"Touchstone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... could but own that to Imogen it might well appear so. He did not answer her, and there the incident seemed to end. But it left them both with the sense of frustrated hope, and over and above that Jack had felt, sharper than ever before, the old shoot of weariness for "papa" as the touchstone for such ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... the power of binding them slaves: and the single die which determines this unparalleled event is, whether we support our independence or she overturn it. This is coming to the point at once. Here is the touchstone to try men by. He that is not a supporter of the independent States of America in the same degree that his religious and political principles would suffer him to support the government of any other country, of which he called himself ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... crowded, late-open holiday evenings of department stores, but they all entered into the pantomime and interpreted the reading with spirit, as they did at another time in some of the Shakespeare scenes, Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone, Hamlet and Ophelia, Bottom and Titania, with attendant fairies, and Shylock and Portia. The Dickens scenes were repeated for a younger club, just trying its dramatic wings in charades, and when ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... Langland thunders anathema. Lack of sincerity, all the shapes and sorts of "faux semblants," or "merveilleux semblants," as Rutebeuf said, fill him with inextinguishable hatred. In shams and "faux semblants" he sees the true source of good and evil, the touchstone of right and wrong, the main difference between the worthy and the unworthy. He constantly recurs to the subject by means of his preachings, epigrams, portraits, caricatures; he broadens, he magnifies and multiplies his figures and his precepts, so as to deepen ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... materials up and down the garden. After seeing these, we were led by the gardener into the summer-house, in the lower part of which, built semicircularly, are the twelve Roman emperors in white marble, and a table of touchstone; the upper part of it is set round with cisterns of lead, into which the water is conveyed through pipes, so that fish may be kept in them, and in summer-time they are very convenient for bathing. In another room for entertainment, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... tree of life to them whose sorrows grow, Beneath its fruit of virtue bending low; Father to good men; virtue's touchstone he; The mirror of the learned; and the sea Where all the tides of character unite; A righteous man, whom pride could never blight; A treasure-house, with human virtues stored; Courtesy's essence, honor's precious hoard. He doth to life its fullest meaning give, So good is he; we others breathe, ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... typical visions, the anticipation of a restless impatience which yearned for the touchstone of sober experience, to-day they are the re-creation of memory, and a rehearsal of all those circumstances that have made sober experience a ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... does not Learn her Lessons Questions The Daisies The Touchstone The December Rose The Fire Song A Parting The Gift of Life Incompatibilities The Stolen God—Lazarus to Dives Winter Sea-shells Hope The Prodigal's Return The Skylark Saturday Song The Champion The Garden Refused ...
— Many Voices • E. Nesbit
... neither the half nor the whole. The stage is ultimately the touchstone of dramatic excellence. But if it is to be such a touchstone, it must have an audience with a penetration of intelligence and a soundness of taste such as had long ceased to characterize Roman audiences. The Senecan ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Touchstone, with unfailing loyalty, follows his master with quip and quirk, into exile. When all, even his daughters, have forsaken King Lear, the fool bares himself to the storm and covers the shaking old man with his own cloak. And when in our own day we meet the avatars of Trinculo, Costard, ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... pledged Word of God found in the Scriptures seemed to him the main miracle of the ages, and as, in his contests with Zwickau "Prophets," "Anabaptists," and "Spiritualists," he found himself forced to produce a fixed touchstone of faith and a solid authority to take the place left vacant by the Old Church, he swung naturally toward the dogma of the absolute authority of Scripture, and he laid, without wishing to do so, the ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... they are true physiological species. The test would be an admirable one, if, in the first place, it were always practicable to apply it, and if, in the second, it always yielded results susceptible of a definite interpretation. Unfortunately, in the great majority of cases, this touchstone ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... to him cards considerably below kings,—though knaves were his constant companions. But this elegant English, figlio mio, may be more idiomatically rendered, perhaps, in the language of the day, thus:—It doesn't pay! Paying is the touchstone nowadays to which everything is brought, from the stock of the great Beaugous Bootjack Company to the great Rebellion ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... and under all circumstances. No bank ought ever to be chartered without such restrictions on its business as to secure this result. All other restrictions are comparatively vain. This is the only true touchstone, the only efficient regulator of a paper currency—the only one which can guard the public against overissues and bank suspensions. As a collateral and eventual security, it is doubtless wise, and in all cases ought to ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... insist upon it. They have shown the same bravery, endurance, self-sacrifice, resource, and grim determination as the men. In every war, it may be argued, women have displayed the same spirit and the same qualities, proving that they needed but the touchstone of opportunity to reveal the splendor of their endowment, but treated by man, as soon as peace was restored, as the ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... see a romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin's in the eyes of Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mother, the Queen,) is the figure under which Ophelia is ridiculed in 'Eastward Hoe.' [48] The first is a girl of loosest manners. Her ambition torments her to marry a nobleman, in order to obtain a 'coach.' To her mother (Mrs. Touchstone) she incessantly speaks words of most shameless indecency, which cannot be repeated; more especially as regards her 'coach,' for which she asks ever and anon. A lackey, called Hamlet, must procure it to her. We will give some fragments of that scene. The remainder cannot be ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... glory is less a jewel than a touchstone, and with her portion of it daily she appraises her own doing, and without vain speech. And her high past she values now, in chief, as fit foundation of that edifice whereon she labors day by day, and with ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Straton, which your fellow-pupil, King Ptolemy, outgrew long ago. Yet he, also, recognised in philosophy, first of all, the bond which unites the widely sundered acquisitions of the intellect, the vital breath which pervades them, the touchstone which proves each true or false. If the praise of Alexandria is to be sung, we must not forget the library to which the most precious treasures of knowledge of the East and West are flowing, and which ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the best only, but the poorest, thinking, perhaps, as good a lesson as could come to the careless or the incapable would come from that sure touchstone of the value of any ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... when they came to the dun, the King had his son into his treasury. "Here," said he, "is the touchstone which shows truth; for there is no truth but plain truth; and if you will look in this, you will see yourself as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of Elia. Jaques, it will be remembered, after hearing the "motley fool" moral on the time, declared that "motley's the only wear"; and I opine that Lamb would consider it no small praise to be likened, in wit, wisdom, and eloquence, to Touchstone, or to the Clown in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... feet in height, that the leaves of the branches were newly fallen; from whence I inferred that the horse had touched them, and that he must therefore be five feet high. As to his bit, it must be gold of twenty-three carats, for he had rubbed its bosses against a stone which I knew to be a touchstone, and which I have tried. In a word, from the marks made by his shoes on flints of another kind, I concluded that he was shod ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare—Touchstone, I think—talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist. Or rather I would say that he is ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... which has been spoken; if however opposite opinions be uttered, this is possible; just as we do not distinguish the gold which is free from alloy when it is alone by itself, but when we rub it on the touchstone in comparison with other gold, then we distinguish that which is the better. Now I gave advice to thy father Dareios also, who was my brother, not to march against the Scythians, men who occupied no abiding city in any ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... the constitution. Where arms were expected and not found, a very new mode of trial was instituted. The suspected or accused person was suspended by the neck until the process of strangulation was nearly completed. He was then let down, and if he was still pertinacious, the touchstone was again tried, until he either confessed or accused others. In other cases, it was ascertained what quantity of arms should be brought in by a certain village or district—if the full quantity could not be produced by the inhabitants, their habitations were reduced to ashes ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... distinction is liberality, that is, the habit of disputing questions and judging persons on their merits, with due allowance for that never wholly negligible possibility that the other man is right. Among those who are united by this spirit, there is one joke that is an unfailing touchstone and bond of union—the institution of lese-majeste. It is a matter for unquenchable laughter, {166} that superiority should require to be protected against inferiority by the enforced signs of respect, or ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... empiricism is based on a necessity felt, rationalism on a necessity seen). And thus universal empiricism reveals itself as absolute scepticism. It is erroneous to attribute this in such an unqualified sense to Hume, * since he left at least one certain touchstone (which can only be found in a priori principles), although experience consists not only of feelings, but ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... the highest of existing things, and though it is less characteristic of men than of women, it is none the less supreme when men exhibit it. In days to come, when women can choose, as they should be able to choose to-day, they may well be counselled to use as a touchstone of their suitor's quality that line of Wordsworth, "Wisdom doth live with children round her knees." A man who thinks that "rot" is rot, or ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... is this science which analyzes every spring and every part brought to play in the manifestation of life? A compass to guide us to the desired goal; a measure of proportion to fix each variety in the immensity of types; a touchstone by which to ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... children of the Queen of Spain. "Every difficulty would be removed if there were an appearance of more equality," wrote the Regent to Dubois on the 24th of January, 1718. "I am quite aware that my personal interest does not suffer from this inequality, and that it is a species of touchstone for discovering my friends as well at home as abroad. But I am Regent of France, and I ought to so behave myself that none may be able to reproach me with having thought of nothing but myself. I also owe some ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... hundreds of cleverly drawn and cleanly cut illustrations. Better than these, there is a fearlessness of consequences and of persons, when a wrong is to be combated, an error to be set right. And this Touchstone has been impartial as well as sturdy in his castigation; he has not been blind to the faults of his friends, or slow in bidding them imitate the excellences of his enemies; he had "a whip of scorpions" for the late Administration, when others, whose intuitions were ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... significance than the changes in the names of the characters are the additions and changes in the list of dramatis personae. Nine characters are added outright—Dennis, Le Beau, Amiens, the First Lord, Sir Oliver Martext, William, Audrey, Touchstone, and Jaques. The latter is most noteworthy. Hazlitt calls him the only purely contemplative character Shakespeare ever drew. From the beginning to the end of the play he does absolutely nothing except to think and moralize. Another critic has said, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... course of things that modern criticism, ever aiming at a wider comprehension, a keener analysis, a greater independence of judgment and expression, should test itself anew on a subject affording so full a scope and so sure a touchstone as the life and writings of Rousseau. The character of Rousseau, with its strange blending of delicate beauty and repulsive infirmity, requires to be handled with the firm but tender and sympathetic touch which the nurse or the physician lays upon a child afflicted ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... didn't calculate right, did I?' There are idiosyncrasies in Yankeedom, there is no doubt of it. We had a long drive to the cars, but there our close companionship, and our acquaintance, too, ended, except that the woman's husband—for she had a husband, some Touchstone, whose 'humor' it was to 'take that no other man would,' came to me, and asked me to put my window down, for his 'wife was sick.' But as I had just observed the good woman munching a bit of mince-pie, I thought that, coming so close upon the segar might ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the beautiful and the good; but seeing is not beautiful nor good; rather is it the touchstone or light by which we see, not only the beautiful and good, but also the evil and bad. Therefore it seems to me that seeing may be equally beautiful or good, as the thing seen may be white or black. If, then, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... knew all about the Haunted House. Since our earliest years it had been the very touchstone of courage to go to the gate on a moonlight night, hold the bars and cry three times, "I'm no feared!" Some had done this, I myself among the number. But—though, of course, being a school-master's son, I did not believe in ghosts—I admit that the return journey was the more pleasant of the two, ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... presumption. Much that he would fain have destroyed because he found it customary, was solid, true, and beneficial. Much that he thought it desirable to substitute, was visionary, hollow, and pernicious. He lacked the touchstone of mature philosophy, whereby to separate the pinchbeck from the gold of social usage; and in his intense enthusiasm he lost his hold on common sense, which might have saved him from the puerility of arrogant iconoclasm. The positive side of his creed remains ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... not ease and facility that tries men, and brings out the good that is in them, so much as trial and difficulty. Adversity is the touchstone of character. As some herbs need to be crushed to give forth their sweetest odour, so some natures need to be tried by suffering to evoke the excellence that is in them. Hence trials often unmask virtues, and bring to light hidden graces. Men apparently useless and purposeless, when placed ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... which my mind is susceptible. But the latter being secondary, I cannot make the former yield to it, unless some criterion more infallible than partial (if they are not party) meetings can be discovered as the touchstone of public sentiment. If any person on earth could, or the great Power above would, erect the standard of infallibility in political opinions, no being that inhabits this terrestrial globe would resort to it with more eagerness than myself, so long as I remain a servant of ...
— Life And Times Of Washington, Volume 2 • John Frederick Schroeder and Benson John Lossing
... Peas (Sweet Peas, Everlasting Peas, &c.) are of different family (Lathyrus, not Pisum), but very closely allied. There is a curious amount of folklore connected with Peas, and in every case the Peas and Peascods are connected with wooing the lasses. This explains Touchstone's speech (No. 6). Brand gives several instances of this, from which one stanza from ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... this period of trial that my mother was enabled to prove, by that unerring touchstone, adversity, who were her real and disinterested friends. Many, with affected commiseration, dropped a tear—or rather seemed to drop one—on the disappointments of our family; while others, with a malignant triumph, condemned the expensive style in which my father had reared his children, ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... tree is known by its fruit, so is the state of a man's heart known by his desires. The desires of the righteous are the touchstone or standard of Christian sincerity—the evidence of the new birth—the spiritual barometer of faith and grace—and the springs of obedience. Christ and him crucified is the ground of all our hopes—the foundation upon which all our desires after God and holiness are built—and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and essayed, it was found to amount to the amazing sum of six hundred millions of maravedies, or more than 4,500,000 livres. It is true that the proof or essay of this gold was made hurriedly, and only by means of the touchstone, as they had no aqua fortis to conduct the process in a more exact manner. It afterwards appeared that this gold had been estimated two or three carats below its real value; so that the whole amount ought to have been reckoned at seven millions ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... "'Tis the true touchstone of greatness. Nought can be little that a man doth for God; like as nought can be great that a man doth ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... cold, while the works of many ordinary legislators have attained to a perpetuity denied to the statutes of Solon or Lycurgus. Durability is not the test of merit in human institutions. Tried by the only touchstone applicable to governments, their capacity to insure the highest welfare of the governed, we shall not find his polity deserving of much admiration. It is not merely that he was a despot by birth and inclination, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar money-getters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... managed her affairs, snug in the snugness of the horse-leech's daughters. She had been all for the walled little island,—as she had heard it called,—the island of the upward bound, where self-propelment was the test of right or wrong, and a marriage well above her the touchstone of a girl's sound morality. On this island such as Jack Dalhousie had no merit. What simpler than to kick him off, and turn away with your fingers ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... steal to rendezvous by night Through darkness that a needle might divide, Show them the road with lightning-flashes bright As golden streaks upon the touchstone's side— But rain and thunder not, lest they ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... in a citadel, to control and enslave it, be entirely broken and disbanded, and every work they have thrown up be levelled with the ground. The disposition of public men to keep this corps together, and to act under it, or to co- operate with it, is a touchstone by which every Administration ought in future to be tried. There has not been one which has not sufficiently experienced the utter incompatibility of that faction with the public peace, and with all the ends of good Government; since, if they opposed it, they soon ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... is, in Courbet's case, unusually difficult. We are all dreamers, more or less—in more or less desultory fashion—and can all appreciate that prismatic turn of what is real and actual into a position wherein it catches glints of the imagination. The imagination is a universal touchstone. The sense of reality is a special, an individual faculty. When one is poetizing in an amateur, a dilettante way, as most of us poetize, a picture of Courbet, which seems to flaunt and challenge the imagination in ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... indeed the touchstone of the entire civilization which followed upon the heels of these scenes of violence. It was fair play which really animated the great Montana Vigilante movement and which eventually cleaned up the merciless gang of Henry Plummer and his associates. The ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... the thought. "You can't possibly mean that. The galaxy is filled with Truth, it's the touchstone of Life itself. It's the thing that ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them. Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. Could the departed, whoever he may be, return in a week after his decease, he would almost invariably find himself at a higher or lower point than he had formerly occupied, on the scale of public appreciation. But the talk, or scandal, to ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fact confirmatory, at least, of the principle on which his brother poet, Petrarch, acted, that the friends, whether of his youth or manhood, of whom he had seen least, through life, were those of whom he always thought and spoke with the most warmth and fondness. Being brought less often to the touchstone of familiar intercourse, they stood naturally a better chance of being adopted as the favourites of his imagination, and of sharing, in consequence, a portion of that bright colouring reserved for all that gave it interest and pleasure. Next to the dead, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... she answered with a jaunty affectation of amusement. "The Touchstone-Blatz people sent it back. The slip says its being returned does not imply any ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... blue African sky and sunshine are more agreeable than Piccadilly fogs; but, after all, his own kennel is best for a dying dog, and his own familiar surroundings best for his declining hours. Again, Touchstone had not the faintest idea what he was going to do in the Forest of Arden, and I was equally ignorant of what would befall when I landed at Algiers. He was bound on a fool adventure, and so was I. He preferred the easy way of home, and so do I. I have always loved ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Longfellow and Whittier were celebrated at a period of comparative indifference to their significance. But if the present moment is still too near to Lowell's life-time to afford a desirable literary perspective, a moral touchstone of his worth is close at hand. In this hour of heightened national consciousness, when we are all absorbed with the part which the English-speaking races are playing in the service of the world, we may surely ask whether Lowell's mind kept ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... Money is a touchstone which influences all social relations, especially when on one side there is a somewhat morbid susceptibility, and on the other a lack of good breeding and education. The Sparks, father and daughter, Americans ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... wind of his fancy,—not one world but a thousand worlds, circling through the empyrean of his rhythmic splendor,—not one joy but a thousand joys, all quivering song-wise through the radiance of his clear illumined inspiration. The heart,—the human heart alone is the final touchstone of a poet's genius,—and when that responds, who shall deny ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... conviction. The truth of Scripture is testified by human nature itself, which, educated by Christianity, recognizes freely and personally the truth of the gospel. The natural faculty that performs this high office is reason, not feeling. Scripture is the touchstone of the Christianity of a conviction, but not of its truth. The Reformers very properly distinguished between a first and secondary authority, and allowed themselves complete liberty in their search after the origin of the books of Scripture. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... simply because they have not had the opportunity to sin. The opportunity, which makes the thief, is also the touchstone of women's virtue. Therefore, when this blessed opportunity presents itself, although it is said to be bald, they well know how to find other hairs on it by which they seize and do not let it ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... I could find that camera!" he cried. "It's the touchstone of the whole thing, mark my words. If it's an accomplice who did this thing, he's got it; even ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... "the Continuity Theory". It is difficult to us to realise how such a theory can possibly be held by thoughtful and earnest men and women who have even a moderate acquaintance with history. Bishop Vaughan applies more than one touchstone, which, one would imagine, ought to be sufficient to prove to any unprejudiced mind the falsity of that theory. Among these, what I may call the "pallium touchstone,"—which still bears its irrefragable testimony in ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... misery forceth him, the dread Child of fore-scheming Woe! And help is vain; the fell desire within Is veiled not, but shineth bright like Sin: And as false gold will show Black where the touchstone trieth, so doth fade His honour in God's ordeal. Like a child, Forgetting all, he hath chased his winged bird, And planted amid his people a sharp thorn. And no God hears his prayer, or, have they heard, The man so base-beguiled They ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... . . Pardon me, but a thoroughly virtuous or a thoroughly amiable man is not worth twopence as a touchstone for a creed; he would convert even Mormonism to a thing of beauty. . . . Whereas the real test of any religion is—as I saw it excellently well put the other day—'not what form it takes in a virtuous mind, but what effects it produces on those of another sort.' Well, I have been ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... you mention responsibility," he resumed, "I am disposed to say that I never had the happiness of knowing any one whom I should consider so refreshingly responsible as yourself. You appear to me to be the very touchstone of responsibility. When I see you, my dear Miss Summerson, intent upon the perfect working of the whole little orderly system of which you are the centre, I feel inclined to say to myself—in fact I do say to myself very ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... fair a prospect that they will long to pass further, this "cluster of grapes" being one of the "lures immortal" for the rapidly increasing number of discriminating lovers of the high poetry that is the touchstone of beauty. The finest lyric work of our day needs no further introduction; the poet is his own best interpreter; but it may be added, in anticipation of adventitious criticism of the limitations of these examples, that the capacity of the present volume and the absence abroad of ...
— A Cluster of Grapes - A Book of Twentieth Century Poetry • Various
... They have been followed by younger poets, more debatable and more debated, many of them intensely and daringly original, but all of them firmly planted in the living tradition of yesterday. They learn from their elders and teach their juniors—the true touchstone of an organic and vigorous movement. What is perhaps still more significant—the level of minor poetry is extraordinarily high, and every verse-producer is, in varying degrees, ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... feel his reproaches; yet I would not change this too exquisite nicety for the gross content with which he tramples on the thorns of love! His engaging me in this duel has started an idea in my head, which I will instantly pursue. I'll use it as the touchstone of Julia's sincerity and disinterestedness. If her love prove pure and sterling ore, my name will rest on it with honour; and once I've stamped it there, I lay aside my doubts for ever! But if the dross of ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... you only knew," her lifted eyebrows confessed the tedium of Calcutta small talk. "But why do you say you are lightly esteemed? Surely the public is a touchstone—and you hold the public in the hollow ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... reviewed from a station distant by forty years) will often appear to have erred; nay, he will be detected and nailed in error. But this is the necessity of us all. Keen are the refutations of time. And absolute results to posterity are the fatal touchstone of opinions in the past. It is undeniable, besides, that Coleridge had strong personal antipathies, for instance, to Messrs. Pitt and Dundas. Yet why, we never could understand. We once heard him tell a story upon Windermere, to ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... creature known as Orlando. Every line of Orlando should have sounded the knell of his fate in her ears. However, it must be remembered that Orlando was young and good-looking, and that, at least in the play, men of the right stamp seemed to be scarce. Of course, it is out of Touchstone that Shaw ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... prison is a house of care, A place where none can thrive, A touchstone true to try a friend, A grave for men alive. —Inscription on the Old ...
— Reminiscences of a Rebel • Wayland Fuller Dunaway
... eternity. I grieved then that I could not grieve; but since, I feel how great a part he was of me. His great and dear spirit haunts me. I cannot think a thought, I cannot make a criticism on men or books, without an ineffectual turning and reference to him. He was the proof and touchstone of all my cogitations." Lamb did not long outlive his old schoolfellow. Walking in the middle of December along the London road, he stumbled and fell, inflicting a slight wound upon his face. The injury at first seemed trivial; but soon after, erysipelas appearing, it became evident ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... those houses where people work alone or by twos. They work in a slovenly fashion. The alchemistic quacks are generally called "bunglers" and "messy cooks" by the masters of the art. These are the ones who do not work according to the "possibilities of nature," which is, nevertheless, the touchstone of all right production. ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... feel blindly towards the light, or the seed sown on the top of a rock will grope down the bare stone for the earth by which it must be fed. Let the sense of our own weakness ever lead to a buoyant confidence in what we, even we, may become if we will only take the grace we have. To this touchstone let us bring all claims to higher holiness—they who are perfect are most conscious of imperfection, and most eager in their efforts after a further progress in the knowledge, love, and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... man and the relations between them; then he proceeds to take these facts into account and to act in relation to them with ordinary reason and common sense. He regulates his life according to the laws of evolution which it has taught him, and this gives him a totally different standpoint, and a touchstone by which to try everything—his own thoughts and feelings, and his own actions first of all, and then those things which come before him in the world ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... from the dreary exile of the actual world." This study is one of "those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven." "The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' Fruitfulness is the aim of the sower, and the test of the reception of the seed. If there is not fruit, manifestly there has been no real understanding of the word. A touchstone, that, which will produce surprising results in detecting spurious Christianity, if it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... any of these are sufficient to effect a present liking, but not to fix a lasting admiration; for nothing but truth can long continue; and time is the surest judge of truth. I am not vain enough to think that I have left no faults in this, which that touchstone will not discover; neither, indeed, is it possible to avoid them in a play of this nature. There are evidently two actions in it; but it will be clear to any judicious man, that with half the pains I could have raised a play from either of them; ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... more manifest in loving trust than in practical obedience which comes from trust. 'He that doeth righteousness is righteous,' and he is to be righteous 'even as He is righteous.' If you are God's, you will be like God. Apply the touchstone to your lives, and test your Christianity by this simple ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from the board Looked up at Aymon's son; but who this while Well marked him, as he eyed Montalban's lord, Had deemed him more disposed to weep than smile. "So oft reminded, to maintain my word, 'Tis time meseems (said he, that owned the pile) To shew the touchstone for a woman's love, Which needs to ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... fates, the most delicate goodness, have nowhere been more prominent than in the private existence of those devoted to the public mimicry of men and women. Contact with the stage, almost throughout its history, presents itself as a kind of touchstone, to bring out the bizarrerie, the theatrical tricks and contrasts, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... connexion, and Lord Chesterfield, too early for his interest, founded their hopes on Mrs. Howard's influence; but astonished and disappointed at finding Walpole not shaken from his seat, they determined on an experiment that should be the touchstone of Mrs. Howard's credit. They persuaded her to demand of the new King an Earl's coronet for Lord Bathurst. She did-the Queen put in her veto, and Swift, in despair, returned to Ireland, to lament Queen Anne, and curse Queen Caroline, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... usually to be found in his writings) "we have brought this excellent prelate unto his end, after two years and a half hard imprisonment. His body was not carried to the grave in state, nor buried, as many of his predecessors were, in his own cathedral church, nor inclosed in a monument of marble or touchstone. Nor had he any inscription to set forth his praises to posterity. No shrine to be visited by devout pilgrims, as his predecessors, S. Dunstan and S. Thomas had. Shall we therefore say, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... auctioneer proceeds: 'Bring forward the head from Herculaneum.... Now, gentlemen, here is a jewel.... The very mutilations of this piece are worth all the most perfect performances of modern artists. Now, gentlemen, here is a touchstone for your taste!' He is asked whether the head is intended to represent a man or a woman. 'The connoisseurs differ,' he answers. 'Some will have it to be the Jupiter Tonans of Phidias, and others the Venus of Paphos from Praxiteles; but I don't think it fierce enough ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... should become duly informed, and thus be prepared to act intelligently. For this preparation he needs light, which light the real working of things, properly set forth, would surely give. Experience is ever regarded as the best school-master, the proper touchstone to all ...
— The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its Experiences • Hosea Quinby
... "that very word makes me surer than ever that it cannot but be true. Let us go on putting it to the hardest test; let us try it until it crumbles in our hands,—try it by the touchstone of action founded ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. The wisdom of our sages and blood of our heroes have been devoted to their attainment. They should be the creed of our political faith, the text of civic instruction, the touchstone by which to try the services of those we trust; and should we wander from them in moments of error or of alarm, let us hasten to retrace our steps and to regain the road which alone leads ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 4) of Volume 1: Thomas Jefferson • Edited by James D. Richardson
... without comment, frequently without indicating whether or not the idea broached by others had already occurred to him. We who knew him best knew that often the idea had occurred to him and had been thought out more lucidly than any adviser could state it. But he would test his own views by the touchstone of other minds' reactions to the situations and problems which he was facing and would get the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... house-animal, and knows only the wants of a house-animal (like our cultured people of today, including the Christians of "cultured" Christianity), need neither be amazed nor even sad amid those ruins—the taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small": perhaps he will find that the New Testament, the book of grace, still appeals more to his heart (there is much of the odour of the genuine, tender, stupid beadsman and petty soul in it). To have bound ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... more aptI doubt it not. You shall peruse, upon your next visit to Monkbarns, my trivial Essay upon Castrametation, with some particular Remarks upon the Vestiges of Ancient Fortifications lately discovered by the Author at the Kaim of Kinprunes. I think I have pointed out the infallible touchstone of supposed antiquity. I premise a few general rules on that point, on the nature, namely, of the evidence to be received in such cases. Meanwhile be pleased to observe, for example, that I could press into my ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... was ever spontaneous in any true sense of the word? This seems to be more factitious than usual. You seem to know a great deal about it; try it by the touchstone of subscriptions, a coarse but fairly trustworthy criterion, and there is scarcely the color of money in it. The delegates write from England that they are out of pocket for working expenses, railway fares, and stationery—the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... admiration for Montaigne and for Bayle, who, with Hume, would make the great trinity of scepticism. "The work of Montaigne," said Diderot, "is the touchstone of a good intelligence; you may be sure that any one whom the reading of Montaigne displeases has some vice either of heart or understanding. As for Bayle, he has had few equals in the art of reasoning, ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... thus made the touchstone of Balder's morality. He stood ready to abide by her decision. Her understanding of the case should first be made full; then, if condemned by her look, he would publish his crime to the world, and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... madman was seeking the touchstone, with matted locks tawny and dust-laden, and body worn to a shadow, his lips tight-pressed, like the shut-up doors of his heart, his burning eyes like the lamp of a glow-worm seeking ...
— The Gardener • Rabindranath Tagore
... such things myself, gave me great satisfaction; and I do not know whether there is not more pleasure in not being a prophet in one's own country, when one is almost received like Mahomet in every other. To be an idol at home, is no assured touchstone of merit. Stocks and stones have been adored in fifty regions, but do not bear transplanting. The Apollo Belvidere and the Hercules Farnese may lose their temples, but never ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... is of rock crystal, the second of copper, the third of fine steel, the fourth of brass, the fifth of touchstone, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of massy gold. He has furnished these palaces most sumptuously, each in a manner suited to the materials that they are built of. He has filled the gardens with grass and flowers, intermixed with pieces of water, water- works, fountains, canals, cascades, and ...
— Fairy Tales From The Arabian Nights • E. Dixon
... I'd like to set up house in that fashion, and make love to some delicately-nurtured miss, win her affections, and bring her home to such a spot. Wouldn't that be a touchstone of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... complete misunderstanding of the case. Because you neither play nor sing, it by no means follows that you are unmusical. If you love music and appreciate it, you may be more musical than many pianists and singers; or latent within you and only awaiting the touchstone of music there may be a deeper love and appreciation of the art than can be attributed to many virtuosos. For most of a virtuoso's love and appreciation is apt to be centered upon himself. And when you say, 'I cannot ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... walk there and back was over the fresh moor. He lectured Ethel herself on opening the window, now that she could; and advised Norman to go and spend an hour in the school, that he might learn how pleasant peat- smoke was—a speech Norman did not like at all. The real touchstone of temper is ridicule on a point where we do not choose to own ourselves fastidious, and if it and been from any one but his father, Norman would not have so entirely kept ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... The touchstone of friendship is practical help and readiness to do what the friend wishes. It is so in our friendships here, which are best cemented so. It is so in the highest degree in our friendship with the true Friend and Lover of us all, the sweetness and power of our friendship with whom we do ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... our secret self-love which is set upon this favor from on high; such may be our desire, but such is not the will of God. We are to be exercised, humbled, tried, and tormented to the end. It is our patience which is the touchstone of our virtue. To bear with life even when illusion and hope are gone; to accept this position of perpetual war, while at the same time loving only peace; to stay patiently in the world, even when it repels us as a place of low company, and seems to us a mere arena of ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fallen leaves; so I knew that the horse had brushed some of the branches, and was therefore five feet high. As to his bit, it must have been made of twenty-three carat gold, for he had rubbed it against a stone, which turned out to be a touchstone, with the properties of which I am familiar by experiment. Lastly, by the marks which his shoes left upon pebbles of another kind, I was led to think that his shoes ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... Others were there with him—town dandies and nobodies, young men who came there to get shaved or to drink a glass of whisky. And all of these he admired and sought to emulate. Clothes were the main touchstone. If men wore nice clothes and had rings and pins, whatever they did seemed appropriate. He wanted to be like them and to act like them, and so his experience of the more pointless forms ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... conversion is. It is easy, I say, for men to lay conversion to God, on a legal, or ceremonial, or delusive bottom, on such a bottom that will sink under the burden that is laid upon it; on such a bottom that will not stand when it is brought under the touchstone of God, nor against the rain, wind, and floods that are ordained to put it to the trial, whether it is true or false. The Pharisee here stands upon a supposed conversion to God; "I am not as other men;" but both he and his ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... totally obliterated. There was a similar reformation in the outward man of Davie Gellatley, who met them, every now and then stopping to admire the new suit which graced his person, in the same colours as formerly, but bedizened fine enough to have served Touchstone himself. He danced up with his usual ungainly frolics, first to the Baron and then to Rose, passing his hands over his clothes, crying, 'Bra', bra' Davie,' and scarce able to sing a bar to an end of his thousand-and-one songs for the breathless extravagance of his ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... definitely by the technique he possessed, the skilled way in which he performed his task. Did he play the game well? That was the first question. Often it was the first and last. If he did, his subject-matter, and his particular vision of Life, were pretty much his own affair. And this modern touchstone, applied to the writings of our two authors, favored Thackeray. Simple, old-fashioned readers inclined to give Dickens the preference over him because the former's interpretation of humanity was, they averred, kindlier and more wholesome. ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... approached his hiding-place in the wall and waited. Presently his head emerged from the line of weeds by the fence, his nose began working anxiously, he sifted and resifted the air with it, and then quickly withdrew; his nose had detected me, but his eye had not. The touchstone of most animals is the nose, and not the eye. The eye quickly detects objects in motion, but not those at rest; this is the function ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... already quoted the opening of Act II. It is not Shakespeare but it is good poetry in itself. And the immortal scene between Touchstone and Corin in III, 2 (Shak. III, 2), in which Touchstone clearly proves that the shepherd is damned, is a capital piece of work. The following fragment ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... thought the "sugred" compliment worth the cruel wounds, the cleaving of the heart in twain, that seemed to Shakespear as natural and amusing a reaction as the burlesquing of his heroics by Pistol, his sermons by Falstaff, and his poems by Cloten and Touchstone. ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... In Eastward Hoe, 1605, Touchstone assures Goulding that he hopes to see him reckoned one of the worthies of the city of London "When the famous fable of Whittington and ...
— The History of Sir Richard Whittington • T. H.
... higher motives in life, more elevated goals toward which struggling humanity should strive. If you examine the average mind, however, you will be pretty sure to find that success is the touchstone by which we judge our fellows and what, in our hearts, we admire the most. That is not to be wondered at, either, for we have done all we can to implant it there. From a child's first opening thought, it is impressed ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... great pursuit of it on every side, and no truer or more needful instinct has been given to Man, but he fails to use it in the way intended. This world is a Touchstone, a Finding-place for God. Whoever will obey the law of finding God from this world instead of waiting to try and do it from the next, he, and he only, will ever grasp and take into himself that fugitive mysterious unseen Something which—not knowing what it is, yet feeling ...
— The Romance of the Soul • Lilian Staveley
... 590 Back to its antique lustre in our annals, By sweet revenge on all that's base in Venice, And freedom to the rest, or leave it black To all the growing calumnies of Time, Which never spare the fame of him who fails, But try the Caesar, or the Catiline, By the true touchstone of desert—Success.[401] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... woman who impersonates for our imagination the essence of the beauty that environs us. It seems, at such a fortunate moment, as though we had been waiting for this revelation, although perchance the want of it had not been previously felt. Our sensations and perceptions test themselves at the touchstone of this living individuality. The keynote of the whole music dimly sounding in our ears is struck. A melody emerges, clear in form and excellent in rhythm. The landscapes we have painted on our brain, no longer lack ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... ungenerous an appearance what I have said, and what I have further to say, on this topic, will have from me: But am I not bringing virtue to the touchstone, with a view to exalt it, if it come out to be proof?—'Avaunt then, for one moment, all consideration that may arise from a weakness which some would miscall gratitude; and is oftentimes the corrupter of a heart ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... of our hockey," said Mr. Britling, "the more wonderful it seems to me as a touchstone of ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells |
