"Austere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... long after she returned to New York that the wealthy and eminent specialist who attended her insisted upon taking her to the Riviera and marrying her. I sometimes wonder—but, as I have said, such reflections have no place in these austere pages. ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... to them. I have gone through all; your own manuscript, which I envy Mr. Gough, his specimen, and the four letters to you from the latter and Mr. Steevens. I am glad they were both satisfied with my reception. In truth, you know I am neither formal nor austere, nor have any grave aversion to our antiquities, though I do now and then divert myself with their solemnity about arrant trifles; yet perhaps we owe much to their thinking those trifles of importance, or the Lord knows how they would have patience to investigate them ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... hardly be overstated. In other cases there was extravagance and harm. Uncompromisingly, and not very intelligently, did they speak Scripture, think Scripture, and act Scripture, like Hebrews born out of due season. Knox invested himself with the austere authority of the Hebrew prophet; Calvin was fain to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord. The Puritans of England became fanatical in their sombre conception of sin and in the rigour of their exaggerated Hebraism. Here was the second period of Hebraic ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... blue horizon. The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine. The desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting. It spoke to Cameron. It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul. In that wild solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly. They had shone upon a desert that might once have been alive and was now ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... from the laboratory, and not from the soil by the sweat of the brow. Toil was unknown; the toil that we know, menial, degrading and harassing. Science had been the magician that had done away all that. Science, so formidable and austere to our untutored minds, had been gracious to these fair beings and opened the door to nature's most occult secrets. The beauty of those women it is not in my power to describe. The Greeks, in their highest art, never rivalled it, for here ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... against it, looking down upon the toe of her smart little shoe which was describing a small semicircle beyond the hem of her gown. Her attitude, which was half-defiant, half-indolent, brought out the pretty curves of her waist and shoulders. The master noticed it and became a trifle more austere. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... had fallen between two stools. It had fallen between that austere old three-legged stool which was the tripod of the cold priestess of Apollo; and that other mystical and mediaeval stool that may well be called the Stool of Repentance. It kept neither of the two values as intensely valuable. It could not believe ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... passions and frailties of humanity, seems to justify his assertion, "I have shaken hands with delight [sc. by way of parting] in my warm blood and canicular days." So uniformly lofty and dignified is its tone, and so austere its morality, that the book might be taken for the fruit of those later and sadder years that bring the philosophic mind. Its frank confessions and calm analysis of motive and action have been compared with Montaigne's: if ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Mill has thrown a new light, or which he has at least invested with a novel interest by the view he has given of them. And as, in this selection of topics, we are not bound to choose those which are most austere and repulsive, we hope that such of our readers as are not deterred by the very name of logic, will follow us with some interest through the several points of view, and the various extracts we shall present ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... remote, austere, Let us all read, whate'er the cost: O Maiden! why that bitter tear? Is it for dear one you have lost? Is it for fond illusion gone? For trusted lover proved untrue? O sweet girl-face, so sad, so wan What hath the ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... marked characteristics of our national life until recent years have been those born of contact with frontier conditions—courage, discipline, an austere sense of duty, a passion for work, marvelous practicality joined to a fundamental idealism and love of sentiment, an unconquerable hopefulness and an innate ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... was but little difference between the isba of her father and the workroom of the seignorial mansion. Here, as there, her life was spent in assiduous work from sunrise to sunset. There, her mother, an austere, somber woman, like most village matrons to whom life had proved no light matter; here, the lady's maid, often grumbling, but at times kind and even condescending. The chief difference between the two modes of life consisted in the daily visits of the countess, who generally ...
— The Little Russian Servant • Henri Greville
... life appear to have for their object a renewal of the powers and virtues which they attribute to the rite. And they are observed more frequently by those who strive to preserve unaltered the ancient state of society among them, or by men who assume austere habits for the purpose of acquiring influence in the tribe, or as preparatives for war or some extraordinary feat. It is not known that there is any fixed day observed as a general fast. So far as a rule is ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... to find hold, was clothed with a mat of blueberry bushes. The berries, of an opaque violet-blue tone (much more vivid and higher in key than the same berries can show when picked and brought to market) were so large and so thickly crowded as to almost hide the leaves. They gave the austere steeps of "Old Baldy" the effect of having been dyed with ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... this point pardon your father, for it was not his fault. You were born in 1703, at the most austere period of Louis XIV.'s reign; your father was already out of favor with the king, or rather with Madame de Maintenon; and for your sake, as much or more than for his, he sent you into Bretagne, confiding ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... hand; at his left an old man leant on the throne; he was dressed in the mantle formerly worn by the administrators of Sweden, before it became a kingdom under Gustavus Vasa. Before the throne were seated several grave, austere looking personages, in long black robes. Between the throne and the benches of the assembly was a block covered with black crape; an axe lay beside it. No one in the vast assembly appeared conscious of the presence of Charles ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... year by year, The singer who lies songless here Was wont to woo a less austere, Less deep repose, Where Rotha to ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... suppose that the habits of rigid economy learned in this school of adversity influenced the passage of the celebrated law against wearing superfluities, quite as much as their austere prejudice against display. Be that as it may, the attention of the court was called to the dangerous increase of lace and other ornaments in female attire, and, after mature deliberation, it seemed wise to them to ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... was satisfied that the seeds of belief were deeply sown in the human heart. It was on that principle that he permitted and justified, though he did not dare to authorize the revival of La Trappe and other austere orders. He contended that they might operate as a safety-valve for the fanatical and visionary ferment which would otherwise burst forth and disturb society. In his remarks on the death of Duroc and in the reasons he alleged ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... is adopting the former mode of locomotion; nor does he recover a sense of his true position until he finds himself seated at one end of a square table, the other three sides whereof are occupied by the same number of gentlemen of grave and austere bearing, with all the candles in the room apparently endeavouring to imitate that species of eccentric dance which he has only seen the gas-lamps attempt occasionally as he has returned home from his harmonic society. The table ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... beholders, and impress them with a vivid sense of the presence of spiritual powers. As a late product of the emotions and conceptions thus stimulated, we have the fine myth of the ancient nature goddess, Athene— sprung from the head of Zeus, the austere virgin, who was to become the personification of prudence, self-restraint, and culture, the celestial representative of the loftiest intellectual and spiritual ideals of the Greek world at its best. Hence, too, the group ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... met her heroics. He stood and looked her full in the eyes with a calm radiance in his face that reminded her of the dawn-light she had seen that morning come over Providence Nob and his deep smile gave a young prophet look to his austere mouth. And as she gazed at him she drew timidly nearer, even around ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... insect-slaughtering thunder-clap With that between the fingers and the thumb. It seemeth mad to quit the Olympian couch, Which bade our public gobble or reject. O spectacle of Peter, shrewdly pecked, Piper, by his own pepper from his pouch! What of the sneer, the jeer, the voice austere, You dealt?—the voice austere, the jeer, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... candidly about the conduct or opinion of which he thought ill; would be more on his guard against pharisaic censoriousness, and that desire to be ever judging one another, which Milton well called the stronghold of our hypocrisy. The disapproval of such a person would have an austere colour, a gravity, a self-respecting reserve, which could never belong to an equal degree of disapproval in a person who had started from the officious principle, that if we are sure we are right, it is straightway our business to make the person whom we think wrong smart for his error. And ...
— On Compromise • John Morley
... last pale luster. Raising himself on his elbow and looking out over the country to learn his whereabouts, his eye fell upon a tree, blood-red, a maple amid evergreens. Behind this somber community of pines, stiff as a band of Puritan elders, surrounding the bright-hued maple, a Hester in that austere congregation, appeared the glazed tile roof of Little Thunder's habitation, a two-story abode of modest proportions and olden type. As the land baron passed, a brindle cow in the side yard saluted the morn, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... great matter, I am not insensible to the austere demands of the occasion; but the dependence of the crime against Kansas upon the slave power is so peculiar and important, that I trust to be pardoned while I impress it with an illustration, which to some may seem trivial. It is related ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a clear intellect which rebels but ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... clever and sympathetic woman may arouse in philosophic minds of a certain calibre—in a Condillac, a Joubert, a D'Alembert, a Mill. Though Hemsterhuys himself never advanced from a philosophy of religion to the active region of dogmatic professions, his disciple could not find contentment on his austere heights. In the very year of Diderot's death (1784) the Princess Galitzin became a catholic, and her son became not only a catholic but a zealous missionary ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Savior Jesus Christ: therefore our beloved son, the master-general of the Order of Preachers [21] [Dominicans], has determined to send thither professed members under the care of their own vicar, with rules for austere life and a reformed standard of conduct—as is becoming to a religious and praiseworthy institute, and according to which their province of New Spain was established—who there may found a new ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly free from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's can be. It lay in a life which most men would have found austere and blank indeed; a life from which not Croesus only, but Solon would have turned in scorn, a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent failure, and honour that came tardily at the close; it was a happiness nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager appropriation of the goods of ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... they are the least and the last of the Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere puritanism which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... extended the whole length of the house. One end was curtained off as a bedroom, and she smiled at its austere simplicity. ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... Christmas Day 1635, and the Jesuits had lost a staunch friend and never-failing protector. His successor, however, was Charles Huault de Montmagny, a knight of Malta, a man of devout character, thoroughly in sympathy with the missions. Under Montmagny's rule New France became as austere ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... this was the same haughty young girl who had once so proudly shown him Gania's letter. He could not understand how that proud and austere beauty could show herself to be such an utter child—a child who probably did not even now ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... not surprised at Mrs. Copley disliking the child, for she—a thin, sharp-vis-aged and austere lady of forty years of age—was childless, and older than her cheerful, kind-hearted husband by twelve years. The natives bore her no love, and had given her the contemptuous nickname of Le Matua moa e le fua—"the ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... might go to sleep, or perhaps go away, the science and the austere philosophy taught in these plays were enlivened by tavern scenes, and by the gambols of a clown, fool, or buffoon, called Vice, armed, as Harlequin, with a wooden dagger. And often, such is human frailty, the beholders went, remembering nothing but the mad pranks of Vice. It was in their ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... I saw a girl climbing a neighbouring peak. She did not perceive us; but when she reached the summit the image of Spero was thrown on a cloud in front of her, by one of those curious plays of sunlight and mist which sometimes occur in hazy, mountainous regions. His fine, austere features and graceful figure were enlarged into a vast, god-like apparition, with a halo of bright colours shining like a glory around his head, and a fainter circle of rainbow hues framing his whole form. It was the first anthelia ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Valley. It is inhabited by the Iliaszai and Malizai divisions of the Pathan tribe of Yusafzais, who are called after their country the Bunerwals. There is no finer race on the north-west frontier of India than the Bunerwals. Simple and austere in their habits, religious and truthful in their ways, hospitable to all who seek shelter amongst them, free from secret assassinations, they are bright examples of the Pathan character at its best. They are a powerful and warlike tribe, numbering ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... eagles To guard each planted seed and seedling. Then he was a god, to the red man's dreaming; Then the chiefs brought treasures grotesque and fair,— Magical trinkets and pipes and guns, Beads and furs from their medicine-lair,— Stuck holy feathers in his hair, Hailed him with austere delight. The orchard god was their guest ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... servant and she his good and faithful wife. But when it comes to dealing with human beings anything, anything may be expected. So even my astonishment did not last very long. How far she developed and illustrated that conscienceless and austere doctrine to the girl-friends, who were mere transient shadows to her husband, I could not tell. Any length I supposed. And he looked on, acquiesced, approved, just for that very reason—because these pretty girls were but shadows to him. O! ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... Kayasth girl was passing by, and her Parasurama seized and made over to the Pasis. From them sprang the Kaithwas subcaste. Another legend related by Mr. Crooke tells that during the time Parasurama was incarnate there was an austere devotee called Kuphal who was asked by Brahma to demand of him a boon, whereupon he requested that he might be perfected in the art of thieving. His request was granted, and there is a well-known verse regarding the devotions of Kuphal, the pith of which ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... gold and crimson and purple, and the whole cloudy west in a flame, it is unsurpassed; only your standard of beauty must not be a velvet lawn studded with copper beeches, or a primary-hued landscape bathed in American sunshine. Connemara is austere and gloomy under a dull sky, but it has the poetic charm that belongs to all mystery, and its bare cliffs and ridges are delicately pencilled on a violet background, in a way peculiar to ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... part with any pleasure but in hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their lives. The sole trouble which she demands is that of just calculation, and a steady preference of the greater happiness. And if any austere pretenders approach her, enemies to joy and pleasure, she either rejects them as hypocrites and deceivers, or if she admit them in her train, they are ranked, however, among the least ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... got out of a servant who works with a cheery heart than out of one that is driven reluctantly to his task. You remember our Lord's parable where He traces idleness to fear: 'I knew thee that thou wast an austere man, gathering where thou didst not strew, and I was afraid, and I went and hid thy talent.' No work was got out of that servant because there was no joy in him. The opposite state of mind—diligence in righteous work, inspired ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... garb, her rigid rule Reformed on Benedictine school; Her cheek was pale, her form was spare; Vigils, and penitence austere, Had early quenched the light of youth, But gentle was the dame, in sooth: Though, vain of her religious sway, She loved to see her maids obey; Yet nothing stern was she in cell, And the nuns loved their Abbess well. Sad was this voyage to the dame; Summoned to Lindisfarne, she came, There, ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... up toward the eleventh story in the elevator she rehearsed her opening scene with Hilmer. She decided to take her cue flippantly. She would banter him at first and gradually veer to more serious topics... But once she stood in his rather austere inner shrine of business, she decided against subterfuges. He had stepped into the main office, the boy who showed her in explained. Would she have a seat? She dropped into a chair, taking in her background with feminine swiftness. A barometer, a map, two stiffly painted pictures exhibiting ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the bubbling spring, the atmosphere altered. Without becoming stale or unpleasant, it grew cold, clear and refined, and somehow suggested austere and tomblike thoughts. The daylight disappeared at the first bend in the tunnel. After that, Maskull could not say where the light came from. The air itself must have been luminous, for though it was as light ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... attention to twist the silk string of his ball programme round and round his finger. The room where they sat was singularly unlike those rose-shaded bowers which are considered suitable to the needs of dancers who pause and rest in them. Its austere furnishing had something almost solemn and mysterious about it; and the stone walls hung with tapestry, on which quaint figures moved restlessly with the draught from an open window, would have given an eerie feeling ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... of a great plateau, and now and again we caught glimpses of verdure topping the rocky escarpment, as though bush or jungle-land had pushed outward from a lush vegetation farther inland to signal to an unseeing world that Caprona lived and joyed in life beyond her austere and ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... chapels—even too many in the opinion of austere Christians. Monnica went from one to another carrying in a large basket made of willow branches some pieces of minced meat, bread, and wine mixed with water. She met her friends in these places. They would sit down around the tombs, of which ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... Life! Austere arbiter of each man's fate, By whom he learns that Nature's steadfast laws Are as decrees immutable; O pause Your even forward march! Not yet too late Teach me the needed lesson, when to wait Inactive as a ship when no wind draws To stretch the loosened cordage. One implores Thy ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... the opinion of others, and he put on, without embarrassment, the academical uniform. He entered the section of physics and mathematics. Robust, rosy-cheeked, bearded, and taciturn, he produced a strange impression on his companions; they did not suspect that this austere man, who came so punctually to the lectures in a wide village sledge with a pair of horses, was inwardly almost a child. He appeared to them to be a queer kind of pedant; they did not care for him, and made no overtures to him, and he avoided them. During ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the colonel continued, "that in order to survive, an aristocracy must be hard upon itself. Moral discipline is indispensable to any class that wants to govern. If the industrial middle class is to take our place, it will have to be austere and hard. What sealed once and for all the doom of the Roman Senators was the decadent Greek culture of their sons. Those young noblemen affected an elegant dilettantism and toyed pleasantly with ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... good influences followed. But the tree was not yet deeply enough rooted to resist accidents, and all his wise arrangements were suddenly overthrown by the caprice of the monarch, who, tired of the austere virtue of Confucius, suddenly plunged into a career of dissipation. Confucius resigned his office, and again became a wanderer, but now with a new motive. He had before travelled to learn, now he travelled to teach. He collected disciples around him, and, ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... patriotism with no taint of the slightest worldliness in her thoughts. I was not the only one in love with her; but it was I who had to hear oftenest her scathing criticism of my levities—very much like poor Decoud—or stand the brunt of her austere, unanswerable invective. She did not quite understand—but never mind. That afternoon when I came in, a shrinking yet defiant sinner, to say the final good-bye I received a hand-squeeze that made my heart leap and saw a tear that took my breath away. She was softened ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... absence of this the more austere and wicked member of the family, we shall continue from time to time to speed a questing arrow in the general direction of the ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... whose teaching Epictetus grew to maturity, and it was evidently a teaching which was wise and noble, even if it were somewhat chilling and austere. It formed an epoch in the slave's life; it remoulded his entire character; it was to him the source of blessings so inestimable in their value that it is doubtful whether they were counter-balanced by all the miseries ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... occasion of it, not only sinned against himself, but against his country. Vulgar and indecent literature was denounced as un-Irish; Irish dances were advocated, not only for their admirable grace and their historic interest, but also because it was held that dances like the waltz, departed from the austere standard of Irish morality. Irish men and women were taught to buy goods of Irish manufacture by the people who taught them to learn the language, on the ground that if the Irish nation continued to ebb away out of Ireland, nationality and ...
— Irish Books and Irish People • Stephen Gwynn
... spacious field for the exercise of all my energies. I sought out a preceptor in my new religion. I entered into the hearts of priests and confessors, the hidalgo and the peasant, the monk and the prelate, the austere and voluptuous devotee were ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... regarded the autocrat, whose great power made him so lonely, with an interest not untouched with compassion at the remote period when he had visited her Court and had talked with her statesmen about the imminent decay of Turkey. At that time the austere majesty of his aspect, seen amid the finer and softer lineaments of British courtiers, had been likened to the half-savage grandeur of an emperor of old Rome who should have been born a Thracian peasant. It proved that the contrast had gone much deeper than outward appearance, and ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... is next accused of harshness and intolerance, as well as of growing rich by tithes, and even by trade, in which it is affirmed he has a covert interest. [Footnote: Francois Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, first bishop of Quebec, was a prelate of austere character. His memory is cherished in Canada by adherents of the Jesuits and all ultramontane Catholics.] It is added that there exists in Quebec, under the auspices of the Jesuits, an association called the Sainte Famille, of which Madame Bourdon [Footnote: This Madame Bourdon was the widow ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... his voice uplifted: "Hail to thee, my guest austere! Drain with me this cup of welcome: thou shalt share our Yule-tide cheer. Thou shalt sit next to my high-seat e'en though lowly be thy birth, For to-night our Lord, the Savior, came a ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... market value of brides. Indifference to masculine chastity continued much longer still. The ancient civilized nations had advanced far enough to value purity in wives and maidens, but it hardly occurred to them that it was man's duty to cultivate the same virtue. Even so austere and eminent a moral philosopher as Cicero declared that one would have to be very severe indeed to ask young men to refrain from illicit relations. The mediaeval church fathers endeavored for centuries to enforce the doctrine that men should be as pure as ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... like the mother of a wayward child Who needs must chide the offspring of her heart, Disguiseth for a season all the sweet and mild Maternal softness for an austere part. ...
— Cobwebs from a Library Corner • John Kendrick Bangs
... the drawing-room. There was the bust of the master, the piano he composed on, his scores spread over all the furniture, melodious even to look at, as tho from between their half-opened pages the written phrases reechoed musically. The actual and very real charm of the widow, surrounded by those austere memories as by a frame that became her, brought his love ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the Virginian, whose greatest source of discomfort now was the apprehension of serious reprimand, if not something worse, from the austere Captain Headley, whose displeasure, he was certain, would be so much the greater on account of the loss of the unfortunate Collins. He looked at his watch, but to his great annoyance, found that it ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson
... their various designs, mistakes, detections and disappointments, form altogether a melange of pleasantry highly provocative of laughter, yet by no means so low as to reduce the piece to the rank of farce, which some austere critics in London have ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... a genuine hermit," remarked his host gravely. "Men do indeed call me the Hermit of Rakata, because I dwell alone here under the shadow of this particular cone of Krakatoa, but I do not ape the austere life of the conventional hermit, as you see, either in my domestic arrangements or food. Come, your breakfast is ready. From my outlook I saw your boat approaching some hours ago, and knew that it was mine, so I made ready for your arrival, though I did not guess that ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... steps with his eyes till the last wave of her garment was visible at the closing door; then turned his looks to Major Bridgenorth, and then sunk them on the ground. The Major continued to regard him in profound silence; his looks were melancholy and even austere; but there was nothing which indicated either agitation or keen resentment. He motioned to Julian to take a seat, and assumed one himself. After which he opened the conversation in ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... logic, abstract and arid, and Alexandrian esoteric mysticism, quietistic, nay, nihilistic; and the Church had ceased to answer to any spiritual wants of the people. Meanwhile, on all sides everywhere, heresies were teeming, austere and equivocal, pure and unclean according to individuals, but all of them anarchical, and therefore destructive at a moment when, above all, order and discipline were wanted. The belief in the world's end, in the speedy coming of Antichrist and the Messiah, was rife among all ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... do not disturb or interrupt you, sir," he said, beaming in the doorway like a benevolent high priest. He had doffed his professional manner of austere disapproval, as was his ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... remained the stronghold of mental unrestraint and moral license, where thinkers uttered their thoughts with tolerable freedom, and libertines indulged their tastes unhindered. Rome early assumed novel airs of piety, and external conformity to austere patterns became the fashion here. Yet the Papal capital did not wholly cease to be the resort of students and of artists. The universities maintained themselves in a respectable position—- far different, indeed, from that which they had held in ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... husband, conferring with the cook, feeding the cat, combing and brushing the Pomeranian—in a word, staying put. I was more than a little bleary-eyed, but I endeavoured, as far as the fact that my eyelids were more or less glued together would permit, to give her an austere ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... of the highest honours of chivalry—the self-styled minstrel might not in reality be a man of that worth which he assumed. There was certainly something in his conversation, at least more grave, if not more austere, than was common to those of his calling; and when he recollected many points of Sir John de Walton's minuteness, a doubt arose in his mind, that the governor might not approve of his having introduced into the ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was not made to an insensible audience. There were few among them who did not feel that their fortunes were indissolubly connected with those of their commander; and while they had little to expect from the austere character of the governor, they were warmly attached to the person of their young chief, who, with all the popular qualities of his father, excited additional sympathy from the circumstances of his age and his forlorn condition. Laying their hands on the cross, placed on an altar raised for the purpose, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... weakness and a sense of duty without any compromise. He, the son, had become a magistrate, and, wielding the weapon of the law, he struck down without pity the feeble and the erring. She, the daughter, quite penetrated with the virtue that had bathed her in this austere family, had become the spouse of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... the smell of burning on his garments. None could lay self-seeking to his charge, nor even the smallest of the many vices which in every order raised their heads, rampant and unashamed. It was characteristic of Louis that he should attach to himself men of such unselfish humility and austere pureness of life. God and the Saints would surely forgive a little chicanery to one who lived in an atmosphere of ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... sat silently looking straight before her. And truly it was a magnificent scene which was thus so suddenly presented to her view. Below stretched a dense forest, lying sombre beneath the shades of evening. Away in the distance rose the mighty mountains, sentinel-like and austere, while between, flashing like a jewel in its dark stern setting, was a large body of water. Not a ripple ruffled its surface, and nothing could Glen discern there, although her ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... as a busy business man or a clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"—with the air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... emigrant in a new country, built himself a house with his own hands. Poverty of the most distressing sort, with sometimes the near prospect of a gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill, backward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious in his family, he was yet a man of very unusual parts and of an affectionate nature. On his way through life he had remarked much upon other men, with more result in theory than practice; and he had reflected ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... de Puymaigre in France, that all ballads there have their air or tune, and that every dance has its own words, for if a new dance comes in, perhaps a fashionable one from Paris, words are fitted to it. Is there any trace of such an operatic, lyrical, dancing peasantry in austere Scotland? We find it in Gawin Douglas's ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... with those locked rooms on the ground-floor where the window-blinds are drawn down close, have been spared the general devastation. Mrs Pipchin has remained austere and stony during the proceedings, in her own room; or has occasionally looked in at the sale to see what the goods are fetching, and to bid for one particular easy chair. Mrs Pipchin has been the highest bidder for the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... success of Jacob with the sheep, which in J is due to his skill and cunning, xxx. 29-43, is referred in E to the intervention of God, xxxi. 5-12. In general it may be said that J, while religious, is also natural, whereas E tends to emphasize the supernatural, and thus takes the first step towards the austere theology of P.[2] [Footnote 1: In this way it is distinguished from P, which, as we have seen, is also Elohistic, but is not now so called.] [Footnote 2: A detailed justification of the grounds of the critical analysis will be found in Professor Driver's elaborate ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... peculiar structure of the book renders necessary, there rises slowly into view and presently into prominence the outline of a purpose as noble as it is rare. In the teeth of popular prejudice, Bayard Taylor has had the courage to take for his heroine a woman "strong-minded," austere in her faith, past her first youth, given to public speaking, and imbued, we might almost say to stubbornness, with ultra ideas of "woman's rights." True, he has given her to us in the most modified form possible to such a character, utterly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the limp figure on the bed. Mechanically he picked up the fallen picture to replace it. There looked out at him the face of a man of early middle age, a face of manifest intellectual power, high-boned, long-lined, and of the austere, almost ascetic beauty which the Florentine coins have preserved for us in clear fidelity. Across the bottom was written in a ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... us familiar with the process of 'whitewashing' historical characters. We are past being surprised at finding Tiberius portrayed as an austere and melancholy recluse, Henry VIII pictured as a pietistic sentimentalist with a pedantic respect for the letter of the law, and Napoleon depicted as a romantic idealist, seeking to impose the Social Contract on an immature, reluctant ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... over the past five years despite a serious armed conflict. In fact, 2007 is regarded by policy makers and the private sector as one of the best economic years in recent history, after 2005. The economy continues to improve in part because of austere government budgets, focused efforts to reduce public debt levels, an export-oriented growth strategy, improved domestic security, and high commodity prices. Ongoing economic problems facing President URIBE ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... court; the chair on the extreme right was for the "prisoner's friend," that on the left awaited the Judge-Advocate. About five yards in front of the table, in the centre of an empty space, stood two more chairs turned towards it. Otherwise the room was as bare as a guard-room. And this austere meagreness gave it a certain dignity of its own as of a place where nothing was allowed to distract the mind from the serious business in hand. At the door stood an orderly with a red armlet bearing the imprint of the ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... by St. Paul, that the commission came—"he is a chosen vessel unto Me, to bear My Name." A chosen vessel unto Him. The seed-vessel belongs to the seed, only and for ever: it is formed for itself and has no purpose apart. Separation has nothing austere and narrow in it when ...
— Parables of the Christ-life • I. Lilias Trotter
... fearsome in it which enhanced the unpleasant fancy. I felt an icy sweat come out upon my forehead in huge beads, and my hair stood up with a hideous fear. Within the depths of my own heart I felt that the act of the austere Serapion was an abominable sacrilege; and I could have prayed that a triangle of fire would issue from the entrails of the dark clouds, heavily rolling above us, to reduce him to cinders. The owls which had been nestling in the cypress-trees, startled by the gleam of the lantern, flew ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... the early Romans of the republic), there was a sufficiently austere morality. A public officer of state, whose business was to inquire into the private lives of the citizens, and to punish offences against morals, is a phenomenon which we have seen only once on this planet. There was never a people before, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... exhibited a schoolboy's love of horseplay and a great capacity for primitive happiness. It was as if the people, having thrown off the more galling restraints of civilization and order, felt their limbs and spirits free for the first time, and exercised both with the freedom and, the austere critic may say, the foolishness ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Varuna. O prince of Kuru race, thy friends think that as thou art worthy of the attributes of an emperor, the time is even come for thee for the performance of the Rajasuya sacrifice. The time for the performance of that sacrifice in which Rishis of austere vows kindle six fires with mantras of the Sama Veda, is come for thee in consequence of thy Kshatriya possessions. At the conclusion of the Rajasuya sacrifice when the performer is installed in the sovereignty of the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Part 2 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
... for Joan Whitworth as she spoke, but Joan was so utterly indifferent as to whether Colonel Luttrell would arrive or not that she could not stifle a sigh. She had gathered Luttrell into the party with some effort and now it seemed her effort was to be fruitless. Joan persisted in her mood of austere contempt for the foibles of the world. She was dressed in a gown of an indeterminate shade between drab and sage-green, which did its best to annul her. She had even come to sandals. There they were now sticking out beneath the ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... it happens, that love is guilty of any thing capable of being condemned, even by the most austere; most of the faults committed under that sanction, being in reality instigated by some other passion, such as avarice and ambition in the one sex, and a flame which is too often confounded and mistaken for a pure affection ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... turned to his follower and bade him hasten to Messer Folco, where he sat at his wine, and get his private ear, and tell him that a man was having speech with his daughter on the threshold of her apartments. Messer Simone knew well enough how great an effect such a piece of news would have upon the austere nature of his host, and I make no doubt that his red face grinned in the moonlight as he dispatched his fellow upon his errand. When Maleotti had gone, Messer Simone slowly ascended the staircase that conducted to the loggia, and concealed himself very effectually behind ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... organized murder on a basis of religious fervour. "'Nothing is true and all is allowed' was the ground of their secret doctrine, which, however, being imparted but to few and concealed under the veil of the most austere religionism and piety, restrained the mind under the yoke of blind obedience."[134] To the outside world all this remained a profound mystery; fidelity to Islam was proclaimed as the fundamental doctrine of the sect, and when ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... her close the street door and heard the rusty click of her cotton umbrella as she raised it. Then he turned to the table at his elbow and kindled his deep-bowled pipe and drew over his legs the skirts of his long gown, coarse, austere, sombre. ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... Rising austere and dumb, On the high shelf Of my half-lighted room, Would place the shining bust And wait alone, Until I was but dust, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... Fawkes Festival of Judaism, the Purim Feast, appointed by Esther and Mordecai, commemorating deliverance from massacre which Hamar had determined by lot against them, gave occasion for relaxation. Even the most austere and gloomy rejoiced, while the younger people abandoned themselves to dissolute mirth, opposite sexes dressing up in the clothes of each other; a habit at present in favour amongst the coster fraternity of East London on Bank Holidays. The Jews were a peculiar ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... blooming like an oasis from the irrigation afforded by the artesian wells, rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple canons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of the desert which stretched away and away, its illimitable distances lost at last in the ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow |
