"Sterner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... chiefly in the reorganization of the army —a work which was above all things needful, but which required a sterner man and an officer of greater mark. Discharges and furloughs might be bought, and therefore the divisions were never up to their full numbers; the men were put into quarters in summer, and, as the officers plundered on a large, the common soldiers plundered on a small, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... fearfully overhanging the road." Every level spot along the bottom, and even in the cliffs of the mountains, bore crops of yams, millet, and cotton. Lander describes one of the lovely spots that so beautifully relieved the sterner magnificence of the rocks. "At noon we descended into a delightful valley, situated in the bottom of a ridge of rocks, which effectually hid it from observation till one approached almost close to it. It was intersected with streams ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... doubt that with a Greek audience this would count to him as a merit, and that the shifting of the centre of interest by Euripides from the sterner passions of heroes and of kings to this tenderer phase of human feeling would be felt even by those whom it charmed to be a declension from the ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... His friends had no pity for him. He had placed his wife in the fire; what could he expect but that she would be burned? It did not alter the case that Mrs. Sharp had been also in the fire, but came out unconsumed. She was made of sterner stuff. Stubble would burn, but ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... Italy. He received as the reward of his loyal extravagance not only Judea but Galilee and Perea, together with the title of king. He was not, however, given permission to repair to his kingdom, since his patron desired his attentions at Rome. Later he was detained by a sterner call. Gaius, who had passed from folly to lunacy, was not content with the customary voluntary worship paid to the Emperors, but imagined himself the supreme deity, and demanded veneration from all his subjects. He ordered his image to be set up in all temples, and, irritated by the petition ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... unity and be satisfied with the splendid achievements of the intellectual era. Dazzled by the brilliancy of this later age he is not conscious that in securing the finer results of our riper civilization, we have left in abeyance the deeper, sterner, and more religious elements of life. He would urge us onward in our merely intellectual career, unmindful of the lesson, which the pages of history logically teach, which the principles we have pointed out unerringly ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... illustration of these sterner methods we add a brief account of one such expedition led by one of us (C. H.) in the year 1904, in his capacity of Divisional Resident of the several Rejang districts; an expedition which, there is reason to hope, may prove to be the last of the series. The purpose ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... I doubt not, are casting longing and tear-bedimmed eyes after us; and many a handkerchief flutters its good bye long after objects on the shore have ceased to be distinguishable. Let us leave them to their tears; for us the sterner realities of life. We are not going away for ever, I trust; and England's sailors are patriots enough to feel that their own land, and mothers, wives, and sisters are the dearest and best in the world. With a short silent prayer, commending ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... not?" asked she with a toss of her gold locks and a pout of her red lips which was childishness and wilfulness itself, but there went along with it a glance of her eyes which puzzled me, for suddenly a sterner and older spirit of resolve seemed to look out of them into mine. "Think you I am in my dotage, Master Wingfield, that I remember not the day?" said she, "and think you that I am going deaf that I hear ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... taste, and graphic expression, whose work possesses touches of genius and individualism that have already brought her renown in amateur circles. In the poem under consideration, Mrs. Jordan displays a phenomenal comprehension of the sterner aspects of Nature, producing a thoroughly virile effect. Words are chosen with care and placed with remarkable force, whilst both alliteration and onomatopoeia are employed with striking success. By the same author is the shorter poem entitled ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... proceeded from the same essential cause: physical laws disobeyed and bodies exhausted. The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The delirium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... particular request he had followed the Colonel to this country, with the view that, if overtaken by disease and suffering in his headlong career, he might have some one near him who had known him ere the pranksome mischief of the boy had hardened into the sterner vices of the man. 'He was always a wild blade, friend,' (said the old man) 'and many a heart-ache has he given us all, but he'll mend in time, I hope." Just then my attention was arrested by the violent plungings of a horse, which two stout grooms, one on each side, were endeavouring ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... say this— Which all true men say after me, not loud But solemnly and as you'd say a prayer! This King, who treads our England underfoot, Has just so much ... it may be fear or craft, As bids him pause at each fresh outrage; friends, He needs some sterner hand to grasp his own, Some voice to ask, "Why shrink? Am I not by?" Now, one whom England loved for serving her, Found in his heart to say, "I know where best The iron heel shall bruise her, for she leans Upon me ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... me too! This child's play of the heart, Which sterner duty has repressed in me, Makes even captives bold. ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... one, I ween, wherein the discipline was sterner. Are all castles in this land of yours, my lord, ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... Union, and who has done more than any other woman to prove, by her strong and unique personality, the mental equality of woman with man and her fitness for the things sought to be entrusted to her care, share and share alike with the sterner sex. After a graceful introduction by Colonel J. W. Bush, the lecturer plunged at once with ease and distinction into her subject and line of argument.... She is a very able and incisive speaker, talks ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Barnabas differed about how to treat the renegade. Which of them was right? Would it have been better to have put him back in his old post, and given him another chance, and said nothing about the failure; or was it better to do what the sterner wisdom of Paul did, and declare that a man who had once so forgotten himself and abandoned his work was not the man to put in the same place again? Barnabas' highest quality, as far as we know, was a certain kind of broad generosity and rejoicing to discern good in ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... unfitness, recognise in time that they will be wise to abandon a career which must always be hazardous and difficult even to those who are successful, and cruel to those who fail. Let it be something far sterner and stronger than mere fancy that decides you to try your fortunes ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... "Mittie!" A sterner voice than that of Clinton's breathed her name. "Mittie, you must come in, the night air ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of man,—the words God, Immortality, Duty,—pronounced, with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... island desire annexation just as much, but they dare not say so, for they are starving; and those who venture to suggest separation from England would be punished by the withdrawal of charity, if not by even sterner means. ...
— Newfoundland and the Jingoes - An Appeal to England's Honor • John Fretwell
... made no answer. He was evidently taken aback at the unexpected sight of the sick child, and the skipper had to repeat his question in a sterner tone. Even then Lumpy did not look at his commander, but, ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems. But now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that—as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men. He was ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... his brother in appearance, but his face was sterner and his eyes keener. He had been made a bold, determined man by the pressure of harsher circumstances. He shook his brother by the hand ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... relations, it was in a very different spirit. The sovereign contempt with which the Spartans regarded the Helots, they would scarcely have felt for a tribe distinguished from the more honoured Perioeci only by a sterner valour and a greater regard for freedom; while that contempt is easily accounted for, if its objects were the previously subdued population of a ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... young men to test the mettle of the Camp Fire girls. Take them by surprise, bear down upon them without warning, that was the way to discover whether the girls were lolling about reading novels and eating sweets as they suspected, or attending to the sterner duties of camp life. Subject them to the trial of preparing an impromptu meal for hungry guests, in short, see whether the effort of the girls to effect an organization similar in many respects to the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... bold challenge was a stern reprimand from Bishop Frederik Munter, accompanied by a solemn warning that if he ever again ventured to voice a similar judgment upon his fellow pastors, sterner measures would at once be taken against him. Besides this, his enemies raved, some of his few remaining friends broke with him, and H. C. Oersted, the famous discoverer of electro-magnetism, continued an attack upon him that for bitterness has no counterpart in Danish letters. In the ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... was Mr. Garrison with Bert's honesty, that he would have been glad to let him off with a reprimand; but the interests of good discipline demanded sterner measures. Accordingly, he called to one ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... it is certainly an infringement upon the generally recognised prerogatives of the sterner sex, and should be discountenanced by all Koraks who favour masculine supremacy. Before they know it, they will have a woman's suffrage association on their hands, and female lecturers will be going about from band to band advocating the substitution of hickory clubs and slung-shots ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Dale's room without knocking. None of the girls would have ventured to do so. But Aunt Sophia was made of sterner stuff. She did not knock. She opened the door and entered. The scholar was seated at the far end of the room. A large reading-lamp stood on the table. It spread a wide circle of light on the papers and books, and on ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... answer to the scepticism so often expressed when I asserted my belief in this world after all. I mean if a man, when he experiences some transcendent joy, is prompted to express that joy in terms of nobler effort and sterner consecration to the welfare of others—does not this fact lead him to infer that happiness is, at least, more natural than unhappiness? that the universe does indeed exist, in Emerson's phrase, "hospitably for the weal of souls"? That, in fine, when the majority turn their faces this way, first ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... hope ye're wrong," he said. "I'd like to spend me last days here with me sons and daughters around me, sich as are left to me," here his voice became sterner. "It's the curse of our country,—this constant moving, moving. I'd have been better off had I stayed in Ohio, though this valley seemed very beautiful to me the first time I ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... in Death's relentless claim We read thy mercy by its sterner name; In the bright flower that decks the solemn bier, We see thy glory in its narrowed sphere; In the deep lessons that affliction draws, We trace the curves of thy encircling laws; In the long sigh that sets our spirits free, We own the love that ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... gasp. She looked hard at her brother. Blair wore a cool smile, underneath which there was sterner hidden meaning. Then Margaret looked at Lane with slow, deep blush, making ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... one with whom you can quarrel is an absolute necessity of life. You and I are affinities. Ours will be an ideally happy marriage. You would be miserable if you had to go through life with a human doormat with 'Welcome' written on him. You want some one made of sterner stuff. You want, as it were, a sparring-partner, some one with whom you can quarrel happily with the certain knowledge that he will not curl up in a ball for you to kick, but will be there with the return wallop. ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... constitution and his situation are equally unfavorable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of the dark ages. What the horns are to the buffalo, what the paw is to the tiger, what ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mellowing seasons toned down its ruder aspects, and green grass and waving boughs framed it as if it were a picture. Within, the high pulpit, surmounted by a sounding-board, towered over the square-backed pews, facing a congregation kept orderly by stern tithing-man and sterner tradition. There was at first neither organ nor stove nor clock. The shivering congregation warmed itself as best it might by the aid of foot-stoves; the parson timed his sermon by an hour-glass; and in the singing-seats the fiddle and the bass—viol formed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... a large contempt for the intellect of women, and was therefore surprised at the quickness and spirit of the girl whom he wished to terrify. A sterner tone must be used ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the distinguishing tenet of that sect; but he did not consider that tenet as one of high importance, and willingly joined in communion with quiet Presbyterians and Independents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... see anything of two strangers last night?" continued Tom in a sterner tone. "Two boys about ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... the pies were baking, a slow process with Dutch ovens, I sat on the wagon-tongue and played the violin by the hour. A rude imitation of the gentler sex, as we had witnessed in dance-halls in Dodge and Ogalalla, was reproduced with open shirt fronts, and amorous advances by the sterner one. ...
— The Outlet • Andy Adams
... fair promise of our new life, and of the peril in which I might place the happiness which we had so hardly earned. Yes! let me own it honestly. For a brief time I wandered, in the sweet guiding of love, far from the purpose to which I had been true under sterner discipline and in darker days. Innocently Laura had tempted me aside from the hard path—innocently she was destined to ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... one wore a domino of bright scarlet silk and a leering false face mask that was hideous in the extreme. The flickering flame of the candles added to the grim and horrifying effect. A girl of timid inclinations would have been sadly frightened. Marjorie was made of sterner stuff. She had experienced, briefly, actual terror when she felt herself seized and drawn into the house. She had now recovered from that and was righteously angry. She determined to assume contemptuous indifference, ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... eyes involuntarily met; a silent spectator would have noted the contrast of the moistened blue, to the deep black of sterner make, but as it was, that contrast was not discovered, each felt that the other was reading the thought, which had but then sprung up within the soul. Natalie withdrew her gaze, while Delwood, stooping to pluck a moss rose-bud from an urn at her feet, placed it within his diamond fastener, and the ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... begetting of life. Prayer came but slowly to his lips; fancies made his mind wander. He perceived things he had never seen before—the gentle wave of her chestnut hair, the rounded swell of her rosy throat. She had to assume a sterner air and overwhelm him with the splendour of her sovereign power to bring him back to the unfinished sentences of his broken prayer. At last the sight of her golden crown, her golden mantle, all the ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... her mere physical perfection, his pleasure in the admiration she excited, and in the envy of other men. Life's river glided smoothly, gayly in the sunshine; then ugly snags began to appear, and reefs, fretting the surface of the water, and hinting of sterner difficulties below; then a long stretch of tossing, troubled water, growing more and more turbulent as it proceeded, boiling and bubbling into angry whirlpools and sullen eddies. The boat of married happiness was hard among the breakers, tossed from side to side, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... of the sterner sex, you can also penetrate into the Capuchin Monastery, and enter the gardens, where the terraces that rise behind the buildings are almost Italian in appearance, festooned with vines and radiant with roses. Not that the fame of this institution ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... may the sterner virtues know, Determined justice, truth severe; But female hearts with pity glow, And women holds affliction dear; For guiltless woes her sorrow flows, And suffering vice compels her tear; 'Tis hers to soothe the ills below, And bid life's fairer ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... having shared his water with an Indian, but he wondered why his destiny at this time of need had sent to him another thirsty mouth. Further, he allowed himself to wonder soberly if he would ever see his green fields again. He measured his chances with a steady mind, and in the end his mouth grew sterner. ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... powerful and graceful, wild, gloomy, proud, yet genial, was one of the most wonderful and perfect spectacles that could be seen in any town on this old earth of ours. While of a different order of architecture, built of other elements and standing under sterner skies, it should have been as precious to man, as sacred and as intangible as the Piazza di San Marco at Venice, the Signoria at Florence or the Piazza del Duomo at Pisa. It constituted a peerless specimen of art, which at all times ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... attributed the terrible disaster that followed. There are two ways of fighting a savage or undisciplined enemy; the scientific way, such as is taught in staff colleges, and the unscientific way that is to be learned in the sterner school of experience. We English were not the first white men who had to deal with the rush of the Zulu impis. The Boers had encountered them before, at the battle of the Blood River, and armed only with muzzle-loading 'roers,' or elephant guns, despite their ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... so weary with herself that she seemed to have no desire in the world but that of sleep. Tristan and Isolde, drowning soul and body in music which made love, and love which was the heart of music, were not to be thought of on this side of the grave. The Fates had a sterner way for her. She was never to empty herself in a kiss or to watch out the stars with Jack Senhouse. Homing in the carriage with Lady Maria, she denied him, like Peter his Lord. "I know not the man." Vaguely dreaming at her open window, under the fire-fretted roof of that May night, she suddenly ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... some people were predicting that the lines of kinship would become narrower and sterner. There was Mr. Cecil Rhodes, who thought that the one thing of the future was the British Empire, and that there would be a gulf between those who were of the Empire and those who were not, between the Chinaman in Hong Kong and the Chinaman ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... aught our wanderings ever could molest; But snatch'd from that serener life, and thrown To the low wretched state we here endure, One comfort, short of death, survives alone: Vengeance upon our captor full and sure! Who, slave himself at others' power, remains Pent in worse prison, bound by sterner chains. ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... proportion written before him are decidedly far superior in value to those written after him; a discouraging fact, though not difficult to explain, if we consider the great social changes which have been proceeding, the sterner subjects of thought which have been arising, during the last half-century. True song requires for its atmosphere a state rather of careless Arcadian prosperity, than of struggle and doubt, of earnest looking forward to an unknown future, and pardonable regret for a dying past; and in that ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Galerius was the most susceptible of the sterner passions, but it was not, however, incapable of a sincere and lasting friendship. Licinius, whose manners as well as character, were not unlike his own, seems to have engaged both his affection and esteem. Their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... author cannot be unconscious of what the readers of his former books require of him. They will turn the leaves of "Little by Little," expecting to find an abundance of stirring incidents; and he hopes they will not be disappointed. Some of the older readers and sterner critics will look for romantic and rather exaggerated events; but he thinks they will look in vain, for as we grow older we become more reasonable, and do not expect showers of gold to fall upon every seedy hero, or to see nice young gentlemen leap over lofty precipices ...
— Little By Little - or, The Cruise of the Flyaway • William Taylor Adams
... climate proved unhealthy, they took care to relieve their men by frequent reinforcements, allowing the earlier recruits to return to their homes.61 But while thus economical of life, both in their own followers and in the enemy, they did not shrink from sterner measures when provoked by the ferocious or obstinate character of the resistance; and the Peruvian annals contain more than one of those sanguinary pages which cannot be pondered at the present day without a shudder. It should be added, that the beneficent ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... raising of independent militia companies in New England and the enforcement of non-importation by the Virginia Associations to be acts of rebellion. When they learned about the Continental Association in late 1774, they were convinced sterner measures were called for. At its January 1775 session parliament defeated a late-hour plan of union offered by Chatham. This plan would have conferred limited dominion status on the American colonies, reasserted ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... of a sterner and more majestic beauty; as when, assuming the weightier diction of Cowper, he says, in language which the hearts of all readers of modern ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... somber, and pervaded by fatalism and religious feeling. A careful reading of the few remaining fragments of Anglo-Saxon literature reveals five striking characteristics: the love of freedom; responsiveness to nature, especially in her sterner moods; strong religious convictions, and a belief in Wyrd, or Fate; reverence for womanhood; and a devotion to glory as the ruling motive ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... fowls of heaven will lodge for generations. Great are the promises of Ceylon; great already her performances. Great are the possessions of Ceylon, far greater her reversions. Rich she is by her developments, richer by her endowments. She combines the luxury of the tropics with the sterner gifts of our own climate. She is hot; she is cold. She is civilized; she is barbarous. She has the resources of the rich; and she has the energies of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... whose motto was "Do as you please," and that invitation still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind, whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that were to follow them, five hundred ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... no hypocrisy or pretence in this expression of her feelings. She did in her heart of hearts believe that there was some college or club of papists at Oxford, emissaries of the Pope or of the Jesuits. In her moments of sterner thought the latter were the enemies she most feared; whereas, when she was simply pervaded by her usual chronic hatred of the Irish Roman Catholic hierarchy, she was wont to inveigh most against the Pope. And this ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... pause a moment at the Bermudas, "the still vexed Bermoothes." Beautiful isles, with their fresh verdure, green gems in the ocean, with airs soft and balmy as Eden's were! They have their homely uses too. They furnish arrowroot for the sick, and ample supplies of vegetables earlier than sterner climates will grant. Is this all that can be said? Reflect a little more deeply. Here is a military and naval depot, and here a splendid harbor, land-locked, amply fortified, difficult of access to strangers,—and all this as near to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... up to our faces, we ran with the rest to the courtyard. Already the house was filled with soldiers, and several shrieks of agony told us that they were killing even the poor servants. We heard sterner shouts also, and hoped in our hearts that Carnaton, Yolet, and the few Switzers were making Guise's butchers pay ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... even coquetry recoils from that armor of proof, and to fancy how the dead beauty might triumph over the defeat of her living rivals, laughing the seductions of their loveliness to scorn. Even in crises of graver difficulty, where sterner assailants are to be encountered than Helen's magical smile or Florence's magnetic eyes, the invisible presence seems to inspire her lover with supernatural valiance. Remember the story of Aslauga's Knight; when once through the cloud of battle-dust gleamed the golden tresses, ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... about this period, sterner disputes arose among men than those mere individual matters which generate duels. The men of the Commonwealth encouraged no practice of the kind, and the subdued aristocracy carried their habits and prejudices elsewhere, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... unquestioned by any human authority, and unassailed by any human power; who, when they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid in his angry robe ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... pardon if I seemed to criticize thy language. Being somewhat used to a sterner manner of speaking, I took the word in its ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... slight tenure by which they seemed to hold him, had wrought to bind the hearts of father and mother to this child, as it were, with the very life- strings of both. Not his mother was more gentle with Hugh than his much sterner father. And now little Fleda, sharing somewhat of Hugh's peculiar claims upon their tenderness, and adding another of her own, was admitted, not to the same place in their hearts that could not ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... than that of the Epicureans, and a sterner sense of man's duties, Zeno and the Stoic philosophers prescribed suicide in certain cases to their followers. They reasoned thus: Man differs from the brute in that he has the sovereign right to dispose of his person; take away this power ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... black. Easy to say, "Resist till we die;" but to go about, year after year, practically doing it, under cloudy omens, no end of it visible ahead, is not easy. Many men, Kings and other, have had to take that stern posture;—few on sterner terms than those of Friedrich at present; and none that I know of with a more truly stoical and manful figure of demeanor. He is long used to it! Wet to the bone, you do not regard new showers; the one thing is, reach the bridge ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... have escaped its ravages. The government began by burning the holy books of the Christians, by destroying their churches, and by taking away their property. Members of the hated faith lost their privileges as full Roman citizens. Then sterner measures followed. The prisons were crowded with Christians. Those who refused to recant and sacrifice to the emperor were thrown to wild animals in the arena, stretched on the rack, or burned over a slow fire. Every refinement of torture was practiced. Paganism, ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... sterner than usual, while his wife clung to his arm. "It is Alppain—our second sun," he replied. "Those hills are the Ifdawn Marest.... Now let us get to ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... seemed that as he spoke a sterner shadow flitted across his bronzed face. "The sun sets to-night over the ashes of the ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... served for Lerryn: but this year the maidens of Troy, if they would fare thither to pay their vows, must fare alone. Their swains would be bent upon a sterner errand. ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... he would wreak, not for this offence alone, but for a long course of enmity. He sat, absorbed in the plan of vengeance, perfectly still, for his physical exhaustion was complete; but as the pulsations of his heart grew less wild, his purpose became sterner and more fixed. He devised its execution, planned his sudden journey, saw himself bursting on Philip early next morning, summoning him to answer for his falsehoods. The impulse to action seemed to restore his power over his senses. ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in Lima, New York, but has lived so much in California that she is identified with that State, and especially with San Francisco. She made her studies in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York, and Paris, where she was a pupil of Felix Regamy and Albert Sterner. She then went to Holland, where she also studied. On her return to San Francisco she became so enamoured of the Oriental life she saw there that she determined to go to Japan to perfect herself in ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the earth 785 During the time of his life. 'Tis told us in books, How from on high the humble one came, The Treasure-hoard of honor, to the earth below In the Virgin's womb, the valiant Son of God, Holy from on high. I hope in truth 790 And also dread the doom far sterner, When Christ and his angels shall come again, Since I kept not closely the counsels my Savior Bade in his books. I shall bear therefore To see the work of sin (it shall certainly be) 795 When many shall be led to meet their doom, To receive justice in the sight of their Judge. ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various
... Sentences were shortened, punishments were mitigated, the death penalty was abolished for almost all crimes except murder. But even now, the moment society sees any form of crime showing a tendency to evade the vigilance of the law, a cry is immediately raised for sterner measures of repression against the perpetrators of that particular form of crime. The Flogging Bill recently passed by Parliament is a case in point. These instances afford a fairly accurate insight into the action of society with regard to the punishment of crime. It punishes severely when the ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... along the river's bank Ab emerged at last. All was familiar to him now. There, by the clump of trees in the flat below, was the place where he and Oak had dug the pit when they were but mere boys and had learned their first important lessons in sterner woodcraft. Soon came in sight, as he ran, the entrance to the cave of his own family. He was home again. But he was not the one who had left that rude habitation three days before. He had gone away a youth. He had come back one ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... adorns them in their native soil; but if in the case of the culled flowers, which are here presented, some of their perfume may chance to linger, it will probably serve to suggest their original attractiveness. That they may, in some capacity, be used to adorn the worship of Christ in our sterner clime, is the earnest prayer of ...
— Hymns from the Morningland - Being Translations, Centos and Suggestions from the Service - Books of the Holy Eastern Church • Various
... Sterner yet they looked when Brian cried that Golam Head was veiling in fog behind them, and with that the wind swerved almost in a moment and swept down out of the east, bearing fog and snow with it. Nor was this all, for the shift ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... "shame!" but I care not for the stoics, nor the puritans. Genuine nature and unsophisticated morality, that turn disgusted from the rooted adepts in vice, have ever a reclaiming tear to shed on the children of error. Then, let the sterner virtues, that allow no plea for human frailty, stalk on to paradise without me! The mild associate of my journey thither shall be charity:—and my pilgrimage to the shrine of mercy will not, I trust, be worse performed for having aided the ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... verge of shabbiness. To her they were associated with hops, the gayest of music and lightest of laughter, brilliant crowds in flower-scented rooms, dancing and flirtation—the froth and bubble of life. But something sterner than waxed floors had wrought the havoc here. How much of life's ground all unknown to her had these poor little slippers trodden? Was it often like that?—that the things created for the fun and the joy found ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... mistress of the situation. Partly the primitive love of power, partly the animal instinct to subject and oppress—pride on top of that, and something of her sex, too, glorying in giving orders to the self-styled sterner members—drove her to ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... to play. In childhood, it is the very language of life. In youth, it vies with the sterner business of young manhood or womanhood. When we are older and the days of childhood are but a fading memory, we still have some "hobby" that offers recreation from our business and social duties. It may be golf or tennis or billiards; but it is play—and ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... times when recklessness is the only safety. If she did not burn her ships now she could not tell what temptations might come. But she would not let it be among her motives that thus she would thereby escape unbearable pity from Lady Rose and the far sterner magnanimity of Edmund Grosse. She would act simply; she would ask Rose a favour; she would ask her ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... Columbus gave freer breath to the globe, ignorance and superstition chained the limbs of the brave old navigator, and disgrace and star- 121:1 vation stared him in the face; but sterner still would have been his fate, if his discovery had undermined the favor- 121:3 ite inclinations ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... Carmel cowed, if it did not convince, Ahab, so that he did not oppose the slaughter of the Baal prophets; but Jezebel was made of sterner stuff, and her passionate idolatry was proof against even a sign from heaven. Obstinacy in error is often a rebuke to tremulous faith in God. She fiercely puts her back to the wall, and defies Elijah and his God. Her threat to the prophet has a certain ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... There was a sterner manner on the Texan side of the Guadalupe. The watch at the fords was not relaxed, but Ned went back into the little town to carry the word to the women and children. Most of the women, like the men, were ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Blanchard, among others, sympathised very heartily with the great disappointment that had now fallen upon Chris and her sweetheart. His sister's attitude had astonished both him and his mother. They fancied that Blanchards were made of sterner stuff; but Chris went down before the blow in a manner very unexpected. She seemed dazed and unable to recover from it. Her old elastic spirit was crushed, and a great ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... emotions, strengthening and supporting him, was a secret bitterness towards Kate—a certain contempt of her fickleness, her lightness, her shallow love, her readiness to be off with the old love and on with the new. There was a sort of pride in his own higher type of devotion, his sterner passion. Pete invited him to the wedding, but he would not go, he ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... one employment, and call its practitioners the Daughters of Joy. The artist is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man. Journals but a little while ago declaimed against the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was blamed for condescension when he followed the example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and Lord Clyde. The poet was more happily inspired; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a lady champion and you happened to displease her? She'd spank you! Think of being laid face downward firmly across a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of those hard catgut rackets! The very suggestion is intolerable to a believer in the supremacy of the formerly sterner sex. ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... its being in my own case felt so deeply. It maintained its ground with more or less firmness at all times, and ultimately triumphed, in despite of all efforts made to the contrary over the suggestions of prudence and even the sterner reasonings of the sense of justice. In times of sadness and melancholy, which, like the preacher's days of darkness, were many, when hope scarcely lit the gloom of the heart on which it sat though the band of love was about its brow, I busied myself ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the curtain aside with one hand and looks out. As he gazes his face grows sterner, and he lifts his hand above his head in menace. LAVARCAM looks on with terror, and as he drops the curtain and looks back on her, she lets her face sink in ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... formulated the standard of purity and self-restraint might be few in number; but, except they displayed the irritating activity and the uncompromising methods of a Cato, they generally secured the support of their peers, and the sterner the censor, the more gladly was he hailed as an ornament to the order. This guardian of morals still issued his edicts against delicacies of the table, foreign perfumes and expensive houses;[76] as late as the year 169 people would hastily put out ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... in a very carnival of unceasing visitation. These overtures I had had little hesitation in declining, for observation had taught me that the slave's place soon makes the slave's spirit, unless that slavery be an indenture unto God, which is but the sterner name ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... living, for a modest village library and reading-room. Indeed, if I could have my own way, I should not confine the attraction and entertainment of the village to strictly "moral" appliances. It would probably be wiser to recognize the fact that young men find an attraction in amusements which our sterner ancestors regarded as dangerous; and I would not eschew billiards, nor even, "by rigorous enactment," the milder vice of social tobacco. Better have a little harmless wickedness near home and under the eye of parents than to encounter the risk that boys, after ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... community from avenging themselves without the forms of law for the dark crime committed. And when, at the request of Mr. Charless, the community spared the life of the felon, there was all the sterner purpose that Justice should be meted out to his crime by the hand of law. And no jury could have been found in the city, who, if they had been so disposed, would have ventured to acquit him on false or frivolous pretexts, ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless
... away, and descending the slope again re-entered the thicker shade of the main avenue. Here they seemed to have left the sterner aspect of Death. They walked slowly; the air was heavy with the hot incense of flowers; the road sinking a little left a grassy bank on one side. Here Miss Sally halted and listlessly seated herself, motioning Courtland to do the same. He obeyed eagerly. The incident of the wreath had ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was trained in that profession and in those times which had a tendency to develop the sterner qualities, and was what would be termed in these times a man of stern, rigid, and imperious nature. It is said he never retired at night without first loading his pistols and swinging them over the headboard ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... lie loosely upon the soil, and in many cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below, merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines, in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... with more truthfulness,—their severity, their strict and Judaical observance of the Sabbath, their hostility to popular amusements, their rigid and legal morality, their love of theological dogmas, their inflexible prejudices, their lofty aspirations? Where shall we find in literature a sterner fanatical Puritan than John Balfour of Burley, or a fiercer royalist than Graham of Claverhouse? As a love-story this novel is not remarkable. It is not in the description of passionate love that ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... disclosure gave her a shock. She had the sensation of standing for the first time face to face with one of the sterner miseries of life. ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... tyrant, if it be so disposed. Notwithstanding the softness which it now assumes, and the care with which it conceals its giant proportions beneath the deceitful drapery of sentiment, when it next appears before you it may show itself with a sterner countenance and in more awful dimensions. It is, to speak the truth, sir, a power of colossal size—if indeed it be not an abuse of language to call it by the gentle name of a power. Sir, it is a wilderness ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... sterner note in his voice. "This won't do! You mustn't sit here, and draw a crowd. First thing you know an officer will be along, and you may get into trouble. Tell me what's wrong, and I promise to see you through it, as far ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: Did this in Caesar seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man. 100 You all did see that on the Lupercal I thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition? Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And, sure, ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... glances and countless charms subdue man's sterner nature—to you I dedicate the following pages. The subject on which I am about to treat is the gravest, the lightest, the most decided, the most undefined, the most earthly, the most spiritual, the saddest, and the gayest, the most individual, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 11, 1841 • Various |
