"Stael" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Our best novelists in point of composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women; and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I have said, what is chiefly wanting. And ...
— The Subjection of Women • John Stuart Mill
... the cardinal points as her sole garment." "Vetu de climat," says Madame de Stael. In Paris nude statues are "draped in cerulean blue." Rabelais (iv.,29) robes King Shrovetide in grey and gold of a comical cut, nothing before, nothing behind, with sleeves ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... of his two bald authoresses, Mrs. Barbauld being one and Mrs. Inchbald being the other. Crabb Robinson and Rogers were two faithful links with the outer world. 'Crabb Robinson corresponds with Madame de Stael, is quite intimate,' she writes, 'has received I don't know how many letters,' she adds, not without some slight amusement. Miss Lucy Aikin tells a pretty story of Scott meeting Mrs. Barbauld at dinner, and telling her that ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... embittered by the infusion of party spirit.' Gibbon died in London almost at the very moment that De Maistre arrived at Lausanne, but his account of things remained true, and political feuds continued to run as high as ever. Among the people with whom De Maistre was thrown was Madame de Stael. 'As we had not been to the same school,' he says, 'either in theology or in politics, we had some scenes enough to make one die of laughter; still without quarrelling. Her father, who was then alive, was the friend and relative of people that I love with all my ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley
... Stael was right when she said she greatly preferred meeting interesting men and women to admiring places or scenery. Among my pleasantest memories of Los Angeles are my visits to Madame Fremont in her ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... its proneness to frivolity and broad jest, its thirst for superficial excitement. Whatever his individual preferences, his mental organization is so large and happy, that he enjoys, and can do equal justice to, Father Lacordaire and M. Michelet, to Madame de Stael and M. Guizot, to Corneille and Goethe, to Fenelon and M. Renan, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... and their positions, often produced in her presence the seductive idea of the lover; they cast into her soul certain ardent talk of love, the "mot d'enigme" which life propounds to woman, the grand passion, as Madame de Stael called it,—preaching by example. When the countess asked naively, in a small and select circle of these friends, what difference there was between a lover and a husband, all those who wished evil to Felix took care to reply ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... he persisted in the falsehood. For what it really is, it must be partially praised; and it will remain not only as a literary curiosity, but as a work of unequal but real merit. It was greatly admired by Napoleon and Madame de Stael, and, in endeavoring to consign it to oblivion, the critics are greatly ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... kingdom of Italy, in April 1814, Pellico became tutor to the two children of the Count Porro Lambertenghi, at whose table he met writers of mark, from many countries; Byron (whose Manfred he translated), Madame de Stael, Schlegel, Manzoni, and others. In 1819 Silvio Pellico began publishing Il Conciliatore, a journal purely literary, that was to look through literature to the life that it expresses, and so help towards the better ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... forgotten. To explain by what net-work of circumstances the masculine incarnation of a young girl was brought about, why Felicite des Touches became a man and an author, and why, more fortunate than Madame de Stael, she kept her freedom and was thus more excusable for her celebrity, would be to satisfy many curiosities and do justice to one of those abnormal beings who rise in humanity like monuments, and whose fame is promoted by its rarity,—for in twenty centuries ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... it. A wonderful contrast with that gloomy day in London, where all places of amusement were closed and nothing open to the people but the churches and drinking saloons. The streets and houses in which Voltaire, La Fayette, Mme. de Stael, Mme. Roland, Charlotte Corday, and other famous men and women lived and died, were pointed out to us. We little thought, then, of all the terrible scenes to be enacted in Paris, nor that France would emerge from the dangers that beset her on every side into a sister republic. It has been a ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... she had seen me not only at the time I mention but before and after, had always passed me without notice. One Sunday, when in the gallery of the Tuileries with Madame de Stael, the Queen, with her usual suite, of which Madame Campan formed one, was going, according to custom, to hear Mass, Her Majesty perceived me and most graciously addressed me in German. Madame Campan appeared greatly surprised at this, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... B. Rousseau, Fontenelle, Lamotte.—2. Progress of Skepticism: Montesquieu, Voltaire. —3. French Literature during the Revolution: D'Holbach, D'Alembert, Diderot, J. J. Rousseau, Buffon, Beaumarchais, St. Pierre, and others. —4. French Literature under the Empire: Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Royer-Collard, Ronald, De Maistre.—5. French Literature from the Age of the Restoration to the Present Time. History: Thierry, Sismondi, Thiers, Mignet, Martin, Michelet, and others. Poetry and the Drama; Rise of the Romantic School: Beranger, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... she was always hampered by shyness. She certainly attracted all the best and most gifted of her time, and had a noble fearlessness in friendship, and a constancy which she showed by following Madame de Stael into exile, and in her devotion to Ballenche and Chateaubriand. She had the genius of friendship, a native sincerity, a certain reality of nature—those fine qualities which so often accompany the shy that we almost, as we read ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... without pride, virtuous without severity." Gen. Scott, Lord Cornwallis, Dr. Wistar, Bishop Soule John Bright, Jenny Lind Goldsmidt, and Dr. Gall are good representatives of this temperament. Fig. 86 is an excellent illustration of it, finely blended and well balanced, in the person of Madame de Stael. This temperament requires fewer tonics and stimulants than the lymphatic. This constitution is best able to restore vital losses. It is a vital temperament, in other words, it combines favorably with all the others, and better adapts itself to their various conditions. Some ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... admitted that public liberty, and the perpetuity of a free constitution, rest on the virtue and intelligence of the community which enjoys it. How is that virtue to be inspired, and how is that intelligence to be communicated? Bonaparte once asked Madame de Stael in what manner he could best promote the happiness of France. Her reply is full of political wisdom. She said, "Instruct the mothers of the French people." Mothers are, indeed, the affectionate and effective teachers of the human race. The mother begins her process of training with the infant ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... glad that you have read Madame de Stael's Allemagne. The book is a foolish one in some respects; but it abounds with information, and shows great mental power. She was certainly the first woman of her age; Miss Edgeworth, I think, the second; and ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Lombardy. Oh! the rapture that breathes from those simple pages! The vintage scenes, the mid-day halt for luncheon eaten in the open air, the afternoon start, the front seat of the carriage heaped with purple grapes, used to fire my youthful imagination and now recalls Madame de Stael's line on perfect happiness: "To be young! to be in love! ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... have only to show themselves, to receive the attention and applause that a man of genius must work a lifetime to earn. Their world is at their feet. Wealth, power, gratified vanity, are theirs without an effort. Madame de Stael said she would willingly give all her fame for one season of the reign of a youthful beauty. She, it is true, was a woman; but David Hume, a keen observer, and moderate in his statements, noticed that even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... second-rate as regards productive power, Amiel's mind was of no inferior quality, and his journal gained a sympathy which the author had failed to obtain in his life. In addition to the Journal, he produced several volumes of poetry and wrote studies on Erasmus, Madame de Stael and other writers. He died in Geneva on the 11th of March 1881. His chief poetical works are Grains de mil, Il penseroso, Part du reve, Les Etrangeres, Charles le Temeraire, Romancero historique, Jour ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... conqueror of Gaul might establish a throne upon the ruins of public liberty, he would have instantly repelled the unjust insinuation. Yet Greece fell; Caesar passed the Rubicon, and the patriotic arm even of Brutus could not preserve the liberties of his devoted country! The celebrated Madame de Stael, in her last and perhaps her best work, has said, that in the very year, almost the very month, when the president of the Directory declared that monarchy would never more show its frightful head in France, Bonaparte, with his grenadiers, entered ...
— Henry Clay's Remarks in House and Senate • Henry Clay
... expressed a sentiment born of the genius of the nation, and made an impression that was only gradually effaced. Marmontel, La Harpe, Marie-Joseph Chenier, and Chateaubriand, in his 'Essai sur Shakespeare,' 1801, inclined to Voltaire's view; but Madame de Stael wrote effectively on the other side in her 'De la Litterature, 1804 (i. caps. 13, 14, ii. 5.) 'At this day,' wrote Wordsworth in 1815, 'the French critics have abated nothing of their aversion to "this darling of our nation." "The English with their bouffon de Shakespeare" is ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... was also presented to the Duke of Orleans, at the Palais Royal, who spoke with grateful remembrance of hospitalities he had received in America. Mr. Adams was often in the society of Lafayette, Madame de Stael, Humboldt, Constant, and other eminent persons, and was deeply interested in observing the effect of all changes in the laws ...
— Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. • Josiah Quincy
... which once adorned the salon of Madame De Stael,' Arthur said, 'Put up your purse, but for Heaven's sake, never again tip back in your chair. It is a vulgar trick, of which no gentleman would ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... Revolution; whilst her mother, also Swiss, had been the lover of the historian Gion and now presided over one of the most brilliant salons in Paris. Anne Marie Louise Germaine Necker was born at Paris on April 22, 1766. In 1787 she was married—unhappily—to Baron de Stael-Holstein, Swedish Ambassador at Paris. She was in peril during the Terror, but escaped to Switzerland. A few years afterwards she showed keen political activity against Napoleon, who respected her hostility so profoundly ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... expression of her biographer—"was ascertained to be one of the greatest ornaments of her sex." She was painted by Lawrence, she was eulogized by Miss Edgeworth, she was complimented by Madame de Stael herself. She had, indeed, won for herself a position which can hardly be paralleled among the women of the eighteenth century—a position of independence and honour, based upon talent, and upon talent alone. In 1796 she published Nature and Art, and ten ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... under its poetical aspect, is the union of passion and imagination. I had foolishly believed that this calm, sweet-voiced woman had loved me, but those letters made it plain that I had been utterly fooled. "Le mystere de l'existence," said Madame de Stael to her daughter, "c'est la rapport de nos erreurs avec ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... immoral; therefore, we must believe that the robbers were strangers—if strangers, why not foreigners?—if foreigners, who so likely as the French? Signor Brunoni spoke broken English like a Frenchman; and, though he wore a turban like a Turk, Mrs Forrester had seen a print of Madame de Stael with a turban on, and another of Mr Denon in just such a dress as that in which the conjuror had made his appearance, showing clearly that the French, as well as the Turks, wore turbans. There could be no doubt Signor Brunoni was a Frenchman—a ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... yet Napoleon, in his turn, was not great enough with eight hundred thousand troops at his back, to face a pair of freeborn eyes, but fenced himself with etiquette and within triple barriers of reserve; and, as all the world knows from Madame de Stael, was wont, when he found himself observed, to discharge his face of all expression. But emperors and rich men are by no means the most skilful masters of good manners. No rentroll nor army-list can dignify skulking and dissimulation; and the first point of courtesy ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... should make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women, from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several types of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the banishment of Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes in his career. It was not that he showed lack of judgment merely by the persecution of a rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was pointing out truths very valuable to his own safety. This is what happened in France when George Sand—the ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... Fraternal and Sisterly Influence. The Mother's sway over her Children. Woman's Political Influence. The Christian Religion. The Church. Religious Education. Benevolent Enterprizes. The Minister of Legislative Beneficence. Responsibilities correspond to Influence. Madame de Stael's description of Society in Paris. Woman by Nature a Teacher. Domestic Claims. Patriotism. The women in the French Revolution. A Family in the West. ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... French politician, of liberal constitutional principles, born at Lausanne, of Huguenot parents; settled in Paris at the commencement of the Revolution, where he distinguished himself by his political writings and speeches; was expelled from France in 1802, along with Mme. de Stael, for denouncing the military ascendency of Napoleon; lived for a time at Weimar in the society of Goethe and Schiller; translated Schiller's "Wallenstein"; returned to France in 1814; declared for the Bourbons, and pled in favour of constitutional liberty; he was ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... coat to pick out a thought there. You know the story Walter Scott tells about the head boy? He always fumbled over a particular button when he recited; so, one day, the button being furtively removed by Walter, the boy became abstracted, and Scott passed above him. Madame De Stael, as she talked, twisted a bit of paper, or rolled a leaf between her fingers. (Some have attributed this to her vanity, as she had very beautiful hands.) I believe friends came to note her necessity, and ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... come to the bad old woman whose excess of iniquity was blazoned in her "bad black and white straw bonnet." This woman might have been an ASPASIA, a DE STAEL, a Mrs. SOMERVILLE,—nay, the SYBILLA CUMEA herself. What of that? The "bad" bonnet must sink the large souled Grecian to a cinder-wench, make the Frenchwoman a trapes from the Palais Royal, our fair astronomer a gipsy of Greenwich Park, and the fate-foretelling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... Madame de Stael's words show much insight when she says that only the people who can play with children are able to educate them. For success in training children the first condition is to become as a child oneself, ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... other evening with M. Fazy, who is, of course, French in education, we talked of our English literature. He. had Hamlet in French—just think of it. One never feels the national difference so much as in thinking of Shakspeare in French! Madame de Stael says of translation, that music written for one instrument cannot be played upon another. I asked ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... influences the tables of this country, however, if I tell you that the ladies of the coterie, in which the remarks on the amorous sister were made, once gravely discussed in my presence the question whether Madame de Stael was right or wrong, in causing Corinne to go through certain sentimental experiences, as our canters call it at home, on a clouded day, instead of choosing one on which the sun was bright: or, vice versa; for I really forget whether it was on the "windy side" of sensibility or not, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... poetic element in the works of George Sand will, in spite of all its vagaries, still be recognized. And more than this, since the period of sentimentalism will be seen as more extensive, and as the works of Richardson, Rousseau (of course only those which belong in this category), and of Madame de Stael and others, will be included in it, then we say that the better productions of our authoress will carry off the prize from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... certain Madame de S—, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat. Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the republican territory of Geneva. Driving through the streets in her big landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... famous financier. He married Mdlle. Curchod, Gibbon's one attachment. Their only child became the celebrated Mme. de Stael. In 1790 he finally was forced to retire from office ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... reading the life of Madame de Stael and 'Corinne.' I have felt an intense sympathy with many parts of that book, with many parts of her character. But in America feelings vehement and absorbing like hers become still more deep, morbid, and impassioned by the constant habits of self-government which the rigid forms of our society ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... Stael described it as "frozen music;" and a cathedral is a glorious specimen of "thought in stone," whose very windows are transparent ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... societies are most agreeable where there are fewest women: if there were not women superior to her I should not hesitate to assent to her proposition, and I should with pleasure read Madame de Stael's book called Le Malheur d'etre femme. If, on the contrary, all women were Madame de Pastorets, or Madame Delesserts, or Madame Gautiers, I think I should take up the book with the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... about for nearly two years. He visited Genoa, the birthplace of Columbus, and climbed Mount Vesuvius. He dined with Madame de Stael, the famous author of "Corinne." At Rome he met Washington Allston, the great American painter, then a young man not much older than he. They became good friends, and Allston afterward illustrated some of Irving's works. Irving was tempted to remain in Rome and become ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... front gate, duster in hand (she never conversed quite as well without it, and never did anything else with it), might have been a humble American descendant of Madame de Stael talking on the terrace at Coppet, with the famous sprig of olive in her fingers. She moved among her subjects like a barouche among express wagons, was heard after them as a song after sermons. That she did ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... must not be omitted. The jailer of the press, he affected the patronage of letters; the proscriber of books, he encouraged philosophy; the persecutor of authors, and the murderer of printers, he yet pretended to the protection of learning; the assassin of Palm, the silencer of De Stael, and the denouncer of Kotzebue, he was the friend of David, the benefactor of De Lille, and sent his academic prize to ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... situation as absolute sovereign. He studied the laws of etiquette as closely as he studied the condition of his troops. He saw that the men of the old regime were more conversant in the art of flattery, more eager than the new men. As Madame de Stael says: "Whenever a gentleman of the old court recalled the ancient etiquette, suggested an additional bow, a certain way at knocking at the door of an ante-chamber, a ceremonious method of presenting a despatch, of folding a letter, of concluding it with this ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... some of the great qualities of Napoleon, but he also resembled him occasionally in a singular lack of delicacy and good taste. We do not, however, find that he ever showed such mean malignity as the French general did when persecuting Madame de Stael, because in her Germany she had omitted to ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... particular as to furnish in themselves extensive reading. The notices of every person named would go far to serve as a brief biographical dictionary of Byron's contemporaries, whether known or unknown to fame. We get a concise account of Madame de Stael—her birth, books, and political opinions—very useful to those who had no previous acquaintance with her. Lady Morgan and Joanna Southcote obtain quite as much space as would be allotted to them in any handbook of celebrities. Beau Brummell and Lord Castlereagh are treated with similar ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... enthusiastic and encyclopaedic book on Madame de Stael she quotes approvingly Sainte-Beuve's phrase that "with Corinne Madame de Stael ascended the Capitol." I forget in which of his many dealings with an author who, as he remarks in the "Coppet-and-Weimar" causeries, was "an idol of his youth and one that he never ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... of architecture prevails in the medley of different periods constituting London is indeed difficult. One authority concludes that the "dark house in the long, unlovely street," of which Tennyson tells, and Mme. de Stael vituperates, covers the greater number of acres. The fact is, each of the districts constituting London as it now is, i. e., Belgravia, Tyburnia, Bayswater, Kensington, Chelsea, etc., has the impress and character of the time of its greatest popularity and fashion and of the class ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... Cousin an eclecticist. His Philosophy is a positive one compared with that of Emerson. Here are scraps of Plato and Hegel, of Porphyry and Swedenborg, of AEschylus and De Stael. Like the Lehrer zu Sais, 'he looks on the stars, and imitates their courses and positions in the sand.' In the obscurity that proves him great, for 'To be great is to be misunderstood,' (is this the true 'misery of greatness' of Milton?) ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... House of Bourbon has been obliged to give himself up entirely to the new system, and to pretend even to propagate it with all zeal: at least, that club of intriguers who assemble at the Feuillants, and whose cabinet meets at Madame de Stael's, and makes and directs all the ministers, is the real executive government of France. The Emperor is perfectly in concert, and they will not long suffer any prince of the House of Bourbon to keep by force the French emissaries out of their dominions; nor whilst France has a commerce ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... as to the meaning? The writer, like Pluto, "long puzzled his brain" to find it out, till he was immersed "in a lower deep" by hearing Madame de Stael say, at the table of the late Lord Dillon, "Buonaparte is not a man, but a system." Inquiry was made in the course of the evening of Sir James Mackintosh as to what the lady meant? He answered, "Mass! I cannot tell." Madame de Stael repeats this apophthegm in her work ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... other person was taken from the protection of our national flag without any form of trial whatever." So insolent and oppressive had British aggression become before the war of 1812, that Mr. Jefferson in his somewhat celebrated letter to Madame de Stael-Holstein of May 24, 1813, said, "No American could safely cross the ocean or venture to pass by sea from one to another of our own ports. It is not long since they impressed at sea two nephews of General Washington returning from Europe, and put them, ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan, Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Stael, Burns, Savage, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the painter), Gerard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glueck, Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. This list is by no means complete, as the well-informed reader may see at a glance; it serves to show, ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... exclaimed, "Valgame Dios! who is that girl?" Afterwards he was constantly with her, and more captivated, it is said, by her wit than by her beauty, considering her a sort of western Madame de Stael; all which leads me to suspect that the grave traveller was considerably under the influence of her fascinations, and that neither mines nor mountains, geography nor geology, petrified shells nor ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Lady Mary Wortley. We have not as yet much female poetry; but there is a truly feminine tenderness, purity, and elegance in the Psyche of Mrs. Tighe, and in some of the smaller pieces of Lady Craven. On some of the works of Madame de Stael—her Corinne especially—there is a still deeper stamp of the genius of her sex. Her pictures of its boundless devotedness—its depth and capacity of suffering—its high aspirations—its painful irritability, and inextinguishable thirst ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady
... captivating theorizing. For one thing, while recognizing, as the World War has freshly compelled us to recognize, the actuality of racial differences, we have grown sceptical of the old endeavors to classify races in simple terms, as Madame de Stael attempted to do, for instance, in her famous book on Germany. We endeavor to distinguish, more accurately than of old, between ethnic, linguistic and political divisions of men. We try to look behind the name at the ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... he, "at the orator's Irish brogue when he began his speech that day, but after he had been on his legs five minutes nobody dared to laugh any more." Then followed personal anecdotes of Madame De Stael, the Duke of Wellington, Walter Scott, Tom Moore, and Sydney Smith, all exquisitely told. Both our host and his friend Procter had known or entertained most of the celebrities of their day. Procter soon led the conversation up to matters connected with the stage, and thinking of ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... brilliantly-improvising orators and philosophers of the half-hour, are often that which, could we have chosen, we should have preserved. Most notable among the women, the young daughter of Necker, the wife of the Swedish ambassador, Mme. la Baronne de Stael Holstein: a rather mannish superb sort of creature, with shoulders and arms compensating for thick swarthy features; eyes like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... cause to regret the enduring friendship of the brilliant young conversationalist, who afterwards became an intimate friend of Wordsworth, Southey the Laureate, and the Lake School, with Goethe, Madame de Stael, and many other great names in the world of letters and art, and even had the offer of the Chancellorship of ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... intercourse. At Montauban they saw the chief "school of the prophets," where the Protestant pastors are educated, They also went to Switzerland, enjoying the scenery, and also the intercourse with the Duke de Broglie's family, then at the house of the Baroness de Stael. Above a hundred persons were invited to meet her, at the house of Colonel Trouchin, near the Lake of Geneva. Several places were visited, and they returned ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... less he allowed himself to believe it. This question absorbed all his mental powers. All else was to him only life's customary routine. To such customary routine belonged his conversations with the staff, the letters he wrote from Tarutino to Madame de Stael, the reading of novels, the distribution of awards, his correspondence with Petersburg, and so on. But the destruction of the French, which he alone foresaw, was ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... three distinguished personages," said Mr. Holiday, "whose names and histories are intimately associated with Geneva, because they all lived in Geneva, or in the environs of it. These three persons are Madame de Stael, John Calvin, and Voltaire. I will tell you something about them on the way. As soon as you have finished your breakfast you may go and engage a carriage for us. Get a carriage with two horses, and have it ready ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... dictating bulletins and articles for the 'Moniteur,' revising the details of the budgets, giving instructions to architects as to alterations to be made at the Tuileries and the Church of the Madelaine, throwing an occasional sarcasm at Madame de Stael and the Parisian journals, interfering to put down a squabble at the Grand Opera, carrying on a correspondence with the Sultan of Turkey and the Schah of Persia, so that while his body was at Finkenstein, his mind seemed to be working at a hundred different ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles
... done well. I pride myself on some diplomatic experience. You have negotiated your coup in a manner worthy of a De Stael. You would adorn the service. I wonder if you realize the possibilities of your future in an international sphere. To you I have no fear of talking. ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... exhaustiveness is claimed for this "Supplementary List;" the method of study therein indicated might be indefinitely extended, but the few works given form an almost necessary starting-point. A less restricted list would, of course, include the Semi-Historic examples of such Foreign authors as Madame de Stael, Balzac, Spielhagen, &c. The purport of this book being primarily in the direction of Historical Romance proper, I have confined my attention here to a few works on the borderland ...
— A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales • Jonathan Nield
... generally was he who introduced distinguished guests who spoke at the opera house on Decoration Day. He called Mrs. Keller "Mother," and he wasn't above noticing the fit of a gown on a pretty feminine figure. He thought Ivy was an expurgated edition of Lillian Russell, Madame De Stael, and Mrs. Pankburst. ...
— Buttered Side Down • Edna Ferber
... interview with Count Nesselrode, but Lafayette took up the cause with his hearty zeal for everything that concerned the United States, and, in a long interview with the emperor at the house of Madame de Stael, submitted to him the view taken by the United States of the controversy, and obtained from him his promise to exert his personal influence with the British government on his arrival at London. Baron von Humboldt, ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... clear perception, the scholarly and philosophic tone and decided judgment, which, supplemented by his picturesque description, full of life and color, have given character to his histories. They are features which might well have served to extend the remark of Madame de Stael that a great historian is almost a statesman. I can speak also from my own observation of the reputation which Motley left in the Austrian capital. Notwithstanding the decision with which, under the direction of Mr. Seward, he had addressed the minister of foreign affairs, Count Mensdorff, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Messalina, Marie de Medici, Catherine of Russia, Elizabeth of England—all of them have been immoral. Publicity to women is like handling to peaches—the bloom comes off, whether or not any other harm occurs. In literature, the great feminine figures, George Sand, Madame de Sevigne, Madame de Stael, George Eliot—all were banned and at least one—the first—was out of the pale. Creative thought has in it the germ of masculinity. Genius in a woman, as we usually describe genius, means masculinity, which, of all things, to real men is abhorrent in woman. True genius in woman is the antithesis ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... Benson, the present-day essayist, in some of his intimate discourses, proclaims himself to be. But Burke and Browning, the best conversationalists in the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, like all the famous women of the French salon, from Mme. Roland to Mme. de Stael, kept pace with any number of interlocutors on any number of subjects, from the most abstruse science to the lightest jeu d'esprit. Good talk between two is no doubt a duet of exquisite sympathy; but true conversation is ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... Every society needs all the best intellect that it can get. We have many evil influences acting upon our society here, and we need the all-controlling influence of woman. We cannot fix a standard for her. History shows what she has done, in a Vespasia, Vittoria Colonna, De Stael, Bremer, Evans, Somerville and Maria Mitchell. She does not go out of her sphere when she is so highly educated. She can darn her stockings just as well if she does know the word in half-a-dozen languages. There is no longer novelty ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... face may hide A Stael before whose mannish pride Our frailer sex shall tremble; Perchance this audience anserine May hiss (O fluttering Muse of mine!)— May hiss—a ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... back—that he guessed, and how old Paris continued in a manner to echo there; but the post-revolutionary period, the world he vaguely thought of as the world of Chateaubriand, of Madame de Stael, even of the young Lamartine, had left its stamp of harps and urns and torches, a stamp impressed on sundry small objects, ornaments and relics. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, of ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England a six-canto quarto tale; In Spain, he'd make a ballad or romance on The last war—much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he'd prance on Would be old Goethe's—(see what says de Stael) In Italy he'd ape the 'Trecentisti;' In Greece, he'd sing some sort of ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... poor rhetoric for those who need them most. Men are wonderfully imitative in killing themselves. Once the practice is come in vogue, it becomes a rage, an epidemic. Atheism and Materialism form the best nidus for the contagion of suicide. It is a shrewd remark of Madame de Stael: "Though there are crimes of a darker hue than suicide, yet there is none other by which man seems so entirely to renounce ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... the elite of Paris society. Among these were Edward Montague, Charles Standish, Hervey Aston, Arthur Upton, "Kangaroo" Cook, Benjamin Constant, Dupin, Casimir Perier, as well as the chief Orleanists. On one occasion, I recollect seeing there George Canning and the celebrated Madame de Stael. Cornwall, the eldest son of the Bishop of Worcester, had, from some unaccountable cause, a misunderstanding with Madame de Stael, who appeared very excited, and said to Lady Oxford, in a loud voice, "Notre ami, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... Malouet, 1.247, 248.—"Correspondence (manuscript) of M. de Stael," Swedish Ambassador, with his court, copied from the archives at Stockholm by M. Leouzon-le-Duc. Letter from M. Stael of April 21, 1791: "M. Laclos, secret agent of this wretched prince, (is a) clever and subtle intriguer." April 24: "His agents are more to be feared than himself. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... times, Madame de Stael had a dish of very unique pattern, and, when driven by the command of Napoleon from her beloved Paris, she carried her chafing-dish with her into exile as one of her most cherished household gods. At the present day among the favored few, ...
— Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties - With Fifty Illustrations of Original Dishes • Janet McKenzie Hill
... Grandson, Lesdiguieres, and Dohna successively held the barony; and in later times the title de Coppet hid a name more widely known, for on the Chalet of Les Biolles, some distance to the east of La Baronne, the name of Auguste de Stael de Holstein de Coppet is carved, after the fashion of Swiss chalets. This was Madame de Stael's son, who built Biolles in 1817; it was afterwards sold to the commune of Nyon, and finally purchased by Arzier two or three ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... Loire-et-Cher, in 1811. Friend of Mme. de Stael who authorized him to place Louis Lambert, at her expense, in the College of Vendome. He probably died ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... French Revolution and Miscellanies. Hero and Hero-Worship. Goethe's poems, plays, and novels. Plutarch's Lives. Madame Guion. Paradise Lost and Comus. Schiller's Plays. Madame de Stael. Bettine. Louis XIV. Jane Eyre. Hypatia. Philothea. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Emerson's Poems. . ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... When Madame de Stael published her celebrated novel of Delphine, she was supposed to have painted herself in the person of the heroine, and M. Talleyrand in that of an elderly lady, who is one of the principal characters. "They tell me," said he, the first time he met her, "that we are both ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... printers and the limits of a duodecimo page did not forbid my reproducing here, in all their glory, the unique head-lines which precede the article in question. Any pageant introduced by music is impressive, says Madame de Stael. At least she says something of that sort, only it is in French, and I can not remember it exactly. And so any newspaper article is startling when introduced by the braying of head-lines. Fonts of type for displayed lines were not abundant in the office of ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... eloquence or genius without them." They add to beauty, they detract from personal ugliness, they cast a glamour over defects, in short, they work the miracle of mind over matter exemplified in the case of the extremely plain Madame de Stael, who was reputed to "talk herself beautiful ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the very ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... things "were there of her"—of her, whose genuine worth excused, whose all-commanding talents threw into shade, those failings which belonged to the weakness of her sex, and her warm feelings and imagination. The servant girl who showed us the apartments, had been fifteen years in Madame de Stael's service. All the servants had remained long in the family, "elle etait si bonne et si charmante maitresse!" A picture of Madame de Stael when young, gave me the idea of a fine countenance and figure, though the features ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... study have simply been glanced at, and others have been omitted altogether. As it would be out of the question in a few pages to make an adequate portrait of women who occupy so conspicuous a place in history as Mme. De Maintenon and Mme. De Stael, the former has been reluctantly passed with a simple allusion, and the latter outlined in a brief resume not at all proportional to the relative interest or importance ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... at Ferney, and Madame de Stael at Coppet. Let the patriarch come first. Voltaire was sixty years of age when he settled on the shores of the lake, where he was to remain for another four-and-twenty years; and he did not go there ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... adhere to his revolutionary ideas. After the 10th of August, 1792, he withdrew to Switzerland, at Coppet, near his friend Madame de Stael. Under the Empire he held himself apart. He had become as conservative as he had been liberal, as religious as he had been Voltairian. Under the Restoration, he was one of the most convinced supporters of the throne and the altar. Minister of Foreign Affairs ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... Madame de Stael said to Bonaparte, when asked why she meddled with politics: "Sire, when women have their heads cut off, it is but just they should know the reason." Whatever political influence springs into being, woman is affected by it. We have the same rights to guard that ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... time, though she died long before him, Mme. de Stael, by her curious and interesting, though never affecting, novels, Delphine and Corinne, by her dissertations on various serious subjects, by her work on Germany, which initiated the French into the habits and literature of neighbours they were ill acquainted ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... have ever read the boasted letters of De Sevigne—often pointed, and always elegant, they are too often frivolous, and almost always local. We are sick of the adorable Grignan, and her "belle chevelure." The letters of Du Deffand, Espinasse, Roland, and even of De Stael, though always exhibiting ability, are too hard or too hot, too fierce or too fond, for our tastes; they are also so evidently intended for any human being except the one to whom they were addressed, or rather for all human beings—they were so palpably "private effusions" for the public ear—sentiments ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... History,' 'Formative Influences,' 'Madame de Stael,' 'Israel among the Nations,' 'Old-age Pensions,' appeared originally in the American Review, the Forum—the first under the title of 'The Art of Writing History'; 'Ireland in the Light of History,' in the North American Review. Those on Sir Robert Peel, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... It is necessary for the world's sake, as well as for their own sake, that literary men and artists should take care to "provide against the evil day" like other people. "Imagination and art," says Madame de Stael, "have need to look after their own comfort and happiness in this world." The world ought to help them generously; all good men ought to help them; but what is better than all, ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Boswell's long and erudite note in his Shakespeare, vii. 536. "Il me semble," says Madame De Stael, "cu'en lisant cette tragedie, on distingue parfaitement dans Hamlet l'egarement reel a travers l'egarement affecte."—Mme. De Stael de la Litterature, c. xiii. See also Schlegel in his Dramatic ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... composition, and it was one of Mrs. Middleton's favourite amusements to look over my various attempts, and to encourage the talent which she fancied I possessed; but now I vainly tried to exert it; my mind was not capable of a continued effort. I believe it is Madame de Stael who remarks (and how truly) that to write one must have suffered, and have struggled; one must have been acquainted with passion and with grief; but they must have passed away from the soul ere the mind can concentrate its powers, and bring its energies to ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... Revolution; and a great number of other works in which there is cursory mention of different incidents, especially in the earlier part of the Revolution; such as the journals of Arthur Young, Madame de Stael's elaborate treatise on the Revolution; several articles in the last series of the "Causeries de Lundi," by Sainte-Beuve, and others in the Revue des Deux Mondes, etc., etc., and to those may of course be added the regular histories of ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... Josephine, who is living very happily, amusing herself with her gardens and her shrubberies.' This ci-devant Empress and Kennedy and Co., the seedsmen, are in partnership, says Miss Edgeworth. And then among the lists of all the grand people Maria meets in London in 1813 (Madame de Stael is mentioned as expected), she gives an interesting account of an actual visitor, Peggy Langan, who was grand-daughter to Thady in CASTLE RACKRENT. Peggy went to England with Mrs. Beddoes, and was for thirty years in the service of Mrs. Haldimand ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... and ancestor of Merle d'Aubigne, the truest friend of Henry IV., Geneva honored as if her own son. Voltaire so loved Geneva that there he had a residence as well as at Ferney, and sang with enthusiasm of blue Lake Leman, "Mon lac est le premier." Madame de Stael was born of Swiss parents in Paris, but her childhood and many of her mature years were spent in charming Coppet, where the waters of the lake lave the shores within the boundary of the Canton of Geneva. Sismondi was a native of Geneva, and under the influence of Madame de Stael, and inspired by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... might receive a little preliminary information on the merits of the rest of the company, who were only invited to tea. Four maiden ladies (who had pulled on blue stockings in order to hide the increasing thickness of their ankles, and considered Miss Hendy the legitimate successor of Madame de Stael, and Mr Pitskiver in Harley Street the beau-ideal of love in a cottage) relieved the monotony of a gentleman party by as profuse a display of female charms as low gowns and short sleeves would allow. And about six o'clock there was a highly interesting and superior party of eight, to whom Miss Hendy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... dispensations of Providence towards myself, and its righteous judgments on my neighbors!" Doubtless, God has ordained that sin and folly shall produce suffering, that the consequences may warn us from the causes. Madame de Stael, whose brilliancy, I think, has rather thrown into the shade her very considerable common sense, has well said, "Le secret de l'existence, c'est le rapport de nos peines avec nos fautes." And to ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... E.g. Stael Holstein who also thinks that Kanishka's tribe should be called Kusha not Kushan. Vincent Smith in his latest work (Oxford History of India, p. 130) gives 120 A.D. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... library, chooses rather to become familiar with the Greek classics. Herodotus and Homer win, with their "vowelled" Greek, his warmest enthusiasm; whole nights of fever are devoted to them; disturbing dreams of an [179] Odyssey of his own come to him. "He felt in himself," says Madame de Stael, "an ardent attraction towards the south. In German imaginations even now traces are often to be found of that love of the sun, that weariness of the North (cette fatigue du nord), which carried the northern peoples away into the countries ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... It was Madame de Stael, under the influence of Constant, who first made Europe listen to reason after the Bourbon restoration of 1815. {2} Her Considerations sur la Revolution francaise, published in 1818, one year after her death, was a bold though ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... their nimbleness; they can be fattened, for I have seen baboons as sleek as seals, but, like Gibbon, Henry Buckle, and Marshal Vendome, they prove that the energy of a strong will can bear up under such burdens. Madame de Stael, too, managed to combine a progressive embonpoint with the undiminished brilliancy of her genius, though it is certain that adipose tissue does not feed the flame of every mind. Charles Dickens in his "American Notes" expresses ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various |
