"Opulence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... obscured by a thick veil, the icy hand of death began to freeze my veins. 'Oh!' said I, making an effort to speak, 'take back those estates for which I have sacrificed everything. Give me four hours longer, and I make you master of all my gold, of all my wealth, of all that opulence of fortune I have so earnestly desired.' 'Agreed: you have been a good master, and I am willing to do something for you; I consent to your prayer.' I felt my strength return; and I exclaimed: 'Four hours are so little ... oh! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... hath become a chamber of importance—the buckram suit is changed into black velvet; and although the wearer retains his puritanical humility and politeness to clients of consequence, he can now look others broad in the face, and treat them with a full allowance of superior opulence, and the insolence arising from it. It was but a short period that had achieved these alterations, nor was the party himself as yet entirely accustomed to them, but the change was becoming less embarrassing ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... far from the subject of boarding schools, in which so many catastrophes are hatched, and from which issue so many young girls incapable of appreciating the painful sacrifices by which the honest man who does them the honor of marrying them, has obtained opulence; young girls eager for the enjoyments of luxury, ignorant of our laws, ignorant of our manners, claim with avidity the empire which their beauty yields them, and show themselves quite ready to turn away from the genuine utterances of the heart, while they readily listen ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... and occasionally she deviated into the truth. A kind lady, the Marquise de Boulainvilliers, investigated her story, found it true, and took up the Valois orphans. The wicked mother went back to Bar-sur-Aube, which Jeanne was to dazzle with her opulence, after she got ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... farmers, he confiscated many estates to his own use, and reaped the crops. Even travellers were attacked to enrich this extraordinary thief, and six vessels were afterward dispatched to Rome with the plunder, which he asserted was sufficient to permit him to revel in opulence the remainder of his life, even if he were obliged to give up two ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... of commerce depends upon liberty. Till 1806 it was a flourishing city. With England in particular, whose manufactures and colonial produce were allowed to be freely imported, its commercial relations were of the highest importance. For the opulence which Leipzig then enjoyed it was indebted to its extensive traffic, which contributed to the prosperity of Saxony in general; but it was more particularly the numerous adjacent villages and hamlets that owed to our city their respectability, their improvements, and ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... original cause of many of our needs; and even the poverty, which is so frequent and distressful in civilized nations, proceeds often from that change of manners which opulence has produced. Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries; but custom gives the name of poverty ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... weather-stained stucco, and looks at first sight a little gloomy, with the patina of time upon it. But it is a restful change from the spick-and-spanness of the near-by millionaire colony, so eloquent of the paint-brush and the lawn-valet's shears, so smug and new and strident in its paraded opulence. Peter's gardens, in fact, are a rather careless riot of color and line, a sort of achieved genteel roughness, like certain phases of his house, as though the wave of refinement driven too high had broken and tumbled ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... this conspicuous when, on entering the library, we found Mr. Rochester—alone! The envied possessor of all this opulence can be no happy man. He was seated with his head bent on his folded arms, and when he looked up a morose—almost a malignant—scowl blackened his features! Hastily beckoning to the governess, who entered with us, to follow him, ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... sisters for my distinct fondness for precious stones and diamonds. I have made a collection of them worthy of the Princes of Asia; and if my whole fortune were to fail me to-day, my pearls and diamonds, being left to me, would still give me opulence. The King, by a strange accident, shares this taste with me. He has in his third closet two huge pedestals, veneered in rosewood, and divided within, like cabinets of coins, into several layers. It is there that he has conveyed, one ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... of intelligence, cultivated taste, and opulence. It was probably the finest mansion of the town. In every room there were things to see, and after supper we looked at them, and, as I wandered from pictures to vases and carved ivory, the remarks of the two elder ladies and Miss Willoughby seemed like a harmonized chorus accompanying ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... fruits is, and can only be, in this country, an appendage to opulence and rank. Several varieties are cultivated in our forcing-stoves, and grace the tables of the rich, and in as great perfection as they can be had between the tropics. In their wild state, they affect the sides of rivulets, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... have convenient syllogisms to quiet consciences. My visit was a drama. To be Providence itself; actually to fulfil that futile wish, 'If heaven were to send us twenty thousand francs a year,'—that silly wish we all make, laughing; to bring opulence to a family sitting by the light of one miserable lamp over a poor turf fire!—no, words cannot describe it. My extreme justice seemed to them unjust. Well! if there is a Paradise my father is happy in it now. As for me, I am loved as no man was ever ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... people of sufficient opulence to contract for so vast a fishery, the Company might undertake it themselves; three or four gun-boats would be necessary to protect the fishermen; and a small fort should be erected at Tambisan or Tawi Tawi. But it is necessary to observe, the Sulo people do not practice ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... contact with this furnace of a revolution, had turned her head, and she lived in the intoxication of passions, ideas, and pleasures. Connected at first with the great innovators of '89, she had passed from their arms into those of rich voluptuaries, who purchased her charms dearly. Courtezan of opulence, she became the voluntary prostitute of the people; and like her celebrated prototypes of Egypt or of Rome, she lavished upon liberty the ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... del Venado. The proprietor, Don Augustin Pena, was a man of great opulence. In addition to a rich gold mine which he worked, at no great distance off, he was the owner of countless herds of horses, mules, and cattle, that in a half-wild state roamed over the vast savannahs and forests that constituted the twenty leagues of land belonging to the ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... them to me!" So he bade the eunuch bring them in; and, when she looked on them and saw that they were both of distinguished beauty, she wept for them and said, "By Allah, these are people of condition and show plain signs of former opulence." "O my lady," said the Syndic's wife, "we love the poor and the destitute, more especially as reward in Heaven will recompense our love; and, as for these persons, haply the oppressor hath dealt hardly with them ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... late had to recount portions of my dear old friend's history which must needs be told, and over which the writer does not like to dwell. If Thomas Newcome's opulence was unpleasant to describe, and to contrast with the bright goodness and simplicity I remembered in former days, how much more painful is that part of his story to which we are now come perforce, and which the acute reader of novels has, no doubt, long foreseen? ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... silly to be talking of all this opulence when neither of them had enough to buy a meal. Pretending important matters, ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... production, of France—the bright, cheerful, smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all, the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions into gold. The whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence, an appearance which culminates in the great place which surrounds the Grand-Theatre—an establishment of the highest style, encircled with columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafes. One feels it to be a monument to the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If I had not forbidden ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... that such giant 'archaspistae' of the Catholic Faith, as Bull and Waterland, should have clung to the intruded gloss (1 'John' v. 7), which, in the opulence and continuity of the evidences, as displayed by their own master-minds, would have been superfluous, had it not been worse than superfluous, that is, senseless in itself, and interruptive of the ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... crickets and the katydids sang in unison, the hills dreamed in the misty distance like vast, peaceful, patient, crouching animals. The wheat and corn burdened the warm wind with messages of safely-garnered harvests, and my mind, reacting to the serenity, the peace, the opulence of it all, was at rest. The dark swamps of the Bulkley, the poisonous plants of the Skeena, the endless ice-cold marshes of the high country, the stinging insects of the tundra, and the hurtling clouds of the White Pass, all seemed events of another ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... dexterous. The instances when he writes badly are not frequent. The C-sharp minor Prelude is, after all, something of a sport. No doubt, there are times, as in so many of the passages of the new version of his first piano concerto, when he seeks to dazzle with the opulence and clangor and glare of tones. However, as a rule, he writes politely. If the second concerto is a trifle too soft and elegiac and sweet, a little too much like a mournful banqueting on jam and honey, it is still most deftly and ingratiatingly made. On the whole, even though his music ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... last words with an expression so heart-breaking—there was something so moving in the comparison which this unfortunate creature, obscure and disdained, infirm and miserable, made of herself with Adrienne de Cardoville, the very type of resplendent youth, beauty, and opulence—that Agricola was moved even to tears; and, holding out one of his hands to the speaker, he said to her, tenderly, "How very good you are; how full of ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... her mother's brother, and a number of elated New York relatives came to the Belgian capital, shedding their American opulence as the sun throws out its light. The skill of a general was required to direct, manage and control the pageant of the sixteenth. Thousands of dollars were tossed into the cauldron of social ambition by the lavish mother, who, from behind an army of lieutenants, directed ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... understand the needs of those who were not so favored. Divine writ, said he, was with him. Just as impossible as for a camel to pass through the needle's eye or for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven was it that the wealthy could feel for the poor. Opulence and indigence were no more sympathetic than oil and vinegar. The poor must ever have a champion, a savior, a mediator, or they are ground beneath a relentless heel. It was Elmendorf's belief that no manufacturer, employer, landlord, capitalist, or manager ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... loose-folded turban inclined on one side, from which the mala or chaplet was gracefully suspended; and the naiques or leaders, with their massive necklaces of gold, with the image of the pitriswar (manes) depending therefrom, gave the whole an air of opulence and dignity. The females were uniformly attired in a skirt of dark-brown camlet, having a bodice of light-coloured stuff, with gold ornaments worked into their fine black hair; and all had the favourite churis or rings of hathidant (elephant's ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... almost every nation in the world, Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese, Persians, Moors, Malays, Javanese, and many others: The Chinese, however, have a large town to themselves, without the walls, and carry on a considerable trade, for they have annually ten or twelve large junks from China; and to these the opulence of the Dutch at Batavia is in a great measure owing. The beef here is bad, and the mutton scarce, but the poultry and fish are excellent and in great plenty. Here are also the greatest variety and abundance of the finest fruit in the world, but the musquitos, centipedes, scorpions, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... dilated upon, is one of the healthiest and strongest on the face of the earth. We are not demoralized or effeminated by the luxury and abundance which are ours, but elevated rather, and strengthened by the very magnificence and opulence of our circumstances, and by the perfect freedom, under healthful restraint, which we enjoy through the community's strong, vigorous, moral ...
— The Dominion in 1983 • Ralph Centennius
... off. Washington itself was becoming one of the most beautiful cities in the world, with its broad avenues, seldom thronged, its circles and squares, whose frequenters seemed never busy, its spirit of leisure, its suggestion of opulence and amplitude, and of a not too zealous or disturbing hold on reality. You still saw occasionally a tiny cottage inhabited by a colored family cuddled up against a new and imposing palace, just as you might pass a colored mammy on the same ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... gained a foothold only in the few blocks above and below Twenty-third Street, and for the rest it was still a street of homes, where people moved in a more leisurely fashion than in the crowded thoroughfares downtown. The very air was charged with a healthier life, and here amid the opulence one could forget the near presence of the squalid alley. So it had become a habit of mine always to begin my day with a walk uptown, as a gentle tonic for my body and to give my mind a brief but more cheerful outlook than through the smutted office windows. I never ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... Shakspere as they have done so many others; and in point of fact his work, from HAMLET forth, shows a gain in nervous tension and pith, fairly attributable to the stirring impact of the style of Montaigne, with its incessancy of stroke, its opulence of colour, its hardy freshness of figure and epithet, its swift, unflagging stride. Seek in any of Shakspere's plays for such a strenuous rush of idea and rhythm as pulses ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... dressed, as she had always been, a certain style of languorous silken deshabille which she was wont to affect in better health now became her paler cheek and feverishly brilliant eyes. There was the same opulence of lace and ornament, and, whether by accident or design, clasped around the slight wrist of her extended hand was a bracelet which he remembered had swept away the last dregs ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... believe that he is in the midst of an inhabited place, the houses appearing to be fewer in number, and more insignificant, than a closer inspection proves them to be. No splendid fragment, imposing in its ruin, records the glory and opulence of the populous city, as it existed in the days of Solyman the Magnificent, the era from whence it dates its decline. The possession of Aden was eagerly contended for by the two great powers, the Turks and the Portuguese, struggling for mastery in the East, and when they were no longer able to ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... below had halted, wheeled about, and were watching an approaching carriage. Down the wharf with this equipage came an atmosphere of solidity and opulence, of luxury and perfect taste. On the box, in quiet livery, sat a driver and a footman. The driver, from his bearing and appearance, could easily have passed for the president of a college. As the carriage ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... balustrade and double steps of the Confession, the rich altars and yet richer tombs—all, nave, aisles, transepts, and apsis, were in marble, resplendent with the wealth of marble; not a nook small as the palm of one's hand appearing but it showed the insolent opulence of marble. And the basilica triumphed, beyond discussion, recognised and admired by every one as the largest and most splendid church in the whole world—the personification of hugeness and ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Surinam. The governour of that settlement was appointed by the States General, the town of Amsterdam, and Sommelsdyck. The States General have acquired Sommelsdyck's right; but the family has still great dignity and opulence, and by intermarriages is connected with many other noble families. When I was at the Hague, I was received with all the affection of kindred. The present Sommelsdyck has an important charge in the Republick, and is as worthy a man as lives. He has honoured ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... return, no rage vented in fire and ruins upon the unoffending houses and walls. Together also with advantage, a reputation for clemency was obtained among the allies, by the preservation of a city of the greatest celebrity and opulence, the demolition of which, all Campania, and all the people dwelling in the neighbourhood of Campania, would have bewailed, while their enemies were compelled to admit the ability of the Romans to punish their faithless ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... cite those, wherein our ancestors, defying the influence of passion, have acted well and wisely. During the Macedonian war which we waged against King Perseus, the state of Rhodes, splendid then and stately, which had been built up by the aid and opulence of Rome, proved faithless to us, and a foe. Yet, when, the war being ended, debate was had concerning her, our fathers suffered her citizens to go unpunished, in order that no men might infer that Rome had gone to war for greed, and not for just resentment. Again, in all the Punic wars, although ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... Sevres porcelain, and white damask, was redolent of opulence. The dishes were from Chevet, the wines from a celebrated merchant on the Quai Saint-Bernard, a personal friend of Matifat's. For the first time Lucien beheld the luxury of Paris displayed; he went ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... an opulence which we must do Raleigh the credit to say was expended not on debauchery or display, but in the most enlightened efforts to extend the field of English commercial enterprise beyond the Atlantic. We need not suppose him to have been unselfish beyond the fashion of his age. In his action there ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... castle. They smacked of the possessions of titled nobility. But Germany! . . . The comforts and luxuries in his country! . . . He just wished his brother-in-law to admire the way he lived and the noble friendships that embellished his opulence. And so he insisted in his letters that the Desnoyers family should return their visit. This change of environment might tone Julio down a little. Perhaps his ambition might waken on seeing the diligence ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... comparatively short space of time, by the exercise of that art, to his natural gifts for which he had now added the wholesome tonic of experience, Peace passed from a poor and obscure lodging in a slum in Lambeth to the state and opulence of a comfortable suburban residence in Peckham. These were the halcyon days of Peace's enterprise in life. From No. 25 Stangate Street, Lambeth, the dealer in musical instruments, as Peace now described himself, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... Privileges of this kind are transitory; they belong to the place, and are distinct from the individual: but if public officers are not uniformly remunerated by the state, the public charges must be intrusted to men of opulence and independence, who constitute the basis of an aristocracy; and if the people still retains its right of election, that election can only be made from a certain ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Southern California resort a world-weary woman, young and beautiful but disillusioned, meets a girl who has learned the art of living—of tasting life in all its richness, opulence and joy. The story hinges upon the change wrought in the soul of the blase woman by this glimpse into ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... Russia. The city of Odessa was founded on the ceded territory. The merchants who raised it to its sudden prosperity were not Russians but Greeks; and in the course of a single generation many a Greek trading-house, which had hitherto deemed the sum of L3,000 to be a large capital, rose to an opulence little behind that of the great London firms. Profiting by the neutrality of Turkey or its alliance with England during a great part of the revolutionary war, the Greeks succeeded to much of the Mediterranean trade that was lost ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... influences of sordid circumstances and habits of careful calculation and rigid economy, thrifty, prudent, just, and eminently conscientious; of Portia one can only think as of a creature born in the very lap of luxury and nursed in the midst of sunny magnificence, whose very element was elegant opulence and refined splendor, and by whose cradle Fortune herself stood godmother. She seems like a perfect rose, blooming in a precious vase of gold and gems and exquisite workmanship. Camiola's contemptuous rebuff of her insolent courtier lover; her merciless ridicule of her fantastical, half-witted ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... them arrested and confiscated their property. Then returning to the gaming table, he exultingly exclaimed that he had never made a better throw!(31) On another occasion, after having condemned to death several Gauls of great opulence, he immediately went back to his gambling companions and said:—'I pity you when I see you lose a few sestertii, whilst, with a stroke of the pen, I have just won ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... source of the degradation of our own cities but this same curse of selfishness which is ready to march to opulence and luxury over the bodies of the starved and poisoned toilers of our towns and factories, and thinks it can justify its barbarity by an off-hand reference to Political Economy and its irrefragable laws? "Supply ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... a wise man. The broad, unequivocal sentence of history seems to be that whoever is not noble by nature will hardly be rendered so by art. Education can do much; it can foster nobilities, it can discourage vices; but literal conveyance of lofty qualities, can it effect that? Can it create opulence of soul in a sterile nature? Can it cause a thin soil to do the work of a deep one? We have seen harsh natures mellowed, violent natures chastened, rough ones refined; but who has seen an essentially mean nature made ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... six hens. But he particularly fretted over other news his spies had brought, which was the information that Perion had wedded Dame Melusine, and had begotten two lusty children—Bertram and a daughter called Blaniferte—and now enjoyed the opulence and sovereignty of Brunbelois. ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... I long to write an ode And magnify his name, The man of honor, on the road To opulence and fame, On whom was never aid bestowed By any ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... ever blossoming Like rich parterres the hoardings fling An opulence of hue, and make Within my ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... While the ancient city, whose life had withdrawn itself from century to century, was gradually shrinking all around it, the Grand'Place itself remained an immovable, gigantic, magnificent witness to the might and opulence of old, when Ypres was, with Ghent and Bruges, one of the three queens of the western world, one of the most strenuous centres of human industry and activity and the cradle of our great liberties. Such as it ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... credulity. Her daughters were rational and discreet young women; in the main, perhaps, not insensible to their true circumstances. I have seen them assume a thoughtful air at times. But such was the preponderating opulence of his fancy, that I am persuaded, not for any half hour together, did they ever look their own prospects fairly in the face. There was no resisting the vortex of his temperament. His riotous imagination conjured up handsome settlements before their eyes, which kept ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fast car. She liked its spacious lawns and its terraced Italian garden—they were so admirable for garden parties and open-air theatricals. She liked the useless size of the house—it ministered to her love of opulence. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... had frequent occasion since our frontier experiences began to ponder the untrammelled opulence of this Western word, outfit. From the Mississippi to the Pacific its expansive possibilities are momentarily being tested. There is nothing that lives, breathes or grows, nothing known to the arts or investigated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... a circus Hercules. By stiffening one of his senseless arms he could bring down roars of applause. By years of bitter labour with his pen he earned the barest living. The muscles that a porter might have, offered him opulence, because it was tougher by a few degrees than the flesh of other men. The knowledge he had striven for just kept him ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... great financial company had brought about a crisis on the Bourse. The news of the inability of Wermant, the 'agent de change', to meet his engagements, had completed the downfall of M. de Nailles. Not only death, but ruin, had entered that house, where, a few hours before, luxury and opulence had ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... from the circuit of the antient walls, the remains of which are still to be seen. Its present size is not one third of its former extent. Its temples, baths, statues, towers, basilica, and amphitheatre, prove it to have been a city of great opulence and magnificence. At present, the remains of these antiquities are all that make it respectable or remarkable; though here are manufactures of silk and wool, carried on with good success. The water necessary for these works ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Ronald was somewhat disappointed in the city of which he had heard so much. The streets were ill paved and worse lighted, and were narrow and winding. In the neighbourhood of the Louvre there were signs of wealth and opulence. The rich dresses of the nobles contrasted strongly indeed with the sombre attire of the Glasgow citizens, and the appearance and uniform of the royal guards filled him with admiration; but beyond the fashionable quarter it did not appear to him that Paris possessed many advantages over ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... noble institutions for literary and scientific purposes, which reflect such credit on Liverpool, and are giving such an impulse to the public mind, have mostly been originated, and have all been effectively promoted, by Mr. Roscoe; and when we consider the rapidly increasing opulence and magnitude of that town, which promises to vie in commercial importance with the metropolis, it will be perceived that in awakening an ambition of mental improvement among its inhabitants, he has effected a great benefit to the cause ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... the scene—the marble-topped tables, the range of leather-upholstered wall seats, the gay company, the ladies dressed in demi-state toilets, speaking in an exquisite visible chorus of taste, economy, opulence or art; the sedulous and largess-loving garcons, the music wisely catering to all with its raids upon the composers; the melange of talk and laughter—and, if you will, the Wuerzburger in the tall glass cones that bend to your lips as a ripe cherry sways on its branch to the beak of ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... obliterated altogether. Nothing at all was said about the "great round, pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen lolling at the doors and tumbling into the streets in their apoplectic opulence." Nothing about the ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish friars, and "winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe." ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... amidst the ceaseless reverberation of the old. The more ancient a nation is, the more liable is it to be overwhelmed by this dreadful evil. The Byzantine empire, during a thousand years of civilisation and opulence, did not produce one work of original thought; five hundred years after the light of Athenian genius had been extinguished, the schools of Greece were still pursuing the beaten paths, and teaching the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle. It is the peculiar and prodigious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... was to-day than she had been yesterday. When she appreciated the fact that the interest on her invested property had increased her wealth, since the previous morning, by some hundreds of dollars, it frightened her. She felt as if an irresistible flood of opulence was flowing in upon her, and she shuddered to think of the responsibility of directing it into its proper courses, and so preventing it from overwhelming her and sweeping ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of wealth that released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted hands of work that spared it from their need. The giving continues in this latest Christian age as in the earliest, and Rome ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... and there indeed he touched a salient point. His people were dead; his father had been a younger son; he had no money of his own. But his father's elder brother, a squire in Hampshire, made him rather a liberal allowance,—something like six hundred a year, I believe, which was opulence in the Latin Quarter. Now, the squire had been aware of Pair's relation with Godelinette from its inception, and had not disapproved. On his visits to Paris he had dined with them, given them dinners, ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... smaller the realm and the humbler the act into which this amplitude and universality of spirit are carried, the more are they emphasized and set off; so that, without opportunity of unusual occasion, or singular opulence of natural power, a man's life may possess all that majesty which the imagination pictures in archangels and in gods. Indeed, it is but simple statement of fact to say, that he who rests utterly in his action shall belittle not only whatsoever history has recorded, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... the news of these events drifted into Washington, it colored perceptibly the minds of those who doubted whether Great Britain or France were the greater offender. Grundy, who had seen three brothers killed by Indians and his mother reduced from opulence to poverty in a single night, spoke passionately of that power which was taking every "opportunity of intriguing with our Indian neighbors and setting on the ruthless savages to tomahawk our women and ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borgia, a lady for whom I have always entertained the highest respect, on account of her rare histrionic capabilities, her opulence in solid gold goblets made of gilded wood, her high distinction as an operatic screamer, and the facility with which she could order a sextuple funeral and get the corpses ready for it. We saw one single coarse yellow hair from Lucrezia's head, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Irish famine of 1846-47 America appeared like a mirage, and wondering peasants in their dire distress exaggerated its opulence and opportunities. They braved the perils of the sea and trusted to luck in the great new world. The journey in itself was no small adventure. There were some sailings directly from Ireland; but most of the ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... apparently hopeless a country—so barren, so wild, and so repulsive, and yet enjoying the most perfect vigour, the most well-fed health, and all else that here constitutes not merely wealth, but the opulence of luxury, since they were as amply furnished with provisions as with every other thing that could be here ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... houses in London, the firm of Billing, Barlow, & Co., of Thames Street; and but for the unfortunate circumstance, of my having allowed myself to be allured to this country, by the glowing accounts of designing men, I should, sir, have still been in the enjoyment of comfortable means, if not of opulence. My experience therefore, sir, has been such as to warrant my assertion; and I utter it, I assure you, sir, without egotism, but merely as the result of a practical mercantile life; that I am sufficiently ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... readers in Great Britain and America will feel deeply and almost despairingly that, in the original fountain of his teaching, there was "a poison-drop which killed the plants it was expected to nourish, and left a sterile waste where men looked for the bloom and the opulence of a garden of God." It behooves those who idolize him to examine the image before which they stand. He is a man of unquestioned boldness and some originality, and no one of the present generation has greater power to dazzle and bewilder the young. Happily, ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... introduced during the last century, of which number something over half remained at the beginning of this. Human blood flowed in fertilizing streams over the island, and out of this ghastly compost rose an opulence so splendid as to silence for generations all inquiry into its origin or character. It secured its possessors not only easy access, but frequent intermarriages among the aristocracy of England, who thus in time ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... harvests of clover and hay in the background and weeds and wild grass in the foreground, the area of vegetation in the opulence of midsummer was demarked from the area of shell-craters, trenches and explosions. You had the majesty of battle and the desolation of war; nature's eternal seeding and fruiting alongside the most ruthless forms of destruction. In the clear air the black bursts ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... unexpectedly. His mother never recovered from the shock, but in a short time followed her loved husband to the grave. So the son was left with a good business and ample means, seeming to be on the road to opulence. ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... Cure chanced to meet a young girl who was unknown to him. She was but poorly dressed, and her shoes were white with dust; but youth and gaiety shone forth beneath the glow of her cheeks, her blue eye sparkled under the dark arch of her eyebrows, and the voluptuous opulence of her shape made one forget the poverty of her dress. From her straw hat with its faded ribbons escaped heavy tresses ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... affairs. Charles Townshend, who posed as an infallible authority on America, replied that the last war had cost the colonies little though they had profited much by it; and now these "American children, planted by our care, nourished up to strength and opulence by our indulgence, and protected by our arms, grudge to contribute their mite to relieve us from the heavy burden ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... that Durant was lapped in material comfort only intensified his spiritual pangs. The Tancreds were rich, and their wealth was not of to-day or yesterday; they had the dim golden tone, the deep opulence of centuries. And they were generous, they gave him of their best; so that, besides being bored, he had the additional discomfort of feeling himself a bit of a brute. As he lay awake night after night in his luxurious bed ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... entered the city next day without opposition, which he found entirely deserted of its inhabitants, but filled with much valuable booty, as by its mines and commerce it had already attained considerable opulence, and the inhabitants were in such haste to escape with their lives, that they only took what provisions they could procure along with them, and abandoned their riches. After removing every thing that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... exact sum which he had deposited. You may imagine how much interest might be earned by the sum of fifteen millions left in the hands of a Jewish Frankfurt banker for a period of eight years! It is from this time that dates the opulence of the House of the Brothers Rothschild, who owe to the probity of their founder the high financial ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... day for the pressed man. A single stroke of the official pen had raised him from starvation to opulence, and thenceforward, when food was cheap and the purchasing power of the penny high, he regaled himself daily, as at Limerick in 1814, on such abundant fare as a pound of beef, seven and a half pounds of potatoes, a pint of milk, a quart of porter, a boiling ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... Commons. Indeed one of the principal uses of the Upper House is to defend the vested rights of property in cases in which those rights are unpopular, and are attacked on grounds which to shortsighted politicians seem valid. An assembly composed of men almost all of whom have inherited opulence, and who are not under the necessity of paying court to constituent bodies, will not easily be hurried by passion or seduced by sophistry into robbery. As soon as the bill for punishing Duncombe had been read at the table of the Peers, it ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... can, and if you have the grace of felicitous expression or the power of energetic expression your style will be admirable and admired. At any rate see that it be your own, and not another's; on no other terms will the world listen to it. You cannot be eloquent by borrowing from the opulence of another; you cannot be humorous by mimicking the whims of another; what was a pleasant smile dimpling his features becomes ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... struggled on, often with feeble hands and fainting heart, to earn a subsistence for herself and Katy. She had been bred in opulence, and her wants were not so few and simple as the wants of those who have never enjoyed the luxury of a soft couch and a well-supplied table. She had never learned that calculating economy which provides a great deal with very ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... form the boundaries of the green cornfields, and give to the whole of the distant country the appearance of a large and majestic garden. The neat villages and small towns with sundry intermediate country seats, suggest ideas of prosperity and opulence which is not ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... received letters of recommendation from a gentleman of rank in Scotland, to some persons of distinction in London, which he had carefully tied up in his pocket-handkerchief. As he sauntered along the streets, he could not withhold his admiration of the magnitude, opulence, and various objects this great metropolis continually presented to his view. These must naturally have diverted the imagination of a man of less reflexion, and it is not greatly to be wondered at, if Mr. Thomson's mind was so ingrossed by these new ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... conspicuous in all our early literature; and, more recently, not only Pope[554] and Dryden[555] have been beholden to him, but, in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower.[556] Chaucer, it seems, drew continually, through Lydgat[557] and Caxton,[558] from Guido di Colonna,[559] whose Latin romance of the Trojan war was in turn a compilation from Dares Phrygius,[560] Ovid,[561] and Statius.[562] Then ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... calm and thorough consideration of another subject, more important if possible than the foregoing one, but like it somewhat difficult to seize by reason of the very opulence of the phraseology, logical and rhetorical, in which it has been set forth. The subject now to be considered relates to what has been called 'the death-point of bacteria.' Those who happen to be acquainted with the modern English literature of the question ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... he, "this poor young man, coming from opulence, no doubt, a dear English home, to die here for no end, one of the first-fruits of a bloody war,—so much privately sacrificed. But let him rest, Septimius. I am sorry that he fell by your hand, though it involves no shadow of ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... grandfather of William III. being Stadtholder of Holland) the Dutch discovered this island. The enterprise of that people had raised them to the zenith of their power: unless by England, they were unrivalled in nautical science and commercial opulence. More for the purposes of trade than the acquisition of knowledge, they were anxious to discover unknown countries, and to conceal the information they possessed from the ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... instantaneously curbed and petrified, just as it was about to break and overwhelm the valley with destruction. Beneath it, for seventy miles in exquisitely blended hues, stretched the wonderful San Gabriel intervale, ideal in its tranquil loveliness. Oh, the splendor, opulence, and sweetness of its countless flowers, whose scarlet, gold, and crimson glowed and melted into the richest sheen of velvet, and rendered miles of pure air redolent with perfume, as grapes impart ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... princess by a respectful silence due to her name, which is one of those that all men honor, to her misfortunes, which they ceased to discuss, and to her beauty, the only thing she saved of her departed opulence. Society, of which she had once been the ornament, was thankful to her for having, as it were, taken the veil, and cloistered herself in her own home. This act of good taste was for her, more than for any other woman, an immense sacrifice. Great deeds are always so ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac
... his table he was terribly afraid that the whole transaction would fail; as one of the people invited was a painter, and painters are an "observant, malicious, profound race, who take in everything at a glance."[*] Everything else in his rooms would represent the opulence, ease, and wealth of ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... Murders, and we never got farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... locusts of the summer, and resistless as the blasts of pestilence. Thy magazines are stored with ammunition, thy treasures overflow with the tribute of conquered kingdoms. Plenty waves upon thy fields, and opulence glitters in thy cities. Thy nod is as the earthquake that shakes the mountains, and thy smile as the dawn of the vernal day. In thy hand is the strength of thousands, and thy health is the health ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... the generous gondolier, and we go to the Hall—a dismal, bleak place, ghastly with the memories of last year's opulence and plenty, and here Giuseppe's fare is swelled by the stranger's mite. But here Giuseppe tells me of the "Relief Boat" which leaves for the flooded district in the interior, and here, profiting by the lesson he has taught me, I make the resolve to turn my ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... respectable one in New England as well as Old England. One of Boston's richest merchants, Henry Shrimpton, made large quantities of pewter ware for the Massachusetts colonists. So proud was he of his business that in his later years of opulence he had a great kettle atop of his house, to indicate his past trade and means of wealth. Pewter and pewterers abounded until the vast increase of Oriental commerce brought the influx of Chinese porcelain to drive out the dull metal. ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... a most unconventional evening suit, the waistcoat cut very high, and a plain black tie. Two footmen stood behind his chair, and a large florid lady, wearing a crown of diamonds, and with a European reputation for opulence, sat on his right hand. Neither seemed to embarrass him in the least, for the simple reason that he took no notice of them. He drank water, ate sparingly, and talked Wall Street with a man a few places down the table on the ...
— The Great Secret • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... talked, the heart of the good woman rose up within her and blessed her son, acknowledging, in spite of her natural desires, that he was in this more truly the great man than she had fancied him in her wildest dreams of opulence and renown. She credited him with far purer motives than ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... several others of similar pursuit, they took a genteel house in a respectable part of the town, and dividing themselves into classes of masters, clerks, out-riders, shopmen, porters, and servants, and thus making a show of opulence, they easily obtained credit, and laid in goods of every kind, which they sent into the country and sold, or bartered for other commodities; these commodities they brought up to London, and sold for ready money, generally taking in exchange double the quantity, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan |
