"Savageness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... looking thoughtfully and talking leisurely—and every moment I have expected I confess, some word (that did not come) about Pisa. Mr. Kenyon thinks it cannot end so—and I do sometimes—and in the meantime I do confess to a little 'savageness' also—at heart! All I asked him to say the other day, was that he was not displeased with me—and he wouldn't; and for me to walk across his displeasure spread on the threshold of the door, and moreover take ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... distinctly, one by one, omitting nothing in the immensity of her self-accusation. She could feel the icy horror creeping through bone and marrow, as the truth tortured her in the utterance of it. She could see Greifenstein's grey face transformed with rage and hatred, she trembled under the inhuman savageness of his fiery eyes, she saw his tall body rise up before her, and his hand raised to strike, and she ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... creditors, then, he comported himself with a savageness and scorn towards Sedley, which almost succeeded in breaking the heart of that ruined bankrupt man. On George's intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth with maledictions if he broke his commands, and vilipending ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at times within a few yards of a tiger without knowing it, the tendency of the animal being to crouch and hide until the strange-looking two-legged beast has passed. The narrowest escape I ever had is an instance. I had hunted a large tiger, well known for the savageness of his disposition, on foot from ravine to ravine on the banks of the Pench, one hot day in June, and, giving him no rest, made sure of getting him about three o'clock in the afternoon. He had been seen to slip ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... straight into his tired eyes that were so deep under the black, silver-tipped wings of his brows. I did not mean that death I had threatened myself from the mathematics in the paper, but in my heart there was something that rose and answered the sadness in his eyes with again all that savageness of ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Isaac Reed, in the Biog. Dramatica, was uncertain whether Gay was the author of this unacted drama. It is a satire on the inhuman frolics of the bucks and bloods of those days, who imitated the savageness of the Indians whose name they assumed.[244] Why Gay repurchased "The Mohocks," remains to be discovered. Was it another joint production with Pope?—The literary co-partnership between Pope and Gay has never been opened to the curious. It is probable that Pope was consulted, if not concerned, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... the three before; of how, realizing the necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how, undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands, and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches, and filled those ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... otherwise disturb me while I was writing or reading; yet at other times they could be positively impertinent, especially if excited. The islander is very nervous; when he is quiet, he is shy and reticent, but once he is aroused, all his bad instincts run riot, and incredible savageness and cruelty appear. The secret of successful treatment of the natives seems to be to keep them very quiet, and never to let any excitement arise, a point in which ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... tell why. Every man was at his post—two to each oar bench beside the rower, one with ready shield, and the other with bent bow, and these were looking forward also as they sang that hoarse song which had roused me. I do not know that I have ever heard aught so terrible as that. The wildness and savageness of it bides with me, and of a night when the wind blows round the roof I wake and think I hear it again. But it set me longing for battle, even here on the strange deck, and I would that I might join ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... frowned upon by the impatient, and smiled down by the good-natured in a manner that brought sudden blushes of exasperation to his face, and often made him ashamed to find himself going over these sham battles again in much savageness of spirit, when alone with his books; or, in moments of weakness, casting about for such unworthy weapons as irony and satire. In the present debate, he had just provoked a sneer that made his blood leap and his friends laugh, when Doctor Keene, suddenly rising and beckoning ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Captain." She looked over the roaring side. Long and loose and lean, she was lengthening out like a quarter-horse, and he was singing, but with a puzzling savageness ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... before beauty liberates him from free pleasure, and the serenity of form tames down the savageness of life? Eternally uniform in his aims, eternally changing in his judgments, self-seeking without being himself, unfettered without being free, a slave without serving any rule. At this period, the world is to him only destiny, not yet an object; ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... become scientific, and all the wisdom we can get from this source will be still more advantageous. The woman's physical nature should ever teach us that she is not to be taxed with physical labor beyond her strength and sphere of life. Such taxation is barbarism and savageness. This heathenism always destroys home. The American Indian has no home; he lives an idle, lazy, good-for-nothing life, while his wife, or woman, as the case may be, does all the drudgery. For this very reason he was never elevated, as a general rule, above ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... king arrives Everything will be happy; When Karens have a king Wild beasts will lose their savageness." ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... a little hard battling to keep them from doing it. Ay, by the Gods! it was at times a fight my heart warmed to, and if I had not contrived to pluck a shield from one fool who came too vain-gloriously near me with one, I could not swear they would not have dragged me down by sheer ravening savageness. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... these islands were white, differing only from Europeans in being sun-burnt, and they seemed a very harmless good sort of people, of brisk and lively dispositions, behaving to each other with much civility, and shewing no appearance of wildness or savageness in their behaviour. Their bodies were not painted like those of the islanders they had seen hitherto, but very handsomely cloathed from the waist downwards, with a sort of silk fringes very neatly arranged. On their heads they wore ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... said he, again, mimicking the Gardener's voice, half growling, half coaxing. And while he spoke, the real voice was heard behind the hedge. There was a sound as of a great wasp flying away, which made Dolly prick up her ears, and look as if the old savageness was coming back upon her. The children snatched up their mugs, but there was no need, they had ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... certain of our readers first made acquaintance with it, was filled with troops, and otherwise exhibited all the confusion incident to preparations for an immediate evacuation. These preparations, however were made with a savageness of mien by the irregulars, and a sullen silence by all, that attested how little their inclination had been consulted in the decision of their Chief. Many an oath was muttered, and many a fierce glance was cast by the half civilized back-woodsmen, upon the little detachment as it ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... and so ardently craved. She had parted from him with a consciousness that she was never to meet him again; and yet his image was with her by day and by night—her fancy kept him by day, and her dreams by night. She loved him for the mellow civilization of his heart and for the wild savageness of his garb. Oh, the heart of dear woman! it is her world. Would that the realizations of life were as her heart paints and craves them! He had again come as unexpectedly to her; but the figure was without its surroundings: the diamond was there, but ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... more sweet [Collins]; like the faint exquisite music of a dream [Moore]; music arose with its voluptuous swell [Byron]; music is the universal language of mankind [Longfellow]; music's golden tongue [Keats]; the speech of angels [Carlyle]; will sing the savageness out of a bear [Othello]; music hath charms to soothe ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... mentioned his name to her husband. Trevelyan, acknowledging to himself that he had done no good by his former interference, feeling that he had put himself in the wrong on that occasion, and that his wife had got the better of him, had borne with all this, with soreness and a moody savageness of general conduct, but still without further words of anger with reference to the man himself. But now, on this Sunday, when his wife had been closeted with Colonel Osborne in the back drawing-room, leaving him with his sister-in-law, his temper had become too hot for him, ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... sensation of the cloth and the nude body are as keen as a sword and as inconceivable as madness. And now he cries for help, now he presses the sweet and supple body to his breast. His unconscious abandonment unchains the savageness of his passion. He whispers in a low voice, 'I love you, I love you.' And throwing himself violently upon her lips, he feels his ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... heights and depths, mere rock walls and pine trees, and rushing water. For really, what had these to do with her? These were only physical things that she was passing. Nevertheless, although she resisted sensation, she was more and more shot through and through with the wildness and savageness ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... will bring no advantage to one, but will cause sorrow.' And when you know this, then eschew it. I say to all you dwellers in this village, answer me this. Lopho, that is covetousness, Thoso, that is anger and savageness, and Moho, that is ignorance and folly—when any or all of these arise in the hearts of men, is the result beneficial or the reverse?' And they answered, 'It is not beneficial, O Lord!' Then the Lord continued, 'Covetous, passionate, and ignorant men destroy life and steal, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... again inclined downward to the sea in increasing savageness of desolation. Stones littered the purple surface of the moors, or rose in insecure heaps on the steep slopes, as though piled there by the hands of the giants supposed to have once roved these gloomy wilds. Solitude held sway, but there ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... it was—the most 'orrible sight I ever saw, for wild savageness, so I drew my sword and gave the hox a prog that sent 'im 'ead over 'eels down the kloof w'ere 'e broke 'is back. Just at that werry moment—would you mind takin' your toe out o' my neck, Junkie? it ain't comfortable: thank you.—Well, ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... the truth is that savageness begets savageness, and gentleness begets gentleness. Children who are unsympathetically treated become unsympathetic; whereas treating them with due fellow-feeling is a means of cultivating their fellow-feeling. With family governments as ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... leaves any impression on the memory. "Labitur et labetur;" it forms and breaks again, like the billows of the sea, and is but a mockery of unity. When I speak of barbarian states, I mean such as consist of members not simply barbarous, but just so far removed from the extreme of savageness that they admit of having certain principles in common, and are able to submit themselves individually to the system which rises out of those principles; that they do recognize the ideas of government, property, and ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... rolling on the ground; but the well-trained steed sprang nimbly on one side, and the now infuriated buffalo dashed towards Mike and me. I shot my last arrow, but it glanced off the skull of the creature, which now came towards me, looking the picture of savageness. ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... of an elevated and intellectual kind have been strangers to his heart; and were it not that the subtlety of wit was a gift bestowed upon him by supernatural existencies, he must long ere this have sunk his mind to the lowest savageness ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... new invention, were full of it. The babbling infancy of this great union of art and learning, whose speech flows in its later works so clear, babbled of nothing else: its Elizabethan savageness, with its first taste of learning on its lips, with its new classic lore yet stumbling in its speech, already, knew nothing else. The very rudest play in all this collection of the school,—left to show us the march of that 'time-bettering age,' the play which offends us most—belongs properly ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... were readers in sympathetic action with thinkers and literary artists. Their saying in common, 'Plutarch's Pompeius,' may be traceable to a reading of some professorial article on the common portrait-painting of the sage of Chaeroneia. The dainty savageness in the 'bite' Plutarch mentions, evidently struck on a similarity of tastes in both, as it has done with others. And in regard to Caesar, Clotilde thought much of Caesar; she had often wished that Caesar (for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... my sight. Down he went with a crash. I wound the reel like a madman, but I never even half got up the slack line. The swordfish had run straight toward the boat. He leaped again, in a place I did not expect, and going down, instantly came up in another direction. His speed, his savageness, stunned me. I could not judge of his strength, for I never felt his weight. The next leap I saw him sling the hook. It was a great performance. Then that swordfish, finding himself free, leaped for the open sea, and every few yards he came out in a clean jump. I watched him, too ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... me a look that was savageness itself. Apparently he was on the verge of giving way to a burst of temper. But he seemed to think better of it, and turning, he jumped into ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer
... birds, one on its bough, and one above it, seen in the background, behind a soldier's mace, in the drawing of the Betrayal. In the engraving of this subject, by Schoengauer himself, the mace does not occur; it has been put in by the finishing workman, in order to give greater expression of savageness to the boughs of the tree, which, joined with the spikes of the mace, form one mass of disorganized angles and thorns, while the birds look partly as if being torn to pieces, and ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... only steeled the Hollanders to a more obstinate resistance; nor must it be concealed that in these plusquam civilia bella, where civil hatred was still further embittered by sectarian malignancy, the Dutch sometimes displayed as much savageness as their adversaries. Thus, during the struggle in Zealand, a surgeon at Veer cut out the heart of a Spanish prisoner, and, fixing it on the prow of a vessel, invited his fellow-townsmen to fix their teeth in it, an invitation with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... principles the most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout did both, and both simultaneously; ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... myself under the necessity of observing, that this learned and judicious writer has not accurately distinguished the deficiencies and demands of the different conditions of human life, which, from a degree of savageness and independence, in which all laws are vain, passes, or may pass, by innumerable gradations, to a state of reciprocal benignity, in which laws shall be no longer necessary. Men are first wild and unsocial, living each man to himself, taking ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... exclaimed the elder, with concentrated savageness which did credit to his powers of command. What you choose has nothing to do with it, and that you'll please to understand. At half-past nine to-morrow morning you're ready for me in this room; hear that? I'll have an end to this ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... intimacies. As she told her aunt in her wickedness, she would almost have preferred a shoemaker,—if she could have become acquainted with a shoemaker in a manner that should be unforced and genuine. There was a savageness of antipathy in her to the mode of life which her circumstances had produced for her. It was that very savageness which made her ride so hard, and which forbade her to smile and be pleasant to people whom she could not like. And yet she knew that something must be done. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... with a hot right hand, That shall afflict thee with the touch of fire, Till, scorpion-like, thou turn and sting thyself. What dost thou think—that I shall perish here, Gnawed by the tooth of hungry savageness? Think what thou list, and go what way thou wilt. I, that have truth and heaven on my side, Though but a weak and solitary woman, Forecast no fear of any violence— But thou, false hound! thou would'st not dare come back, ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... flippancy that ran through Aurora's demonstrations of preference for the younger man. The quarrel was inevitable, however, and it was precipitated by a half-drunken demonstration of affection towards Aurora on Quigley's part, which the girl resented with a savageness that betrayed ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... the due homage that you owe me. I am the King Egerius, The worthy lord of this small realm, for thus I call it being mine; Till 'tis the world, my sword shall not resign Its valorous hope. The dress, Not of a king, but of wild savageness I wear: to testify, Thus seeming a wild beast, how wild am I. No god my worship claims; I do not even know the deities' names: Here they no service nor respect receive; To die and to be born is all that we believe. Now that you know how much you should revere ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... those who have the command of men try to bring them to order and discipline by the mildest and fairest means, and not treat them worse than gardeners do those wild plants, which, with care and attention, lose gradually the savageness of their ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... any zoo or menagerie, had they seen his equal. He was a monster, with massive head, deep chest and powerful limbs; and his thick fur—nature's protection against the Arctic cold—seemed to emphasize both his size and his savageness. ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... and those gentlemen which should have inhabited all the year in those countries, whose valiant minds were much to be commended, that neither fear of force, nor the cruel nipping storms of the raging winter, neither the intemperature of so unhealthful a country, neither the savageness of the people, neither the sight and show of such and so many strange meteors, neither the desire to return to their native soil, neither regard of friends, neither care of possessions and inheritances, finally, ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... be a greater savageness or cruelty, or any thing more degrading to a man of fashion, than to put upon, or take unbecoming liberties with him, whose modesty, humility, or respect, will not suffer him to retaliate. True politeness consists in making every body happy about you; and as to mortify is to render unhappy, ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... say here, that howsoever he may have been indebted to Burns's example for the notion of writing at all, he has profited very little by Burns's own poems. Instead of the genial loving tone of the great Scotchman, we find in Elliott a tone of deliberate savageness, all the more ugly, because evidently intentional. He tries to curse; "he delights"—may we be forgiven if we misjudge the man—"in cursing;" he makes a science of it; he defiles, of malice prepense, the loveliest and sweetest thoughts and scenes (and ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... trunk, or bored to death by the teeth of the river horse. In regard to the latter animal, the danger which they incurred, was more imminent than with the elephants, but this did not arise from the greater ferocity or savageness of the animal, for the river horse moves in general in a sluggish and harmless manner; but in the shallow places of the river, the horses were seen walking at the bottom, and the space between them and the boat so small, that the keel often came into collision ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... the precipitous limestone, and small forests growing far down in the broad bed of the river, with here and there checkerboard spaces of cultivated land, gleaming, smooth and green, amid all the spectacular savageness—soft, cozy spots of verdure nestling dreamily in the hollow of the giant rocky hand. The road ran close to the edge of the chasm, and the sublimity was with us, laying its hush upon us, for the rest of the afternoon. Appropriate ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... noise, nor speak to the sentry," he said, with a sullen savageness; "if you do I ...
— The Trader's Wife - 1901 • Louis Becke
... questions, by taking refuge in Mrs. Huzzard's best room, and much of her afternoon was spent there under that lady's surveillance, fashioning a party gown with which to astonish the natives. For Mrs. Huzzard would not consent to her appearing in the savageness of an Indian dress, when the occasion was one of importance—namely, the first dance in the settlement held in the house of a ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... did make them more savage than he received them, and their savageness was shown towards himself; which he must have ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... in his hand the fascia herbarum, and the crepidae on his feet. There is a wild-boar represented lying on one side, which I admire as a master-piece. The savageness of his appearance is finely contrasted with the case and indolence of the attitude. Were I to meet with a living boar lying with the same expression, I should be tempted to stroke his bristles. Here is an elegant bust of Antinous, the favourite of Adrian; and a beautiful ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... seemed to be too much for this faithful animal's temper; he became gloomy, desponding, refused his food, and for a long time his life appeared to be in danger. His health, however, returned; but he no longer suffered the caresses of any but his keepers, and towards strangers manifested the original savageness of his species." ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... may season it in the charge. You must not put another scandal on him, That he is open to incontinency; That's not my meaning: but breathe his faults so quaintly That they may seem the taints of liberty; The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind; A savageness in unreclaimed blood, ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... left, staring down at the floor, an expression in his eyes compounded of many emotions. But presently his thoughts resolved themselves. For, throwing back his head, he gave a laugh: a laugh long, rather loud, but replete with anything in the world save mirth: suggesting strongly, indeed, the savageness of the frown which presently replaced it, when, drumming a scale upon the edge of the table in front of him, he muttered: "Conduct a symphony played by a full concert orchestra without a single rehearsal!—Good Heavens! Nicholas is turning into ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... cooking their victuals, and roasting several animals, and fish of many kinds: where we saw that they were roasting a certain animal which seemed to be a serpent, save that it had no wings, and was in its appearance so loathsome that we marveled much at its savageness: ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... has the Indian lost of savageness by merely desisting from killing, that the executioners braved themselves to their work by drinking and a show of quarrelsomeness. In the end a sharp hatchet-stroke discharged the duty of the campoodie. Afterward his women buried him, and a warm wind coming out of the ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... those of his own race with whom he is unacquainted, always excepting the females. To one of these he will become attached if he succeeds in carrying one off; otherwise he will kill the women out of mere savageness and hatred of their husbands" (80). "Whenever they can, blacks in their wild state never neglect to massacre all male strangers who fall into their power. Females are ravished, and often slain afterward if they ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... not uncommonly a savageness of self-assertion about Americans which arises from a too great anxiety to be admitted to fellowship with Britons. She had felt this, and conscious of reputation already made by herself in the social life of New York, she had half ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... other hand, happily unaware of his savageness and unnatural spirit, drooped his homely, ungainly head in a dejected manner. To him, Mary was only one more burden, one more wriggling, gasping infliction, to be jogged slowly about for her first ride. He snorted in disdain. Mary jumped. Why ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... Offended at such savageness, but without answering him, Wallace drew toward Murray, and calling to Edwin, ordered him to march at his side. The youth seemed glad of the summons, and Wallace was pleased to observe it, as he thought that a longer stay with one who so grossly overcharged ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... ones' or 'painted men'. Demersay, in his 'Histoire du Paraguay',* thinks it probable that the word is an alteration of the word 'guaranai', i.e., numerous. Barco de la Centenera** ('Argentina', book i., canto i.) says the word means 'hornet', and was applied on account of their savageness. Be that as it may, it is certain that the Guaranis did not at the time of the conquest, and do not now, apply the word to themselves, except when talking Spanish or to a foreigner. The word 'aba', Indian ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... its walls—but they will not be allowed. Any one who reads Colquhoun's account of London and its rabble, will perceive that there are people enough there ready to do offensive offices for the pure sake of offence and savageness; but not only the magistrates, but the audience themselves will not put up with it. The latter generally abate the nuisance in a summary way—they turn out the offender; and the law warrants, and if necessary aids them. If our audience suffer these encroachments ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... revolt. He wished to run about and make himself ill, to escape the fondling that disgusted him. He would then drag Therese along with him, provoking her to wrestle, to roll in the grass. One day, having pushed his cousin down, the young girl bounded to her feet with all the savageness of a wild beast, and, with flaming face and bloodshot eyes, fell upon him with clenched fists. Camille in fear sank ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... mirth. Men hung helplessly to other men or flapped their hands and staggered about, choking with their merriment. The savageness of the punishment administered to the boastful Kyle might have shocked persons with squeamish dispositions; it was wildly humorous in the estimation of those men o' the forest. They were used to having ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... Its legs are short and its front feet strong, with long nails for digging. The fur is soft and silky and dark brown in color. Where the gopher is there may be found the weasel, his greatest enemy. It should be an even fight between them, for they are equally matched in ill-temper and savageness, and are near of a size though the ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard
... all manner of courtier accomplishments, so that he met general approbation. On one occasion the vizir was detailing some instances of his proficiency and talents in the royal presence, and saying: "The instruction of the wise has made an impression upon him, and his former savageness is obliterated from his mind." The king smiled at this speech, and replied:—"The whelp of a wolf must prove a wolf at last, notwithstanding he may be brought up by ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... there, his energy has pushed the desert out of his path across the continent. But I fear that I am not so practical. To many the desert in its stony sterility, its desolateness, its unbroken solitude, its fantastic savageness, is either appalling or repulsive. To them it is tiresome and monotonous. The vast plains of Kansas and Nebraska are monotonous even in the agricultural green of summer. Not so to me the desert. It is as changeable in its lights and colors as ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... discovered that I was in flight. I heard the rapid patter of his shoes behind me. In another twenty feet I heard his voice. It was not loud and it was cautious, but it reached my ears with a suggestion of extraordinary savageness. ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... Esuriem Hunger. 2. Rabiem Savageness. 3. Senectutem Old age. 4. Experientiam Experience. 5. Insaniem Madness. 6. Diabolum ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... would have been soothed could he have been present at the first interview of this pair. He would have seen Severne treated with a hauteur and a sort of savageness he himself was safe from, safe in her ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... South of France is famous for being the very nest of sorcery: the witch-sabbaths were frequently held there. It was the country of the Albigenses, which had been devastated by De Montfort, the executioner of Catholic vengeance, in the twelfth century, and was, with something of the same sort of savageness, ravaged by De Lanere in the seventeenth century. Scotland, before the religious revolution, exhibits a few remarkable cases of witch-persecution, as that of the Earl of Mar, brother of James III. ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... Jerry could drink no more. Love he offered, but Jerry could not forget his torment of desire for Skipper. In the end, disgusted with so unreasonable a puppy, Lamai forgot his love in his boyish savageness, clouted Jerry over the head, right side and left, and tied him as few whites men's dogs have ever been tied. For, in his way, Lamai was a genius. He had never seen the thing done with any dog, yet he devised, on the spur of the moment, the invention of ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... "calculated to stimulate the noble courage of Englishmen." The bull was secured to a stake in the market-place or the bull-ring (the name still survives in many towns), and there the animal was baited by the rabble dogs of the neighbourhood. One can scarcely imagine the savageness of the sport—the animal mutilations, the imprecations of ruffians worse than brutes, the ferociousness and drunkenness, the blasphemy and unspeakable horrors of the exhibition. The public mind of this day absolutely revolts at such brutality. Yet, less than a hundred years ago—on ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... well as the page of the chronicler, begins to present constant evidence of the difficulties to which the crown was exposed, while the haughty house of Douglas all but overbalanced its authority on the Southern border, and the North was at the same time torn in pieces by the yet untamed savageness of the Highland races, and the daring loftiness to which some of the remoter chieftains still ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... acre. At Avon Mr. Hall quitted the main road, and followed the right bank of the Genesee. The scenery, in the vicinity of this place, began to improve, but the roads were proportionally deteriorated. Wild even to savageness, mountain heights branched thickly across the country, with no seeming order or direction. The only level ground was in the narrow valleys, along ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... would be but for a few minutes; it would take place all the same. As the sense of his helplessness filled him, two or three great tears forced themselves out of his eyes. He dashed them away with a most unangelic savageness; then, conscious only of a devouring desire to be near his father in his perilous hour, he drove on the machine as ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... forms. Now comes a woman endowed not only with their large discourse of reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... the savageness of the inhabitants, and the vastness of its Mad Mountains—for so they are called—availed it nothing. Great severity was exercised upon its cities, and upon Caralis, the city of its cities, that a nation, obstinate and regardless of death, might at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 2 • Various
... sadness might have been agreeable. The interview had been hell, ineffable torture, a perfect crime of clumsiness. It had resulted in nothing. (Except, of course, that he had seen her—that fact was indisputable.) He blamed himself. He cursed himself with really extraordinary savageness. ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... judgment. Probably she adored her rufous lord, took his veneer of courtesy—a veneer of the most exquisite polish, I grant you, but perilously thin—for the very perfection of chivalry. Or perchance it was his inner savageness itself that charmed her; the most refined women often amaze one by the fascination which the preponderance of the brute in the opposite sex seems to have ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... shakes the earth to its center and its poles! The scourge of France! The terror of the world! That governs with a nod, and pours down vengeance like a God." This language neither makes a nation great or little; but it shows a savageness of manners, and has a tendency to keep national animosity alive. The entertainments of the stage are calculated to the same end, and almost every public exhibition is tinctured with insult. Yet England is always in dread of France,—terrified ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Saint-Hilaire to difference of education. Four or five years ago a male Giraffe, extremely savage, was brought to Constantinople. The keeper of the present Giraffe had also the charge of this one, and he ascribes its savageness entirely to the manner in which it was treated. At the same time M. Mongez read a memoir on the testimony of ancient authors respecting the Giraffe. Moses is the first author who speaks of it. As Aristotle ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume X, No. 280, Saturday, October 27, 1827. • Various
... were Kings among them from their first Settlement, but the Men thus dignified, were in Reality only Generals elected out of the Troops, and whose Prerogative was limited to Military Affairs. These Chiefs, whose Savageness was rather augmented by the Power with which they were invested, made no Scruple to dispatch a neighbouring Competitor with the Sword or Poison, and their History is full of unnatural Instances, of Brothers stabbing ...
— The Amours of Zeokinizul, King of the Kofirans - Translated from the Arabic of the famous Traveller Krinelbol • Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crbillon
... and it seemed at present worse than death that it was in such a pitiful condition, bespeaking compassion, and I had no refreshing for it, nor suitable things to revive it. Little do many think what is the savageness and brutishness of this barbarous enemy, Ay, even those that seem to profess more than others among them, when the English have ...
— Captivity and Restoration • Mrs. Mary Rowlandson
... due to a single man—soon took away from the British public all power of sanely judging the conflict, and a struggle in which no quarter was given was naturally marked by extreme savageness; but in looking back upon it, English writers must acknowledge with humiliation that, if mutiny is ever justifiable, no stronger justification could be given than ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and these, together with the dirty blankets wrapped round their loins to protect them against the inclemency of the season, and fastened by broad leathern belts, into which were thrust axes and knives of an enormous length, gave them an air of wildness and savageness." ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney
... I quite understand that you wanted Marchmont to marry May," Dick retorted in an alien savageness born of ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... had achieved this melancholy victory. And they, again, were sometimes converted into the carriage of the dead, sometimes of the plunder, and, in every instance, were surmounted by women, female furies, drinking, shouting, and uttering cries of unspeakable savageness and blasphemy against priests, nobles, and kings; and, mingled with all this, were choruses of bacchanal songs, accompanied with shouts of laughter. It was now near midnight; and my anxiety for the condition of my unfortunate friend at last urged ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... Hawkins's edition in 1760. Johnson said of Hawkins, 'Why, ma'am, I believe him to be an honest man at the bottom; but, to be sure, he is penurious, and he is mean, and it must be owned he has a degree of brutality, and a tendency to savageness, that cannot ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang
... the result of your atrocities, combined with the delight with which you have wallowed in human gore; your contempt for all the dictates of honesty, truth, pity, and good faith; your greed, ingratitude, treachery, savageness, meanness, and cannibalism; all these things stamp you as the most atrocious, unmitigated and loathsome scoundrel, savage, monster, and vampire that ever wallowed in the foul and fathomless quagmire ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... his usual savageness and activity. It whirled round his adversary's head with frightful rapidity. Now it carried away a feather of his plume; now it shore off a leaf of his coronet. The flail of the thrasher does not fall more swiftly upon the corn. For many minutes it was ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... desecrated her temples, and destroyed her beautiful works of art, even their savageness was somewhat tamed by the sense of beauty which prevailed everywhere. They broke her beautiful statues, it is true; but the spirit of beauty refused to die, and it transformed the savage heart and awakened even in the barbarian a new power. From the apparent death of Grecian art ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... recently learned, in the first attempts to christianize the Indians of the Philippine Islands, so many dangers of life had to be undergone, on account of the savageness of these Indians, that many were constrained to take up arms against those Indians, and even to ravage their property; while subsequently, after the conversion of these Indians—who, abandoning their ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... conscience, what degradation of his own thought, may not a courtier be involved! Ah, De Thou, my dear De Thou! I am not made for the court; I feel it, though I have seen it but for a moment. There is in my temperament a certain savageness, which education has polished only on the surface. At a distance, I thought myself adapted to live in this all-powerful world; I even desired it, led by a cherished hope of my heart. But I shuddered at the first step; I shuddered at the mere sight of the Cardinal. The ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... an encampment of Bedouins outside the gate. Their tents are worse than any gipsy's, low, smoky, and of the rudest construction. These people are a spectacle of savageness. Their huge heads of shock hair, dyed red and dripping with butter, are garnished with a Firin, or long three-pronged comb, a stick, which acts as scratcher when the owner does not wish to grease his fingers, and sometimes with the ominous ostrich ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... half-hysterical laugh. His fierce energy had, so to speak, left her breathless; she was shaken by confused emotions. It was for her sake he had plunged into the quarrel, but she felt disturbed by his savageness. For all that, something in her approved, and it was really this that troubled her. Picking up the basket, she crossed the field with ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... not be affected. History does not carry us to a time when gold was not the recognized standard for the measurement of every other kind of property, and that not by one tribe or people only, but by mankind in every clime and in every stage of savageness or of civilization. ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 2 • George S. Boutwell
... be Anathema. Who taught them that? The men who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... self-preservation which constitutes the sole understanding of ferocious animals, and which is ready to sacrifice everything to itself; nature, wild and barbarous around them, seemed to have communicated to them all its savageness. The strongest despoiled the weakest; they rushed about the dying, and frequently waited not for their last breath. When a horse fell, you might have fancied you saw a famished pack of hounds: they surrounded him, they tore him to pieces, and quarrelled among ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... bull's side, just forward of the flank, protruded a feathered arrow-end, which accounted for his savageness. Guided by that instinct which came from the old hunting days of the primordial world, Buck proceeded to cut the bull out from the herd. It was no slight task. He would bark and dance about in front of the bull, just out of reach of the great antlers and of the ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... his search; though it was not patience but the savageness of desperation that animated him. He would not go back empty-handed, if he struggled ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... He asked the question sharply, and looked at her with that savageness in his eyes which all the family remembered so well, and ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... The savageness of these big bears is indescribable. Many lives are lost in each hunt, and it has several times happened that the whole party of hunters has been exterminated by some monster of ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... unsocial, and that he changes his character by the practice of vice which is contrary to his nature, but that he is tamed by habits and change of place and life, and that wild beasts by being accustomed to a gentler mode of living put off their wildness and savageness, he determined to transfer the men to the land from the sea and to let them taste a quiet life by being accustomed to live in cities and to cultivate the ground. The small and somewhat depopulated cities of Cilicia ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... voluminous welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that animated them survive this discipline ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... everybody still was deeply dejected, not to say morose. After an interval of only two hours more of thorough and intense wretchedness we had a "grogs," but there was no attempt at conviviality—subdued savageness was the prevailing state of mind. I tried to infuse a little hope into the party, by suggestions of a speedy termination to our misery, but my own private opinion was that we should all be laid up for weeks to come with illness. ...
— Station Life in New Zealand • Lady Barker
... fashion of strong minds. He became, not cautious, but reckless, and faced the rage of the whole nation with a scowl of inflexible defiance. He was born with a sweet and generous temper; but he had been goaded and baited into a savageness which was not natural to him, and which amazed and shocked those who knew him best. Such was the man to whom Bute, in extreme need, applied ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... courtiers set out to subdue the untutored savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... they were filled with tears; and even while her mind rapidly embraced the hope that this manifestation of tenderness was but the dawning of mercy towards the children of her he had once loved, her kind nature could not avoid sympathizing with him, whose uncouthness of appearance and savageness of nature was, in some measure, lost sight of in the fact of the powerful love ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... come out here, trying to horn in on our range, I'd lead 'em gently to the railroad, by cripes, and tell 'em goodbye so's't they'd know I meant it! Can't yuh see the difference?" he bawled, goggling at Pink with misleading savageness in ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... head. He held that up, his eyes wild, showing the whites, his foaming mouth wide open, his teeth gleaming. A sound like a scream rent the air. Terrible fear and hate were expressed in that piercing neigh. And shaggy, wet, dusty red, with all of brute savageness in the look and action of his ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... my poet,—an amphitheatre of precipitous rock, slightly veiled with a delicate growth of verdure, enclosing a few acres of prairie-like land, once the site of an ancient lake, now a garden of unknown depth and fertility. Elemental ruggedness, savageness, and grandeur, combined with wonderful tenderness, modernness, and geniality. There rise the gray scarred cliffs, crowned here and there with a dead hemlock or pine, where, morning after morning, I have seen the bald-eagle perch, and here at their feet this level area of tender ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... deserves praise for liveliness of description and justness of observation. Before the Tatler and Spectator, if the writers for the theatre are excepted, England had no masters of common life. No writers had yet undertaken to reform either the savageness of neglect, or the impertinence of civility; to show when to speak, or to be silent; how to refuse, or how to comply. We had many books to teach us our more important duties, and to settle opinions in philosophy or politics; but an arbiter elegantiarum, ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... within two or three months of the marriage; and finally consummated by a disclosure that, if provable, might consign Harlowe to the hulks. The tears, the agony, the despair of the unhappy lady, excited in me a savageness of feeling, an eager thirst for vengeance, which I had believed foreign to my nature. Edith divined my thoughts, and taking my hand, said, "Never, sir, never will I appear against him: the father of my little Helen shall never be publicly ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... reality the crime still *obtains among the remoter clans. These Khonds are situate in the Madras presidency, and are aborigines of the Eastern Gh[a]ts. The most extraordinary views about them have been published. Despite their acknowledged barbarity, savageness, and polytheism, they have been soberly credited with a belief in One Supreme God, 'a theism embracing polytheism,' and other notions which have been abstracted from their worship of the sun ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... life, I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. To many creatures there is in this sense but one necessary of life, Food. To the bison of the prairie it is a few inches of palatable grass, with water to drink; unless he seeks the Shelter of the forest or ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... interpenetrated with golden light. On this 14th of September the warmth and dazzlingness of mid-summer still reigned at Pougues; and the scenery in which we suddenly found ourselves, bosquets, dells, and glades, with all the charm but without the savageness of the forest, recalled the loveliest lines ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... I said, in Bewick which you find in Holbein. But do you suppose Holbein himself, or any other Northern painter, could wholly quit himself of the like accusations? I told you, in the second of these lectures, that the Northern temper, refined from savageness, and the Southern, redeemed from decay, met, in Florence. Holbein and Botticelli are the purest types of the two races. Holbein is a civilized boor; Botticelli a reanimate Greek. Holbein was polished by companionship with scholars and kings, but remains always ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... to talk of him, too drunk even to hold on to the boat, I was a poor swimmer, and in the deep and cold lake water should never have reached the shore swimming, and I found myself obliged to menace violence. I raised the steering paddle over his head and assured him with a savageness that reached even his drunken brain, that I should knock him on the head and pitch him overboard if he did not keep perfectly quiet. There was imminent danger, for the slight boat of that region requires to be treated with the care of a bark canoe, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... it was the abject clinging to life; not the remorse of the soul,—that still slept within him, too noble an agency for one so debased,—but the gross physical terror. As the fear of the tiger, once aroused, is more paralyzing than that of the deer, proportioned to the savageness of a disposition to which fear is a novelty, so the very boldness of Varney, coming only from the perfection of the nervous organization, and unsupported by one moral sentiment, once struck down, ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... know you will manage my cause, as a concern on which my happiness entirely depends; and I hope everything from your compassion and beneficence, while I fear everything from her rigour and barbarity. Yes! I call it barbarity, a savageness of delicacy altogether inconsistent with the tenderness of human nature; and may the most abject contempt be my portion, if I live under its scourge! But I begin to rave. I conjure you by your own humanity and sweetness of disposition, I conjure you by your love for the man ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... animals and creatures of various sorts: a huge crocodile, from the Nile; a vulture, with expanded wings, and talons tearing its prey, at which its bloodshot eyes looked down with an expression of life-like savageness. On one side there was a human skeleton of gigantic proportions, with a club in its hand, in the attitude of striking. Toads and lizards abounded. There were mummy cases, with their lids off, exposing the dried remnants of mortality within. In ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... another reflection in passing to the rest of the history. Humane, beautiful, and cheering as the religion of the patriarchs appears, yet traits of savageness and cruelty run through it, out of which man may emerge, or into which he ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... countries where the war had raged, the misery and exhaustion were more appalling than ever; but still there were left men and beasts, arms and food, and still Frederic fought on. In truth, he had now been baited into savageness. His heart was ulcerated with hatred. The implacable resentment with which his enemies persecuted him, though originally provoked by his own unprincipled ambition, excited in him a thirst for vengeance which he did not even attempt to conceal. ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Miriam. "I have seen Donatello in this mood once or twice before. If you consider him well, you will observe an odd mixture of the bulldog, or some other equally fierce brute, in our friend's composition; a trait of savageness hardly to be expected in such a gentle creature as he usually is. Donatello is a very strange young man. I wish he would not ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the lake-bed must be! Empty the water from it and it is pure and unrelieved desolation. And the sovereign loveliness of the water that fills it is its color. The very savageness of the rent and fissure is made the condition of the purest charm. The Lake does not feed a permanent river. We cannot trace any issue of it to the ocean. It is not, that we know, a well-spring to supply any large district with water for ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... my savageness against France goes no further than wishing that the new and gay part of Paris were battered down; not the poor working part, no, nor any of the People destroyed. But I wish ornamental Paris down, because then I think the French would be kept quiet till they had rebuilt it. For what would ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... young, sensitive, throbbing at the old, old wrong, at the black shame of our history; I saw him drawn into that fearful whirlpool of blood and passion, driven mad with the pain and the horror of it; and I saw him drilled and hammered to a grim savageness, saw him fighting, day by day, with his spirit, forging it into an iron sword of war. He was haggard and hollow-eyed, hard, ruthless, desperate. He saw into the future, he saw the land he loved, the land he dreamed of—the Union! She stretched out her arms to him; she cried with ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... to do this, though a present death Had been more merciful.—Come on, poor babe: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside, have done Like offices of pity.—Sir, be prosperous In more than this deed does require!—and blessing, Against this cruelty, fight on thy side, Poor ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... backs, then piu forte, "Sahib!" crescendo, "Sahib, Sahib!" and then at last, in a burst of harmony, "Sahib purana Baira kutch bukshish mil jawe?"[33] and the miserable doolie traveller, who has been, probably, feigning sleep in sulky savageness for the last ten minutes, makes a sudden dive through the curtains with a stick, an exclamation is heard very like swearing, only in a foreign language, and the troop of applicants vanish like a shot, keeping up, however, a yelping of Sahibs, and Purana Bairas, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... him. He ranged about the basement, and none but I dared venture down there. He was, in short, a cur by day, at night a demon. I supposed the early dogs of this breed had been trained to night slaughter and savageness alone, and that it was a case of atavism, a recurrence of hereditary instinct. It interested me vastly, and I resolved to make him the most perfect of watchdogs. I trained him to lie couchant, and to spring upon ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... so great that very trifling labour will be sufficient to provide them with the means of existence, and they will thus relapse rapidly into a state of barbarism; they will resume the habits of their African brethren, but, he thinks, without the ferocity and savageness which distinguish the latter. Of course the germs of civilisation and religion which have been sown among them in their servile state will be speedily obliterated; if not, as man must either rise or fall in the moral scale, they will acquire strength, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... characteristics of a company of idiots, Lunatics, notwithstanding the incoherency of their words and thoughts, at least speak, know each other, and seek each other; but among idiots there reigns a stupid indifference, an isolated savageness. Never do they pronounce an articulate word. Sometimes is heard among them savage laughter, or groans and cries which resemble nothing human. Scarcely can a few among them recognize their keepers; and yet, let us repeat it with ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... would have been smaller and more sensitive: their faces most dignified. Where now they express chiefly savageness, they would have expressed fir ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day Jr.
... self-control. So while they loved each other, Jenny also despised Emmy, while Emmy in return hated and was jealous of Jenny, even to the point of actively wishing in moments of furtive and shamefaced savageness to harm her. That was the outward difference between the sisters in time of stress. Of their inner, truer, selves it would be more rash to speak, for in times of peace Jenny had innumerable insights and emotions that would be forever unknown to the elder girl. The sense ...
— Nocturne • Frank Swinnerton
... some helpless slave. One thing is certain, that when he was in health, it was enough to chill the blood, and to stiffen the hair of an ordinary man, to hear Mr. Sevier talk. Nature, or his cruel habits, had given to his face an expression of unusual savageness, even for a slave-driver. Tobacco and rage had worn his teeth short, and nearly every sentence that escaped their compressed grating, was commenced or concluded with some outburst of profanity. His presence made the field alike ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... manner very different from that she had spoken in but a minute or two before. 'He and many another,—all Hamper's men,—and many a one besides. Th' women are as bad as th' men, in their savageness, this time. Food is high,—and they mun have food for their childer, I reckon. Suppose Thorntons sent 'em their dinner out,—th' same money, spent on potatoes and meal, would keep many a crying babby quiet, and hush up its mother's heart ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... wish to propitiate the local deities is easily understood. If the whole body of lion anecdote, from the days of the Assyrian Kings till the last year of the nineteenth century, were collated and brought together, it would not equal in tragedy or atrocity, in savageness or in sheer insolent contempt for man, armed or unarmed, white or black, the ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... forests, beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and savage dwell, for their pine-boards for ordinary use. And, on the other hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets, and guns to point his savageness with. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... cylinder to reassure myself for the hundredth time that it was ready. But Laguerre stood quite motionless, with his eyes fixed impassively upon his watch as though he were a physician at a sick-bed. Only once did he raise his eyes. It was when the human savageness of the rifle-fire was broken by a low mechanical rattle, like the whirr of a mowing-machine as one hears it across the hay-fields. It spanked the air ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... governors, I am totally ignorant, you must ask Sir Charles Williams; he is the present ruling star of our negotiations. His letters are as much admired as ever his verses were. He has met the ministers of the two angry empresses, and pacified Russian savageness and Austrian haughtiness. He is to teach the monarch of Prussia to fetch and carry, .@;, unless they happen to treat in iambics, or begin to settle the limits of' Parnassus instead of' those of Silesia. As he is so good a pacifier, I don't know but we may want his assistance at home ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... mankind disdain all base considerations; but such times are evanescent. The permanent constitutional condition of the manufactured man, thought Ahab, is sordidness. Granting that the White Whale fully incites the hearts of this my savage crew, and playing round their savageness even breeds a certain generous knight-errantism in them, still, while for the love of it they give chase to Moby Dick, they must also have food for their more common, daily appetites. For even the high lifted and chivalric Crusaders of old times were not content to traverse two thousand miles of ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... corporal in the centre allowed his horse to graze the haunches of mine, "Tourne-Toujours," my gallant charger, the fiery thoroughbred which had so often maddened me at the riding schools of the regiment and at manoeuvres, by his savageness and the shaking he gave me. "Tourne-Toujours" gave evident signs of excitement. By his pawing the ground every now and then he, an officer's horse, seemed to resent the close proximity of mere troop horses. And certainly, under ordinary circumstances, I should have fallen foul of the rider imprudent ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... shrill cries as he forced himself through to the edge of the fire. Cummins was there, kneeling with turned-up sleeves and greasy hands beside the huge roast, and when he saw Jan he stared at him in wonder. There was neither laughter nor song in Jan Thoreau's voice. It was vibrant with a strange savageness which was more savage than the wildest yells of the half-breed Crees, and his great eyes burned fiercely as they rested for ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... luggage, we pulled off from Darien, not, however, without a sage remark from Margery, that, though we seemed to have traveled to the very end of the world, here yet were people and houses, ships, and even steamboats; in which evidences that we were not to be plunged into the deepest abysses of savageness she seemed to take no ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... of new; casting in the gold of his mind, as Aaron did that of the Israelites, and waiting to see what sort of a thing would come out of the furnace. The children coming in from their play, he spoke harshly to them, and eyed little Ned with a sort of savageness, as if he meant to eat him up, or do some other dreadful deed: and when little Elsie came with her usual frankness to his knee, he repelled her in such a way that she shook her little hand at him, saying, "Naughty Doctor Grim, what has come ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dreary dark. The hoarse night-raven, hid among the roots, startled the voyagers with a sudden shout, and then all was again silent as a grave. The loathly alligators, lounging in the slime, lifted their horny eyelids lazily, and leered upon him as he passed with stupid savageness. Lines of tall herons stood dimly in the growing gloom, like white fantastic ghosts, watching the passage of the doomed boat. All was foul, sullen, weird as witches' dream. If Amyas had seen a crew of skeletons glide down the stream behind him, with Satan standing at the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... animal appears too simple to be made artistically interesting, apart from this or that conventional or imaginative addition. The lion must be presented, not as he is, but as vulgar anticipation expects him to be; not with the savageness and terror which are native to him, but with the savageness and terror which those who have trembled and fled at the echo of his roar invest him with,—which are quite another matter. Zoological gardens ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... groundlessness of such an alleged fear. It needs only to consider them candidly to be disabused on that score. No one who has seen and knows the tenderness of the negro toward the children of his master, and his never-failing respect toward his mistress, dares say he fears the negro's savageness. No one who knows the negro's religious sensibility and his unshaken faith in Christ, dares say he fears. No. Only those fear who know nothing at all about the negro. They fear whose creed is given them by men thirsting for the negro's ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... into the Tribune. I had seen him before, on the fearful night which prepared the attack on the palace; but he was then in the haste and affected savageness of the rabble. He now played the part of leader of a political sect; and the commencement of his address adopted something of the decorum of public council. In this there was an artifice; for, resistless ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... of God's orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... pen, and dealt as trenchantly with Ward as Ward himself had dealt trenchantly with the reformers and all others whom he found planted in his dialectic way. Mr. Gladstone held the book up to stringent reproof for its capricious injustice; for the triviality of its investigations of fact; for the savageness of its censures; for the wild and wanton opinions broached in its pages; for the infatuation of mind manifested in some of its arguments; and for the lamentable circumstance that it exhibited a far greater debt in mental culture to Mr. John Stuart Mill ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... scenery is to be found throughout the Jura than this, and it is quite peculiar, being unlike any other mountain conformation I have ever seen, whilst the narrow winding valley of soft gold-green is in beautiful contrast with the rugged grandeur, not to say savageness, of its environment. ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... whatever with them, but is merely a manifestation of that vanity, that lust of the eye and pride of life, which we are taught to believe inherent in all human nature, and which the savage exhibits according to his savageness, the civilized man according ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... savageness of his utterance Millard continued to gaze thoughtfully, for a few moments, ...
— The Submarine Boys for the Flag - Deeding Their Lives to Uncle Sam • Victor G. Durham
... Yet even these are rather to be referred to the Germans, since they build houses, carry shields, and travel with speed on foot; in all which particulars they totally differ from the Sarmatians, who pass their time in wagons and on horseback. [272] The Fenni [273] live in a state of amazing savageness and squalid poverty. They are destitute of arms, horses, and settled abodes: their food is herbs; [274] their clothing, skins; their bed, the ground. Their only dependence is on their arrows, which, for want of iron, are headed with bone; [275] and the chase ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... John's cruelty and savageness were making the whole kingdom miserable; and at last the great barons could bear it no longer. They met together and agreed that they would make John swear to govern by the good old English laws that had prevailed before the Normans ...
— Young Folks' History of England • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mending their clothes, the door of their chamber was violently thrown open, and six commissioners entered to announce to the queen that the Convention had ordered the removal of her boy, that he might he committed to the care of a tutor—the tutor named being the cobbler, Simon, whose savageness of disposition was sufficiently attested by the fact of his having been chosen on the recommendation of Marat. At this unexpected blow, Marie Antoinette's fortitude and resignation at last gave way. She wept, she remonstrated, ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge |
