auburns and rich browns. And withal she is exquisitely simple in her manner, utterly unaffected, and her laughter ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... rare and valuable old-fashioned type. He has the finest collection of old tinsel pictures of the Richard III. and Dick Turpin order in the kingdom, and values an old book full of tinsel patterns of the most exquisite design and workmanship. Old glass pictures are scattered about, "Lord Nelson's Funeral Car," and Joey Grimaldi grins at you from the ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... amuse him vastly and he always referred to the exquisite granite structure with its triple arch and richly carved piers ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... the further expressions of my admiration lest they should not seem applicable to man; but it is really astonishing that a mere human being, a part of humanity only, should so perfectly comprehend the whole; and that he should possess such exquisite art, that whilst every woman and every child shall feel the whole effect, his learned Editors and Commentators should yet so very frequently mistake or seem ignorant of the cause. A sceptre or a straw are in his hands ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... reformers of free and equal New York. It is wonderful, Hugh, into what follies men precipitate themselves as soon as they begin to run into exaggerations, whether of politics, religion, or tastes. Here are half of the exquisite philanthropists who see a great evil affecting the rights of human nature in one man's hiring a farm from another for as long a term as he can obtain it, who are at the very extreme in their opinions on free ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... of health he resigned from the Chinese service and returned to America. For two years he lived in New York City, suffering in body without cessation the most exquisite torture. During that time his letters to his family show only tremendous courage. On the splintered, gaping deck of the Chen Yuen, with the fires below it, and the shells bursting upon it, he had shown to his Chinese crew the courage of the white man who knew he was responsible for them ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... possessed an open, tender and touching countenance upon which shone friendship and affection. Her voice was soft and silvery, her arms and hands superb models for a sculptor, and all her movements and gestures manifested an exquisite, natural grace which made her conspicuous in the most crowded drawing-room. As she was in her youth, so she continued to be until her death at the age of ninety years, an incredible fact but so well attested by the gravest and most reliable writers, who testify to the ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... aesthetic sense discovers another order of beauty altogether, hidden, veiled, secret and mysterious, akin to moral beauty. This sort of beauty only reveals itself to the initiated, and is all the more exquisite for that. It is a little like the refined joy of sacrifice, like the madness of faith, like the luxury of grief; it is not within the reach of all the world. Its attraction is peculiar, and affects one like some strange perfume, or bizarre melody. When once ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... she had stretched down to the step of the carriage. The attitude certainly showed the svelte perfection of her form to advantage; and from the unavoidable circumstances of the position, it also showed one of the most beautifully formed feet that ever was seen, together with the whole of the exquisite little bottine that clothed it, a beautifully turned ankle, and perhaps as much as two inches of the ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... the expression and perpetuation of religious emotion and belief. Even rude drawings attempt to record the history of the deeds of the race. Progress is shown in better lines, in better form, and a more exquisite blending of colors. That many primitive people display a high degree of art and a low degree of general culture is one of the insoluble problems of the race. Perhaps it may be attributed primarily to the fact that all artistic ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... off, as it seemed, there came a dreamy, exquisite music, as sweet as the spinnet's had been, but so much fuller, so much richer, seeming as though a chorus of angels were singing all together. August ceased to think of the museum: he thought of heaven. "Are we gone to the Master?" he thought, remembering ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... did not seem to be so alluring to Wentworth as one might have expected, when the announcement was made by a girl so pretty, and dressed in such exquisite taste; but the young man promptly offered her a chair, and then sat down, with the table between them. She placed her parasol and a few things she had been carrying on the table, arranging them with some care; then, having ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... coming to regard his mother as somewhat inferior, in intellectual attainments, to the father—that she was considered in that home as a mere domestic. True, the steak had been broiled well, the pudding was exquisite, the children's clothes were always in order, the husband's trousers were always beautifully pressed, his ties were cleaned as well as a cleaner could clean them; but where did she stand in her boy's mind and where was ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... nerve him to battle it was this. The post was important; next to the Hill-end itself, it might be called the key to the position; and it was where the cover was bad, and in which it was most natural to place a child. It should have been Heathercat's; why had it been given to Crozer? An exquisite fear of what should be the answer passed through his marrow every time he faced the question. Was it possible that Crozer could have boasted? that there were rumours abroad to his—Heathercat's—discredit? that his honour was publicly sullied? All the world went dark about him at the thought; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the exquisite delight with which I ate the first fig Ithulpo handed to me. It cooled my burning thirst more than all the water I had swallowed, and served both for meat and drink. It was a large soft fig with a white pulp. I instantly put out my hand for ...
— Manco, the Peruvian Chief - An Englishman's Adventures in the Country of the Incas • W.H.G. Kingston
... splendour on an audience. It is the old difficulty of getting a quart into a pint bottle. But Berenice is a pint—neither more nor less, and fits its bottle to a nicety. To witness a performance of it is a rare and exquisite pleasure; the impression is one of flawless beauty; one comes away profoundly moved, and with a new vision of the capacities ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... the moon pouring in through the uncurtained windows, she sat with her profile, cameo-like (or like perhaps to the head on a postage stamp) against the dark oak walls of her music-room, and entranced herself and her listeners, if there were people to dinner, with the exquisite pathos of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata. Devotedly as she worshipped the Master, whose picture hung above her Steinway Grand, she could never bring herself to believe that the two succeeding movements were ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... near them and as faithful to them as ever. Surely that was seeing Him again after a little while. Surely then their sorrow was turned to joy. Surely then a man, the man of all men, was born into the world a second time, and in them was fulfilled our Lord's most exquisite parable—most human and yet most divine—of the mother remembering no more her anguish for joy that a man ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... that not only thou, but all those who hear me were (Iask for no ambiguous catchword or byword, but) what you see before you; Iwould that you all were such as I am—such as I am, upheld by the hopes, filled with the affections, that sustain my charmed existence;" and then, with that exquisite courtesy which characterizes so many traits of the Apostle's history, glancing at the chains which bound him to the Roman guard—"'except these bonds.' This, whether you call it Christian or not, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... of the mock gravity, the broad humor, and often exquisite wit of those meetings, but it is impossible to give you any adequate idea of them. Burlesque lectures on all conceivable and inconceivable subjects were frequently read or improvised by members ad libitum. I remember something of a remarkable one from Dr. Alden, upon ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... her scholars, and she never knows how time passes,' said Mr. Dusautoy. 'But step this way, and I'll show you the best view in Bayford.' He took her up a step or two, to a little turfed mound, where there was a rustic seat commanding the whole exquisite view of river, vale, and woodland, with the church tower rising in the foreground. The wind blew pleasantly, chasing the shadows of the clouds across the open space. Albinia was delighted to feel it fan her brow, and her eager exclamations contented Mr. Dusautoy. ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 21 Yea, I say unto you, my son, that there could be nothing so exquisite and so bitter as were my pains. Yea, and again I say unto you, my son, that on the other hand, there can be nothing so exquisite and ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... Into the grave music of the Syro-Chaldaic tongue he put the mutterings of thunder. Where he had preached, he upbraided; in place of exquisite parables came sonorous threats. He blessed but rarely, sometimes he cursed. That mosaic, the Law, he treated like a cobweb; and to the arrogant clergy a rumor filtered that this vagabond, who had not where to lay his head, declared his ability to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... he had all the coarseness without the sentiment of the French peasantry, whence he sprang; that his political radicalism attests a lack of the serenity of spirit indispensable to the sincere artist; that he had no conception of the beautiful, the exquisite—the fact remains that he triumphs over all his deficiencies, and in very splendid fashion. He is, in truth, of all the realists for whom he discovered the way, and set the pace, as it were, one of the two naturalistic painters who have shown ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... path,—wound through a sycamore and white-oak grove that fringed the river, the sloping banks of which were covered with an infinite variety of shrubs and evergreens, bearing flowers and blossoms of most delicate beauty and exquisite fragrance, amidst which tangled festoons of the indigenous vine drooped with pendant bunches of purple grapes. Arbutus shrubs of immense size were seen, and the landscape was in some places interspersed thickly with manzanita rushes, the crimson berries of which are ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne
... lasted the whole night round, and increased in intensity every day, as they advanced north. They had, indeed, often heard and read of it before, but their minds had utterly failed to form a correct conception of the exquisite calmness and beauty of the midnight-day ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... magnificent columns with capitals, each hewn from a single block of stone. The basement, like every other part of the building, is ornamented in varied and animated styles; and every slab of the vast pile is covered with exquisite carvings representing the lotos, the lily, and the rose, with arabesques wrought with the chisel with astonishing taste and skill. The porticos are supported by sculptured columns; and the terraces, which form a cross, have ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... friend two or three times, and once mentioned his name, but Susan forgot it. She was such a beautiful, happy little thing, and seemed so exquisite an expression of spring-like, radiant youth and its innocent joy in living that the desolate and stranded creature she had befriended could think of nothing but her own awkward worship and the fascination of the flower-like charm. She used to ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... not deny my privileges," said the schoolmaster, with a smile such as might have acknowledged the possession of some exquisite and ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... visibly protected. A white towel met our eyes, spread neatly out at its full length. Lifting it, we looked beneath. A carefully folded dress of dark blue silk, to all appearance elegantly made, confronted our rather eager eyes. Beside it, a collar of exquisite lace—I know enough of such matters to be a judge—pricked through by a gold breast-pin of a strange and unique pattern. A withered bunch of what appeared to have been a bouquet of red roses, surmounted the whole, giving to the otherwise commonplace ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... upbraided this arbitrary wretch with his inhumanity to me, told him, that he proposed to give him a little discipline for the good of his soul, which he immediately put in practice, with great vigour and dexterity. This smart application to the pedant's withered posteriors gave him such exquisite pain that he roared like a mad bull, danced, cursed, and blasphemed, like a frantic bedlamite. When the lieutenant thought himself sufficiently revenged, he took his leave of him in these words: "Now, friend, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... are, and how queenly you look with your massive braids of midnight hair fastened with such an exquisite comb!" ...
— The Harvest of Years • Martha Lewis Beckwith Ewell
... were drawn to the girl at the bedside. She was beautiful, of a type sufficiently rare to attract attention anywhere. Her delicate profile and dainty grace shone in the shadow of the sordid room like an exquisite picture. He was aware of a skin of transparent whiteness, a wistful sensitive mouth, a pair of wonderful eyes with the green-grey colour of the sea in their depths, and a crown of red-gold hair. She was poorly, almost shabbily, dressed, but the ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... peculiarly delicate, strikingly refined. When she was fifteen her father was found dead, one morning, in an obscure hotel in the Middle West. He had neglected his insurance premiums. The resourceful little widow went to work at once. The products of her needle were exquisite. She sold some of the handsome old furniture and, during the next five years, most of her jewels went to keep the children in school. She had given absolutely to her husband and to her home, and through the years to come her cheer was never bedimmed save when the ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... this work that persons ignorant of mathematics may obtain competent knowledge of the methods to which physical astronomy owes its astonishing progress. Written with a noble simplicity of style, an exquisite exactness of expression, and a scrupulous accuracy, it is universally conceded to stand among the noblest monuments of French literature.... The labors of all ages to persuade truth from the heavens are there justly, clearly, and profoundly analyzed. Genius ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... How exquisite it was—that dress in Evelina's shop off Shaftesbury Avenue! It was four o'clock on a fine day early in April, and was Fanny the one to spend four o'clock on a fine day indoors? Other girls in that very street sat over ledgers, or drew long threads wearily between silk and gauze; or, ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... costume multiplied by three was indeed monotonous. I had such an aversion to that color that I used to rebel regularly at the beginning of each season when new dresses were purchased, until we finally passed into an exquisite shade of blue. No words could do justice to my dislike of those red dresses. My grandfather's detestation of the British redcoats must have descended to me. My childhood's antipathy to wearing red enabled me later to comprehend the feelings of a little niece, who hated everything ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... are kindely met sir. Farthewell, commend me to thy Honourable vertuous Lord, my very exquisite Friend ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... many-folded curtain of time, still retains its shadowy lack of sharp detail, toning down and mellowing the hard aspect of real life—harder and more unromantic even than our own—into the blending softness of an exquisite mirage. ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... turned from all this sunset glory to find out what little bird was making the very big fuss near by, and because, parting the foliage of an arrow-wood bush, I looked with exquisite pleasure into the nest of a white-eyed vireo, does it mean that I am still unborn as to soul? For some reason it was a relief to look away from that west of vast and burning color to the delicately dotted eggs in the tiny cradle—the same relief felt in descending from a mountain-top to the valley; ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp |
