"Sharpness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the dog had gone into a great fit of laughing at Jack's sharpness about the money. 'The money that's in it, Jack!' says he; and he took the pipe out of his mouth, and laughed till he brought on a hard fit of coughing. 'O, by this and by that says he, 'but that bates Bannagher! And you're ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... another method on them, since yon one did not stop them," said the druid. And the druid froze the grey ridged sea into hard rocky knobs, the sharpness of sword being on the one edge and the poison power of adders on the other. Then Arden cried that he was getting tired, and nearly giving over. "Come you, Arden, and sit on my right shoulder," said Naois. ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... creation of his own immature fancy, and to recommend the acceptance of the latter upon the ground of their common rejection of startling plot and dramatic situation. The two compositions have certainly that in common; and the flawless diamond has some things, such as mere sharpness and smoothness, in common with ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... and sharpness of vigor about him which was lost sight of as he ripened and mellowed in a conspicuous manner under the influences of ampler means and advancing years. The simple tastes and quiet ways of his boyhood home ...
— Fifty years with the Revere Copper Co. - A Paper Read at the Stockholders' Meeting held on Monday 24 March 1890 • S. T. Snow
... Hiram escorted into the room proved to be no more nor less than Lampaxo. Two years had not removed the wrinkles from her cheek, the sharpness from her nose, the rasping from her tongue. At sight of her Democrates half rose from his seat and held out his hand affably, the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... a salad, cut some of the red part of the lobster, and add to it. This will form a pleasing contrast to the white and green of the vegetables. Be careful not to put in too much oil, as shell-fish absorbs the sharpness of the vinegar. Serve it up in a ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... original, had often to be added (cf. Figs, 101, 104, etc.). The existence of such a support in a marble work is, then, one reason among others for assuming a bronze original. Other indications pointing the same way are afforded by a peculiar sharpness of edge, e.g., of the eyelids and the eyebrows, and by the metallic treatment of the hair. These points are well illustrated by Fig. 76. Notice especially the curls, which in the original would have been made of separate strips of bronze, twisted and attached ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... scornfully, but in the absence of a crushing reply disdained one at all. She contented herself instead by going outside and closing the door after her with a sharpness which stirred every ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... he saw was a gray squirrel on the trunk of a tree about twenty feet away. But he was a friend of the squirrel, and he regarded it with friendly eyes, noting the sharpness of its claws, the bushiness of its tail, and the alertness of its keen little nose. It was an uncommon squirrel, endowed with great curiosity, and perception, a leader in its tribe, and it was intensely interested in the large, still body ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he spreads his wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion's paws, his woman's neck, his horse's loins, and his intellectual head; he shakes his sacred fillets, he strikes an ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Part First • Honore de Balzac
... from what he is abroad. There he is "sweet," but he sours the moment he steps off the island. In this country he is too generally arrogant, fault-finding, and supercilious. The very traits of loudness, sharpness, and unleavenedness, which I complain of in our national manners, he very frequently exemplifies ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... in a couple of strides to the edge of the little stream and there held her threateningly over the bank. The two young men shouted approval and Myrtle began to squirm. At first she demanded coyly to be set down, and then with more sharpness in her tone. Joe looked into her eyes. They were unfathomable. Her peach-bloom cheeks were quite pink. But there were a few tiny wrinkles about her mouth that he had never seen before. Made her look older, somehow. He softened, for the lovely burden ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... first presented the appearance of dense vapour became visible on the Barracouta's larboard bow; but presently, when the cold whiteness of the coming day became flushed with a delicate tint of purest, palest primrose, the supposed fog-bank assumed a depth of rich purple hue and a clear-cut sharpness of outline that proclaimed it what it was—land, most unmistakably. The look-out was a smart young fellow, who had already established a reputation for trustworthiness, and he more than half suspected the character of the cloud-like appearance when it first caught his attention; he therefore ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... tall child whom he met there did not drink it, and her father seemed but to wet his lips, so that Leila and he had all the rest. Rather a wonderful little scene it made in his mind, very warm, glowing, yet with a strange dark sharpness to it, which came perhaps from the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... before her. Perhaps the resemblance between this young girl and the young girl of the past was more one of mien than aught else, although the type of face was the same. This girl had the same fine sharpness of feature and delicately bright color, and she also wore her hair in curls, although they were tied back from her face with a black velvet ribbon, and did not veil it when she drooped her head, ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... made me dislike her. I never knew unkindness till I knew her. I never felt the sting of poverty till she made me feel all its sharpness. I never knew that I was steeped in sinful pride until ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Holstein, and Lauenburg.[782] During the (p. 557) later years of the reign successive ministries grappled vainly with this problem, and the political forces of the kingdom came to be divided with unprecedented sharpness by the conflict between the separatist tendency and the demand for immediate and complete incorporation. The king himself was brought eventually to consent to the framing of a constitution for the whole of his dominions, ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... the lining membrane is richly glandular. In the Insectivora, Carnivora, Perissodactyla, and in most Edentata, Chiroptera, Rodentia and Primates, this primitive disposition is retained, the difference consisting chiefly in the degrees of elongation of the stomach and the sharpness of the distal curvature. In other cases the cardiac portion may be prolonged into a caecal sac, a condition most highly differentiated in the blood-sucking bat, Desmodeus, where it is longer than the entire length of the body. There are two ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... began to unfasten her long, frilled, black sleeves, and rose with a smile so winning that it entirely robbed her speech of sharpness. ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... "There is a Latin sharpness of mentality manifested in these clearly, sardonically etched portraits of a ship's crew. The whimsical humour revealed in final lines is a portent, in the present writer's opinion, of a talent which will probably ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... tone, and old Oliver looked down upon him through his spectacles, with a closer survey than he had given to him before. The boy's face was pale and meagre, with an unboyish sharpness about it, though he did not seem more than nine or ten years old. His glittering eyes were filled with tears, and his colourless lips quivered. He wiped away the tears roughly upon the ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... was somethin' i' the wind wi' that little girl! The memory o' my own young days when I boarded and captured the poetess is strong upon me yet. I saw it in the rascal's eye the very first time they met—an' he thinks I'm as blind as a bat, I'll be bound, with his poetical reef-point-pattering sharpness. But it's a strange discovery he has made and must be looked into. The young dog! He gives me orders as ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... True, he wore better clothes, had learned slightly better manners, and spoke better English. As a gambler and a man-trampler he had developed remarkable efficiency. Also, he had become used to a higher standard of living, and he had whetted his wits to razor sharpness in the fierce, complicated struggle of fighting males. But he had hardened, and at the expense of his old-time, whole-souled geniality. Of the essential refinements of civilization he knew nothing. He did not know they existed. He had become ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... gave to almost every one. She was like a household blaze upon a rainy day, one stretched out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against the charge of being amiable. "It would be horrid to be amiable," she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a touch of sharpness about her. She was amused once because I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and half sour. "Oh! any stupid woman can be sweet," she said, "it's ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... map, follow the R-V line, V indicating valley and R ridge or hill. Note first the difference in sharpness in the contour bends; also how the valley contours point to the highland and the ridge ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... vignette in my memory of my return to my father's house, down through the pine woods and by the winding path across the deep valley that separated our two ridges. I was thinking of Mary and nothing but Mary in all the world and of the friendly sweetness of her eyes and the clean strong sharpness of her voice. That sweet white figure of Rachel that had been creeping to an ascendancy in my imagination was moonlight to her sunrise. I knew it was Mary I loved and had always loved. I wanted passionately to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... adversaries with sophisms and deduces from the views of Darwin and Haeckel conclusions to which they certainly do not lead. But in the majority of cases, his work is full of real convincing power, and with the breadth of its philosophical view and with the sharpness of its definitions, as well as with its abundance of philosophic and especially botanical teachings and their ingenious application, it is directly destructive to the use of the selection theory as the principal key to the solution of the problems. Eduard von Hartmann describes ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... interview she had firmly decided to board that very train. This was not entirely due to stubbornness, for she reflected that if she stayed at the school her unhappy condition would become aggravated, instead of improving, especially since Miss Stearne had developed unexpected sharpness of temper. She would endure no longer the malicious taunts of her school fellows or the scoldings of the principal, and these could be avoided in no other way than by escaping as ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... rider lay still, the blood pulsing from his throat and staining the yellow sand. With dextrous fingers Tahn-te removed the helmet and breastplate that the position of the body might be eased. With sinew of deer from his pouch, and a bone awl of needle-like sharpness, he drew together the edges of the wound, then turning to where the Navahu lay prone on his face in the sand, he deftly cut a strip of the brown skin a finger's width across, and in length from shoulder to girdle; this he took from the yet warm body as he would take the bark from a willow tree, ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... Miss Emily. It was a long time since I had heard the word so used, but it was very apt. Maggie was indeed sharp. But Miss Emily launched into a general dissertation on servants, and Maggie's sharpness was forgotten. ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... After a time she stretched forth her fingers to the blaze. All over! She straightened slowly and caught a glimpse of her face in the mirror. The firelight gleamed under her brows, brought out with unpleasant sharpness the angle of her jaw and touched the bones of her cheek caressingly. She looked again, the truth compelling her, and then buried her face in her arm. The truth—middle age, had set its first mark upon her. The sallow fingers of Time had touched her lightly, more as a warning than as a prophecy, ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... its sharpness when we consider not the affairs of a particular business, but the industrial system as a whole. Then the period of time involved in the consumption of durable instruments falls into place as part of the time required for the production of the ultimate consumers' goods. We can even, perhaps, ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... naturally pale face acquired a corpselike sharpness in its lines. "I had no idea that it was of this ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... or rather this shifting of responsibility on to another's shoulders, had its bad results, for while the dog improved every day in sharpness and conscientious performance of duty, the boy did the opposite. Tim became somewhat careless and lazy, and though Joshua knew nothing of it, he did not really fill his post half so well as before the dog came; he allowed things to get slack. Now, whether one ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... they leave the bow, but if they pass through the radiant envelope of divine protection that surrounds us—and they must have passed through that if they reach us—it cleanses all the venom from the points though it leaves the sharpness there. The evil is not an evil if it has got our length; and its having touched us shows that He who lets it pass into the light where His children safely dwell, knows that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... sleeping at our post, and that our courage rose with every fresh attack, the thieves gradually gave up open war, and only sought to entrap the birds by artifice; and, like the foxes and cats, came sneaking into the grounds, and trusted to the swiftness of their legs rather than the sharpness of their teeth when Nip or I caught sight ...
— The Adventures of a Dog, and a Good Dog Too • Alfred Elwes
... good story if my papa tells it," spoke up the Daughter of the House. And John Gayther was pleased to note a sharpness in ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... right inside; for while he was under scraper and towel he would be read to or dictate. When travelling he thought of nothing else: at his side was a shorthand writer with a book and his tablets. In winter the writer's hands were protected by mittens, so that not even the sharpness of the weather should rob him of a moment. For the same reason even at Rome he used to ride in a sedan-chair (and not in a litter). I remember how he once took me to task for walking. Said he, 'You need not have wasted ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... field, A little cockle-shell his shield, Which he could very bravely wield, Yet could it not be pierced: His spear a bent[14] both stiff and strong, And well-near of two inches long: The pile was of a horse-fly's tongue, Whose sharpness nought reversed. ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... chair, and, shirking the man's gaze, stared down at the worn carpet and at his boots thereon. One instinct in her desired that he should move away or that the room should be larger, but another instinct wanted him to remain close, lest the savour of life should lose its sharpness. ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... should be remembered, of the foregoing night alone, while she speaks of that past so wholly blotted from his mind. "Oh, wily hero! see how you lie! how ill-advisedly you call to witness your sword! I am acquainted indeed with its sharpness, but acquainted, too, with the sheath—in which, pleasantly encased, Nothung, the faithful friend, hung against the wall, while the master courted ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... before any one else could call for a drink, he seized the opportunity himself. He plied them with a big drink at his own expense, and so promptly enlisted their favor—incidentally setting their appetites for a further orgie with a sharpness that it would take most of ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... Harmony's requirements. Dr. Jennings seemed to fit them all, a woman, not young, not too stout, agreeable and human. She was a large, almost bovinely placid person, not at all reminiscent of Anna. She was neat where Anna had been disorderly, well dressed and breezy against Anna's dowdiness and sharpness. Peter, having totaled the score, rose and looked down ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... depiction of misfortune. Pity for the individual, not despair of the race, is his motive. And pity makes his gentle style, pity makes him regardless of artifice, and gives his often clumsy novels an undercurrent which sweeps them beyond technical masterpieces whose only merit is sharpness of thought. It is instructive to compare the relative fortunes of Hardy and Meredith, once always bracketed—the apostle of pity in comparison with the most subtle and brilliant mind of his time. Hardy has ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... remorse which, for the instant, foreshadowed danger ahead; from an acute pity for her; or perchance from a longing to forego the attempt upon an exalted place, and get back to the straightforward hours, such as those upon the Ecrehos, when he knew that he loved her. But the sharpness of his feelings rendered more intense now the declaration of his love. The phrases were wrung from him. "Good-bye—no, a la bonne heure, my dearest," he wrote. "Good days are coming—brave, great days, when I shall be free to strike another ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a leaden morning in November, when the mud was deepest and the first snow was shied through the air, whose sharpness cut like a knife, "Dodd" Weaver came into the schoolroom alone, his mother being too busy to go with him. He had waded across the street where the mud and slush were worse than anywhere else. His boots were smeared to their very tops, and the new book that he ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith
... the sharpness of the lines of demarcation between natural groups and in the absence of transitional forms, with all the confidence of youth and imperfect knowledge. I was not aware at that time that he had been many years brooding over the species question; and the humorous smile ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... A sharpness came into the voice of the speaker. He turned to McGregor and talked vigorously like one making a defence. "My woman was a good enough sort," he said. "I suppose loving is an art like writing a book or drawing pictures or making violins. ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... imagin'd, but onely a piece of a tapering body, with a great part of the top remov'd, or deficient. The Points of Pins are yet more blunt, and the Points of the most curious Mathematical Instruments do very seldome arrive at so great a sharpness; how much therefore can be built upon demonstrations made onely by the productions of the Ruler and Compasses, he will be better able to consider that shall but view those points and ...
— Micrographia • Robert Hooke
... out from the dust with the same hint of crushing force, the same die cut sharpness, the same METALLIC suggestion—and pointing toward the globes were the claw marks of the ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... remarries or not; that is, can affect only her feelings, and only such of them as are least creditable to her. Yet her self-interest is enlisted against him to do him incessant disservice. By merely caring for her health she increases the sharpness of his punishment—for punishment it is if he feels it such; every hour that she wrests from death is added to his "term." The expediency of preventing a man from marrying, without having the power to prevent him from making his marriage desirable in the interest of the ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... standard. And Durmukha rushing against the mighty Sahadeva battling in that terrific encounter, pierced him with a shower of arrows. The heroic Sahadeva then, in that fearful battle, overthrew Durmukha's charioteer with an arrow of great sharpness. Both of them, irrepressible in fight, approaching each other in combat, and each attacking the other and desirous of warding off the other's attack, began to strike terror into each other with terrible shafts. And king Yudhishthira ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... contrast still exists in all its sharpness, as we still have a real forest. England, on the contrary, has practically no really free forest left—no forest which has any social significance. This, of necessity, occasions at the very outset a number of the clearest distinctions ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... continued to write in this way several months, signing all his articles "Busy Body." The public were greatly interested in the communications, because of their real merit. They were bright, even sparkling, full of humor, logical to sharpness, and charged with ability. They drew public attention to Bradford's paper, and public ridicule to Keimer's; so that the subscription list of the former increased, while that of the latter never had over ninety subscribers. People on every hand inquired, "Who is Busy Body?" And, ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... man is not, by nature, destined to devour animal food, is evident from the construction of the human frame, which bears no resemblance to wild beasts or birds of prey. Man is not provided with claws or talons, with sharpness of fang or tusk, so well adapted to tear and lacerate; nor is his stomach so well braced and muscular, nor his animal spirits so warm, as to enable him to digest this solid mass of animal flesh. On the contrary, nature has made ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... Senator, whose ideas of the Roumanian and Bulgarian neighbourhood were vague, and who had a general notion that all such people lived in tents, wore sheepskins with the wool inside, and ate curds: "Oh, they have politicians there! I would like to see them try their sharpness ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... I was destined by my grandfather for a Rabbi—my heart is too heavy to speak. Who does not know the arid wilderness of ceremonial law, the barren hyper-subtleties of Talmudic debate, which in my country had then reached the extreme of human sharpness in dividing hairs; the dead sea fruit of learning, unquickened by living waters? And who will wonder if my soul turned in silent longing in search of green pastures, and panted for the water-brooks, and if my childish spirit ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the end of two days there came down to the shore quite one hundred and fifty Moors on foot, and thirty-five mounted on camels and horses, and though they seemed to be a race both barbarous and bestial, there was not wanting in them a certain sharpness, with which they could cheat their enemies, for at first there only appeared three of them on the beach, and the rest lay in ambush till our men should land and they could rush out and master them, which thing they ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... casting about for an eating-house when I heard the purr of a motor-cycle and across the road saw the intelligent boy scout. He saw me, too, and put on the brake with a sharpness which caused him to skid and all but come to grief under the wheels of a wool-wagon. That gave me time to efface myself by darting up a side street. I had an unpleasant sense that I was about to be trapped, for in a place ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... freshen and blow coldly where I sat. I had no motive in changing my seat, except to escape the sharpness of the breeze. I crossed to the other side, where the white line of cliffs lay—away from the brilliant lights of the west pier, hidden behind the wooden structure erected to shelter those on the pier. I gave myself up to ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... borrowed to bear in the fighting No blunt-edged weapon of Skeggi: There is strength in the serpent that quivers By the side of the land of the girdle. But vain was the virtue of Skofnung When he vanquished the sharpness of Whitting; And a shard have I shorn, to my sorrow, From the shearer ...
— The Life and Death of Cormac the Skald • Unknown
... freshness, and seem as if just chiselled; but, saving these exceptions, the Cypriot figures have their angles rounded, and their projections softened down. It is like a page of writing, where the ink, before it had time to dry, preserving its sharpness of tone, has been absorbed by the blotting paper and has left only pale ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... slanderous lewdness to be the more condemned, that have in favor of heinous malefactors and stubborn traitors spread untrue rumours and slanders, to make her merciful government disliked, under false pretence and rumors of sharpness and cruelty to those against whom nothing can be cruel, and yet upon whom nothing hath been done but ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... devotion, so that I passed four years in his service. When I first came there, I found two other pupils of mine own age newly arrived, Hakim Omar Khayyam, and the ill- fated Ben Sabbah. Both were endowed with sharpness of wit and the highest natural powers; and we three formed a close friendship together. When the Imam rose from his lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... principal combatants; so, as he was aboard the lugger, I ran down close under the Dolphin's lee and, having hove-to, lowered a boat and put the medico on board the schooner, going with him myself to see whether I could be of any service. The deck of the schooner bore eloquent testimony to the sharpness of the recent conflict, several dead and wounded men lying about the guns in little pools of blood, while the torn and splintered woodwork that met one's view on every side was grimly suggestive of the pandemonium that had raged there a few minutes previously. Captain Winter was one of ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... his head, as he did the other that the dwarf made for him, and strikes it upon the anvil. And this time the anvil falls in two as if it were made of paper, and the sword glitters and shines and shimmers in the joy of its magic sharpness and strength. ...
— The Wagner Story Book • Henry Frost
... time we never call on. They are a hoard which we do not touch. Our resources and our power of life are greater than we imagine. The sudden loss of sight gives, after a time, something like the lash of a whip to the whole organism. All the other senses are roused to greater sharpness. When the blind soldier fully realizes this, he will perhaps arrive at a state in which I have seen some men blind from birth, the state of being proud of being blind. Why should they not be proud, when ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... look at all that sort of age?" was Lady Sellingworth's thought as, for a brief instant, she contemplated him, with an intensity, a sort of almost fierce sharpness which she was ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... came after the winter storms, early, in March, with all the strength and sweetness of spring in it; though there was sharpness enough in the air to make my veins tingle. The sun was shining with so much heat in it, that I might be out-of-doors all day under the shelter of the rocks, in the warm, southern nooks where the daisies ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... extended the weapon edgeways in the air, and drawing it suddenly through the veil, although it hung on the blade entirely loose, severed that also into two parts, which floated to different sides of the tent, equally displaying the extreme temper and sharpness of the weapon and the exquisite dexterity of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the wood of which the mechanism has to be made, by means of fire; either baking it in hot sand or ashes, or otherwise applying heat to a degree just short of charring its surface. The mechanism will then retain the sharpness of its edges under a continuance of pressure, and during many hours of wet weather. The slighter the strain on the springe, the more delicately can its mechanism ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... rough diamond." Bulmer realized that Iris was overwrought. Vague but sensational items in newspapers had prepared him in some measure for the story of her wanderings since last they met in quiet, old-fashioned Bootle. He felt that she was altered, that their ways in life had deviated with a sharpness that was not to be brought back into parallel grooves simply because he had traveled many thousands ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too, especially when he smiled: his hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his forehead very high and large, and a great vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes. The colour of his skin was not quite black, but very tawny, and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians and Virginians, and other natives of America are, but of a bright kind of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... dominant in the wild creatures that are necessary for the survival of the species—strength, speed, sharpness of eye and ear, keenness of scent; all ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language; for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty, and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last bitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... warpiness of the English climate, sparkling one day with the dew-drop-on-the-grass-freshness of an early summer morning, to hang the next as passing heavy on the hand as the November fog upon the new hat brim; veering within twelve hours to the sharpness of the East wind, which braces skin and temper to cracking point, and to make up for it all, for one whole hour in the twenty-four, resembling the exquisite moment of the June morning, in which you find the first half-open rose upon the bush ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... The result ... has been to produce an indescribable scene of desolation. Everywhere the hillsides facing the valley have been stripped bare from crest to base, and the seams of coal and partings of shale could be seen running in and out of the irregularities of the cliffs with a sharpness and distinctness which recalled the pictures of the caons of Colorado. At the bottom of the valley was a piled-up heap of dbris and broken trees, while the old stream had been obliterated and the stream could be seen flowing over a sandy bed, which must have been ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... I had expected; and if you choose to be dutiful in the station to which it has pleased God to call you, you will find me a very kind old fellow. I like your looks,' he added, calling me by my name, which he scandalously mispronounced. 'Is your hair all your own?' he then inquired with a certain sharpness, and coming up to me, as though I were a horse, he grossly satisfied his doubts. I was all one flame from head to foot, but I contained my righteous anger and submitted. 'That is very well,' he continued, chucking me good humouredly under the chin. 'You will have no ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... divine right, of which St. Paul indeed says: "For though I should boast somewhat more of our authority which the Lord hath given us for edification, and not for your destruction," 2 Cor. 10:8, and afterwards: "Therefore I write these things being absent, lest being present I should use sharpness, according to the power which the Lord hath given me to edification, and not to destruction," 2 Cor. 13:10. Paul also displays his coercitive disposition when he says: "What will ye? Shall I come unto you with ...
— The Confutatio Pontificia • Anonymous
... had rested since the earliest peep of dawn a hush of affectionate and anxious expectancy, the very plough-boys going about their labours without boisterous laughter, the children playing quietly, and the good wives in their kitchens and dairies bustling less than usual and modulating the sharpness of their voices, the most motherly among them in truth finding themselves falling into whispering as they gossiped of the great subject ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thinking swiftly, and his thoughts covered a very wide range of time and place as he stood there. Then he spoke very deliberately and coolly, but with a certain peremptory sharpness. ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... had scarcely passed his lips, when the crack of the rifle, followed by a bright blaze of light, sounded throughout the stillness of the night with exciting sharpness. For an instant all was hushed; but scarcely had the distant woods ceased to reverberate the spirit-stirring echoes, when the anxious group of officers were surprised and startled by a sudden flash, the report of a ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... At the astonishing sharpness of the prick, she gave a cry and awoke to a sense of undeserved escape. A little ruby spot of blood was the reward of that great act of desperation; but the pain had braced her like a tonic, and her whole design of ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... worthy friend." And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, or else that you dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... latter has probably seen the Swiss Alps, which, though barely possessing half the sublimity, extent, or height of the Himalaya, are yet far more beautiful. In either case he is struck with the precision and sharpness of their outlines, and still more with the wonderful play of colours on their snowy flanks, from the glowing hues reflected in orange, gold and ruby, from clouds illumined by the sinking or rising sun, to the ghastly pallor that succeeds with twilight, when the red seems to give place ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... purple moors, is very poetical to look back upon; but when such life actually touches on our own days, and we can hear particulars from the lips of those now living, there come out details of coarseness—of the uncouthness of the rustic mingled with the sharpness of the tradesman—of irregularity and fierce lawlessness—that rather mar the vision of pastoral innocence and simplicity. Still, as it is the exceptional and exaggerated characteristics of any period that leave the most vivid memory behind them, it ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... later," retorted William, with unwonted sharpness. "But not now. This is what she says." ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... guide awaiting him was a coal-black negro named Dionysio, who was of such huge stature that the other Cubans seemed pygmies beside him. He was armed only with a great machete, ground to exceeding sharpness, and he disdained to ride a horse, declaring that he could, on foot, cover a greater distance in less time than any horse on the island, which Ridge was able to credit after a short experience with his ebony guide. Besides, being a big man and a very ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... saw die, in his youth, as we may remember. They are all dead. And now the Heritages are to settle, at least the recent part of them. Let Kannegiesser keep his eyes open. Kannegiesser is an expert high-mannered man; but said to be subject to sharpness of temper; and not in the best favor with the Hanover people. That is ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... me. I am tired of living in an atmosphere of suspicion, and I have done with it—that is all. You think some game is being played on you—both you and Mr. Wentworth think that—and yet you haven't the "cuteness," as they call it here, or sharpness, to find it out. Now, a man who has suspicions he cannot prove to be well founded should keep those suspicions to himself until he can prove them. That is my advice to you. I ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... histrionic activity, had that effect upon this perfect artist and impoverished human being ... An artist, a real one, not one whose official profession is art, but a predestined and pre-condemned artist, you can pick out of a thousand men, with a little sharpness of sight. The feeling of separation and of non-membership, of being recognized and observed, is in his face, something at once regal and perplexed. In the features of a prince walking in ordinary clothes through a crowd one ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... technique, the dexterity, the finger facility, or whatever you may choose to call it. So far as this is concerned the instrument itself makes you a virtuoso—places you on a par with a Liszt, Paderewski or Rosenthal. It does so mechanically, yet without the sharpness and insistent preciseness of a machine. Its action is pneumatic and the effect of the compressed air is to impart to its "touch"—the manner in which its "fingers" strike the keys—an elasticity which at least is comparable with the touch of human fingers. As a friend of mine, ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Now, a spirit like his cannot see and hear and know such things as Peter had been experiencing for three years, without showing signs of the conflict. Peter had changed physically as well as spiritually. His face had paled to an ivory tone, the features had a cameo sharpness and purity of outline; cheeks and chin were covered with a heavy, jet-black beard,—as if his countenance were in morning for its lost boyishness. And out of this thin, quiet, black-haired, black-bearded face looked a pair of golden eyes of an almost intolerable ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... women. I never could abide your shrewd, knowing people, who seemed to be always living with a wink in their eyes, and a grin on their lips, as if they believed in nobody and nothing but their own sharpness. I loathed them, and I loathe them still. But I wasn't wise. I had to smart for it. I had plenty of money when I came of age, and I had plenty of friends, or rather acquaintances, who knew it. But I was shy, and not over fond of many companions; my weakness wasn't in that direction. ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... motionless lethargy. Nothing seemed properly to interest or to concern me, and not till evening was I visited by any muse. Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) was no longer a subject for my entertainment, and I suffered from an uneasy isolation that had not the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the mind. I had the feeling that every one I might see would be a stranger, and that their language would be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men who travel, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... said, with a slight sharpness in his accent. Then he added quickly, "No, for I am a born shopkeeper in another sense than because I am one of a ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... plain to my father, that all souls were by nature equal,—and that the great difference between the most acute and the most obtuse understanding—was from no original sharpness or bluntness of one thinking substance above or below another,—but arose merely from the lucky or unlucky organization of the body, in that part where the soul principally took up her residence,—he had made it the subject ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... poet who has borrowed from them their giants and enchanters, their forests and their magic castles; and these and similar properties are used in the twelfth century with the same kind of literary sharpness, the same attention to the demands of the "reading public," as is shown by the various poets and novelists who have waited on the successes, and tried to copy the methods, of Goethe, Scott, or Victor Hugo. Pure Romance, such as is found in the old Northern ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... image of the old burnt article, its air-drawn counterpart,—this you still had, or might get, and draw uses from, if you could. Wait till the Book on the Logos were done;—alas, till your own terrene eyes, blind with conceit and the dust of logic, were purged, subtilized and spiritualized into the sharpness of vision requisite for discerning such an "om-m-mject."—The ingenuous young English head, of those days, stood strangely puzzled by such revelations; uncertain whether it were getting inspired, or getting infatuated into flat imbecility; ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... returned Dic, with a sharpness that attracted her attention at once, "did she say I took hold of her, or are you trying to tease me? If you are teasing, I think it is in bad ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... church, and, like Anna, serves the Lord with fastings and with prayers. There she takes up the cross in the morning, bears it through the day, and returns at night to give thanks, and press it to her bosom with all its thorns and all its sharpness. ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... the Seine, the stone quays, and the gilded trees. The red sun threw into the cloudy sky the last glories of the year. Therese, as she went out, relished the sharpness of the air and the dying splendor of the day. Since her return to Paris, happy, she found pleasure every morning in the changes of the weather. It seemed to her, in her generous selfishness, that it was for her the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... him," they said, when a new-comer was disputatious, and hard to manage; "Owd Sammy's th' one to gi' him one fur his nob. Owd Sammy'll fettle him—graidely." And the fact was that Craddock's cantankerous sharpness of brain and tongue were usually efficacious. So he "tackled" Barholm, and so he "tackled" the curate. But, for some reason, he was never actually bitter against Grace. He spoke of him lightly, and rather sneered at his physical ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... experience and observation. M—— told me, after dining with Dickens immediately on his return, that one thing that had disgusted him was the almost universal want of conscience upon money matters in America; and the levity, occasionally approaching to something like self-satisfaction, for their "sharpness," which he had repeated occasions of observing, in your people when speaking of the present disgraceful condition of their finances and deservedly degraded state of their national credit.... But I do hope (because ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... all these rebuffs that when Mr. Jorrocks met the Yorkshireman, he was not in the best possible humour; indeed, to say nothing of the extreme sharpness and suspicion of the people, we know of no place where a man, not fond of racing, is so completely out of his element as at Newmarket, for with the exception of a little "elbow shaking" in the evening, there is literally and truly nothing else to do. It is "Heath," ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... in it more of weariness and sorrow than sharpness. "How utterly faithless you are! You turn your backs on God himself! How long must I teach you? How much longer must I endure your cold hearts?" He turned ...
— Men Called Him Master • Elwyn Allen Smith
... full scope for the exercise of his powers. He selected wood as nearly as possible resembling that found in the works of Niccolo Amati. The backs are mostly of even grain, and compact; the modelling can only be found fault with near the purfling, where its sharpness at once catches the attention of the critic in these matters, and divulges the true author. The varnish, though good, is not equal to that of Amati. The scroll is inferior to the body in merit. The purfling is of whalebone, like that of most of the ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... natural faculties. She lost her mother very young; her father—speaking with great diffidence, from a very slight and imperfect knowledge—appeared to me a harsh and ungenial man. She inherited from him her thin voice, but not the steel-edged sharpness of his own; and she inherited, not from him, but from her mother, a largeness of heart that entered proportionately into the working of her mind. She had a masculine capacity for study; for, though I suspect her early schooling was irregular, she remained a student all her life, and by painstaking ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... knee, glanced under the shawl, and saw indeed a sad spectacle, and she felt such a sharpness of bone as proved that there was far from being the proper amount of clothing or of flesh to protect them. Lady Temple looked at Mary's attenuated hand, and fairly sobbed, "Oh, ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... said suddenly one night, and in her voice was the mother's sharpness which is so delightful to hear and so effectual when it is heard only at long intervals; "John, my lad, shut your book and put on your coat, and take Robin with you for a run on the sands, and then go to ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... the spot around which three different races met and struggled; the Russians, the Finns, and the Swedes. The Russians with their superior numbers, their riches, and their sharpness, pushed the Finns towards the North and took their country, the now northern half of Russia in Europe. The Swedes came and conquered the Slavs; founded a dynasty and called their State Russia (i.e. Sweden, Ruotsi ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... quarrelling over the spoil. So they asked him to divide it for them. He came down off the horse, and he divided the carcass amongst the three, three shares to the dog, two shares to the otter, and a share to the falcon. "For this," said the dog, "if swiftness of foot or sharpness of tooth will give thee aid, mind me, and I will be at thy side." Said the otter, "If the swimming of foot on the ground of a pool will loose thee, mind me, and I will be at thy side." Said the falcon, "If hardship comes on thee, where swiftness of wing or crook of claw ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... round her singularly small and fleshless neck, a wisp of black velvet. The top of the head was rather flat, and the heavy dark hair, projecting stiffly on either side of the face, emphasized at once the sharpness of the little bony chin, the general sallowness of complexion, and the remarkable size and blackness of the eyes. There was something snakelike about the flat head, and the thin triangular face; an effect which certainly belied the little lady, for there ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... grew stronger and the light more brilliant, while the mountains gradually assumed a harsher aspect, and the details of things, in the dawn so delicately clear, became, as it were, more piercing in their sharpness, she realised a new and terrible aspect of it. That which has the power to bestow has another power. She had seen the great procession of those who had received gifts of the desert's hands. Would she some day, or in the night when the sky was like a sapphire, see the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... that so, upon the shining meadow When the sun draws the magic of your shadow, Or when the red fire's gradual sinking light Yields up the room to night; Seeing you thus or thus I may recapture The very sharpness of remembered rapture:— So it may seem, by exquisite deceit, You are yet mine, I yours, and life ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
... a strong and very tough bow adorned with gold and capable of taking the lives of foes he pierced thy sons in that conflict, with his shafts. Then king Duryodhana struck the mighty Bhimasena at the very vitals with a long shaft of exceeding sharpness. Then that mighty bowman, pierced thus deeply by thy son, bow in hand, forcibly drawing his own with eyes red in wrath, struck Duryodhana in his two arms and the breast with three shafts. But struck thus, O king, he moved not, like a prince of mountains. Beholding then ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... been for the woman, Adam had kept his integrity, and therefore her punishment shall be, as it is said, "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow in thy conception: in sorrow shall thou bring forth children—and thy husband shall rule over thee." But nevertheless, if thou shalt not survive the sharpness of thy sorrow, thy death shall be deemed to be such an alleviation of thy part of the entailed transgression, that thou shalt be saved, if thou hast CONTINUED in faith and charity, ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... admirably clear, with a blue sea and sky, and the voyage in the long canoe—I had not been in one for two or three years—gave me indescribable enjoyment. We passed Dunmore Head, and then stood Out nearly due west towards the Great Blasket itself, the height of the mountains round the bay and the sharpness of the rocks making the place singularly different from the sounds about Aran, where I had last travelled in a curagh. As usual, three men were rowing—the man I have come to stay with, his son, and a tall neighbour, all dressed in blue jerseys, homespun ...
— In Wicklow and West Kerry • John M. Synge
... below me on the street the flat bell of the scissors-grinder. I know not what skill is required, yet it needs a pretty eye and even foot. The ragman takes to an ancestral business and chants the ancient song of his fathers. When distance has somewhat muffled its nearer sharpness, the song bears a melody unparalleled among tradesmen's cries. Window glass, too, is hawked pleasantly from house to house and requires but a knife and putty. In the spring the vegetable vender, standing ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks |
