"Pleasurable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... one of those unaccountable and extraordinary monsters, who, thanks to nature! appear but once in many ages, to whom sin is dear for its own naked self, to whom butchery(8) is a pastime, and blood and agonies and tears a pleasurable excitement to their mad ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... discussing the question with Wild, I informed all hands that I intended to try and make a march to the west to reduce the distance between us and Paulet Island. A buzz of pleasurable anticipation went round the camp, and every one was anxious to get on the move. So the next day I set off with Wild, Crean, and Hurley, with dog teams, to the westward to survey the route. After travelling ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... that if the persecution of these classes of people continue, and commerce (already nearly annihilated by the war) be thus shackled, an absolute want of various articles of primary consumption must ensue; but if Paris and the armies can be supplied, the starving the departments will be a mere pleasurable experiment to their ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... to the wardrobe to get his coat. There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me, they shan't say I was afraid to face them." Heated red-hot with that idea, he seized his hat and ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the Fair Harbor his comings and goings were no longer events to cause pleasurable interest and excitement. The change there was quite as evident. Miss Snowden and Mrs. Brackett, leaders of their clique, always greeted him politely enough, but they did not, individually or collectively, ask his advice or offer theirs. There were smiles, significant ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... of a father, mother, two sons, and one daughter. They are far from exhibiting in their countenances that contentment of mind which is a "continual feast," and yet something has transpired that gives them, for the time being, an unusual degree of pleasurable emotion. ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... realized, as well as anybody, that the nephew of Richard Smallwood would not be considered a fitting mate for a daughter of the house of Farringdon; but the fact that he did not mention the circumstance in no way prevented him from dwelling upon it in his own mind, and deriving much pleasurable pain and much painful pleasure therefrom. In short, he dwelt upon it so exclusively and so persistently that it went near to breaking his heart; but that was not until his heart was older, and therefore more capable of being broken ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... was anything but pleasurable; but Captain Keppel's conciliatory and kind manner soon removed any feeling of fear; and was all along of the greatest use to me in our subsequent doings. The first qualification, in dealing with a Malay, is a kind and gentle manner; for their habitual politeness is ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... The sentiment of recognition was wholly genuine and almost rapturously pleasurable. It is true that in the confusion of our flight I had not been able to give a thought to our friend, who was, unless I am much mistaken, absent from her palace. Nor will I be so absurd as to pretend ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... him in countenance, but Clorinda rather trifled with the sweets, drinking so much strong tea in her pleasurable agitation, that to an observer given to ludicrous ideas, her jetty face would have suggested the idea of an old fashioned black teapot, with her pug nose for the chubby spout. Sally witnessed this dashing festival from behind the door, ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... itself as it uses to do on such occasions; some pity you, and condemn your father; others excuse him, and blame you; only the ladies are merciful, and wish you well, since love and pleasurable expense ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... thought; for it is above bodily thought, and looks upon what belongs to thought from the memory as below itself, drawing therefrom either conclusions or confirmations. But real affection for truth is perceived only as a pressure of will from something pleasurable which is interiorly in meditation as its life, and is little noticed. From all this it can now be seen that these three, affection for truth, perception of truth, and thought, follow in order from love, and ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg
... table gathering the dishes together, satisfied and even glowing with a pleasurable agitation. She was glad that everything had gone so ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... gloomy. There are no huge ungainly pillars in the body of the building; an easy, capacious freedom prevails in it; seeing is not a difficult business; the first sensation which increases as you remain in the church, is calmly pleasurable and satisfactory. There is nothing flimsey, nor specious, nor whimsical in the place; evenness and harmony of proportion; simplicity and solidity of style, strength and straightforwardness of workmanship, strike you as its characteristics. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... didn't feel "crazy" about her. She was sitting bolt upright, with her cheeks flaming a little when she felt Kent's arm stealing round her. She did not resist when he pulled her softly against him. She was utterly surprised at the pleasurable sensation she experienced at having Kent's arm about her. The others were singing but for once Lydia's throaty ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... muttered the lad, gazing up the hundreds of feet of almost sheer precipice. But ere the Pony Rider Boys scaled those rocks again they would pass through some experiences that were far from pleasurable ones. ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... transition, from the full consciousness of life, to the revelations of the heavenly world. Perhaps the effect of disease upon the organs of hearing was such as to produce something like sounds, which, in a joyous state of mind, were pleasurable. During the siege of Jerusalem in 1836, the wife of an American missionary sung while dissolution was actually taking place. The tones of her voice, they said, seemingly more than mortal, were far different from any thing which they had ever ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... all the objects with which he has to do, all works of art, and the fairer forms of nature and human life, as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This influence he feels, and wishes to explain, analysing it and reducing it to its elements. To him, the picture, the landscape, the engaging personality in life or in a book, La Gioconda, the ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... cramped quarters in the little chalet their solitude was broken now and then by a visitor. Thither went at various times "Bob" Stevenson, Sir Sidney Colvin, Mr. Charles Baxter, Mr. W. E. Henley, and Miss Ferrier. The pleasurable excitement of this society, to which he had been so long a stranger, raised Mr. Stevenson's spirits to such an extent that he rashly proposed an expedition to Nice, where he took cold, developed pneumonia, was critically ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... to go abroad. I have made up my mind to that huge, half pleasurable, half painful undertaking; or shall I say, rather, that both the pleasure and the pain come by wholes, and not by halves? The latter I feel as a domestic man, for I must go alone; the former I feel as a civilized man. Civilized, I say, for who that has the lowest measure of educated intelligence ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... to his nephew, whose lingering panic he mistook for pleasurable excitement, and having enfolded him to his bosom turned to greet Don ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... direction of morality by religion had proved a failure. Helvetius, as the organ of reaction against asceticism and against mysticism, appealed to positive experience, and to men's innate tendency to seek what is pleasurable and to avoid what is painful. The scientific imperfection of his attempt is plain; but that, at any rate, is what the attempt signified ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... this lust. This is the accepted, sentimental, and picturesque description: a sort of compound of sinfulness and pathos, making a draught, if the truth is faced, not always altogether unpleasing to women, a fact which surely accounts for the excitement and veiled pleasurable curiosity with which the subject usually is approached. For the lust, men are held responsible, and the chaste characters of women are held up in contrast. Now, it is this view of the matter which affords prostitution one of its most certain opportunities of permanency: also it gives women, ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... could easily render permanent in the minds of their captives the abject terror struck into them by the enormities of which they had been the victims. Now, the impressions we touched upon before bringing forward the case of the Negro slaves were mainly produced by pleasurable circumstances. But of a contrary nature and much more deeply graven are those sentiments which are the outcome of hopeless terror [198] and pain. For whilst impressions of the former character glide into the consciousness through accesses no less normal than agreeable, the ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... have the time or facilities for leaving town during the summer, to spend a part of their time enjoying the country, but would have sufficient time to take occasional recreation for short periods. I have sought by this paper to show a pleasurable, and at the same time very instructive use for the time of this latter class, and that is in mineralogy. In the surrounding parts of New York are many mineralogical localities, known to no others than a few professional ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... announces a new victory we are happy; when our front in the Argonne advances we are satisfied; when our faithful Landsturm beats back a French attack in the Vosges, it awakes a pleasurable pride in our breasts. But when progress is announced in Flanders, when a single square yard of earth is captured by our brave troops in the Ypres district, then all Germany is beside herself with pure joy. The ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... but she could not bring herself to do it; it would mean that she distrusted M. de Nueil. Moreover, he had taken a great fancy to this very Valleroy estate, where he was making plantations and improvements. She would not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands, ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... his position as president of the association it was his pleasurable duty to present a copy of their guide to Mr. G. F. Hoar, the distinguished member of the United States Government, who had always taken a great interest in their historic City.—The presentation consisted of a handsomely ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... particular times of his writing were, the people of the age he lived in, who began to grow wonderfully fond of diversions of this kind, could not but be highly pleased to see a genius arise amongst them, of so pleasurable, so rich a vein, and and so plentifully capable of furnishing their favourite entertainments. Besides the advantage which Shakespear had over all men in the article of wit, he was of a sweet, gentle, amiable disposition, and was a most agreeable ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... hurried on by an impulse to which no obstacle is presented, communicates to the body its languor and debility. The passions, by which the body is chiefly affected, are, joy, grief, hope, fear, love, hatred, and anger. Any others may be reduced to some of these, or are compounded of them. The pleasurable passions produce strong excitement of the body, while the depressing passions diminish the excitement; indeed it would seem that grief is only a diminution of joy, as cold is of heat; when this passion exists in a proper degree, then we feel no particular ...
— Popular Lectures on Zoonomia - Or The Laws of Animal Life, in Health and Disease • Thomas Garnett
... inestimable value, contrasted with the repetitions of organic form which we are compelled to give in vegetation. A really great artist dwells on every inch of exposed soil with care and delight, and renders it one of the most essential, speaking and pleasurable parts of his composition. And be it remembered, that the man who, in the most conspicuous part of his foreground, will violate truth with every stroke of the pencil, is not likely to be more careful in other parts of it; and that in the little bits which ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... ridiculous, you would tumble into the ridiculous, deeply and hopelessly! And think how your very original festival would delight the participators, how they would look forward to it with joy, and back upon it with pleasurable regret; how their minds would dwell sweetly upon the conception of shredded wheat, and how their faith would be encouraged and strengthened by the intellectuality ...
— The Feast of St. Friend • Arnold Bennett
... vertigo is attended with an increase of pleasure; for the irritative ideas and motions occasioned by internal stimulus, that were not attended to in our sober hours, are now just so much increased as to be succeeded by pleasurable sensation, in the same manner as the more violent motions of our organs are succeeded by painful sensation. And hence a greater quantity of pleasurable sensation is introduced into the constitution; which is attended ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... gallons, and they felt it incumbent upon them to save what they could. Anyway, it was difficult to tear themselves away from the fascinations of Nature's prodigal outburst, and so, as being the easiest and most pleasurable course, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... always saw him back into his own rooms. No one knew better than Mr. Maule that the continual bloom of lasting summer which he affected requires great accuracy in living. Late hours, nocturnal cigars, and midnight drinkings, pleasurable though they may be, consume too quickly the free-flowing lamps of youth, and are fatal at once to the husbanded ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... servants were merely going to work somewhat harder and have somewhat less sleep; but such is the magical effect of holly and mistletoe twined round picture-cords and hung under chandeliers that the excitement of the servants was entirely pleasurable. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... himself to masticate and swallow. With the unaccustomed flavour of gravy or fruit juice there may be seen on his face a look of hesitation or surprise. In the stolid and placid child these manifestations are as a rule but little marked, and pleasurable sensations clearly predominate. With children of more nervous temperament it is clear that sensations of taste are much more acute. Even in earliest infancy, children have a way of proclaiming their nervous inheritance by the repugnance which they show to even trifling ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... under ordinary circumstances! abstinence and cleanliness, labor and rest, these simple laws, observed in just proportions, laws that may be engrossed upon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain the equilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibrium is disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectify the unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetary motions do not escape distortion: nor is ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... for me to say that the warm congratulations of my friends, the prospects of change, and the sense of new responsibilities, did not delight and excite me. But a strong measure of regret was mixed with the pleasurable draught. I was greatly attached to my chief, and keenly felt the parting from him. He felt it too. When it came to the last ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow
... entertainments, dramatics, etc. As long as those giving the entertainment are local people, friends or relatives, the audience takes a more or less sympathetic part in the performance and is not actuated solely by the desire to purchase pleasurable sensations as is the case with commercial amusements. I mean by commercial amusements those which are operated solely for profit, whose advantages the individual purchases for his own pleasure rather than with any idea of participating in a group activity. ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... will admit that I have already been frank in my description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon this head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in the world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than when he passes from Damien's "Chinatown" at Kalawao to the beautiful Bishop-Home at Kalaupapa. At this point, in my desire to make all fair for you, I will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony. Here is a passage from my diary about my visit ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... features shone with the gentle light of a pleasurable remembrance. "It was lovely and quiet out there, just like Saskatchewan or the Soudan. Sometimes I fancied I must be close to the fringe of civilization, with the life of the outer world pulsing near at hand, for I could hear whispers of it; ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... prepared. The hour of supper being arrived, we repair to rooms illuminated with the lustre of a thousand tapers fragrant with amber. The supper-room is surrounded by three vast galleries, in which are placed musicians, whose various instruments fill the mind with the most pleasurable and the softest emotions. The young girls are seated at table with us, and, towards the conclusion of the repast, they sing songs, which are hymns in honour of the God who has endowed us with senses which shed such a charm over existence, and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... it was an hour apart. He gathered leaves and placed them here, and here he paused in the lateness of each day though his bring was frugal and his belly would rumble that night. But to that he was accustomed, and this was pleasurable. ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... little difficulty now in procuring promptly the very best accommodation which the house afforded. That this arrangement was accomplished somewhat to the present discomfort of two vociferous Eastern tourists did not greatly interfere with his pleasurable interest ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... engaged to a medical officer in the army. There is another person who frequently completes the family circle at 11 Downing Street. It is Richard Lloyd, the old shoemaker who forty years ago risked his little all to educate his orphan nephew. It was one of the pleasurable anticipations of Lloyd George, when he was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer with the privileges of this historic residence, that Richard Lloyd would be able to come and stay there. "My dear old uncle," he said, "will be so proud ...
— Lloyd George - The Man and His Story • Frank Dilnot
... Tracey, is the only pleasurable incident of a detestable cruise, I can assure you," said Martyn as he bade her farewell; "the Reynard is a beast of a ship and we are employed on beastly work; in fact I'm nothing better than a London sergeant of police detailed off for duty to watch 'the criminal ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... six weeks' work, was one mummified cat! To sit over the work day after day, as did the unfortunate promoter of this particular enterprise, with the flies buzzing around his face and the sun blazing down upon him from a relentless sky, was hardly a pleasurable task; and to watch the clouds of dust go up from the tip-heap, where tons of unprofitable rubbish rolled down the hillside all day long, was an occupation for the damned. Yet that is excavating as it is usually ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... some prohibited dainty. At last the Doctor relented, took it down, and indulged himself in the gratification of letting her taste from his hand; his eyes, always expressive in the revelation of pleasurable feelings, luminously and smilingly avowed that it was a gratification; and he prolonged it by so regulating the position of the cup that only a drop at a time could reach the rosy, sipping lips by which its ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... continuest in any sinful practice, and yet thou canst not abandon thy daily dose of this or that poison without suicide. For the sin of thy soul has become the necessity of thy body, daily tormenting thee, without yielding thee any the least pleasurable sensation, but goading thee on by terror without hope. Under such evidence of God's wrath how canst thou expect to be saved?" Well may the heart cry out, "Who shall deliver me from the 'body of this death',—from this death that lives and tyrannizes in my body?" But the Gospel answers—"There ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... so much as the quiver of a muscle or the minutest shifting of an eye had he given sign. Still convinced that he was the mysterious knight of the desert, she was moved to admiration for his self-command and to a sub-thrill of pleasurable fear as before an unknown and formidable species. The man who had transformed self-controlled and invincible Io Welland into the creature of moods and nerves and revulsions which she had been for the fortnight preceding her marriage, ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... far below zero with no covering upon his shoulders but a damp reindeer skin. It may not be unhealthy, and perhaps a physician of the water-cure practice might recommend it for certain ailments, but it would never become popular as a pleasurable pastime. At night the other two skins are put in the bed, one beneath and the other over the sleepers, and by morning are dry. But it seems almost a miracle that the occupants escape a severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism. In the morning the man ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... his dwelling-place made him not only discontented with his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he found himself. "I am here," he writes, "on my farm, but for all the pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am at the very elbow of existence. The only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting.... As for the Muses, they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as ...
— Robert Burns • Principal Shairp
... to the stability of his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated, and he did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity and some excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately attainable by very many more. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 3 (of 3) - Essay 2: The Death of Mr Mill - Essay 3: Mr Mill's Autobiography • John Morley
... snow and rain swept the roofs, and with a low, rushing sound ran along the gurgling gutters; sometimes a gust of wind forced itself beneath the tiles, which rattled together like castanets, and afterward it was lost in the empty corridor. Then a slight and pleasurable shiver thrilled through my veins: I drew the flaps of my old wadded dressing-gown around me, I pulled my threadbare velvet cap over my eyes, and, letting myself sink deeper into my easy-chair, while my feet basked in the heat and light which shone through the door of the stove, I ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... beautiful, no image however magnificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was clothed in English; but present him with the most trivial common-places in Greek, and he unaffectedly fancied them divine; mistaking the pleasurable sense of his own power in a difficult and rare accomplishment for some peculiar force or beauty in the passage. Such was the outline of his literary taste. And was it upon Shakspeare only, or upon him chiefly, ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... waiting my sponsor's return. Nor did he say where he was going, in case we failed to meet, for no one was allowed to mention the whereabouts of the G.H.Q. After two hours were over, I was at the appointed spot with that pleasurable sense of excitement that seldom comes after one has settled down in life. I could then understand better how a spy must feel. The town naturally was unlit for fear of aircraft, and yet there was a queer feeling that every one was looking at you as you walked up and down ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of Mexico, where I had been graduated in the law, having also made a thorough study of botany, and was happily and lucratively employed in collecting specimens of the Californian flora for the old college, as well as for one in the States, and two in Europe. This pleasurable employment gave me an income, more than supplying the few wants of the primitive life at the little rancho, the herds of which were alone ...
— The Beautiful Eyes of Ysidria • Charles A. Gunnison
... its habitual use, we cannot fail to be struck with the extraordinary fact, that so large a portion of mankind should voluntarily struggle through its repugnant qualities, both of taste and effect, until by habit its stimulus grows pleasurable, and the system becomes mithridated against its poison! It would almost seem as if the use of some substance of this class were necessary to the intellectual and physical economy of man, since no nation nor age, of which we have ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... the latter-day hero, whose appetite for dragons is not keen, this absence of adventure is perhaps rather pleasurable than otherwise; and I confess that I enjoyed the days I spent on foot with Nicolete none the less because they passed in tranquil uneventfulness,—that is, without events of the violent kind. Of course, all depends on what you call ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... you, no matter whether he has been friend or foe. I have no resentments, no bitterness of feeling to carry with me. On the contrary, I shall go back to the pursuit of my profession with my mind and my heart filled with only grateful recollection and a pleasurable, and I trust a pardonable, pride for the gallant, intrepid band who have honored me with their support in this contest. Without any disposition to criticise or find fault in the slightest degree, but only as an excuse ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... fault-findings she bore during the day. Like the hero of a ballad, German or Russian, I forget which, her sleep seemed to her the happy life; her waking hours a bad dream. She had just had her only pleasurable waking in three years. The memories of her childhood had sung their melodious ditties in her soul. The first couplet was heard in a dream; the second made her spring out of bed; at the third, she doubted her ears,—the sorrowful are all disciples of Saint Thomas; but when the fourth was ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... nature—a nature impassioned, frank, generous, and noble, in spite of the taint of overweening, ambitions egotism which somewhat warped its true quality and narrowed the range of its sympathies. In his then frame of mind, a curious, vague sense of half-pleasurable penitence was upon him,—delicate, undefined, almost devotional suggestions stirred his thoughts with the refreshment that a cool wind brings to parched and drooping flowers,—so that when Heliobas, taking ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... simplicity implied by such a name. The site of our dwelling was not far from the Paddington Canal, and was then so far out of town that our nearest neighbors, people of the name of Cockrell, were the owners of a charming residence, in the middle of park-like grounds, of which I still have a faint, pleasurable remembrance. The young ladies, daughters of Mr. Cockrell, really made the first distinct mark I can detect on the tabula rasa of my memory, by giving me a charming pasteboard figure of a little girl, to whose serene and sweetly smiling countenance, and pretty person, a whole bookful ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... Jos of the sentimental adventure which had just befallen the latter, he was not, it must be owned, nearly as much interested as the gentleman from Bengal. On the contrary, his excitement was quite the reverse from a pleasurable one; he made use of a brief but improper expression regarding a poor woman in distress, saying, in fact, "The little minx, has she come to light again?" He never had had the slightest liking for her, but had heartily mistrusted her from the ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... so, and took first one and then the other in his big soft grey palms, to mould and knead and rub them with untiring patience for long enough, the effect being pleasurable ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... his pipe carefully. He had won the first trick, he told himself, and the thought was pleasurable. The conversation had started up again, but it was yet perfunctory, and Satherwaite realized that he was still an outsider. Doyle gave him ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... welcomed his absence. It gave her so much more time for her own work, which absorbed and delighted her. She had never known any sensation so pleasurable as that sense of adventure with which, each morning, she went to work. First, she patted the manuscript pile, which grew so amazingly fast. Then she filled her fountain pen and looked off over the treetops, beyond ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke
... their bustle and din were to him detestable. Around him were sunlight and freedom; the future gave him no anxiety; for he was disposed to accept from life whatever it could offer him. Sanine shut his eyes tight, and stretched himself; the tension of his sound, strong muscles gave him pleasurable thrills. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... appurtenances, we must name the andirons—or, if the fuel is to be coal, then the basket grate. I have wondered sometimes why the philosophers have not hit upon the andiron as a particularly fitting subject for pleasurable rumination. There are so few things which combine to such a degree the purely utilitarian with the eminently decorative qualities. Most things which do combine the two in any real measure have been developed on the ...
— Making a Fireplace • Henry H. Saylor
... mere romancist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and maintain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague of London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the 123 prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts ...
— Roger Trewinion • Joseph Hocking
... surprise that in spite of a crowded house the two seats next him remained unoccupied; but just before the curtain rose again he turned his head suddenly to discover that one of the seats at least, the one farthest from him, was filled. The recognition of this fact came almost with a shock, a pleasurable shock, for the new arrival was a young and beautiful woman and his first feeling of surprise was shot with approbation at the noiselessness of her entrance, an approbation that he ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... in a somewhat similar manner in Book III., which opens with an address to Light—one of the most beautiful passages in the poem, in which he alludes to his blindness when expressing his thoughts and sentiments with regard to this ethereal medium, which conveys to us the pleasurable ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... is, much more than it ought—I mean alms-giving for which he was very remarkable. I have often wondered how he was able to do so many generous things in this way. But his frugality fed the spring. He made no pleasurable expense on himself, and was contented with a very decent appearance in his family, without affecting such an air of grandeur as could not have been supported without sacrificing to it satisfactions far nobler, and, to a temper ...
— The Life of Col. James Gardiner - Who Was Slain at the Battle of Prestonpans, September 21, 1745 • P. Doddridge
... has tamed him and made him a Christian gentleman; the crude and willful have been refined and subdued; religion has made him the most companionable of men and indulgent of masters—a man whose society is pleasurable to a degree.... ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... But she was conscious of a warm pleasurable glow throughout her entire being. It was good to live life in the open, it was good to stand upon the cliff tops with a man like Roderick Norton, it was good to have such a ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... ways. But there remained one rule of the wearer of cap and bells that I had not played. That was the Seeker after Buried Treasure. To few does the delectable furor come. But of all the would-be followers in the hoof-prints of King Midas none has found a pursuit so rich in pleasurable promise. ...
— Options • O. Henry
... in the jury-room, shrewdly "leading" the reluctant witness, delivering weighty opinions on the bearing of testimony, and making all respect him as a marvel of conservatism, dignity, and wisdom. This was to be one of the most important and pleasurable days of his life, the rung in a ladder of preferment which reached as high as ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... to their seats and were watching the ballet, he too felt the consequences of guileless straw-sucking; but with him the after effects were entirely pleasurable. He felt invigorated, ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... surplus; the natural outgo of humanity, its fruit. We are not mere receptacles, we are productive engines, of immense capacity; and, having produced, we must distribute the product. To give, naturally, is to shed, to bear fruit; a healthy and pleasurable process. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... moreover, while very honorable, is scarcely pleasurable. Is any one obliged to submit to such public, sharp and impolite criticisms as a German minister? Is it true of anyone but him that the behavior customary among people of culture does not prevail when he addressed? Without the least scruple one says things to him publicly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... the most pleasurable remembrances I have of Mrs. Pierce is associated with a Handel and Haydn concert in Mechanics' Pavilion. Elijah was given and with Mrs. Campbell and Mrs. Haydn, Mrs. Pierce sang the immortal trio, Lift Thine Eyes, to tremendous enthusiasm. ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... religion, a state of pleasurable annihilation awarded to the wise, particularly to those wise enough ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... was fast drawing to a close, and every student was busy preparing for examinations and annual exercises, and also looking forward to the pleasurable excitement attending class-day ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Thoreau and the Indians grinning openly, and Marie's face peering cautiously and joyously from the cabin door. Three times he entangled his feet hopelessly and floundered like a great fish in the snow; then he caught the "swing" of it and at the end of half an hour began to find a pleasurable exhilaration, even excitement, in his ability to skim over the feathery surface of this great white sea without so much as sinking to his ankle bones. When he slipped the shoes off and stood them up beside his rifle against the cabin, he was panting. His heart was pounding. His lungs drank in the ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Yet, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, Dick remembered that one trait of his Captain's character was a certain daredevil recklessness which made peril, or rather the overcoming of it, a joy and a delight, and caused him actually to court danger for the pleasurable excitement which the evasion of it afforded him. Might it not be, then, that Marshall, knowing the fate that awaited him in the event of detection, was deliberately lingering in Cartagena in order that he might enjoy to the fullest possible extent the ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... with all the force of animal enjoyment. His body is like a good estate to his mind, from which he receives rents and revenues of profit and pleasure in kind, according to its extent, and the richness of the soil. Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation; an effusion of spleen and petty spite at the comforts of others, from feeling none in itself. Falstaff's wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good-humour and good-nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter and ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... wings with black bars. Handsome woodpeckers and gay kingfishers, green and brown cuckoos with velvety red faces and green beaks, red-breasted doves and metallic honeysuckers, were brought in day after day, and kept me in a continual state of pleasurable excitement. After a fortnight one of my servants was seized with fever, and on returning to Malacca, the same disease, attacked the other as well as myself. By a liberal use of quinine, I soon recovered, and obtaining ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... sincerity dissipated every trace of his apprehension. He felt gay, calmly happy, and yet excited too. He was sure, then, that Rachel's agitation was a pleasurable agitation. It was caused solely by his entrance into the kitchen, by the compliment he was paying to her kitchen! Her eyes glittered; her face shone; her little movements were electric; she was intensely conscious of herself—all because he had come into her kitchen! ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... keeping it up with nonsense of this pleasurable sort, but as soon as Anne was back in the car she somehow turned him aside upon quite different ground, just how he could not tell. He found himself led on to talk about his work, and he could not discover in her questioning a trace of anything but genuine interest. No man, however modest about ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived, I maintain, from the contemplation of the Beautiful. In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the heart. I make Beauty, therefore—using the word as inclusive of the sublime—I ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... whether for the splendor of the prospects, the refreshing purity of the air, or the novelty of literally walking in the clouds, we esteem the journey over these downs, as pleasurable as any ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the 'cui bono? cui malo?' system of ethics,—that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... purse permitting, a few guineas at the outside considering the fare to Mullingar where he figured on going was five and six, there and back. The trip would benefit health on account of the bracing ozone and be in every way thoroughly pleasurable, especially for a chap whose liver was out of order, seeing the different places along the route, Plymouth, Falmouth, Southampton and so on culminating in an instructive tour of the sights of the great ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... something belonging to him in my pocket, which was presumably valuable. His friend, Mr. Cullen, I detested, and the reference to Bow Street puzzled me. However, I had no doubt that in a few minutes everything would be explained. Meantime I permitted myself to indulge in certain very pleasurable anticipations. ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... on the flattering side in estimating her cousin's regard for her, always now habitually thought of it and mentioned it in the most scanty measure. She had her own reasons for being less sanguine than ever in hopeful views of the future, less indulgent to pleasurable ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... blackens on the dusky moor, And billows lash the long-resounding shore; In pensive mood I roam the desert ground, And vainly sigh for scenes no longer found. Oh, whither fled the pleasurable hours That chased each care, and fired the muse's powers; The classic haunts of youth, for ever gay Where mirth and friendship cheer'd the close of day, The well-known valleys where I wont to roam, The native sports, the nameless joys of home? Far different ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... palatable, and in its wholesome effect on my constitution. As to its deliciousness, a meal prepared by a Mizora cook could rival the fabled feasts of the gods. Its beneficial effects upon me were manifested in a healthier tone of body and an an increase of animal spirits, a pleasurable feeling of content ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... with a curious sense of pleasurable excitement. I whistled from very lightness of heart as I dressed. When I got down I found the landlady clearing away her breakfast things. I felt disappointed and resolved to be down earlier in future. I didn't feel ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... the park drive to the town he recalled with distinctly pleasurable emotion the first time he had encountered Mrs. Levitt, the vision of the smart little lady who had stood there by the inner gate, the gate that led from the park into the grounds, waiting for his approach with happy confidence. He remembered her smile, an affair ...
— Mr. Waddington of Wyck • May Sinclair
... of the kings under whom they lived. You will thus doubtless have observed in our archaeological department how superior in point of art the pictures were several thousand years ago. Perhaps it is because music is, in reality, more allied to science than it is to poetry, that, of all the pleasurable arts, music is that which flourishes the most amongst us. Still, even in music the absence of stimulus in praise or fame has served to prevent any great superiority of one individual over another; and we rather ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... said that her life was dull, a stupid round of social functions that bored her dreadfully. She had hoped by adopting John Merrick's nieces as her protegees and introducing them to society to find a novel and pleasurable excitement that would serve to take her out of her unfortunate ennui—a condition to which she had ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... was cut off by this collapse of superstition, or eclipse of faith—call it which you will—the habit of pleasurable moving remained; stronger by the force of repeated custom throughout all past times: we keep the shell, but we cunningly substitute a new kernel in the place of the exploded ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his throat swelling till it seemed as if he would suffocate. This was his mother-the woman who bore him, the being who had taken her life in her hand for him; and he, in his excited and pleasurable life, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... occasioned. To this notion he was, no doubt, led from having observed a milder form of St. Vitus' dance, not uncommon in his time, which was accompanied by involuntary laughter, and which bore a resemblance to the hysterical laughter of the moderns, except that it was characterized by more pleasurable sensations, and by an extravagant propensity to dance. There was no howling, screaming, and jumping, as in the severer form; neither was the disposition to dance by any means insuperable. Patients thus affected, although ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... her and trouble. He was so patently an admirer of Joyce Seldon. And on his own merits the virility and good looks of him drew her admiration. At sight of the bruises on his face her heart beat a little fast with pleasurable excitement. He had fought for her like a man. She did not care if he was a workingman. His name was Kilmeny. He was a gentleman by birth, ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... treasured gem Hayat al-Nufus, in wedlock for his son Ardashir, wherefore, if thou consent to this proposal and accept of him, do thou agree with me for her marriage-portion." Abd al-Kadir hearing these words replied, "I hear and obey. For my part, I make no objection, and nothing can be more pleasurable to me; but the girl is of full age and reason and her affair is in her own hand. So be assured that I will refer it to her and she shall choose for herself." Then he turned to the chief eunuch and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... is on them to-day,' said he, with a gleeful look in his eye; for any excitement, no matter at what cost to others, was intensely pleasurable to him. ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... She could hear the maid Marrika moving about in the room beyond. She could hear the rustle of clothes carried to and fro. She knew there were things to dress for—a luncheon, and a bevy of teas—things which must be gone through with, things which at other times she had found sufficiently pleasurable. But now, try as she would to turn her mind to these, it persistently wandered back to the jewel. All the fine, simple pleasure of the morning was dazzled out by it. She slipped it off her finger on to the dressing-table, and it lay among her ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... brought discomfort, especially since the men and women were clothed in the bunglesome garments, necessary in a cool zone frequently overhung with fog. The many open, pleasant months in the Colony made life out of doors a continuing pleasurable experience, when hunting, fishing, horse-racing and games could be indulged ...
— Domestic Life in Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - Jamestown 350th Anniversary Historical Booklet Number 17 • Annie Lash Jester
... at her desk in the empty schoolroom heard the girls laughing and talking, as they clattered down the tin-covered back stairs to the dining-room. She was very tired and very hungry. She had had five hours of work since breakfast, with only a glass of milk at eleven o'clock. Even the pleasurable sensation of being abused did not quite offset the pangs of hunger. She listlessly set about learning the morrow's lesson in French History. It dealt with another martyr. Louis the Ninth left his bones bleaching on the plains of Antioch. The cause was different, but the principle remained. If ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster
... seemed to have entirely forgotten their first meeting, and everything which had occurred since, up to the beginning of her illness, and always talked to her father as though they had but just begun their acquaintance; and it was with feelings half pleasurable, half painful, that he ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... live in Paris upon next to nothing with very great luxury, so we tried it; we strolled through the lilac aisles among bonnes and babies, attended military spectacles, rode on omnibuses, dined on the country heights, went to theatres, and had a most pleasurable time, gaining everywhere front places, friendly smiles, kind little services, in a way that would have been incomprehensible to me but for my consciousness of the magical influence of my father's address, a mixture of the ceremonious ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Scott, "and make its practice pleasurable, and you create for the world a destiny more sublime than ever issued from the ...
— Cheerfulness as a Life Power • Orison Swett Marden
... about by this murder. Your time will be greatly occupied. But, don't render him morbidly suspicious. For instance, no more dinners at The Hollies. No more gadding about by night, if you hear weird noises on the other side of the river. And you must absolutely deny yourself the pleasurable excitement of ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... very forcibly a valuable doctrine for which many earlier writers on the theory of education had failed to get a hearing—the doctrine, namely, that all instruction should be pleasurable and interesting. Fifty years ago almost all teachers believed that it was impossible to make school-work interesting, or life-work either; so that the child must be forced to grind without pleasure, in preparation for life's grind; and the forcing ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... of these cheering facts, with which my researches have been blessed, are pleasurable, and lead me to look back upon those old times with a student's fondness. But besides piety and virtue, I have met with wisdom and philanthropy; the former, too profound, and the latter, too generous for the age; but these things are precious, and worth remembering; ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... task of cheering her somewhat moody brother. She sat beside him, resting her hand with sisterly affection upon his shoulder, while in a low, sweet voice she talked to him, adroitly touching those topics only which she knew awoke pleasurable associations in his mind. Her words were sweet as manna and full of womanly tenderness and sympathy, skilfully wrapped in a strain of gaiety like a bridal veil which covers the tears ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... an ecstasy of joy. To have Compadre under her own roof from Saturday to Monday would be too delightful. Brimful of her pleasurable anticipations, and more like the natural, joyous girl of former days than she had been since leaving Mrs. Harold and Polly, she flew to the piazza where her aunt, arrayed in a filmy lingerie gown, reclined in one of the big East India chairs. For a moment she forgot that she did ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Danforth, the private secretary, roused from his nap in the wicker chair, was able to produce a serviceable revolver. Two minutes later, the sleep still tingling in his nerves to augment another tingling less pleasurable, the secretary had spanned the terrible gap separating the car from the engine and was making his way over the coal, fluttering his handkerchief in ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... bad treatment, or degeneration. The skin of a happy, healthy negro is not only blacker and more oily than an unhappy, unhealthy one, but emits the strongest odor when the body is warmed by exercise and the soul is filled with the most pleasurable emotions. In the dance called patting juber, the odor emitted from the men, intoxicated with pleasure, is often so powerful as to throw the negro women into paroxysms of unconsciousness, vulgo hysterics. On another point of much importance there is no practical difference between the ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... right,' said Felix, feeling very uncomfortable at the time. This great effort of his life was drawing very near. There had been a pleasurable excitement in talking of running away with the great heiress of the day, but now that the deed had to be executed,—and executed after so novel and stupendous a fashion, he almost wished that he had not undertaken it. It must have been much ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... people whose previous practice, for the most part, extended no farther than Gospel hymns or plantation melodies, could not have failed to convince one of careful drill and earnest effort, and was a very pleasurable part of the ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 48, No. 7, July, 1894 • Various
... In the pleasurable height of her anticipations, Polly found it indispensable to put down her piece of toast, cross one of her little fat knees over the other, and bring her little fat right hand down into her left hand with a business-like ...
— Mugby Junction • Charles Dickens
... of life than a person of my limited means can afford to do. The body, you say, is a subtle instrument to be played upon in every variety of manner and rendered above all things as sensitive as possible to pleasurable impressions. In fact, you want to be a kind of Aeolian harp. I admit that this is more than a string of sophisms; you may call it a philosophy of life. But it is not my philosophy. It does not appeal to me in the ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... carrying home some rare plant; but her strength was not equal to her valour—she could not succeed in scaling those heights where flourished the Edelweiss. A week after her arrival she had a surprise, we might even say a pleasurable emotion, which was not comprised in the programme of amusements that the proprietor of Hotel Badrutt undertook to procure for his guests. Returning from an excursion to Lake Silvaplana, she found in her chamber a ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez
... the pursuits which delight mankind—or rather, if you would prefer, let me ask, and do you answer, which of them belong to the pleasurable class, and which of them not? In the first place, what say you of flute-playing? Does not that appear to be an art which seeks only pleasure, Callicles, and ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... her hair mingled with his pleasurable sense of her frank originality. For the first time the bargain really appealed to him. He could not but see that she was easily the fairest of that crush of fair women, and to have her prostrated at the foot of his ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... shaking his long mane and head, commenced a series of curvets and capers which cost the old Frenchman no little trouble to appease. In the midst of these equine freaks, the horse came so near me as to splash my nether garment with a liberality as little ornamental as it was pleasurable. ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pirate stood in his saloon on the morning subsequent to the pleasurable events of the Sunday previous, he, as well as his saloon, presented altogether a different aspect. The apartment had been stripped of all its rare and costly furniture, cabinets, candelabra, plate, china, and glass, and nothing of value was left save the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... to Locke's sensationalism, Hume's skepticism, a new emphasis upon reason as opposed to revelation and the self-sufficiency of the individual. If conscious life is nothing but sensation worked over and built up, then pleasurable sensations are the best we can aspire to, happiness is the end of the quest. So Utilitarianism defined goodness in terms of happiness and gave to conduct generally a grasping, greedy quality for which we have paid over ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... but she drew a number of pictures of various objects, and made me repeat their names, and then she cut out the alphabet in cardboard, by which means I very soon knew my letters. If I was sick she never attempted to teach me, so that all the means offered me of gaining knowledge were pleasurable, and I thus took at once a strong liking to learning, which has never deserted me. Before the termination of the voyage. I could express myself in English, so as to be understood as well as are most children ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... at peace with herself and all the world,—while the relief she experienced at having deliberately severed herself by both word and act from the undesired attentions of a too-persistent and detested lover in the person of Lord Roxmouth, future Duke of Ormistonne, was as keen and pleasurable as that of a child who has run away from school. She was almost confident that the fact of her having thrown off her aunt's protection together with all hope of inheriting her aunt's wealth, would be sufficient to keep him away from her for the future. "For it is Aunt Emily's money he wants—not ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... he sallies forth, To earn experience in the storms of life! But why thus chide—why not with gratitude Receive and cherish ev'ry gleam of joy? For many an hour can witness, that not oft, My solitude is cheered by feelings such, So blithe—so pleasurable as thy song Sweet Robin, gives. Yet on thy graceful banks, Majestic Susquehanna—joy might dwell! For whether bounteous Summer sport her stores, Or niggard Winter bind them—still the forms Most grand, most elegant, that Nature wears Beneath Columbia's skies, are ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... acts according to his own advantage—the question asks merely what this advantage is in the concrete, and whether he who seeks it, seeks it prudently. Even the satisfaction of revenge may be felt as an advantage if it is more pleasurable than the pain which follows confession—the matter is one of relative weight and is prudently sought as the substitution of an immediate and petty advantage for a later ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... vanished so swiftly that he was at a loss to account for them. Miss St. John was a natural foe to dulness of all kinds, and this too without any apparent effort. Indeed, we are rarely entertained by evident and deliberate exertion. Pleasurable exhilaration in society is obtained from those who impart, like warmth, their own spontaneous vivacity. Miss St. John's smile was an antidote for a rainy day, and he was loath to pass from its genial power out under the dripping clouds. Following an impulse, he said to the girl, "You are more ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... The little pleasurable excitement which Merriman had experienced when first the trip had been suggested had not waned as the novelty of the idea passed. Not since he was a boy at school had he looked forward so keenly to holidays. The launch, for one thing, would be a new experience. He had never been on any kind ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts |
