"Saturnine" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and steps tiptoe over rubbishy details that are the delight of the comic poet and the modern Muse of History. Thucydides, it is true, gives us a minute account of the plague. That was a subject which commended itself to his saturnine spirit, and in his description he deigns to speak of the "stuffy cabooses" into which the country people were crowded when the Lacedaemonians invaded Attica. But when Aristophanes touches the same chapter, he goes into picturesque details about the rookeries ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... would make a very good peddler," he thought. Although his grace of address was involuntary, like any keenly intelligent and retrospective man, he could not avoid being aware of it. He felt that he could outstrip that saturnine Syrian in his ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the spacious old cabinet room which looks out on the little garden and the Park. He was a gaunt old man with, meagre mustache and hair, and a face like a death's head. He held out his hand and smiled. His hand was cold and his smile was half tearful and half saturnine. ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... well and bade her think no more about the man, I very soon had reason to be of her opinion. Two or three days later, as I was sawing planks in the yard, to make a trellis, that saturnine person came in, resplendently dressed, and filled the wholesome place with the reek of his essences. He saluted me with extravagant politeness, telling me that he had words for my private ear which he was sure ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... vastly more concerned about the animal's impending fate. This was old Joe McEvoy himself, who, out of the mouth of a steep, sandy boreen, sprang up suddenly, like a jack-fn-the-box-one of the shock-wigged, saturnine-complexioned pattern. But no jack-in-the-box could have looked so flurriedly distracted, or have muttered to itself such queer execrations as he ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... responsive to the jolts and twists and turns of the road. The rear end gate had been removed and three men sat with their heels dangling outside, their backs to the sinister, unnoticed traveller who shared accommodations with them. The central figure was Martin Hawk, grim, saturnine, silent, his feet and hands secured with leather thongs. Trotting along under his heels, so to speak, were his three dogs,—their tongues hanging out, their tails drooping, their eyes turning neither to right nor left. They ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... over the Cicero De Amicitia, or some tale of Antique Friendship, which the young heart even then was burning to anticipate!—Co-Grecian with S. was Th——, who has since executed with ability various diplomatic functions at the Northern courts. Th—— was a tall, dark, saturnine youth, sparing of speech, with raven locks.—Thomas Fanshaw Middleton followed him (now Bishop of Calcutta) a scholar and a gentleman in his teens. He has the reputation of an excellent critic; and is author (besides the Country Spectator) of a Treatise on the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... Devil's Bowl, next day, they found the pair: Adam M'Adam and his Red Wull, face to face; dead, not divided; each, save for the other, alone. The dog, his saturnine expression glazed and ghastly in the fixedness of death, propped up against that humpbacked boulder beneath which, a while before, the Black Killer had dreed his weird; and, close by, his master lying on his back, his dim dead eyes staring up at the heaven, one hand still clasping a crumpled ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... leadership—for during the next two years Chatham was absolutely incapacitated from all attention to business, his policy was reversed by his colleagues, and America taxed by Charles Townshend—he maintained an 'attitude of saturnine reserve,' amusing himself with landscape gardening at his villa at Highgate, doing its honours to Warburton, Hurd, Garrick and other friends, and corresponding among others with Stanislas Augustus, King of Poland, to whom he had been introduced ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... the saturnine Guapo, laughed loudly at the counterfeit, and the vaquero himself was heard to chuckle through the long wool upon the breast. He did not lose time, however, but instantly prepared to set off. He needed no other preparation than to get hold of his bolas,—that was his favourite ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... of light grace and ghostliness. The rustic foxes of Izumo have no grace: they are uncouth; but they betray in countless queer ways the personal fancies of their makers. They are of many moods—whimsical, apathetic, inquisitive, saturnine, jocose, ironical; they watch and snooze and squint and wink and sneer; they wait with lurking smiles; they listen with cocked ears most stealthily, keeping their mouths open or closed. There is an amusing individuality about them all, and an air of knowing mockery about most of them, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... distances. In about five minutes, he would have a programme worked out; in the meantime, von Schlichten could only be patient and contain himself. He looked along the table, and caught sight of a thin-faced, saturnine-looking man in a green shirt, with a colonel's three concentric circles marked on the shoulders in silver-paint. Emmett ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power of shrewd intelligence; and Senor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires, middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more self-contained than most ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... tongue. Quezox and Francos moving backward, and making obeisances. Adieu, most noble Caesar, since the time When Washington first donned the regal crown. We'll smoke the woodchucks out and tan their hides And parchment make, on which, in words of gold, Shall be inscribed, so all the world may read: "Saturnine pleasure it to us doth give, To see them walk the plank from scuttled ship." Caesar: Ha Ha! but speak it not aloud, until 'tis done. Both: Whist! whist as mice! We'll oil the guillotine. Exeunt both while Caesar washes his ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... to enjoy this moving tale with its lovely and ardent heroine, its frank, fearless hero, its glowing love passages, and its variety of characters, captivating or engaging humorous or saturnine, villains, rascals, and men of good will. A tale strong and interesting in plot, faithful and vivid as a picture of wild mountain life, and in its characterization full of warmth ...
— Fair Margaret - A Portrait • Francis Marion Crawford
... put spurs to his horse. But as they cantered through the street, Clarence, who had already become accustomed to the stranger's hirsute adornment, felt a little more awe of him. The profile of the mouth and chin now exposed to his sidelong glance was hard and stern, and slightly saturnine. Although unable at the time to identify it with anybody he had ever known, it seemed to the imaginative boy to be vaguely connected with some sad experience. But the eyes were thoughtful and kindly, and the boy later believed that if he had been more familiar ...
— A Waif of the Plains • Bret Harte
... Methuen, Massachusetts. Here I remained for seven years, in the course of which both my parents died, victims of typhoid. I was cast upon the world utterly alone, save for the rather uncompromising and saturnine regard in which I was held by old Mr. Toddleham, my trustee. This antique gentleman inhabited a musty little office, the only furniture in which consisted of a worn red carpet, a large engraving of the Hon. Jeremiah ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train
... one of the birds came forward, on delicate legs. Its grey speckled back was very elegant, it rolled its full, dark-blue neck as it moved to her. She crouched down. 'Joey, dear,' she said, in an odd, saturnine caressive voice, 'you're bound to find me, aren't you?' She put her face forward, and the bird rolled his neck, almost touching her face with his beak, as if ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... demand a particular strength of resolution, and aptitude of humour. He can scarcely become the favourite companion of our retirement, and the never-failing solace of our cares. Something of slow and saturnine must be the necessary accompaniment of that disposition, that can conquer the difficulties of such a pursuit. And accordingly we find that the classics and the school are generally quitted together, even by persons of taste, who have not acquired a competent mastery of them in their course of ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... beauty, that gives color and tone to the second division of Dante's poem. The five or six cantos, at the opening, have all the milk of human nature that entered into the composition of that miscalled saturnine mind. With little more than two words, the poet makes us aware that we have come into happier latitudes. Every strange visitor breathes love and forgiveness. The shade we meet is only charged with tidings of joy to ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... old man, bitterly; "I heard. I don't wonder at a lad of spirit resenting my harsh, saturnine ways. What a life for a lad like you! Well, you've made up your mind, and I'll be just to you, my lad. You shall be started well. When would you like ...
— The Lost Middy - Being the Secret of the Smugglers' Gap • George Manville Fenn
... said, not even by the Skipper, and the others watched him fascinated as he glared at his victim, and even the iron composure of the saturnine mate seemed to be moved partially aside. The Mexican began to whimper and moan as his eyes shifted to avoid the terrible ones of the Captain. He was not suffering any special violence, but a strange tremor filled the ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... reflected in the mirror which decorated my skimpy wardrobe, and I could see at once that he was beaming with self-congratulation. He was one of the most faithful and constant fellows in the world, but as a general thing he was a little saturnine in temper. Any outward display of cheerfulness was rare with him, and such an outward sign of inward exultation as I read this morning was a ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... sober, say of a Friday afternoon, he was grave, merely creating the impression that some long-past tragedy had clouded his life. When he was by way of being what one may denominate half-interested, his face assumed the saturnine expression of an ancient misanthrope, but when at last he reached the full flower of his magnificent endeavors, the silent severity of his countenance became so forbidding and sinister as to freeze the smile from the lips of a happy child. By his face you might ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... ruthlessly. The climate had played Old Gooseberry with the fine primordial stock. Physically, the Suffolk Punch had degenerated into the steeplechaser; psychologically, the chasm between the stolid English peasant and the saturnine, sensitive Australian had been spanned with that facilis which marks the ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... unhappy man who owes allegiance to no one but Degas and the Japanese was seen at its best. His astonishing qualities of invention, draughtsmanship, and a diabolic ingenuity in sounding the sinister music of decayed souls have never been before assembled under one roof. Power there is and a saturnine hatred of his wretched sitters. Toulouse-Lautrec had not the impersonal vision of Zola nor the repressed and disenchanting irony of Degas. He loathed the crew of repulsive night birds that he pencilled and painted in old Montmartre before the foreign invasion destroyed ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... lank gentleman, surprisingly thin, of a slightly saturnine cast: he was not only unhappy, he looked it. He was alone and he was lonely; he was an American and a man of sentiment (though he didn't look that) and he wanted to go home; to sum up, he found himself in love and in London at one and ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the town, although she remembered quite a number of others in the Directory. Even Vereker Sarle was there. Far down the long room she saw him sitting with two other men: one of them, Dick Nichols, looking very much at home; the other a distinguished, saturnine man with an English air to him, in spite of being burnt as black as the ace of spades. She was aware that Sarle saw her, and had a trembling fear that he might join her. It was almost a relief when Bellew ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... in her saturnine, brooding way the warmth of April sunshine and the stirring greenery of awakening life now beginning to soften the brown austerity of the dead winter earth. Beside her kitchen wall the pink cones of rhubarb were showing, and the fat buds of the lilacs, which clustered ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to conciliate readers of so saturnine and gloomy a class, that they cannot enter with genial sympathy into any gaiety whatever, but, least of all, when the gaiety trespasses a little into the province of the extravagant. In such a case, not ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... younger part of his life he had been wild and licentious, but had early laid aside open profligacy, and embraced the strictest tenets of Calvinism. Unfortunately, habits of excess and intemperance were more easily rooted out of his dark, saturnine, and enterprising spirit, than the vices of revenge and ambition, which continued, notwithstanding his religious professions, to exercise no small sway over his mind. Daring in design, precipitate and violent in execution, and going ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the wind, and cold with the kiss of many icebergs. Under a grey sky, glooming to purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild where God broods ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... watch," said a saturnine-looking soldier, tall and stalwart, and wearing the shield of the adjutant-general's department on the collar of his ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... for the sake of your excellency's coat buttons," said politely the saturnine Gonzales. "We found those of the dead mariner concealed on her person. But your excellency may rest assured that everything that is fitting has been ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... thus unsupported, and far from wishing to try conclusions with Galliard, Tyler with an ill grace surrendered the paper; and, with a pleasant bow and a word of thanks, delivered with never so slight a saturnine smile, Crispin turned on his heel and left the tavern as abruptly as ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... to like the saturnine candour of the soldier. "Well," he said, smiling, "I mustn't tell you anything of the man's identity, or his own story, of course; but there's no particular reason why I shouldn't tell you of the mere outside facts which I found out ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the great money-temple. Very imposing to me has always appeared the army of clerks seated in saturnine silence at the desks, or gliding with grave celerity about the place, and variously employed in balancing enormous accounts, shovelling up heaps of sovereigns, receiving and distributing bank-paper of vast ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 420, New Series, Jan. 17, 1852 • Various
... was the center of a cluster of matrons and dowagers, around which tomorrow's bridesmaids fluttered like many-colored butterflies. She took possession of her daughter and dragged her into the feminine circle. He saw Rovard Grauffis, small and saturnine, Duke Angus' henchman, and Burt Sandrasan, Lady Lavina's brother. They spoke, and then an upper-servant, his tabard blazoned with the yellow flame and black hammer of Karvall mills, approached his master with some tale of domestic ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... somewhat younger than Mr Foster, but rather more pale and saturnine in his aspect, here took up the thread of the discourse, observing, that the proposition just advanced seemed to him perfectly contrary to the true state of the case: "for," said he, "these improvements, as you call them, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... person, is above the middle size, with marked features, and an air somewhat stately and Quixotic. He reminds one of some of Holbein's heads, grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humour, kept under by the manners of the age or by the pretensions of the person. He has a peculiar sweetness in his smile, and great depth and manliness and a rugged ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... gowns and scarfs, the linen-jacketed, broad-hatted merchants, with those of soberer and more conventional dress, laughing and chatting, the children playing despite the heat. Many of these people greeted Monsieur Vigo. There were the saturnine, long-cloaked Spaniards, too, and a greater number than I had believed of my own keen-faced countrymen lounging about, mildly amused by the scene. We crossed the square, and with the courtesy of their race the people made way for us in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... do you mix with us, Hernan Pereira?" asked the saturnine Meyer, thrusting his face forward till the Newgate fringe he wore by way of a beard literally seemed to curl with wrath. "When we were hungry you did not wish it, for you slunk away and left us, taking all the powder. But now that ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... self-restraint. The people as a whole found little fault with her. She reminded them of her father, the bluff King Hal; and even those who criticized her did so only partially. They thought much better of her than they had of her saturnine sister, ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... poise. Behind her sat the younger brother of the prisoner. At her side was the prisoner himself, grave in mien, courageous in bearing, collected in deportment. Back of them were Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey. Among the witnesses for the defense was Dr. Morris, saturnine, mocking, indifferent. ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens
... Chia Chen gave a saturnine laugh. "Are you trying again to excuse yourself with me?" he cried. "Do you flatter yourself that I have no idea of your doings in the family temples? When you get there, you, of course, play the grand personnage and no one has the courage to run counter to your wishes. Then you've also ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... and placed with a Mr Ross, one of the ministers of the city churches, and to whom he formed some attachment, as he speaks of him with kindness, and describes him as a devout, clever little man of mild manners, good-natured, and painstaking. His third instructor was a serious, saturnine, kind young man, named Paterson, the son of a shoemaker, but a good scholar and a rigid Presbyterian. It is somewhat curious in the record which Byron has made of his early years to observe the constant endeavour with which he, the descendant of such a limitless pedigree and ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... and of course he had not spared his garments, for they were so besmeared that it would have puzzled a conjurer to have defined the original color of the cloth. His wig was black, and contrasted with his saturnine complexion, and as long as he held his tongue he would have passed muster ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... Middlemas listened to the noble Captain's marvels with different feelings, as their temperaments were saturnine or sanguine. But none could deny that such things had been; and, as the narrator was known to be a bold dashing fellow, possessed of some abilities, and according to the general opinion, not likely to ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... eyes all this, and her pretty figure, so round and slender, and her shapely little feet, cased in the thick shoes that can't hide their comely proportions, as she stands on the top of the stile. But it is with a dark and saturnine aspect. ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... territory, nominally assigned for the maintenance of the troops under the adventurer's command, was valued in those days at six laths of rupees annually; so that the blood-stained miscreant, whose saturnine manners had given him a bad name, even among the rough Europeans of the Company's battalion, found his career of crime rewarded by an income corresponding to that of many such petty sovereigns as ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... at table. "Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh! They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish, of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired, turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what kind of fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturnine man, in a deep voice, and then went on ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... falcons,—projecting, not in frown, but as roof, to shade the eye from interfering skylight,—gives them their apparently threatening and ominous gaze; the iris itself often wide and pale, showing as a lurid saturnine ring under the shadow of the ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... all the anecdotes recorded of him, except by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the saturnine poet smile—"That is the man who goes to hell whenever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On which her companion observed—"Very likely; don't you see what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face? owing, I dare say, to the heat and ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... thought came into my mind, as I perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man. I have speculated since, whether there may have been infection in ...
— The Signal-Man #33 • Charles Dickens
... days Io Welland lolled and lazed and listened to Miss Van Arsdale's music, or read, or took little walks between showers. No further mention was made by her hostess of the circumstances of the visit. She was a reticent woman; almost saturnine, Io decided, though her perfect and effortless courtesy preserved her from being antipathetic to any one beneath her own roof. How much her silence as to the unusual situation was inspired by consideration for her guest, how ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... are compelled, at some abrupt turn, almost to ride over them. A few sombre garbed Israelites, and occasionally the Turks, attendant on official duties of the Pashalic in this part of the government, also mingle in the passing or seated crowd; when the solemn, saturnine air of the latter, with their flowing, gaudy apparel, forms a striking contrast to the daring, dirty, independent air of the almost ungarmented, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... master discoursed in a way full of grace and good sense. For you must know he was a man of wit and learning, albeit his humour was so saturnine and grasping, above all when his thoughts turned toward filthy lucre. ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... the honest men are to desert their country in order that the dishonest men may have everything their own way." Our Duke could not answer this, and therefore for the moment he yielded. But he was unhappy, saturnine, and generally silent except when closeted with his ancient mentor. And he knew that he was saturnine and silent, and that it behoved him as a leader of men to be genial and communicative,—listening to counsel even if he did not follow it, and ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... advances, often made a precipitate retreat out of the hut, not being aware at the time that by avoiding Sylla, they ran a great risk of failing into Charybdis. The widow Laddie, although huge, fat, and deaf, was by no means of a cold, phlegmatic or saturnine disposition—many a wistful look she cast towards Lander, but he either would not or could not comprehend their meaning, and to punish him for his stupidity, she took care that he should not comprehend any of the significant glances, which were cast towards him by the more juvenile portion of the ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... travels. But since then a child must have noted that something was wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally silent returns,—and ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... sentiment prevailed, but the traditions of a soldier's experience of the sex have informed his ballads with strange touches of irony, that help him to his (so to say) philosophy, which is recklessness. The Tyroler's 'Katchen' here, was a saturnine Giulia, who gave him no response, either of eye ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... members of one's own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is to forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so wildly cordial for fear of seeming to 'condescend,' nor be more than a trifle saturnine, either, for the same motive. Or am I wrong? The whole thing is a mystery to me. All I know is that if I had asked those mechanics what they were doing with that railway car they would have seemed to suspect me of meaning that it ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... the case of temporary failure, were consistent characteristics of his generalship. The Vaalkranz operations are particularly difficult to defend from the charge of having been needlessly slow and half-hearted. This 'saturnine fighter,' as he had been called, proved to be exceedingly sensitive about the lives of his men—an admirable quality in itself, but there are occasions when to spare them to-day is to needlessly imperil them tomorrow. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and disrespectful, that I cannot comprehend the Tories. The men who uphold the dignity of the Crown to treat their Sovereign in such a manner, on such an occasion! Even in private life the most sour and saturnine people relax and grow gay and mildly disposed on occasions like this. Clearly, as you are Queen Regnant, Albert's position is to all intents and purposes that of a male Queen Consort, and the same ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... at the tall figure standing in front of me and saw that he was watching the retreating figure of his henchman with a saturnine smile on his face. I thought swiftly. If I could yell a warning to Lucky, he could bolt the door of the pilot's chamber and then set the ship down at the Trans-Space base. It was the only way to save Lucky and the radium. ...
— Larson's Luck • Gerald Vance
... questions, excited speculators in groups were gesticulating and vociferating, and in the anteroom were impatient clients awaiting their turn. In the inner chamber, however, was perfect calm. There at his table sat the dark, impenetrable operator, whose time was exactly apportioned, serene, saturnine, or genial, as the case might be, listening attentively, speaking deliberately, despatching the affair in hand without haste or the waste ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... distinct substances; or that some parts of the Spirit together with some parts of the Lead may constitute a Chymical Oyle, which therefore though it pass for Homogeneous, may be a very compounded Body: or at least that by the action of the Distill'd Vinager and the Saturnine Calx one upon another, part of the Liquor may be so alter'd as to be transmuted from an Acid Spirit into an Oyle. And though the truth of either of the two former conjectures would make the example I have reflected on more pertinent to my present argument; yet you'l easily discern, the Third ...
— The Sceptical Chymist • Robert Boyle
... behind him, the fingers clenched. His eyes searched her face with an alert, intense gaze. His embarrassment was gone; his expression was saturnine, his eyes narrowed with a slight mockery. And his voice ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... solution of sugar of lead had been instilled. The precipitates of both in the morning, were exactly of the same kind; and the water in which the lead had been infused all night, being again tried by the same test, gave signs of a still stronger saturnine impregnation—Whether the nitrous air acts as an acid on the lead, or in the same manner that fixed air dissolves iron, I do not pretend to determine. Syrup of violets added to the nitrous water became ...
— Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air • Joseph Priestley
... Quarterly Reviews. Surely there can be nothing in mere size, abstractly considered—there can be nothing in mere bulk, so far as a volume is concerned which has so continuously elicited admiration from these saturnine pamphlets! A mountain, to be sure, by the mere sentiment of physical magnitude which it conveys, does impress us with a sense of the sublime—but no man is impressed after this fashion by the material grandeur of even "The Columbiad." Even the Quarterlies have not instructed ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... but much darker than is usual in Hawaii. He was no longer young, and his crisply curling, thick hair was grey. His upper front teeth were cased in gold. He was very proud of them. He had a marked squint and this gave him a saturnine expression. The captain, who was fond of a joke, found in it a constant source of humour and hesitated the less to rally him on the defect because he realised that the mate was sensitive about it. Bananas, unlike most of the natives, was a taciturn fellow and ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... in something or somebody. And the story she had heard of the Rev. Charles Jacomb's assiduous, earnest, uncomplaining labour in that big parish had at the very outset won for him her great regard. He did not understand how he was destroying her childlike faith in him by his saturnine ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... Keyork. "When a man knows what he wants, knows where it is to be found, and goes thither to take it, he is not wandering. Moreover, I have no thought of removing myself or my goods from Prague. I live here. It is a city for old men. It is saturnine. The foundations of its houses rest on the silurian formation, which is more than can be said for any other capital, as ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... young and of cheerful countenances; the rangers in the rear sat their horses and whistled to the woodpeckers in the sugar-trees; the negroes grinned broadly; even the Indians appeared a shade less saturnine than usual. The golden sunshine poured upon them all, and the blue mountains that no Englishman had ever passed seemed for the moment as soft and yielding as the cloud that slept along their summits. And no ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... easy to see why it was, that in the obscure year 1598, while the star of Essex was setting, that of his natural rival did not burn more brightly. But although now, and for the brief remainder of Elizabeth's life, Raleigh was nominally in favour, the saturnine old woman had no longer any tenderness for her Captain of the Guard. Her old love, her old friendship, had quite passed away. There was no longer any excuse for excluding from her presence so valuable a soldier and so wise a courtier, but her pulses had ceased to thrill at his ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... of religion, save the traditions of the Church and the materials for exhibiting the drama of the Mass! This is the contingent which civilization detaches for the settlement of another world. It effaces a smiling barbarism by a saturnine and gloomy one, as when a great forest slides from some height over a wild gay meadow. These capable, cruel men went sailing among the Bahamas, soothed by the novelty and delight of finding land, and tried ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... with relish that John Gray, the schoolmaster, had for some time past shown a marked admiration for the vicar's daughter. She, however, had made it clear that the cadaverous, saturnine pedagogue possessed for ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... village, a paltry, bleak little place. We passed friend Grimm on the bridge; a dark, clean-shaved, saturnine man, ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess, she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit, slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man, very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, "How do you do, sir? I hope I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... forbade Sara to have any more to say to Dufarge, but encouraged the lover of his eldest girl, a man of twice her age, the grim and saturnine Bartholde, by birth seigneur of an estate near Lozere, where, however, he lived only on sufferance, for the title had been abated after the persecutions following the Edict of Nantes, and though Bartholde was rich, he had ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... To the saturnine, New York of its spangled nights is like a Scylla of a thousand heads, each head a menace. Glancing from his cab window one such midnight, an inarticulate expression of that fear must have crept over and sickened Mr. Herman Loeb. He reached out and placed his enveloping ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... translation of J. I. Hollandus, which is dated 1670, addresses the reader as follows: "Kind reader, the philosophers have written much about their lead, which as Basilus has taught, is prepared from antimony; and I am under the impression that this saturnine work of the present philosopher, Mr. Johann Isaak Hollandus, is not to be understood of common lead ... but of ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... Blight laughed so loud at my reply I could not understand, but I supposed that in spite of his saturnine appearance he was a man of jovial temperament and I liked ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... fatal cautiousness; Who never takes a step from his own door But he looks backward ere he looks before. When once he starts, it were too much to say He visibly gets farther on his way: But all allow, he ponders well his course— For future uses hoarding present force. The flippant deem him slow and saturnine, The summed-up phlegm of that illustrious line; But we, his honest adversaries, who More highly prize him than his false friends do, Frankly admire that simple mass and weight— A solid Roman pillar of the State, So inharmonious with the baser style ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... ye enjoy it," shouted the saturnine Alfred Brangwen, and the men roared by now boldly, and the women said, ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... accosted by one Nonno, a sour, saturnine personage. "I know nobody here; not a soul have I seen before; I wonder who they all are." And just then he was familiarly nodded to by nine worthies abreast. Whereupon Nonno vanished. But after going the rounds of the company, and paying ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... most, in those early days, the man or the woman. It had been with him that I first made acquaintance; we were both engaged on journalistic work, reporting, you know, on different papers—and we came across each other once or twice in that way. He was a saturnine, queer-tempered fellow, taciturn at times, and at other times possessed by a wry sense of humour which made him excellent company, though it kept one in a state of alert disquiet. He would say things with that ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... talking to those two men. Of me there was nothing left but the eyes. I had no mind, no thoughts. I saw the three figures go through the attitudes of conversation—she very animated, de Mersch grotesquely empresse, Gurnard undisguisedly saturnine. He repelled me exactly as grossly vulgar men had the power of doing, but he, himself, was not that—there was something ... something. I could not quite make out his face, I never could. I never did, any more than ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... first in great favour at Court, notwithstanding his father's misconduct, but he suddenly compromised himself in a very imprudent way. Closely intimate with that virtuous maid-of-honour, Marie de Hautefort, whom the saturnine Louis XIII. loved as passionately as his peculiar temperament permitted, and also with Mademoiselle de Chemerault, as lovely as she was witty, he was by them hurried into a blind devotion to the cause of their unhappy mistress and queen, Anne ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to elicit the slightest information from the saturnine Mareno. Unmoved alike by promises or threats, he had coolly adhered to ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... rock or stump like balls of india-rubber. They were extremely careless mothers. Even Junkie, as he stood paralysed with terror and surprise, could not avoid seeing that. The troop was led by a great blue-faced old-man baboon with a remarkably saturnine expression. On reaching the top of the rock which the leopard had just vacated, the old man called a halt. The others came tumbling awkwardly towards him on all-fours, with the exception of several of the youngsters, who loitered behind to play. ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... like a beaten schoolboy. He is a great advocate for the Bourbons and for the National Debt. The former he affirms to be the choice of the French people, and the latter he insists is necessary to the salvation of these kingdoms. This last point a little inoffensive gentleman among us, of a saturnine aspect but simple conceptions, cannot comprehend. 'I will tell you, sir—I will make my propositions so clear that you will be convinced of the truth of my observation in a moment. Consider, sir, the number of trades ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... supports his own interests as much from intellectual zeal as from self-love. A shrewd observer is quoted: 'looking on Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Sidney Herbert sitting side by side, the former with his rather saturnine face and straight black hair, and the latter eminently handsome, with his bright, cold smile and subtlety of aspect, I have often thought that I was beholding the Jesuit of the closet really devout, and the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... slightly knowing him. Heavily and somewhat clumsily built, of a vast, disjointed, rambling frame, he can still pull himself together, and figure, not without admiration, in the saloon or the ball-room. His hue and temperament are plentifully bilious; he has a saturnine eye; his cheek is of a dark blue where he has been shaven. Essentially he is to be numbered among the man- haters, a convinced contemner of his fellows. Yet he is himself of a commonplace ambition and greedy of applause. In talk, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 1717, Fleetwood speaks of standing at such times as if it were a singularity rather than otherwise.[1124] Hickes, on the other hand, writes in 1701, as if those who refused to stand at the singing of psalms and anthems were for the most part 'stiff, morose, and saturnine votists.'[1125] In fact, High Churchmen insisted on the one posture, while Low Churchmen generally preferred the other; and so the custom remained very variable, until the High Church reaction of Queen Anne's time succeeded in establishing, in this particular, a rule which was henceforth ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... to school, Mary noted that they carried no flowers to their dear teacher, but that Ben, the oldest pupil, twenty-one years old, six feet four inches in height and deeply saturnine in manner, carried a six-shooter in his cartridge-belt. The teacher felt that she was the last to deny a pupil any reasonable palliative of the tedium of class-hours—the nearness of her own school-days ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... vindication only increased the ridicule of my appearance; and the strange quaintness of the costume totally obliterated every trace of any characteristic of the wearer, so infernally cunning was its contrivance. I don't think that the most saturnine martyr of gout and dyspepsia could survey me without laughing. With a bold effort, I flung open my door, hurried down the stairs, and reached the hall. The first person I met was a kind of pantry boy, a beast only lately emancipated from the plough, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... stood boldly forward, erect, self-possessed, and saturnine. He was freshly shaven, and his periwig, if out of curl, was at least carefully ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini
... of the market. Mr. Fern also settled with his mortgage creditor, and went home at night happy that his head would again lie under a roof actually as well as in name his own. Notes which he had given came back to him soon after, and he burned them with a glee that was almost saturnine. Burned them, after looking at their faces and backs, after scanning the endorsements; burned them with his office door locked, using the flame of ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... form of dishonesty has but lately succeeded to and ousted the classical English critique of Jeffrey, Macaulay, and the late Mr. Abraham Hayward, which was mostly a handy peg for the contents of the critic's noddle or note book. The Saturnine article opens characteristically. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... great zancas that traverse the streets. Such experience might account for the serious, somewhat stern expression that habitually rested upon his countenance, and gave him the character of a "dark saturnine man." I have said incidentally that I never saw him smile— never. He spoke seldom, and, as a general thing, only upon matters of duty; but at times, when he fancied himself alone, I have heard him mutter threats, while a convulsive twitching of the muscles and ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... them grew saturnine at that announcement. For Chairman Presson was not recognized as the especial friend of prohibition by the ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... for the Congress. Elected to the House, he was immediately greeted by connoisseurs of the best stamp— President Martin van Buren, "prince of good fellows;" Webster, another intellect, saturnine in repose and mercurial in activity; the convivial Senator Douglas, and the like. These formed the rapt ring around Lincoln in his own chair in the snug corner of the congressional chat-room. Here he perceived that his rusticity and shallow skimmings placed him under the trained politicians. It ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... away, the colour flaming into his disgusted, saturnine face. He did not speak to her again until he said good-bye ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... upon the mysterious dispensations of Providence in regard to Genoa and the retreat of the Austrians are charged to the full with his saturnine spirit. His suspicions were probably well founded. Ever since 1685 Genoa had been the more or less humiliated satellite of France, and her once famous Bank had been bled pretty extensively by both belligerents. The Senate was helpless ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... Settlement the unfortunate man found the store, or shop, of another friend. This man was saturnine of countenance, but moderately liberal of heart. La Certe approached him with an air so pitiful that the saturnine man melted like snow in the sunshine or ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... the Chief, dark and saturnine to look at, with his straight black hair gleaming in the light. He was a Mohawk, and he and his tribe had taken to steel construction work a long time back. They were good. There were not many big construction ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... no tangible token, except a tiny pearl-colored glove, which Guy twisted rather pensively between his fingers as he stood on the hall steps, and watched the carriage disappear down the avenue. Mr. Bruce exulted after his saturnine fashion, and Isabel Raymond trembled; the one had lost a strong, unscrupulous ally, the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... for a long time after this. A doctor was called in, he was pallid and elderly. How well I remember his long saturnine face, slightly pitted with smallpox, and his chestnut wig. For a good while, every second day, he came and gave me medicine, which ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... a sombre assembly. The chiefs were for the most part tall, well-built men, warriors and hunters from their youth up. There was something fierce and haughty in their bearing, something menacing, violent, and lawless in their saturnine faces and black, glittering eyes. Most of them wore their hair long; some plaited, others flowing loosely over their shoulders. Their ears were loaded with hiagua shells; their dress was composed of buckskin leggings and moccasins, and a short robe of dressed skin that came from the shoulders ...
— The Bridge of the Gods - A Romance of Indian Oregon. 19th Edition. • Frederic Homer Balch
... wife. Not only that, Hugo Mandle, at forty, had no thought of marrying. Not that there was anything austere or saturnine about Hugo. He made you think, somehow, of a cherubic, jovial monk. It may have been his rosy rotundity, or, perhaps, the way in which his thinning hair vanished altogether at the top of his head, so ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... the enemy I have most to guard against is myself. To pretend a belief in opinions I despise, to sit with saturnine gravity and nod approbation when my sides are convulsed with laughter, to ape admiration at what reason contemns and spurns, and to smooth my features into suavity while my heart is bursting with gall ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... be sensible, that he was not born to write comedy; for, says he, 'I want that gaiety of humour which is required in it; my conversation is slow and dull, my humour saturnine and reserved. In short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company, and make repartees; so that those who decry my comedies, do me no injury, except it be in point of profit: Reputation in them is the last thing ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... candle in hand; murmuring, I suppose, a prayer—it sounded like a farewell—as much frightened as if I had just seen a sorcerer stealing stepped cautiously upon the gallery floor, shutting and locking the door upon the dead; and then having listened for a second, the saturnine figure, casting a gigantic and distorted shadow upon the ceiling and side-wall from the lowered candle, strode lightly down the long dark passage, ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... duly disliked by Hazlitt, we may feel assured. The Bourbons he affirmed to be the choice of the French people, the Debt necessary to the salvation of these kingdoms. To a little inoffensive man, 'of a saturnine aspect but simple conceptions,' Hazlitt once heard him say grandly, 'I will tell you, sir. I will make my proposition so clear that you will be convinced of the truth of my observation in a moment. Consider, sir, the number of trades ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... for display, a sullen temper,—one or the other—too often proves 'the dead fly in the compost of spices', and any one is enough to unfit it for the precious balm of unction. For some mighty good sort of people, too, there is not seldom a sort of solemn saturnine, or, if you will, ursine vanity, that keeps itself alive by sucking the paws of its own self-importance. And as this high sense, or rather sensation of their own value is, for the most part, grounded on negative qualities, so they have no better means of preserving the same but ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... dying light the man's saturnine features seemed to relax for a moment into something like a smile. But he ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... brooding like a man stepping into the sun. He laughed, pulling his hat down on the bridge of his nose in the peculiar way he had of wearing it. A little while he sat; then stretched himself back at ease on his elbow, drooling smoke through his nose in saturnine enjoyment. ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... the gypsy streak in my makeup. Each Navajo buck that came to my door peddling his rugs and silver ornaments was led into the house and questioned. Precious little information I was able to abstract at first from my saturnine visitors. As we became better acquainted, and they learned to expect liberal draughts of coffee sweetened into a syrup, sometimes their tongues loosened; but still I couldn't get all the information I craved regarding those marvelous rugs and ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... life is not easy to disprove even now, to any one who is determined to maintain the possibility of it; but under the training of modern science scarcely any one retains such a belief. Of the influence formerly attributed to the planets, traces survive in such epithets as mercurial, jovial, saturnine. Comets appearing in the sky caused widespread alarm, and any disasters that followed close were confidently connected with them. The most learned scientists observed the stars and cast horoscopes: Cardan, for instance, ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... always heralded by a smile, as a yacht driven by a favoring breeze carries a wreath of sparkling foam before her, are born with their happiness ready made. They cannot help being cheerful any more than their saturnine fellow-mortal can help seeing everything through the cloud he carries with him. I give you the precept, then, Be cheerful, for just what it is worth, as I would recommend to you to be six feet, or at least five feet ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... and intelligence, Napoleon Bonaparte the First must be classed as one of the Betelegeuses of the race. H.G. Wells has called his career the "raid of an intolerable egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time." "The figure of an adventurer and wrecker." "This saturnine egotist." "Are men dazzled simply by the scale of his flounderings, by the mere vastness of his notoriety?" "This dark little archaic personage, hard, compact, capable, unscrupulous, imitative and neatly vulgar." There are other opinions. The Man of Destiny was worshipped by millions. Napoleona ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... not made for each other. He was thriftless, idle, dissolute—the small roue of the neighbourhood: she was careful, industrious, virtuous. He was good-looking—of a dark, saturnine beauty, insidiously impressive, like the dangerous charms of a tempter; she was radiant and lustrous with the sweet graces of modesty, innocence, and intelligence. Julia, however, young and susceptible, was for a time pleased with his attentions. Persuasive powers ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 427 - Volume 17, New Series, March 6, 1852 • Various
... of his sympathies, and offering to render whatever assistance might be in his power. To which the Spaniard returned for the present but grave and ceremonious acknowledgments, his national formality dusked by the saturnine mood of ill-health. ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... meaning of the words "jovial," "saturnine," "mercurial," "disastrous," "contemplate," ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... distinctly another person from that tense, saturnine, defiant, brusk person who strode through the reception-hall. He was radiantly and boyishly happy. He was clasping the girl tenderly. He directed her steps in a small circle outside the throng of dancers, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day
... fallen. sad, pensive, penseroso[It], tristful[obs3]; dolesome[obs3], doleful; woebegone; lacrymose, lachrymose, in tears, melancholic, hypped[obs3], hypochondriacal, bilious, jaundiced, atrabilious[obs3], saturnine, splenetic; lackadaisical. serious, sedate, staid, stayed; grave as a judge, grave as an undertaker, grave as a mustard pot; sober, sober as a judge, solemn, demure; grim; grim-faced, grim-visaged; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... story of Loftus's Lenten Hymn, and poor Father Roach's penance, rubbed his hands, and slapped his thigh, and crowed and shouted with ecstasy. O'Flaherty, who called for punch, and was unfortunately prone to grow melancholy and pugnacious over his liquor, was now in a saturnine vein of sentiment, discoursing of the charms of his peerless mistress, the Lady Magnolia Macnamara—for he was not one of those maudlin shepherds, who pipe their loves in lonely glens and other sequestered places, but rather loved to exhibit his bare scars, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... gloom was the most splendid period of the court. With the double purpose of recovering his popularity, and concealing his negotiations, Paul plunged into the most extraordinary festivity. Balls, masquerades, and fetes succeeded each other with restless extravagance. But the contrast of the saturnine Emperor with the sudden change of his court was too powerful. It bore the look of desperation; though for what purpose, was still a mystery to the million. I heard many a whisper among the diplomatic circle, that this whirl of life, this hot and fierce dissipation, was, in all Russian ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... torment. It was like the sudden opening of a gigantic blast-furnace, and in that instant I saw him vividly—his thin, saturnine face, his damp black hair pushed sleekly back, his lips twisted to a cruel smile, his eyes craftily alert, as if to some ambushed danger continually at hand. He was watching me with a sort of malicious relish in the shock he ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the grave-clothes garb and swaddling barret (Why purse up mouth and beak in a pet so, You bald old saturnine poll-clawed parrot?) Not a poor glimmering Crucifixion, Where in the foreground kneels the donor? If such remain, as is my conviction, The hoarding it does you but ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... those men who are remarkable for thick, massive, and saturnine features. At a first glance he was not at all ill-looking; but, on examining his beetle brows, which met in a mass of black thick hair across his face, and on watching the dull, selfish, cruel eyes that they hung over—dead as they were to every ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... was a gaunt, long-legged person with a saturnine countenance. He wore a seersucker coat with a nickel badge pinned on ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... wagon on board, and he pawed the deck uneasily. His owner stood near, with a wary eye upon him, although he was chewing, with as dully reflective an expression as a cow. Beside Rebecca sat a woman of about her own age, who kept looking at her with furtive curiosity; her husband, short and stout and saturnine, stood near her. Rebecca paid no attention to either of them. She was tall and spare and pale, the type of a spinster, yet with rudimentary lines and expressions of matronhood. She all unconsciously held her shawl, rolled up ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... further delay, opened his budget of anecdotes, with the easy fluency of of a man who possessed a well-placed confidence in the perfection of his capacities for narration. Determined that his saturnine colleague should hear him, though he would not give him his attention, he talked in a raised voice, pacing briskly backwards and forwards over the space of his allotted limits, and laughing with ludicrous regularity and ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... evening as the night before had been gloomy. Even the saturnine spirits of Pedro seemed greatly affected by the general hilarity; for his sallow face was all smiles and his little black eyes snapped and twinkled, as he passed hither and thither among the men, and he was very careful ...
— The Cave of Gold - A Tale of California in '49 • Everett McNeil
... from good hands, that there is actually a subscription made by many persons of wit and quality, for the encouragement of new comedies. This design will very much contribute to the improvement and diversion of the town: but as every man is most concerned for himself, I, who am of a saturnine and melancholy complexion, cannot but murmur, that there is not an equal invitation to write tragedies, having by me, in my book of commonplaces, enough to enable me to finish a very sad one by the 5th of next month. I ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... of the light; and that the character, the beauty even, which they attained, is essentially due to a skilful manipulation of texture, and surface, and light—one might almost say of colour. We all know Pisanello's famous heads of the Malatesti of Rimini: the saturnine Sigismund, the delicate dapper Novello, the powerful yet beautiful Isotta; but there are other Renaissance medals which illustrate my meaning even better, and connect my feelings on the subject of this branch of art more clearly with my feelings towards such work as Benedetto's Pietro Mellini. ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... appeared conspicuously a small black volume fastened with clasps of steel. This book, whether accidentally or not, was so turned outwardly from the person as to discover the words "Rituel Catholique" in white letters upon the back. His entire physiognomy was interestingly saturnine—even cadaverously pale. The forehead was lofty, and deeply furrowed with the ridges of contemplation. The corners of the mouth were drawn down into an expression of the most submissive humility. There ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... pushed back the open front door and entered the mansion, I could not but wonder at the saturnine fancy that had led this wayward man to select a brooding-place so desolate for the passage of his days. I regarded it as a vast tomb of Mausolus in which lay deep sepulchred how much genius, culture, brilliancy, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... (With saturnine spleen) Bah! It is because it is. Woman's reason. Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death is the highest ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... retained their powers. His reason, instead of giving way, like those of the men around him, rather brightened under the excitement, as if it foresaw the danger it incurred, and the greater necessity there existed for vigilance. Though born in a southern clime, he was saturnine and cold when unexcited, and such temperaments rather gain their tone than lose their powers by stimulants under which men of feebler organizations sink. He had passed his life amid wild adventure and in scenes of peril which suited such a disposition, ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... with a very small and saturnine clergyman decorated with a shock of ebon hair, who was passing ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... Wizard of the Empire." It was all in sport—a great jest, or at the worst designed only to induce the colored man to work somewhat more industriously from apprehension of ghostly displeasure. It was a funny thing—the gravest, most saturnine, and self-conscious people on the globe making themselves ridiculous, ghostly masqueraders by the hundred thousand! The world which had lately wept with sympathy for the misfortunes of the "Lost Cause," was suddenly convulsed with merriment ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... pleasant reading for Grodman, who chuckled as continuously over his morning egg, as if he had laid it. Jane was alarmed for the sanity of her saturnine master. As her husband would have said, Grodman's grins were not Beautiful. But he made no effort to suppress them. Not only had Wimp perpetrated a grotesque blunder, but the journalists to a man were down on his great sensation tableau, though their denunciations did not appear ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... carried his box to the fire and sat scowling into the flames. He was of a saturnine nature, in whom anger burned slow and deep. He was a man of few words. Half a head shorter than big Jack, he showed a greater breadth of shoulders. His arms hung down ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... on the verandah, the window was pushed open and a man of forty years or so, well-dressed, tall, thin, dark and saturnine ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... off from their fellow beings in some peculiar and extraordinary way. They are isolated and alone, and they appear to realise their lonely position keenly. They are gloomy, morbid, and Saturnine in character. They seldom marry, and when they do it is always a ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... Con Crawley, who was sketched from Lady Morgan's old enemy, John Wilson Croker. According to Moore, Croker winced more under this caricature than under any of the direct attacks which were made upon him. Con Crawley, we are told, was of a bilious, saturnine constitution, even his talent being but the result of disease. These physical disadvantages, combined with an education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... malignity as Mr. Whibley imagines. Thackeray's denigration, I admit, takes the breath away. One can hardly believe that Thackeray had read either Swift's writings or his life. Of course he had done so, but his passion for the sentimental graces made him incapable of doing justice to a genius of saturnine realism such as Swift's. The truth is, though Swift was among the staunchest of friends, he is not among the most sociable of authors. His writings are seldom in the vein either of tenderness or of merriment. We know of the tenderness of Swift only from a rare anecdote ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... once all the signs of extreme nervous tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of the ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... there is a fourteen-foot rod ready for action. He fishes with a line unbelievably short, and a Kendal hook far too big; and when a trout jumps for that hook, R. wastes no time in manoeuvring for position. The unlucky fish is simply "derricked,"—to borrow a word from Theodore, most saturnine and profane ...
— Fishing with a Worm • Bliss Perry
... part, could not face the artist's somewhat rigid self-possession without feeling rebuked and abashed. The fact of Mallard's being here at this hour seemed all but a disproval of what Miriam had hinted, and when he looked up again at the rugged, saturnine, energetic countenance, and met the calmly austere eyes, he felt how improbable it was that this man should be anything to Cecily save ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... Cyclops, in the centre of his forehead. These two figures, again, are supported by gigantic guardians, one on either side, who have nothing absolutely monstrous about them, being distinguished by their saturnine expression. That to the right hand bears a striking likeness to Daniel Webster's stern and well-known features. The deep-set eye and compressed lip were those of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Mochales could kill Cesare without the slightest shadow of a question. There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and therefore he would be—in his own, less subtle manner—as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place—he had been insulted before her. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... barrier without them being aware of how he had done it—the barrier of authority and respect, behind which he stood, an engaging, saturnine, interesting, awe-compelling figure. ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... betokened physical or mental disorder. A mediaeval doctor would have called him saturnine. His face, which carried the entire tale of his years, was of the brown tint of Dublin streets. On his long and rather large head grew dry black hair and a tawny moustache did not quite cover an unamiable mouth. ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... him as ready to advise and instruct; but there is reason to believe that his communication was rather useful than entertaining. He declares of himself that he was saturnine, and not one of those whose sprightly sayings diverted company; and one of his censurers makes ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson |
