"Naturalness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... then withdraw to a side of the veranda, to sit sadly by themselves. If a quieter man, or some young fellow from Camberton, slipped away from the dining-room and joined them, they would talk gayly, simulating ease and naturalness. ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... course rendered with varying degrees of felicity, and this we think one of the happiest versions; though few in their literality lack that ease and naturalness of movement supposed to be the gift solely of those wonder-workers who render the "spirit" of an author, while disdaining a "slavish fidelity" to his words,—who as painters would portray a man's expression without troubling themselves to reproduce ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... state that the book might have been written by any biographer who knew Browning's works and had the sense to see that his characteristics were such that many of his critics were unfair to him. Chesterton will never allow for an instant that Browning suffered from anything but an evident 'naturalness,' which expressed itself in a rugged style, concealing charity in an original ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... Raleigh, Sir Thomas More, Charles II, Archbishop Laud all died with a real greatness of undismayed bravery, but with just a sense of enacting a part rehearsed. The death scene of Socrates, which is, I suppose, a romantically constructed tale, does indeed give a picture of perfect naturalness: and I thought that Father Payne's demeanour, like that of Socrates, showed clearly enough that the idea of death was not an overshadowing dread dispelled by an effort of the will, but that it was not present as a fear in his mind at all, and rather regarded with a reverent curiosity: and ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... naive simplicity and naturalness of his every phrase and word, and particularly his emphatic manner, left a most profound impression upon me. No one could fail to be equally affected by these qualities, and I now realised for the first time the almost magic power ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... * * * The charm of the story is in its naturalness. It is perfectly quiet, domestic, and truthful. In the calm force and homely realities of its scenes it ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... derived his information. It contains also lists of the coincidences between the Acts and St. Paul's and St. Peter's Epistles, of their points of contact with the contemporary history of the outer world, and of the incidents which show the naturalness and veracity of the narrative. The introduction closes with an excellent chronological table from A.D. 28 ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... thankful that she is not," answered Rose, with spirit; "her sweet childish simplicity and perfect naturalness are very charming in these days, when they are so rarely found in a girl ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... was "The Traveller" that was first published (December 19, 1764). Johnson pronounced it a poem to which it would not be easy to find anything equal since the death of Pope. The predominant impression of "The Traveller" is of its naturalness and facility. The serene graces of its style, and the mellow flow of its verse, take us captive before we feel the enchantment of its lovely images of various life reflected from its calm, still depths ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... he found still the old-new Alexander. He saw that the new had always been in the old, the oak in the acorn.... There was a great, sane naturalness in the alteration, in the advance. Strickland caught glimpses of ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... rounder; her breath seemed stirring her more deeply; like a flower of early June she was opening before his very eyes. This, though it gave him pleasure, also added to his fear. The strange silence, in its utter naturalness—for what could he talk about with her?—brought home to him more vividly than anything before, the barriers of class. All he thought of was how not to be ridiculous! She was inviting him in some strange, unconscious, subtle way to treat her ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... but enough has already been said to indicate the principle which underlies this particular phase of the theory of the theatre. The successive changes in the physical aspect of the English theatre during the last three centuries have all tended toward greater naturalness, intimacy, and subtlety, in the drama itself and in the physical aids to its presentment. This progress, with its constant illustration of the interdependence of the drama and the stage, may most conveniently be studied in historical review; and to such a review we shall ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... Dudley. Who's doing this? All I want is sugar, chocolate, a pot, a big spoon, and I'll show you the best fudge you ever ate." Then he would don an apron or towel and go to work in a manner which would rob any gathering of a sense of stiffness and induce a naturalness most intriguing, calculated to enhance ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... of the present day has become a greater favorite with boys than "Harry Castlemon," every book by him is sure to meet with hearty reception by young readers generally. His naturalness and vivacity leads his readers from page to page with breathless interest, and when one volume is finished the fascinated reader, like Oliver ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... never ceases for a moment to tell the serious story of the Pilgrimage, at the same time, it sometimes becomes so merry as almost to pass over into absolute comedy. "There is one passage," says Cheever, "which for exquisite humour, quiet satire, and naturalness in the development of character is scarcely surpassed in the language. It is the account of the courtship between Mr. Brisk and Mercy which took place at ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... ridiculous that he was ashamed of directly he had said it. Fernanda watched him attentively, regaining the calmness and self-possession that he was rapidly losing. She seemed absorbed in the conversation, describing her travelling impressions with naturalness, and expressing her opinions with unconcern, as if there had been nothing between them but an old and tranquil friendship. Finally, availing himself of an instant's silence, he summoned resolution ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... pain. The sculptor's chisel and the painter's brush have often been called upon to represent scenes of death in all its various forms and manifestations. Yet have they never attained the simplicity, the impressiveness, the vivid naturalness of the story told by the figure which ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... and done pretty Polly Peachum was the pivot around which success revolved. Within twenty-four hours all the town was talking of her bewitching face, her artless manner, her sweet voice. The sordid surroundings of Newgate, its thieves, male and female, its thieve takers, gave zest to her naturalness and simplicity. Moreover she was not in a fashionable dress, she wore no hoops (and neither did Lucy) and this in itself was ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... hours later. I had not read two pages before I became satisfied that the book had more truth than fiction in it. To have assumed it wholly the work of imagination, I should have had to admit that the author was an artist of artists, exceeding, through his artfulness, in naturalness, all other fiction-writers. No; there was truth behind the statements in the little book—truth at second or third hand, but truth. Now this little book pretended to tell, and I believe did tell, the story of a sailor under Sir Francis ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... owing to any artificial aid, but to a kind of brilliant vitality, not a bouncing mature liveliness, but a vivid, intense, humorous interest in life that was and would always remain absolutely fresh. She was naturalness itself, and seemed unconscious or careless of her appearance. Nor did she have that well-preserved air of so many modern women who seem younger than their years, but seemed merely clever, amiable, very unaffected, and ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... bodies which make allusion to it; that poetry can represent bodies, but only by means of actions. Returning to this theme, he explained the action or movement in painting as added by our imagination. Lessing was greatly preoccupied with the naturalness and the unnaturalness of signs, which is tantamount to saying that he believed each art to be strictly limited to certain modes of expression, which are only overstepped at the cost of coherency. In the appendix ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... animal and the angel in man. The music is always expressive, the choruses very beautiful, the orchestration skillful, but the whole is fatiguing and excessive, too full, too laborious. When all is said, it lacks gayety, ease, naturalness and vivacity—it has no smile, no wings. Poetically one is fascinated, but one's musical enjoyment is hesitating, often doubtful, and one recalls nothing but the general impression—Wagner's music represents the abdication of the self, and the ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... such early comedies as LOVE'S LABOUR LOST and THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA, the critical reader is apt to be left pretty evenly balanced between the two reflections that the wit and the versification have indeed at times a certain happy naturalness of their own, and that nevertheless, if they really be Shakspere's throughout, the most remarkable thing in the matter is his later progress. But even apart from such disputable issues, we may safely say with Mr. Fleay that ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... Newman, in writing of Debussy, warmly praises the delightful naturalness of his early compositions. "One would feel justified in building the highest hopes on the young genius who can manipulate so easily the beautiful shapes his ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... sorts of sandwiches was laid in the smoking-parlour. Thus those guests for whom audiences were not provided, could have the felicity of seeing the great ones pass across the lawn on their excursions for food, and possibly trip over the croquet hoops, which had been left up to give an air of naturalness to the lawn. In the smoking-parlour an Elzevir or two were left negligently open, as if Mr and Mrs Lucas had been reading the works of Persius and Juvenal when the first guests arrived. In the music-room, ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... fear, knowing it improbable that they could dream of seeking in the grounds, and as a matter of fact their minds were a mere paralysis of holy wonder; so presently he had the little body in a two-foot grave, arranged surface and dead leaves to naturalness, leapt a wall, and ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... intelligent ape till he seems it. With such naturalness can a being endowed with an immortal spirit enter into that of a monkey. But where's your tail? In the pantomime, Marzetti, no hypocrite in his monkery, prides himself ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... been the handmaid of Poetry; and in our modern languages, even, which are so artificial and removed from primitive enthusiasm and naturalness, no composer of opera would consent to adapt his inspirations to a prose libretto. It was far more so in primitive times; and it maybe said that in those days poetry was never composed unless to be sung or played on instruments. ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... the Palace of Fine Arts is from any viewpoint, its simplicity and noble strength are at their best when seen with a foreground of trees and water. The landscape, in its simple naturalness, is in feeling an intimate part of the building itself and so perfectly do they blend that they seem to have grown together through quiet, ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... write represented hours of labor, however; for she felt that the weight of nations lay on every word, and she wrote and rewrote the poor little sentences until every vestige of naturalness and of spontaneity were taken out of them. Such information as she could gather seemed always, in her eyes, either too frivolous to be worth notice, or too serious to be of interest. And ever before her frightened eyes loomed the ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... top of the grave over his head, there to remain until his successor was installed In that subsequent ceremony "the horns" were said to be taken from the grave of the deceased ruler and placed upon the head of his successor The social and religious functions of the phratry, and its naturalness in the organic system of ancient society, are rendered apparent ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... to another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment's probing of the conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... little. Even Dr. Farrar's standard work on "Eternal Hope" I have not read. But I considered this to be no serious disadvantage, on the whole. I conceived—and I think it was no undue egotism—that my own originality and naturalness would balance in a large degree the completeness which otherwise I might have attained. I think it is no small advantage to see the natural working of an open mind, not warped by other ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio
... it. It never occurred to Mrs. McQuinch, an excellent mother to her two eldest daughters, that she was no more fit to have charge of the youngest than a turtle is to rear a young eagle. The discomfort of their relations never shook her faith in their "naturalness." Like her husband and the vicar, she believed that when God sent children he made their parents fit to rule them. And Elinor resented her parents' tyranny, as she felt it to be, without dreaming of making any allowances ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... in the Jersey woods. Between 8 and 9 A.M. a full concert of birds, from different quarters, in keeping with the fresh scent, the peace, the naturalness all around me. I am lately noticing the russet-back, size of the robin or a trifle less, light breast and shoulders, with irregular dark stripes—tail long—sits hunch'd up by the hour these days, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... all the naturalness of innocence, knelt, as he was always used to do, and said his prayers, adding a special petition for his dear absent parents, and another for the poor boy who hadn't ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... mischance of being a scholar; for it does only distract and irregulate him, and the world by him. He hammers much in general upon our opinion's uncertainty, and the possibility of erring makes him not venture on what is true. He is troubled at this naturalness of religion to countries, that protestantism should be born so in England and popery abroad, and that fortune and the stars should so much share in it. He likes not this connection with the commonweal and divinity, ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... back. They all three abused the politicians with perfect sympathy; they abused the British drama with perfect sympathy; with no less perfect sympathy they abused the Cubists and the Vorticists and the New Poets. Mr. Flexen had an odd feeling that they were behaving with entire naturalness and propriety; that their real interest was in the politicians, the British drama, the Cubists, the Vorticists and the New Poets, and not at all in the fate of the murderer of the late Lord Loudwater. After a while he found himself vying earnestly with Mr. Manley in an effort to display himself ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... and light and shade, are admirable; but the life, animation, and naturalness of the figures make its great charm. Ah, why don't our artists study to produce life as it exists around them, and as they themselves know it and feel it, instead of giving us the gods and goddesses of a defunct and false religion, and scenes three ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... extensive course of instruction of this sort, arranged in ten successive grades, and intended to advance from the simple study of objects, forms, colors, etc., gradually to the prosecution of the regular and higher studies. The greater naturalness, life-likeness, and interest of this kind of mental occupation for young learners, over the old plan of restricting them mainly to the bare alphabet, with barren spelling, reading, definitions, and so on, is at once obvious in principle and confirmed by the facts; and ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... them catches the light. Another little girl presents herself, with abundant tresses and slim legs, her hands behind her, quite to the left; and the youngest, nearest to the spectator, sits on the floor and plays with her doll. The naturalness of the composition, the loveliness of the complete effect, the light, free' security of the execution, the sense it gives us as of assimilated secrets and of instinct and knowledge playing together—all this makes the picture as astonishing a work on the ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... a wonderful career of conquest, which lasted nine years. The story of what he accomplished during the first seven is given in his "Commentaries," as they are called, which are still read in schools, on account of the incomparable simplicity, naturalness, and purity of the style in which they are written, as well as because they seem to give truthful accounts of the events they describe. Sixty years before this time the Romans had possessed themselves of a little strip of Gaul ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... weak-limbed country-liver resent this honesty of speech? Surely not, if he be earnest in his loves and faith; but, the rather, by such token of unbounded naturalness, he recognizes under the waistcoat of this dear, old, charming cockney the traces of close cousinship to the Waltons, and binds him, and all the simplicity of his talk, to his heart, for aye. There is never a hillside under whose oaks or chestnuts I lounge upon a smoky afternoon of August, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... be growing nearer and dearer to her, and she liked Ralph better than any man she had ever met. She knew but little of Dora Bannister and had no reason to suppose that any matrimonial connection between her and Mr. Haverley had ever been thought of; in fact, in the sincerity and naturalness of her disposition, she could see no reason why she should not continue to like Mr. Haverley, to like him better and better, if he gave her reason to do so, and more than that, not to forget ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... men had more to turn to. Most men of seventy-three had grandchildren. That would help, surrounding one with a feeling of the naturalness of it all. But that school had been his only child. And he had loved it with the tenderness one gives a child. That in him which would have gone to the child ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... in faded antique dress, Abhorring to be hale and glad and free; And some parade a conscious naturalness, The scholar's ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... ranged as regularly as bow-windows at a watering place. Ethelberta's plan was to tell her pretended history and adventures while sitting in a chair—as if she were at her own fireside, surrounded by a circle of friends. By this touch of domesticity a great appearance of truth and naturalness was given, though really the attitude was at first more difficult to maintain satisfactorily than any one wherein stricter formality should be observed. She gently began her subject, as if scarcely knowing whether a throng were near ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... the spontaneity and naturalness of Eastern religions ought to be recognised. "You will find Christians admiring Walt Whitman, but it is Whitman the democrat they admire, not Whitman the prophet of naturalness." He spoke with appreciation of the Zen sect of Buddhists. Many of the Zen devotees were "noble and had a profound ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... the Pilgrim fathers. Fleeing from persecution and oppression, the Pilgrims of Mayflower fame established in the New World a reign of Puritanic tyranny and crime. The history of New England, and especially of Massachusetts, is full of the horrors that have turned life into gloom, joy into despair, naturalness into disease, honesty and truth into hideous lies and hypocrisies. The ducking-stool and whipping post, as well as numerous other devices of torture, were the favorite ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman
... asserts that the ideals of modesty develop with human development, and forever take on new and finer forms. "There is," he declares, "a very close relationship between naturalness, or sincerity, and modesty, for in love, naturalness is the ideal attained, and modesty is only the fear of coming short of that ideal. Naturalness is the sign and the test of perfect love. It is the sign ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Semiramis has been seducing my susceptible friend here. Like many of us, he has been captivated by her naturalness, her naivete, her clear good eyes,—that look of nature that is always art! May I relate the idyl of your tragic passion, dear Dubois, ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... ashore. He was the very man for us, this modern and unlawful wanderer with his own legend of loves, dangers, and bloodshed. He told us bits of it sometimes in measured, ironic tones. He spoke Catalonian, the Italian of Corsica and the French of Provence with the same easy naturalness. Dressed in shore-togs, a white starched shirt, black jacket, and round hat, as I took him once to see Dona Rita, he was extremely presentable. He could make himself interesting by a tactful and rugged reserve set off by a grim, almost imperceptible, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of a sort quite unusual to my Western ignorance and inexperience—a charm of manner, intonation, apparently native and unstudied elocution, and all that—the groundwork of it native, the ease of it, the polish of it, the winning naturalness of it, acquired in Europe where he had been Charge d'Affaires some time at the Court of Vienna. He was joyous and cordial, a most pleasant comrade. One of the two incidents above referred to as ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... on the whole, however, is chiefly to be admired for the graceful insouciance of its metre, so well in accordance with the character of the sentiments, and especially for the ease of the general manner. This "ease" or naturalness, in a literary style, it has long been the fashion to regard as ease in appearance alone—as a point of really difficult attainment. But not so:—a natural manner is difficult only to him who should never ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... force? We stand in danger of exaggerating these vociferous thoughts. This question of naturalness as opposed to artificiality is not immediately pertinent to our problem, nor is the matter of optimism and pessimism, nor the biologic idea of survival. We should have looked more to the way of love in the lives of men and women and become historians of the method and conduct of ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... 'Little Prudy.' Compared with her, all other book-children are cold creations of literature; she alone is the real thing. All the quaintness of children, its originality, its tenderness and its teasing, its infinite uncommon drollery, the serious earnestness of its fun, the fun of its seriousness, the naturalness of its plays, and the delicious oddity of its progress, all these united for dear Little Prudy ...
— The Twin Cousins • Sophie May
... mine, took lodgings near me for the summer. She was a remarkable girl. If she was not beautiful, she was better-looking than I was, and she possessed a something, I know not what, more powerful than beauty to fascinate men. Perhaps it was her unconstrained naturalness. In walking, sitting, standing—whatever she did—her movements and attitudes were not impeded or unduly masked by artificial restrictions. I should not have called her profound, but what she said upon the commonest subjects was interesting, because it was so entirely her own. If she disliked ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... Friederike Brion in the parsonage at Sesenheim, a village near Strassburg. Now Herder's teaching bore fruit in an outburst of real song (1, 2 and 4). The influence of the Volkslied is clearly discernible in the unaffected naturalness, spontaneity, and simplicity of these lyrics. Thus das Heidenrslein, which symbolizes the tragic close of the sweet idyll of Sesenheim, is to all intents and purposes ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... interesting picture of the times and of the writers. The poet's own letters, as may be supposed from the thought he bestowed on them, are full of artifice, and composed with the most elaborate care. Every sentence is elaborately turned, and the ease and naturalness which give a charm to the letters of Cowper and of Southey are not to be found in Pope. His epistles are weighted with compliments and with professions of the most exalted morality. 'He laboured them,' says Horace Walpole, 'as much as the Essay on Man, and ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... been a fine vengeance upon them for their sin; one not unworthy of Him who wrought it. It had come so insidiously, with such apparent naturalness, little by little—a settler here, a settler there; here an acre of gray desert charmed to yellow wheat; there a pouch of shining gold washed from the burning sands; another wagon-train with hopeful men ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... original, faithfully limned. In Colonel Delancy Hyde, "Virginia-born," we have a most amusing representative of the lower orders of the "Chivalry." Estelle is a charming creation, and we know of few such touching love-stories as that through which she moves with such naturalness and grace. In the cousins Vance and Kenrick we have strongly marked and delicately discriminated portraits. The negro "Peculiar" is made to attract much of our sympathy and respect. He is not the buffoon that the stage and the novel generally ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of a small floating population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him, and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... together on the windy and bleak down-platform of Knype Station, awaiting the express, which had been signalled. Edwin was undoubtedly very nervous and constrained, and it seemed to him that Janet's demeanour lacked naturalness. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... ornaments render the altar a work of great aggregate value. The entire roof of the church, which is divided into zones, is admirably painted by figures of such proportions as to look of life size from the floor, representing prominent Scriptural scenes. The excellence, finish, and naturalness of the figures challenged special attention; it was difficult not to believe them to be in bas-relief. On inquiring as to their authorship, we were told that they were the work of Mattia Preli, an enthusiastic artist, who spent his life in this adornment, refusing ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... beautiful casket of carved ivory and pearl was presented to us, containing engrossed copies of the addresses delivered by the students. There was singing of hymns, both in English and in Telugu, by choir and congregation. The beauty of it all was its spontaneity and naturalness, for the pupils themselves had planned and executed ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... very good picture by J. R. Herbert, A., if it were not for its too great or too common naturalness. The subject is the interview with the woman of Samaria. There is good expression, simplicity of design, but violence of colour. The subject demands a simplicity of colouring. Surely in such a scriptural subject, the annunciation, "I that speak unto thee am He," should alone be in the mind; but ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... found in 'The Autobiography of a Thief' is not only stranger but far more interesting than much of the present day fiction. The autobiography of 'Light-fingered Jim' is absorbing, in many pages startling, in its graphicness.... In spite of its naturalness, daring and directness, the work has a marked literary style—a finish that could not have been given by an unexperienced hand. But this adds to rather than detracts from the charm of the ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... learned doctors. There he manifested some of his powers of discernment, interior and natural philosophy, unsophistocated love, simplicity of expression, kindness of disposition, and universal sympathy and benovolence. These he displayed with all the naturalness and spontaneousness resulting from the promptings of an ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... her face; when she looked at him her lips became set, and her eyes—she looked—" She hesitated for a word, and dropped to the homely, "She looked as if she would bite with annoyance that he should be here. The expression was gone in a moment; she spoke with an ease and naturalness that was astonishing, even disgusting; but it had been there. I ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... to meet Claude Heath, so now she caught at Claude Heath himself. She had come to the cafe with a purpose, and, as she forgot it, she carried it out. Never before had Claude understood completely why she had gained her position in London and Paris, realized fully her fascination. Her delightful naturalness, her pleasure, her almost boyish gaiety, her simplicity, her humor took him captive for the moment. She explained that she had left her companions and stolen away ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... 'A Historie of Ariodante and Ginevra was showed before her Majestie on Shrovetuesdaie at night' in 1583. {208} Throughout Shakespeare's play the ludicrous and serious aspects of humanity are blended with a convincing naturalness. The popular comic actor William Kemp filled the role of Dogberry, and Cowley appeared as Verges. In both the Quarto of 1600 and the Folio of 1623 these actors' names are prefixed by a copyist's error to some of the speeches ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... personifies the Deity with the greatest ease and naturalness. The primitive man interprets the whole world about him by the analogy of his own activity. He sees in all the phenomena of nature the presence of personal beings,—beings who act and suffer and enjoy and love and hate as he does himself. The sky, ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... hesitated. He was a man of five-and-thirty, and she could not get over the feeling that her impulsive exclamation had been presumptuous. He saw her uncertainty, and perhaps liked her the better for it, though the delicious naturalness, the child-like recognition of a real though scarcely known friend, had ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... criminal, to the sinner, that he will be pardoned, that he will be free from punishment, that however badly he may act and however sinful he may be, without the least effort, with the greatest ease and naturalness, he will obtain what he wishes and will triumph on earth as well as ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... copies would bear a very small proportion to that which heard them from the writer's own lips; and though the modern system may have the advantage on the whole, it is hard to believe that the unapproached life and naturalness of Lucian's dialogue does not ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), the author of much religious verse, shows the unaffected naturalness of the new movement. This stanza from her Amor Mundi (Love of the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... reserve, and others were warmer and more outgiving. They expressed themselves straightforwardly rather than by artful striving for effect. There was no studied attempt to appear only in a certain light. To use the common word for it, their people did not regard them as "characters." This naturalness had much to do with their hold on ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... want to congratulate you on your son's last book. You must have helped him to the material for so truthful a picture of American manners in the days when we were young. I fear we have not improved much since then. There was a simplicity, a naturalness in society fifty years ago, that one looks in vain for now. There was, it seems to me, much less regard paid to money, and less of morbid social ambition. Don't you think so, ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... notions of each other. She had ceased from imagining him a walking intellect devoid of sympathies, he from considering her a possibly interesting specimen, but not the type of woman who could be agreeable in a man's life. Her naturalness amounted almost to genius. She was generally unable to be anything but natural, unable not to speak as she was feeling, unable to feel unsympathetic. She always showed keen interest when she felt it, and, with transparent sincerity, ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... attempting naturalness, "will you go back to the guard-room and wait there a few minutes, please? I think—that is, it seems just possible that some one is hiding in yonder. I'd prefer to investigate alone ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... future. Mr. Hatton's first book, When It Was Lurid, created little less than a furore. The work on which he is now engaged, which will bear the title of The Browns of Brixton, is a tender sketch of English domesticity. This new vein of Mr. Hatton's will, doubtless, be distinguished by the naturalness of dialogue and sanity of characterisation of his first novel. Messrs. Prodder and Way are to publish ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... saying exactly what you mean with the utmost clearness and the utmost naturalness: simply that! When you have accomplished so much, you have accomplished good style. In no sense is style of the nature of embroidery, an ornament superimposed: this is what the beginner fails to grasp; she somehow cannot rid herself of the superstition that after the meaning is precisely ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... of De Foe has a naturalness about it beyond that of any other novel or romance writer. His fictions have all the air of true stories. It is impossible to believe, while you are reading them, that a real person is not narrating to you everywhere nothing but what ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... and, in the case of Landscape, even Geology and Botany, should be used to increase the accuracy of his representations. For the strength of appeal in artistic work will depend much on the power the artist possesses of expressing himself through representations that arrest everyone by their truth and naturalness. And although, when truth and naturalness exist without any artistic expression, the result is of little account as art, on the other hand, when truly artistic expression is clothed in representations that offend our ideas of physical truth, it is only the few who can ...
— The Practice and Science Of Drawing • Harold Speed
... Katharine interposed. "Nothing at all." She moved a few paces across the room, as if she intended to leave them. Her preoccupied naturalness was in strange contrast to her father's pomposity and to William's military rigidity. He had not once raised his eyes. Katharine's glance, on the other hand, ranged past the two gentlemen, along the books, over the tables, towards the door. She was paying the least possible ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... solace, assurance, in the naturalness of things about him. Everything else was just the same; it did not seem that it could be part of natural law then for his own life to be ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... preposterous start, you will say; yet the delightful naturalness which Miss GLADYS COOPER and Mr. CHARLES HAWTREY bring to the situation gives it almost an air of possibility. But, once we are at Ostend, and have been introduced to Trotter's incredibly inappropriate fiancee ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... philosophique." I do not know whether you have ever had the pleasure of meeting him. He displays a promising exterior, piercing eyes, a countenance full of expression, much show of reading, much acquired naturalness (if I may be allowed the expression), joined to a princely condescension towards the human race, a large amount of confidence in himself, and an eloquence which talks down all opposition. Who could refuse to pay homage to such splendid ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... forward. Though well in years, her eyes were bright; her smile was winsome, and I thought her face one of the loveliest I had ever looked upon. The voice was singularly sweet and clear, and the manner had such naturalness and grace as a queen might envy. I have forgotten the words, forgotten even the subject, but the benign presence and gracious smile ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... which that parish—if their protest prevailed—would now be dedicated. Not that the church was at once mentioned, but subtly implied as now enlisted,—and emancipated henceforth from all ecclesiastical narrowness . . . . The amazing thing by which Hodder was suddenly struck was the naturalness with which Alison seemed to fit into the new scheme. It was as though she intended to remain there, and had abandoned all intention of returning to the life which apparently she had once permanently and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... a significant wild shyness about her. My presence seemed at once to put her on her guard. The music of her voice was suddenly hushed, as though she had hurriedly, almost in terror, thrown a robe of reticence about an impulsive naturalness not to be displayed before strangers. As for the storekeeper, he was evidently a familiar acquaintance. He had known her—he said, after she was gone—since ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... absorbing charm, sustained interest, and a wealth of thrilling and romantic situations." "So naively fresh in its handling, so plausible through its naturalness, that it comes like a mountain breeze across the far-spreading desert of similar romances."—Gazette-Times, Pittsburg. "A slap-dashing ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... been the aim of any of our masters. Indeed, it may be well in passing to point out to pupils how fatal to success in writing is the attempt to imitate the style of any man, De Quincey included; it is always in order to emphasize the naturalness and spontaneity of the "grand style" wherever it is found. The teacher should not inculcate a blind admiration of all that De Quincey has said or done; there is opportunity, even in this brief ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... speed. At the same time it must be admitted that great increase in rapidity is chiefly obtained by the system of preconcerted abbreviations, before explained, and by the adoption of arbitrary forms, in which naturalness is sacrificed and conventionality established, as has been the case with all spoken languages in the degree in which they have ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... however, for me to speak ill of Pope or his great disciples, above all, when they possess pathos and naturalness like Goldsmith: after the greatest they are perhaps the most agreeable writers and the poets best fitted to add charm to life. Once when Lord Bolingbroke was writing to Swift, Pope added a postscript, in which he said—"I think some advantage ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... praise to an author to say that he is naive; it means that he need not shrink from showing himself as he is. Generally speaking, to be naive is to be attractive; while lack of naturalness is everywhere repulsive. As a matter of fact we find that every really great writer tries to express his thoughts as purely, clearly, definitely and shortly as possible. Simplicity has always been held to be ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... calling things by their right name, and to speak about natural things in a natural way;—all that was foreign to the Middle Ages. Neither was that age familiar with the piquant double sense, in which, out of defective naturalness and out of a prudery that has become morality, things that may not be clearly uttered, are veiled, and are thereby rendered all the more harmful; such a language incites but does not satisfy; it suggests but does not speak out. Our social conversation, our novels and our theatres ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... belle and a general favorite in the American colony. Following a fashion, which Tom was sure had been made for his benefit, she had cut off her obnoxious red hair and substituted in its place a wig of reddish brown, which for naturalness and beauty was a marvel of art and skill, and became her so well that Tom really thought her handsome, or at least very stylish and stunning, which was better than mere beauty. They had a suite of rooms at the Continental, and there Harold and Jerrie dined with them ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... composition, as it were a principle of reflection, by which lines close in upon or recede from each other. We have, in a former paper in this Magazine, treated of this principle—to dwell on it now would take us far from our purpose. As to the ability of all persons to judge of the naturalness of a picture, the translator doubts the correctness of the affirmative opinion of his author. He remarks, that "it requires considerable practice and experience to enable one to judge how much art can do; what is the exact medium between feebleness and exaggeration, which constitutes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... is exemplified by the anecdote of a child going through a gallery of old portraits. She paid very little attention to the finishing, or naturalness of drapery, but put herself at once to mimic the awkward attitudes. "The censure of nature uninformed, fastened upon the greatest fault that could be in a picture, because it related to the character and management of the whole." What ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... been right. The greatest miracles were in himself—Pelle, who resembled hundreds of millions of other workmen, and had never yet had more than just enough for his food. Man was really the most wonderful of all. Was he not himself, in all his commonplace naturalness, like a luminous spark, sprung from the huge anvil of divine thought? He could send out his inquiring thought to the uttermost borders of space, and back to the dawn of time. And this all-embracing power seemed ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo |
