"Wildness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the sweet and shy residents of that lovely bit of wildness showed themselves while I waited. A flicker, whose open door was in sight, and who was plainly engaged in setting her house in order, entertained me for a long time. Silently she stole in, I did not see ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... Methodist brethren have disturbed the peace of their maternal Church by the clamour of enthusiasm and the madness of resentment; but they are the wayward children of passion, and we hope that yet the chastening hand of reason will sober down the wildness of that ferment," etc. Kingston, U.C., ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... for me again. His manner now was changed. The wildness and despair had left it. He was his old, cool, collected self. He was in the sort of mood when he always had an ascendency over me—the sort of mood when he showed that wonderful business faculty for which I could ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... the ducks quacking down in the "Moggason," and he, too, felt the silence and immensity of the plain outside. It was enormous, incredible in its wildness. "I believe we're going to like it out here, Blanche," ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... field-glass and eyes wide open may give a rare, distant view of him; but only as one follows him as a sportsman winter after winter, meeting with much less of success than of discouragement, does he pick up many details of his personal life; for wildness is born in him, and no experience with man is needed to develop it. On the lonely lakes in the midst of a Canada forest, where he meets man perhaps for the first time, he is the same as when he builds at the head of some mill pond within ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... principle of wild beauty; the fury of the combatants, and the fiery animation of the horses are depicted with a truth and effect that strikes the mind with horror. Notwithstanding the singularity and fierceness of his style, he captivates by the unbounded wildness of his fancy, and the picturesque ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... that you may," said the Master; and I thought Mr. Henry looked at him with a kind of wildness in his eye. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... spot I wish to describe, the hills fall back from the Hudson, north and south, far enough to leave a charming little valley of some two or three hundred acres cradled in their wildness and opening greenly to the river, which is sure to catch a sheaf of sunbeams in its bosom when the day fires its last golden salute from behind the Palisades. Sheltered by hills, some broken into cliffs, some rolling smoothly back, clothed ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... face with her hands she threw herself on her knees before the portrait, and gave way to all the bitterness and all the wildness ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... their course, until they came to the brow of a steep descent, down which the path ran in a zigzag manner, through a dark, gloomy ravine, now rendered intensely so to our travelers, by the hour, their thoughts, the wildness of the scenery around, and the dense growth of cedars covering the hollow, whose untrimmed branches, growing even to the ground, overreached and partly obstructed their way. By this time only one or two stars were visible in the heavens; and they shone with ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... peccata, shining sins. What is all your praying and fasting, but to yourselves, as the Lord charges the people, Zech. vii. "Did ye at all fast unto me?" No, ye do it to yourselves. Here is the wildness and degenerateness of your natures. Either you bring forth very bitter fruits, such as intemperance, avarice, contention, swearing, &c., or else fruits that have nothing but a fair skin, like apples of Sodom that are beautiful on the tree, but being ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... beyond for miles are brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... thing looks grotesque and uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... eyes were large, dark, and expressive, and were surmounted by delicate eyebrows which moved about continually with every changeful feeling that filled his breast. When excited his glance was magnificent, and the natural wildness of his whole aspect was increased by the luxuriance of his brown hair, which hung in long elf-locks over his shoulders. Among his intimates he was known by the name of "Mad ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... Pangasinan—people who know the country and its hiding-places and coverts; and who, as being more agile than Spaniards, bear more easily the toils of the march over the routes that have to be traversed, owing to the wildness of the region, which, as is well known, is very great. In payment of the costs to these Indians, the slaves captured in the war might be apportioned to them; and in virtue of this compact they will not commit the cruelties and murders to be apprehended ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair
... holding his face in his hands; but, as the last tones of the bell died away, he raised himself and looked around with some wildness in his face. ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... bulging in exultation of revenge, he had struck those matches with his hairy hands and let them flare in the straw, till the little red flames ran and licked, rustled and licked, and there was nothing to do but watch them lick and burn. Nor of that sudden wildness of dumb fear that rushed into the heart of the crouching creature, changing the madness of his face to palsy. Nor of the recoil from the burning stack; those moments empty with terror. Nor of how terror, through habit of inarticulate, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... expressed himself, was most untiring in his efforts to make Granvelle ridiculous. He went almost nightly to masquerades, dressed as a cardinal or a monk; and as he was rarely known to be sober on these or any other occasions, the wildness of his demonstrations may easily be imagined. He was seconded on all these occasions by his cousin Robert de la Marck, Seigneur de Lumey, a worthy descendant of the famous "Wild Boar of Ardennes;" a man brave to temerity, but utterly depraved, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... mountaineers than by adopting the words of A. Viskovatof, one of the fairest and most discriminating of Russian travellers: "Nature has not properly brought out the moral and intellectual capacity of the Caucasian highlanders. Through the superficial crust of ignorance and wildness you may see in every mountaineer a frank and acute intellect, and, brigand though he may be, he still shows evidences of human feeling and of a soul. His brigandage, indeed, is only the external roughness which results naturally from his education, his circumstances and his mode of life. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... the trunk of a fallen oak, with his tawny visage turned toward her, and his eyes fixed on her face with an expression of wildness and fire, that would have terrified a less resolute female. His blanket had fallen from his shoulders, and was lying in folds around him, leaving his breast, arms, and most of his body bare. The ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... a certain touching interest. The beauty of the day, the wildness of the scenery under the grand old trees, with rude rocks, beautiful slopes, and running, pure water, and the deepening tints of autumn in sky, cloud and foliage,—the warm shafts of sunshine that here and there lit it all up,—the sincere gravity that fell as a ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... road to St. Gothard, like which, the pass of the Rusten leads to a cold and bleak upper valley. Here we noticed the blight of late frost on the barley fields, and were for the first time assailed by beggars. Black storm-clouds hung over the gorge, adding to the savage wildness of its scenery; but the sun came out as we drove up the Valley of Dovre, with its long stretch of grain-fields on the sunny sweep of the hill-side, sheltered by the lofty Dovre Fjeld behind them. We stopped for the night at the inn of Toftemoen, long before sunset, although ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Indies; but they have something unpleasant in their aspect which the mulattoes have not. I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them a disposition towards cruelty and low cunning; and I could never contemplate their physiognomy without feeling sensible uneasiness. From the staring wildness of their eyes a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifest in their plundering excursions against the negro villages. Oftentimes ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... favorite Arab, of a jet black color and of a fierce and fiery temper, hardly to be managed by the Saracen, whose sole office it was to attend upon him; while in the hands of Fausta, though still spirited almost to wildness, he was yet docile and obedient. Soon as she was mounted, although before it had been difficult to hold him, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... the bower behind which the musicians were hidden seemed to gain thrill and wildness as the hours went on. As the rooms grew warmer the flowers breathed out more reaching scent. Now and again Robin paused for a moment to listen to strange delightful chords and to inhale passing waves of something like ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... had won his daughter's approbation. Delighted as he was by the unexpected harmony on their opinions, he was nevertheless wise enough to put forward various objections, calculated to sharpen Miss Lydia's welcome whim. In vain did he dwell on the wildness of the country, and the difficulties of travel there for a lady. Nothing frightened her; she liked travelling on horseback of all things; she delighted in the idea of bivouacking in the open; she even threatened to go as far as Asia Minor—in short, she ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... wandering from us? And yet she was puzzled. She dreaded one of those scenes in which her young strength was barely sufficient to control and soothe the frail form before her. But they did not begin as a rule in this fashion; here, though the mind wandered, was an absence of the wildness to which she had become inured. Here—and yet as she listened, as she looked, now at her mother, now into the dimly lighted corners of the room, where those dilated eyes seemed to see things unseen by her, black things, she found this phase no less ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... however, when the exceeding wildness of the forest, in density and fallen timber, made it imperative for Helen to put all her attention on the ground and trees in her immediate vicinity. So the pleasure of gazing ahead at the beautiful wilderness ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... soundly, her lips slightly parted, her cheeks delicately flushed, her face eloquent in its appeal of helplessness, innocence and beauty. One of the band, a tall broad-shouldered man of middle-age, with an immense quantity of whiskers perhaps worn as a visible sign of inward wildness, was, despite his hardened nature, moved to remonstrance. Under cover of lurid oaths and outrageous obscenity, he advanced his opinion that "the kid" needn't be shot just because her father was ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... shade of trees, soon to reappear over the next shelving rock."[138] Or, to quote from another writer,[139]—"The descent from the summit is gradual, but is everywhere broken by precipices and towering rocks, which time and the elements have chiselled into strange fantastic shapes. Ravines of singular wildness and grandeur furrow the whole mountain-side, looking in many places like huge rents. Here and there, too, bold promontories shoot out, and dip perpendicularly into the bosom of the Mediterranean. The ragged limestone banks are scantily clothed with the evergreen oak, and the sandstone ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... pools. I was now in the most forlorn part of the Double, where all around the eye rested upon forest, swamp, and moor. Not that I found it dismal: I drew delight from the lonesomeness, and revelled in the wildness of all things. Sunshine and flowers made the desert beautiful. The waysides were red with thyme or purple with heather, and the blooming lysimachia was like a belt of gold around the reedy pools. After walking some miles over this country, patches of maize, potatoes, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... equaled. Taking their families and the few articles of commerce gathered from the forest they entered the symmetrical and beautifully carved canoes and breasted the storms and waves of the great sea near which they lived. There was a wildness in the waves which just suited them. The sea brought out the best traits and developed the heroic character. They were the "sea kings" of the Northwest. They were great navigators and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... was, with the terribly clear perception of the male character which all women possess in different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his handsome face and in his careless ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... long since buried in oblivion. Lucian's True History, therefore, like the Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal, cannot be half so agreeable as when it was first written; there is, however, enough remaining to secure it from contempt. The vein of rich fancy, and wildness of a luxuriant imagination, which run through the whole, sufficiently point out the author as a man of uncommon genius and invention. The reader will easily perceive that Bergerac, Swift, and other writers ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... own extravagance, but she believed in it all the same. Amelie, though shocked at her wildness, could not help ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... Truedale saw the wildness in the old man's eyes—saw the trembling and twitching of the outstretched hands, and feared what might be the result of trouble and enforced sobriety. He pulled a large flask from ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... surface of the district bore nothing but a scanty herbage. The soil is sand and an iron cement, or "hard-pan," below the sand. Here uncounted millions of slender sea-pines cover the plain; they stand in serried rows, as regular as a hop-garden, gloomy and without the sweet wildness of nature. And every pine is bitterly scarred, so that it may bleed its gum for traders. When the plantations are near their full growth they are cut down, stacked to season slowly, and the trees finish their existence as mine timbers ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... her pillow, and lay with her face upon her arm, so that he could not see it. All her wildness and passion had subsided; but, though softened, she was not in tears. Her father was changed in nothing so much as in the respect that he would have been glad to see her ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... in a suitor's obvious panoply was Anthony Wilding, of Zoyland Chase, and Richard watched his advent with foreboding. Wilding's was a personality to dazzle any woman, despite—perhaps even because of—the reputation for wildness that clung to him. That he was known as Wild Wilding to the countryside is true; but it were unfair—as Richard knew—to attach to this too much importance; for the adoption of so obvious an alliteration the rude country minds needed ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... the native men wherever they are found, drivings-in of cattle, and scattered pilgrimages of wailing women and children, with relics of the men amongst them, fugitive and starving in side glens and corries, where even now the tourist shudders at the wildness. [Footnote: Rushworth, V. 930, 931; Baillie, II. 262; ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... having been accidently separated from my fellow-traveller, I had to stay in a miserable-looking hut close to a creek, the habitation of a backwoodsman. This person's appearance was extremely unprepossessing. The air of ferocity and wildness which characterized his countenance, added to his unhealthy, cadaverous aspect, would have been sufficient in any other country to make one feel unpleasant at passing the night alone under his roof. He resided in this unhealthy situation, because the land was extremely fertile; ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... hand in hand around the tub in which the beer should be brewed. The brewing-maid now flung into it the silver skilling, upon which the girls, like wild Maenades, tore off each other's caps, and with bacchanalian wildness whirled round the tub. By this means should the beer become stronger, and work more intoxicatingly ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen
... from the top of the cliff made me fully realize the wildness, the sterility, the desolation of nature in this region. Beyond the valley far beneath me where the Dordogne lay, a glittering thread, was the department of the Cantal. The whole southern and eastern prospect was broken up by innumerable savage, heath-covered ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... gay almost to wildness. "O Agnes! Agnes! we have outwitted them, the fools! They thought they had conquered me, but you are ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... mind for those impressions which afterwards produced the mighty events that will be contained hereafter in this history; and to which, it must be confest, the unfortunate lad, by his own wantonness, wildness, and want of caution, ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... way lies onwards towards the mountains. A wildness of landscape, unpictured before, opens to the view. Here rise weird rock-forms, Nature's cathedral towers and grim facades magnificent in solitude and awe-inspiring, as by steep bridle-paths we take our way along the valleys, and draw rein to gaze upon them. Ponderous ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... bubbling o'er with drink-laughter. The chief element in the music of the orchestra was speed. The musicians played in intent fury. A woman was singing and smiling upon the stage, but no one took notice of her. The rate at which the piano, cornet and violins were going, seemed to impart wildness to the half-drunken crowd. Beer glasses were emptied at a gulp and conversation became a rapid chatter. The smoke eddied and swirled like a shadowy river hurrying toward some unseen falls. Pete and Maggie ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... and leading ideas in philosophy and in religion. Every great man wishes to leave behind some monument of his labors, to bless or instruct mankind. Any man without some form of this noble ambition lives in vain, even if his monument be no more than a cultivated farm rescued from wildness ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... For, with whatever wildness Ranny started, he always came back to that—He didn't blame her. He knew whereof she was made. It was proof of his sudden, forced maturity, that unfaltering ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... loveliest moonlight; we seated ourselves on the ruined wall of the old fort; and when the boat had got a short distance from the shore the band in it commenced playing "Sweet Home." The moonlight on the water, the perfect stillness around, the wildness and solitude of the ruins, all seemed to give new pathos to that ever dear and beautiful old song. It came very near to all of us,—strangers in that strange Southern land. After a while we retired to one of the tents,—for the night-air, as usual, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... their differences in each of the great divisions of nature. Disposition, courage, pertinacity , suspicion, restlessness, ill-temper, sagacity and reverse unquestionably vary in animals and are inherited (Cuba wildness dogs, rabbits, fear against particular object as man Galapagos{89}). Habits purely corporeal, breeding season &c., time of going to rest &c., vary and are hereditary, like the analogous habits of plants which vary and are inherited. Habits of body, as manner of movement d^o. and d^o. Habits, ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... that can do nothing but hug and hide its existence, lest some careless breath of hers should blow it out; his pin-head taper must be kept under a bushel, or cease to be even the covert pettiness it is. The wildness of the North is not scenic and pictorial merely, but goes to the very heart of things, immeasurable, immitigable, infinite; deaf and blind to all but itself and its own, it prevails, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... fellow men, he seeks a deeper seclusion, there, in the back ground of this grand amphitheatre, lie the eternal mountains, frowning with brow of rock and cap of snow upon the smiling fields beneath, and there in its recesses may be found as much of wildness, and as much of solitude, as the pilgrim weary of the cares of life can desire. If he turn to the front, your capacious harbor, studded with green islands of ever varying light and shade, and enlivened by all the stirring evidences of commercial ...
— Speeches of the Honorable Jefferson Davis 1858 • Hon. Jefferson Davis
... objects to the senses without suffering a change and a diminution,—that still stronger the objection must lie against representing another line of characters, which Shakespeare has introduced to give a wildness and a supernatural elevation to his scenes, as if to remove them still farther from that assimilation to common life in which their excellence is vulgarly supposed to consist. When we read the incantations of those terrible beings the Witches in Macbeth, though some of the ingredients ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... and hostile. This stalwart form, striding before him, was the one barrier between himself and freedom. Freedom was a thing of which he knew, indeed, nothing,—a thing which, to most of his kind, would have seemed terrifying rather than alluring. But to him, with that inherited wildness stirring in his blood, it seemed the thing to ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the swift horses are looking for the pool; the heath spreads out its long hair, the weak white bog-down grows. A wildness comes on the heart of the deer; the sad restless sea ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... Madeline discovered that a good deal of her sympathy for Stillwell in his hunt for the reckless Stewart had insensibly grown to be sympathy for the cowboy. It was rather a paradox, she thought, that opposed to the continual reports of Stewart's wildness as he caroused from town to town were the continual expressions of good will and faith and hope universally given out by those near her at the ranch. Stillwell loved the cowboy; Florence was fond of him; Alfred liked and admired ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... tribe, there is no quainter little fellow than he of the Island of Skye,—known to his friends and admirers as the "Skye dog." This little animal, which, in length of spine, shortness of legs, wildness of hair, and litheness of movement, resembles one of those long, hirsute caterpillars oft-times to be observed by the happy rambler in the country, as it promenades across his path, possesses many distinctive traits, which separate him, in a manner, from Dog in general, assimilating him somewhat, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... voyage to the borders of the Unknown! Coffined in state,—with a purple velvet pall trailing its rich folds over the casket which enshrined her perished mortality,—and with flowers of every imaginable rareness, or wildness, scattered about it,—the body of Lotys was, with no religious or formal ceremony, placed on the deck of a sailing-brig, and sent out to the waves for burial. So Sergius Thord had willed it; so Sergius Thord had planned it. He had purchased the vessel for this one purpose, ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... the twilight of evening, Sintram, very disturbed, came down to the castle-garden. Although the presence of Gabrielle never failed to soothe and calm him, yet if she left the apartment for even a few instants, the fearful wildness of his spirit seemed to return with renewed strength. So even now, after having long and kindly read legends of the olden times to his father Biorn, she had retired to her chamber. The tones of her lute ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... beam out from his whole being; even although his buoyant animal life, which seldom allows his arms or legs to be quiet, often expresses itself in not the most graceful manner. My eleven-years-old boy is, alas! very—his father says—very unmanageable. Still, notwithstanding all this wildness, he is possessed of a deep and restless fund of sentiment, which makes me often tremble for his future happiness. God defend my darling, my summer child, my only son! Oh, how dear he is to me! Ernst warns me ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... her bright eyes flashing a strange fire, and her white bosom panting with the strong and passionate excitement; but in a moment her mood was changed. A smile, as if at her own vehemence, curled her lip; her glance lost its quick, sharp wildness. She clapped her hands ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... however, will not usually have been the primary owner—goes to work upon his land amid all the wildness of nature. He levels and burns the first trees, and raises his first crop of corn amid stumps still standing four or five feet above the soil; but he does not do so till some mode of conveyance has been found for him. So much I have said hoping to ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... brother's lips. "Slain by her own hand under an impulse of wildness and terror! Can I ever forget that? Do ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... all ages and both sexes, in masses so dense that they nearly forced one another over the brink of the causeways into the water below. Some had climbed on the terraces, others feebly supported themselves against the walls of the buildings. Their squalid and tattered garments gave a wildness to their appearance which still further heightened the ferocity of their expression, as they glared on their enemy with eyes in which hate was mingled with despair. When the Spaniards had approached within bow-shot, the Aztecs let off a flight of impotent missiles, showing to the last the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... the fir-woods below were like a green sea, and white clouds above sailed along over the blue sky. The wildness of the region was, as it were, tamed by its uniformity and the simplicity of its elements. Nature, like a true poet, abhors abrupt transitions. Clouds, however fantastically formed they may at times appear, still have ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... appeal to the higher reason. He is uttering truths before they can be understood, as in all ages the words of philosophers, when they are first uttered, have found the world unprepared for them. A further misunderstanding arises out of the wildness of his humour; he is supposed not only by Callicles, but by the rest of mankind, to be jesting when he is profoundly serious. At length he makes even Polus in earnest. Finally, he drops the argument, and heedless any longer of the forms of dialectic, he ...
— Gorgias • Plato
... scenery of any wildness was gained while shooting the rapids of the Katsuragava, an exciting voyage among boulders in a shallow and often very turbulent stream in a steep and craggy valley a few miles from Kyoto. Previous to this expedition I had seen, from the train, only the trim rice fields,—each a tiny ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... neighbourhood rejoiced in him, and every cottager's wife blessed him when he flung his bright smiles around him as he passed along. At no place was he more welcome than at the rectory, nor was there any house in which he felt so happy, not even excepting his own home. With all his wildness he felt the most sincere love and respect for Mr and Mrs Oliphant, and rejoiced in a day spent with their children. And there was one of these towards whom he was drawn with feelings of peculiar tenderness. He was not conscious of it, and would have laughed ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... on that memorable night had brought on a second severe attack of rheumatism, which had bent her nearly double. Anxiety for Margaret, too, had wasted her to a skeleton, and her thin, sharp face, now of a corpse-like pallor, contrasted strangely with her eyes, from which the wildness all was gone. Touched with pity, Maggie drew a chair to her side, and thus replied: "I do forgive you, Hagar, for I know that what you did was done in love; but by telling me what you have you've ruined all my hopes of happiness. In the ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... hills and woods whirling in glorified riot through an infinity of moon mists and star dust. He felt suddenly mature and strong and catching her in his arms he pressed her close, kissing her hair and temples until she, fluttering with the wildness of her first embrace of love, turned her lips up ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... annually recuperated in turn. Cymria capta ferum ... might have been the motto of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. ONIONS exhibits the romantic spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up, as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her—the drunken Kerr brothers, who built a house in a single night; Howell Gruffydd, the wily grocer; ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... affability; but it was only while he set strict bounds to the expression of his attachment. He had not, however, sufficient self-command to comply with these terms. His constant assiduities, his eyes continually riveted upon her, and the wildness of his looks, convinced her of his inordinate attachment; her virtue took alarm; she retired whenever he approached her, and even covered her face with a veil whilst he was present, nor would she condescend to the slightest action or look that might ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... in India had not improved, "So that is the woman your mother says she fears has got hold of you." It was the first time I had heard, that my mother had any such suspicion, for although she had spoken to me about my wildness, she had never referred to a woman; but she had told my aunt, who told my cousin my mother was awfully astonished. For that six years I had shagged all our servants under her very nose, yet she had not the faintest suspicion of it, my pranks now coming to her ears, shocked ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... so still and gloomy was wakening to something like wildness, threatening, brightening, gusty, when they stepped out of the train upon the platform of the San Mateo station. Clouds were piling gray and castle-like from the east up toward the zenith, and dark fragments ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... which he and the soldier who guarded him travelled passed another at an intermediate station. Reservists were looking out of every carriage; men from every branch of the service were mixed together, and all were alike in the wildness of their spirits. ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... half a century of shepherding life on the downs, which came out during our talks on many autumn and winter evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to the early years of the nineteenth century. Caleb cherished an admiration and reverence for his father's memory which were almost a worship, ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... longer wildness in his actions; but in his thoughts and language, was developed a poetical eccentricity—a morbid sympathy with surrounding scenes and impressions, which kept Sir Henry Delme in a constant state of alarm,—and which was ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... woodcock; here, a squirrel or mink; there, a skunk; there, a fox. What a clear, nervous track Reynard makes! how easy to distinguish it from that of a little dog,—it is so sharply cut and defined! A dog's track is coarse and clumsy beside it. There is as much wildness in the track of an animal as in its voice. Is a deer's track like a sheep's or a goat's? What winged-footed fleetness and agility may be inferred from the sharp, braided track of the gray squirrel upon the new snow! Ah! in nature is the best discipline. I think the sculptor might carve finer and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... which the great debater who employs them forgets within half an hour, and never thinks of again. Whatever was valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh was the ripe fruit of study and of meditation. It was the same with his conversation. In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged. Everything was there; and everything was in its place. His judgments on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully tested ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent,—for wildness was no trait of hers,—but with the perfume of garden-roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have consented together in making grow from summer to summer, and from century to century. Such ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... mothers being removed to isolated cages before the birth of the young. These young which had never seen or been near their father were very wild in disposition in every case. The observations of Yerkes on such rats raised by us indicates that their wildness was not quite as extreme as that of the pure wild rat but closely ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... great troubles in the end. It's for that, Deirdre, I'm praying that you'll come quickly; and you may take the word of a man has no lies, you'll not find, with any other, the like of what I'm bringing you in wildness and confusion in my own mind. DEIRDRE. I cannot go, Conchubor. CONCHUBOR — taking a triumphant tone. — It is my pleasure to have you, and I a man is waiting a long while on the throne of Ulster. Wouldn't you liefer be my com- rade, ...
— Deirdre of the Sorrows • J. M. Synge
... required any other. That would have been of the gold order, had not a great part of its colour been sunburnt, rained, and frozen out of it. All ways it pointed, as if surcharged with electric fluid, crowning him with a wildness which was in amusing contrast with the placidity of his countenance. Perhaps the resulting queerness in the expression of the little vagrant, a look as if he had been hunted till his body and soul were nearly ruffled asunder, and had already parted company ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... these tribes; those we saw were at least five feet and a half in height, slender, their limbs of a moderate size, and strikingly muscular; I should have thought their faces handsome, had they not been disfigured by an expression of wildness and cruelty; their colour is dark brown; some let their long, straight, black hair hang down unornamented over neck, face, and shoulders; others wore it bound up, or frizzed and crisped by burning, and entangled ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... to human beings, indeed, in this pleasant spot, excepting the fisherman and his family, there were few, or rather none, to be met with. For as in the background of the scene, toward the west and north-west, lay a forest of extraordinary wildness, which, owing to its sunless gloom and almost impassable recesses, as well as to fear of the strange creatures and visionary illusions to be encountered in it, most people avoided entering, unless in cases of extreme necessity. The pious old fisherman, however, many times passed through ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... All the wildness and waste, all the sternest desolations of the whole earth, brought together to wed and enhance each other, and then relieved by splendor without equal, perhaps, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... will move shortly. I had an excellent point of vantage on a little hill opposite the saluting base where the King and Lord Kitchener stood. That review was the real thing. It lacked, perhaps, something of the wildness of the review that took place on the sandy plains of Valcartier, but it had a dignity that was ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... the picture only to improve it, for the suggestion of wildness and freedom in her dark hair fitted more perfectly with the spirit of the twilight woods. It may be that only a man can understand the fascination that exists for men in just such a simple operation as she had performed. The absolute ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... permit a little Wildness. But, my good Friend, you must know, I did not do all this neither of ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... wild and lonely down there between the bare hills and the frozen river, but the wildness and the loneliness appealed to him. It was primitive and at times uncomfortable. He slept in a bunk built against the wall, with hard boards under him and a sod roof over his head. There were times ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... contrast in the apparent incoherence of the simplest language. He was born in 1757, towards the close of the reign of George II. Possibly if he had been sent to an age more capable of understanding him, his genius would not have been tempted to utter itself with such a wildness as appears to indicate hopeless indifference to being understood. We cannot tell sometimes whether to attribute the bewilderment the poems cause in us to a mysticism run wild, or to regard it as the reflex of madness in the writer. Here is a lyrical gem, ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... the magic wildness of an autumn night and walked east on Eighty-first Street. The loft building was near the corner of Second Avenue. They passed under the elevated structure, cutting through a hurrying throng ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... occasioned by a pistol-shot; so that his prognostic was very dubious. Meanwhile, he applied proper dressings to both; and, in half an hour after this administration, the gentleman gave some tokens of perception. He looked around him with a wildness of fury in his aspect, as if he had thought himself in the hands of the robbers by whom he had been attacked. But, when he saw the assiduity with which the bystanders exerted themselves in his behalf, one raising his head from the pillow, while another exhorted him to swallow ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... to the cinch and the axe, I have laid my flesh to the rain; I was hunter and trailer and guide; I have touched the most primitive wildness again. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... the hen, and tussled and fought with it, and each other, while the mother, keeping a sharp eye for enemies, looked on with fond delight. The expression on her face was remarkable. It was first a grinning of delight, but her usual look of wildness and cunning was there, nor were cruelty and nervousness lacking, but over all was the unmistakable look of the ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... Mrs. Dexter entered the sitting-room. She was enveloped in a warm cloak, with a hood drawn over her head. As she pushed the latter from her partly hidden face, her aunt saw a wildness about her eyes, that suggested, in connection with this unheralded visit of the feeble invalid, the idea of mental derangement. Starting forward, and almost encircling her with her arms, ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... with me no more, for they were going to put him under ground, whence he could never come to us again." She was a very beautiful woman of a noble spirit, and there was a dignity in her grief amidst all the wildness of her transport, which, methought, struck me with an instinct of sorrow, that before I was sensible of what it was to grieve, seized my very soul, and has made pity the weakness of my heart ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... hardly a trace of motion in the air, but somehow the creature half-scented Thyrsis; and so it stood and trumpeted to the night. Oh, the wildness of that sound—and the thumping of the heart of the hunter, and the breathless suspense, and the burning desire. The deer would take a step, and a twig would crack; and then it would stand still again, and Thyrsis would listen, crouching ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... went quickly; her heart fluttered with a sudden wildness. "Grandmother," she pleaded, hesitatingly, "oh, Aunt Matilda—just for this once, couldn't I have grey alpaca instead of brown? I ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... looked different, she thought, against the river, with the steeples and towers for background. His strangeness, his romance, his power to leave her side and take part in the affairs of men, the possibility that they should together hire a boat and cross the river, the speed and wildness of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired her with such rapture, half of love and half of adventure, that William and Cassandra were startled from their talk, and Cassandra exclaimed, "She looks as if she ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... for the delicacy of his fancy and the beauty of his diction. His Ode on the Passions is universally esteemed for its sudden and effective changes from the bewilderment of Fear, the violence of Anger, and the wildness of Despair to the rapt visions of Hope, the gentle dejection of Pity, and the sprightliness of Mirth and Cheerfulness. His Ode on the Death of Thomson is an exquisite bit of pathos, as is also the Dirge on Cymbeline. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... eyes—still fixed upon him, as they had been throughout the visit—opened to their fullest capacity, in a gaze of only partially alcoholic wildness. ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... all with shining eyes. The emotion of the picturesque, the call of savage wildness, the contagion of a mounting community excitement caused the blood to race through her veins. The drums throbbed against her heart as the pulse throbbed against her temples. She resisted an actual impulse to rise from her ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... its beauty; but it was changed; and there was an anxious haggard look about the gentle face, which it had never worn before. Another minute, and it was suffused with a crimson flush: and a heavy wildness came over the soft blue eye. Again this disappeared, like the shadow thrown by a passing cloud; and she was once more ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... in the wildness of her grief, by one who was ordinarily quiet, and spoke seldom except with a gentle smile and a soothing tone, rung in Esmond's ear; and 'tis said that he repeated many of them in the fever into which he now fell from his wound, and perhaps ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... welcome; but the smile vanished at once, as her eyes met his changed and working countenance; cold drops stood upon the rigid and marble brow, the lips writhed as if in bodily torture, the muscles of the face had fallen, and there was a wildness which appalled her in the fixed and feverish brightness ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... personages of a novel or romance live and move in the midst of an environment. They are placed in the midst of circumstances, upon which they act and by which they are acted upon. They may live on land or sea, in the country or in the city, amid the wildness of unsubdued forests or the culture of long-established communities. They may be surrounded by intelligence and luxury or by ...
— Elementary Guide to Literary Criticism • F. V. N. Painter
... turned their eyes a new creation seemed to bloom around. No signs of human thrift appeared to check the delicious wildness of Nature, who here reveled in all her luxuriant variety. Those hills, now bristled like the fretful porcupine, with rows of poplars (vain upstart plants! minions of wealth and fashion!), were then adorned with the vigorous natives of the soil—the lordly oak, the generous chestnut, the ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... was patient to his wife. "It depends upon the company. A treasurer is sometimes a book-keeping clerk. However, the trouble is, Barbara's as wild as a hawk, though I don't know where she got her wildness. Her brother and sister are ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... stone building, pointed out to me as "Branksome Tower," known by the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," who has sung the achievements of Scottish knights and ladies. This village, at the foot of Skiddaw, though much visited in the summer, has still all the wildness of nature. Daffodils were in blossom when I walked there; and primroses, daisies and violets opened, among the trees, upon every bank and grass plat, while the mountains, clustering about Derwent Water, assumed such tints ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... he ran howling and sputtering round and round the fast increasing crowd like a child gone insane. Presently the uselessness of his action made him think of Mother and Fanny. At once he darted off to the spot where he had seen them last, and in his wildness to find them ran past them two or three times, till Fanny saw him and in amazement cried, "Johnny! John! What on earth is ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... he wanted to build huts there for himself, his comrades, and the Prophet. The other disciples shuddered, and would gladly have persuaded the Master to return. He pointed to the high mountains, and said: "What frightens you, My children? When the races of men are becoming satiated and stupid, such wildness ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... and that no one would hear me if I cried out for help. I have hidden like some hunted animal." Her shaking voice broke, and she held the cloth of his sleeve tightly. "You are alive—alive!" with a sudden sweet wildness. "But it is true the bell tolled! While I was crouching in the dark I called to you—who ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... your congratulations," retorted the Irishman. "She might have made me happy if she had chosen. I would have forgiven her tempers, and loved her for her wildness. She is the sweetest woman I ever knew; as fresh and fair as your furzy hill-tops. But she is not for me. Fate never meant me to be ...
— Vixen, Volume II. • M. E. Braddon
... said: 'Where are you going, Debney?' 'I'm going nowhere, sir,' Ted answered. 'I'm being tossed into strange waters—a lone corvette of no squadron.' He stopped, smiled, and then said—it was so like him, for, with all his wildness, he had the tastes of a student: 'You remember that passage in Isaiah, sir, "And God shall turn upon them violently, and toss them like a ball ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... about a man who died in 1774 must needs be of a very uncertain and fragmentary character. But if I can trust the rather hazy recollections of my oldest inhabitant about what his father told him his father had said of wild Mat Haygarth, the young man's wildness was very free from vice. There is no legend of innocence betrayed or infamy fostered by Matthew Haygarth. He appears to have enjoyed what the young men of that day called life—attended cock-fights, beat ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... inaccessible granite peaks, and pitchy-black forest summits, impenetrable even at this time of the year. As we look down we see that roads have been cut round the mountain sides, and that tiny homesteads are perched wherever vantage ground is to be had, yet the impression is one of isolation and wildness. The town lies in no narrow cleft, as is the case with many little manufacturing towns in the Jura, but in a vast opening and falling back of the meeting hills and mountain tops, so that it is seen from far ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... rattled dismally on the roof of the old cabin. But all this somberness of nature brought comfort and lightness of heart to the besieged. Paul's spirits rose with the blackness of the night and the wildness of ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... me, your Majesty; and now that I am going over to see you, I hope you will consider that I am but rude and uncivil, and do not know my duty to your Highness, nor yet your Majesty's laws, but am one brought up in wildness, far from all civility. Yet have I a good will to the commonwealth of my country; and please your Majesty to send over two commissioners that you can trust, that will take no bribes, nor otherwise be imposed on, to observe what I have done to improve the country, and hear what my accusers ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... we started again, and the clear air, the bright sun, the novel wildness of the dark forest, and our keenly awakened curiosity, made the excursion delightful, and enabled us to bear without shrinking the bumps and bruises we encountered. We soon lost all trace of a road, at least so it appeared ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... passed through and entered the sick man's chamber. Stretched upon a mattress, with both hands tightly bound to the bedstead, the friendless stranger was indeed a pitiful sight. His dark, dishevelled hair prematurely gray, his long, unshaven beard, and the wildness of the eyes which glanced upon them as they opened the door and entered, caused the faint hope which had so suddenly risen in Clotelle's heart, to sink, and she felt that this man could claim no kindred with her. Certainly, he bore no resemblance to the man whom she ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... the landscape the Psalmist saw, and it seemed to him to reflect the mingled wildness and beauty of his own life. Human life was just this wilderness of terrible contrasts, where the light is so bright, but the shadows the darker and more treacherous; where the pasture is rich, but scattered in the wrinkles of vast deserts; where the paths are illusive, ...
— Four Psalms • George Adam Smith
... forced back by sheer weight of numbers to the head of the companion-way, using my weapon with some wildness, for all was passing before me in confusion. I had received a hard crack on the head and scarcely knew what I was doing, but was merely sustained in my resistance by a sense of continuity, inherited, as it were, from the earlier part of the struggle. Somehow ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... trusted the Greeks to fight in line, as they had fought at Marathon; and by expanding their ranks, and moving off his Asiatics to the left, he might, have avoided the danger of being outflanked and surrounded. But his capital error was the wildness and abandon of his charge with the Six Hundred—a charge which it was probably right to make under the circumstances, but which required a combination of coolness and courage that the Persian prince evidently did not possess ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 5. (of 7): Persia • George Rawlinson
... to bed. No questions. I'll explain myself when you come back." There was a wildness in her eyes, and a tone of stern command in her voice, which warned her mother to set dignity ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... born in Thames Street, London, and seemed to have inherited a sort of hereditary wildness and inconstancy, his father having been always of a restless temper and addicted to every species of wickedness, except such as are punished by temporal laws. While this son William was a child, he left him, without any provision, to the care of his mother, and accompanied ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward |
