"Sportive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grinding their teeth at us, especially when we were slaughtering the fish on the bank. We kept watch during the entire night, as on that occasion they were truly vicious. Our dogs, for a change, became quite sportive. One of them, named Negrino, got furious with the ariranhas, and, driven mad by their unmusical noises, actually jumped into the stream to go to their attack. In a moment he had quantities of ariranhas upon him, and was bitten savagely, ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... purely fanciful outline of imaginary land. Terra Australis was the playground of the cartographers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They seemed to abhor blank spaces. Some of the most beautiful of the old maps make the oceans busy with spouting whales, sportive dolphins, and galleons with bellying sails; but what to do with the great staring expanse of vacancy at the bottom their authors did not know. So they drew a crooked line across the map to represent land, and stuck upon it the label Terra Australis, or one ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... fell; and at the same instant the cause of my alarm wheeled past me at full gallop. It was one of the young fillies which pastured loose about the park, whose frolics had thus all but maddened me with terror. I scrambled to my feet, and rushed on with weak but rapid steps, my sportive companion still galloping round and round me with many a frisk and fling, until, at length, more dead than alive, I reached the avenue-gate, and crossed the stile, I scarce knew how. I ran through the village, in which ...
— Two Ghostly Mysteries - A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family; and The Murdered Cousin • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... happy Bard!—to wake thy silent lyre Our British Muse, our charming Seward, deigns!— With more harmonious tones, more sportive fire Beneath her hand arise the ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... Augustus William entered; his countenance was gay and careless, he had come to see the queen-mother, and had been directed to this saloon. Already sportive and jesting words were on his lips, when he perceived this strange scene; Laura on her knees, pale and trembling, before the proud queen, who left her disdainfully in her humble position. It was a sight that the proud lover could not endure. The hot blood of the Hohenzollerns was raging. ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... mane of black hair. There were also a little, grave wife and a fat, grave baby; and these, when they were visible, received separate and distinctive nods, and always returned them. The hide-sellers and tanners were, for the most part, crude and sportive persons with whom he could have nothing in common; they lived, apparently, on drink and uproar; and he had come to regard the silversmith and his family as vague friends. He pressed his face closer to the glass of the double ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... individual and the harmony of society. Sin makes a man at variance with himself, with his neighbour, and with the whole constitution of things. He is restless as the ocean, impelled by every contrary wind, and tossed about by every sportive billow. The desire of happiness exists; but he is ignorant of the true means of it, and is perpetually pursuing it by a method which only plunges him into greater misery. To this cause must be attributed all ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... water as if to kiss their reflected images; and, rising suddenly in long rapid flights, mount in circles up high above the tranquil world into the azure sky, till small white specks alone are visible in the distance. Up, up they rise on sportive wing, till the straining eye can no longer distinguish them, and they are gone! Ducks, too, whir past in rapid flight, steering wide of the boats, and again bending in long graceful curves into their course. The sweet, plaintive cry of the whip-poor-will rings along the shore; ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... give me leave, with the sportive sea-porpoises, preludiately a little to play before the storm of my tears, to make my prayer before I proceed to my sacrifice. Lo, for an oblation to the rich burnished shrine of your virtue, a handful of Jerusalem's mummianized earth, ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... art—and I do not question that if he had properly conceived it he had it in him to master it—he might have found the stage a gold mine, but he would have found, too, that it is a gold mine which cannot be worked in a smiling, sportive, half-contemptuous spirit, but only in the sweat of the brain, and with every mental nerve and sinew strained to its uttermost. He would have known that no ingots are to be got out of this mine, save after sleepless nights, days of gloom and discouragement, and ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... sportive glee, Her spirit's airy lightness, Surround the pleasant prairie home With hues of ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... sculptor of the finest imagination, the most delicate taste, the sweetest feeling, and the rarest artistic skill—in a word, a sculptor and a poet too—could have first dreamed of a Faun in this guise, and then have succeeded in imprisoning the sportive and frisky thing in marble. Neither man nor animal, and yet no monster, but a being in whom both races meet on friendly ground. The idea grows coarse as we handle it, and hardens in our grasp. But, if the spectator broods long over the statue, he will be conscious of its spell; all the pleasantness ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... moustachios. "Florian and I have come to see the latter-day hero," said Edith laughing as she entered the room; "though I know that you are so done up with pistols that no peaceable young woman ought to come near you." To this he made some sportive reply, and then before a minute had passed over their heads he had taken ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... of anger. A man may be cross at one when he is feeling only petulant; or he may be cross when he is seeking to chop off your head and make a stew out of you. A recruit, after having toiled three years on a plantation, was returned to his own village on Malaita. He was clad in all kinds of gay and sportive garments. On his head was a top- hat. He possessed a trade-box full of calico, beads, porpoise- teeth, and tobacco. Hardly was the anchor down, when the villagers were on board. The recruit looked anxiously for his own relatives, ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... why he had withdrawn. Her ladyship's tears were gliding down her cheeks. Miss Egerton, greatly amazed at the oddness of this closet scene, turned to Miss Beaufort, who a moment before having caught a glimpse of the distressed countenance of the count, could only bow her head to Sophia's sportive observation. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... expressed their feeling, as at passing events. The chorus thus naturally assumed the character of satellites of Bacchus, whence they easily fell into the parts of satyrs, who were his companions in sportive adventures, as well as in combats and misfortunes. The name of tragedy, or goat's song, was derived from the resemblance of the singers, in their character of satyrs, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... great Nature's genuine form, Or Fashion's light factitious traits to trace, The scene confess'd;—with glowing pathos warm, Or gaily sportive in familiar grace. ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... and with garden-plats; And in the vineyards and the garden-plats Were happy-hearted youths and merry girls Toiling and singing. Grandsires too were there, Sitting contented under their own vines And fig-trees, while about them merrily played Their children's children like the sportive lambs That frolicked on the foot-hills. Low of kine, Full-uddered, homeward-wending from the meads, Fell on the ear as soft as Hulder's loor Tuned on the Norse-land mountains. Like a nest Hid in a hawthorn-hedge a cottage stood ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... Willy joined. Others climbed up the shrouds, preferably on the inside,—this method of exercise, although very difficult, being considered safer in case of a sudden lurch of the vessel. And the many other sportive things they did, and the many pleasant anecdotes they told, nearly all relating to the discomfiture of clergymen under various embarrassing circumstances, caused Captain Burke to say to Mrs. Cliff that he had never imagined that parsons were such jolly fellows, and ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... under their cloaks, were sent in for rations. The hour was too early, and the French soldiers loitered about under pretence of waiting for the quartermaster. Some sauntered into the Spanish guard-house. Others, by a sportive scuffle on the drawbridge, prevented its being raised, and occupied the attention of the garrison. Suddenly a signal was given. The men drew their weapons and seized the arms of the Spaniards. The grenadiers rushed from their concealment. The bridge and gate were secured, ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... The air, the earth, the water teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on whichever side I turn my eyes myriads of happy beings crowd upon my {18} view. 'The insect youth are on the wing.' Swarms of new-born flies are trying their pinions in the air. Their sportive motions, their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their continual change of place without use or purpose, testify their joy, and the exultation which they feel in their lately discovered faculties.... The whole winged insect tribe, it is probable, are equally intent upon their proper ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... (marsupialis vulgaris) may be studied, and their curious habits learned by anybody willing to incur the expense in the inclosures set apart for their exhibition at the various racecourses, where their sportive gambles are the subject of great interest (and principal) on the part ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a pity that he cares for no other girls. There's Margaret Laidlaw, pretty, attractive, feminine, and Sarah Carew, handsome, sportive, masculine. One would think he'd find a choice between them and they both like him. But no, he has eyes in his head for Marcia only. A moment ago when he was talking to them, his gaze was on the flower-garden. Has he never cared for any other women? Who was the girl who got inside the wall ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... a donkey. And so, sure enough, you had only to look at him to see he had never worked. There was something too roguish and wanton in his face, a look too like that of a schoolboy or a street Arab, to have survived much cudgelling. It was plain that these feet had kicked off sportive children oftener than they had plodded with a freight through miry lanes. He was altogether a fine-weather, holiday sort of donkey; and though he was just then somewhat solemnised and rueful, he still ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... guard as before, however, and again went through his complete list of maneuvers, first rearing high out of the water, turning one side of his head and then the other toward me, then ducking into the depths with a final flourish of his tail, to reappear presently on the other side of me, as sportive as before. ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... with baleful meaning to the ears of sportive innocence, found a melancholy echo among the deeper woes of my own heart, and, if it chanced to be one of Aunt Lobelia's singing days, the "Dar' to be a Dan-yell! Dar' to be a Dan-yell!" which floated across the lane, had but a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... prepaid with the porterage by Viviette, Austin felt that he had done his duty by his brother, and deserved some consideration on his own account. And here it was that the summer began its game with their hearts. On such sportive occasions it is not so much what is said that matters. A conversation that might be entirely conventional between comparative strangers in a fog may become the most romantic interchange of sentiment imaginable between intimates in the sunshine. There are tones, there are glances, there are half-veiled ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... forms of magic, or spiritualism, the presence and aid of 'spirits' is believed to be necessary, with, perhaps, the exception of the sportive or conjuring class. A spirit helps to cure and helps to kill. The free spirit of the clairvoyant in bondage meets other spirits in its wanderings. Anthropologists, taking it for granted that 'spirits' are a mere 'animistic hypothesis'—their appearances ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... in England, on the Continent, and in America. He taught that although gymnastics, military drill, and formal exercises of the limbs are better than nothing, they can never serve in place of the plays prompted by nature. He maintained that "for girls as well as boys the sportive activities to which the instincts impel are essential to bodily welfare." This principle is now being carried into practice not only for school-children, but for operatives in factories, clerks, and other young persons whose occupations ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... family history from which it was possible to extricate only the most ridiculous of facts, chief among them the reiterated assurance that her own father had been, in the bosom of his family, of a delightfully sportive nature, but nothing like the Westfalls—dear no!—that he had a genteel figure, my dear, for all he had developed a somewhat corpulent tendency in later years; that the corn-beef which mother procured was highly ...
— Diane of the Green Van • Leona Dalrymple
... to see the temple, and to walk in the gardens. A monk advanced in years, but still full of vigour and vivacity, accompanied me. I saw several others, of different ages, who were walking there. But what surprised me was to see a great many of them amusing themselves by various agreeable and sportive games with young girls elegantly dressed, listening to their songs, and joining in their dances. The monk, who accompanied me, listened with great civility and kindness to the questions I put to him concerning his ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 1 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... soft waves, our swift boat glided on. It was not propelled by the breeze; it was ruled by our own sportive hearts. Whithersoever we wished, thither did it move, obediently, as though ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... long-faced lot. They didn't know how to play at all. They had been brought up in stern repression of frivolities as haunters—no matter how sportive they may have been in life—and in turn they cowed mortals into a servile submission. No doubt they thought of men and women as mere youngsters that must be taught their place, since any living ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... obscurity, held there by the price paid him for following his own whim. Others would hardly be in the secret. The theory was charming in itself, and only a woman like Edith, whose fancy had always been sportive, would have dreamed it. The detective recalled Arthur's interest in his pursuit of Endicott; then the little scenes on board the Arrow; and grew dizzy to think of the man pursued comparing his own photograph with ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... years (the most unpardonable to the Venetian councillors was his free-thinking, not his dissoluteness, or quarrelsomeness, or rather sportive knavery) were by degrees passing into oblivion, and so Casanova had a certain amount of confidence that he would receive a hearing. The history of his marvellous escape from The Leads of Venice, which he had recounted on innumerable occasions at the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... two went together in glowing August weather, The honey-breathing heather lay to their left and right; And dear she was to doat on, her swift feet seemed to float on The air like soft twin pigeons too sportive ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... in supreme love him who does kindness to the soul." But then the feature in the world which most impresses the Hindu is the constant change and destruction, and this must find a place in the All-god. Hence the sportive kindly Krishna comes to be declared the destroyer of the worlds.[397] It is as if in some vast Dravidian temple one wandered through two corridors differently ornamented and assigned to the priests of different rites but both leading to the same image. Hence it is not surprising to find that there ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... In this sportive way she ran on, saying all kinds of lively nothings; while we drank our coffee out of Saxon porcelain which would have shone on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... shining scales. But no matter how called off, their interest and curiosity remained with the diver. They would return, pushing their noses about him, caressingly in appearance if not intent, and bob into the treasures of worm and shellfish his labor exposed. He became convinced that they were sportive, indulging in dash and play for the fun of it, rather than for any grosser object ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... of her father's; it was the omen of some kindly, often sportive suggestion, such as he loved ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... path sought unaided; When the firm strand it was nearing, sudden, as ruled by a spirit, Reefed were the sails unassisted. Untouched by finger of mortal, The anchor sped through the clear water and fastened its barbs in the bottom. Viking gazed, speechless with wonder; the sportive winds sang in low cadence: "AEger the rescued forgetteth no kindness, he gives thee the dragon." Kingly the gift to behold. The heavy curved planks of oak timber Matched not together like others, but grew in one broad piece united. It stretched ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... fiddle, without a dance, without cards? He would have called it an insipid assembly, and ranked this among the dullest days he bad ever spent. This rural excursion had a very great affinity to those practised in our province, with this difference only, that we have no objection to the sportive dance, though conducted by the rough accents of some self-taught African fiddler. We returned as happy as we went; and the brightness of the moon kindly lengthened a day which had past, like other agreeable ones, ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... Ulysses answered him and said, "Then I will tell you what seems best to me. First wash and put on tunics, and bid the maids about the house array themselves. Then let the sacred bard with tuneful lyre lead us in sportive dancing, that men may say, hearing us from without, 'It is a wedding,' whether such men be passers-by or neighboring folk; and so broad rumor may not reach the town about the suitors' murder till we are gone to our well-wooded farm. There will ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... take more notice of the sea maidens following after her. More than a dozen were in the group; all were lovely in appearance and clothed in the same gauzy robes as Merla and the Princess. These attendants did not join in the conversation but darted here and there in sportive play, and often Trot heard the tinkling chorus of their laughter. Whatever doubts might have arisen in the child's mind through the ignorant tales of her sailor friend, she now found the mermaids to be light-hearted, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... that of a reposing infant. I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak. I have often noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,—by no means intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky. ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... were expressive of an early state of society before the invention of arts and agriculture. The rustic deities who presided over the toils and pleasures of the pastoral life, Pan, Faunus, and their train of satyrs, were such as the fancy of shepherds might create, sportive, petulant, and lascivious; whose power was limited, and whose malice was inoffensive. A goat was the offering the best adapted to their character and attributes; the flesh of the victim was roasted ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... breathlessly up the long slope, and then suddenly turn and rush pell-mell down again. If the wind had only stopped for a moment its endless gossip with the leaves, I am sure I should have heard the gleeful shouts, the sportive cries, of these vagrant flowers whose spell is rewoven over every generation of children, and whose unstudied beauty and joy recall, with every summer, some of the clews which most of us have lost in our journey through life. Even as I write, I see the white and yellow ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... to go and play there. And of course he's going. And he had better play there," said my sister, shaking her head at me as an encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and playtime of the year, That calls th' unwonted villager abroad, With all her little ones, a sportive train, To gather king-cups in the yellow mead, And prink their heads with ...
— The Parent's Assistant • Maria Edgeworth
... probable does the latter hypothesis become when we take into consideration the frequent tricks played by sportive denizens of the other world, against which the untrained person is usually absolutely defenceless. It must also be remembered that the regular inhabitant of the astral plane, whether he be human or elemental, is under ordinary circumstances ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... wind; so that their waters are usually as still as those of a lake. For days and weeks together, they reflect each separate tree-top of the pine-forests which clothe the mountain sides, the mirror being broken only by the leap of some sportive fish, or the oars of the boatman as he goes to inspect the sea-fowl from islet to islet of the fiord, or carries out his nets or his rod to catch the sea-trout or char, or cod, or herrings, which abound, in their seasons, on the ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... Martin finally and completely realized that the even course of his life had been rudely and permanently changed, that he had been plucked out of his humdrum niche and cast willy-nilly into this violent drama by sportive circumstance. The tumultuous incidents of the previous night arrayed themselves in his mind with something of ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... nineteenth century include the old Christmas game of Forfeits, for every breach of the rules of which the players have to deposit some little article as a forfeit, to be redeemed by some sportive penalty, imposed by the "Crier of the Forfeits" (usually a bonnie lassie). The "crying of the forfeits" and paying of the penalties creates much merriment, particularly when a bashful youth is sentenced to "kiss through the ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... them, that they intended to do him no harm; their lunges were sportive and not in earnest; but diverting as the sport was to them, it was the very contrary to the old man, whose cries proclaimed that he thought ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... Where seal, 'mid icebergs, sportive play, Far westward wander'd nature's child, And wigwam built, ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... which had attracted the child took every day a stronger hold of the youth. Frederick was not always in that sportive humour in which we have seen him repeatedly. At times he would wander about silent and solitary, wrapped in his musical meditations. He would sit up late, busy with his beloved music, and often, after lying down, rise from his bed in the middle ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... that the results of the duchess' indiscretion finally worked themselves out to their unexpected, fatal, and momentous ending. Seldom, as I should suppose, has such a mixed skein of good and evil, of fatality and happiness, been spun from material no more substantial than a sportive lady's ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... seem to be occupied in emptying cups, not in correcting codices, Calicibus epotandis, non codicibus emendandis, which they mingle with the lascivious music of Timotheus, and emulate his immodest manners, so that the sportive song cantus ludentis, and not the plaintive hymn, proceeds from the cells of the monks. Flocks and fleeces, grain and granaries, gardens and olives, potions and goblets, are in this day lessons and studies of the monks, except some chosen few."[186] ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... reposed upon the shore; Extended lay her beauteous form, a hundred feet and more. The sun, with rays flammivomous, beat on the blue-black sand; And sportive little Saurians disported on the strand; But oft the Iguanodon reproved them in their glee, And said, "Alas! this Saurian Age is ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... the Elm, secure from the reach of every living creature. From its vast dome of interwoven branches and foliage he has listened to the songs of the earliest and the latest birds; and under its shelter he has witnessed many a merry-making assemblage of children, employed in the sportive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... long-drawn inspirations of Mrs Wickam's breath. His temper gave abundant promise of being imperious in after-life; and he had as hopeful an apprehension of his own importance, and the rightful subservience of all other things and persons to it, as heart could desire. He was childish and sportive enough at times, and not of a sullen disposition; but he had a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful way, at other times, of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair, when he looked (and talked) like one of those terrible little Beings in the Fairy tales, who, ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... life Looks cheerful, when one carries in one's heart The unalienable treasure. 'Tis a game, Which, having once reviewed, I turn more joyous Back to my deeper and appropriate bliss. [Breaking off, and in a sportive tone. In this short time that I've been present here. What new unheard-of things have I not seen; And yet they all must give place to the wond Which this ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Sphinx showered honor and wealth upon my friend. The generous sportive boy, who cared naught for gold, actually grew rich, for the Sphinx had granted him the most lucrative office in the county, the people made him their sheriff. He rose step by step to the highest place of honor in the community until he became the mayor of Prescott. Not satisfied ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... not hasten immediately to his post of leisure and observation. Something unusual that he could not quite grasp was in the air. Something disturbed his thoughts, ruffled his senses, made him at once languid, irritable, elated, dissastisfied and sportive. He was no diagnostician, and he did not know that Lent was breaking up physiologically in ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... private accounts between self and conscience, vaguely hoping thereby to bamboozle somebody besides themselves—perhaps the recording angel. So, this morning, he hunted up the other children, as his mother had bidden him, and made a manful—nay, desperate—effort to be sportive at home; but the little fort, within the shelter of whose wooden walls had been their home ever since that melancholy night two years ago, had never seemed to him so dull and lonesome. The hunters and field-laborers, belonging to the station, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... Arrive at the fatal place by twelve. Burnt brandy, women, and sabbath-breaking, repented of. Some few penitential drops fall under the gallows. Sheriffs' men, parson, pickpockets, criminals, all very busy. The last concluding peremptory psalm struck up. Show over by one."—In this sportive strain does this misguided wit think proper to play with a subject so serious, which yet he would hardly have done if he had not known that there existed a predisposition in the habits of his unaccountable countrymen ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... I need abbreviate this blissful moment, I saw the enraged animal disappearing in the side-door of the barn; and it was a nice, comfortable Durham cow, that somewhat rare but possible thing—a sportive cow. ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... waters plays the sportive monster to-day? Did he return to the coast of Norway, where, according to the naturalists of the country, such as he live at the bottom of the sea, rising sometimes to the surface in summer, but plunging ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... to his long-cherished hopes, and the lost was found. Here all doubt and danger were buried in the vortex of oblivion; sectional differences no longer disunited their opinions; like the freed bird from the cage, sportive claps its rustling wings, wheels about to heaven in a joyful strain, and raises its notes to the upper sky. Ambulinia insisted upon Elfonzo to be seated, and give her a history of his unnecessary absence; assuring him the family had ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... be looking towards the door, she saw it opening a little upon its noiseless hinges, and a hand which she knew to be Pierre's beckoning to her. Her grandfather did not see it. She withdrew herself from him with a sportive kiss, ordered him to rest for a while, and think of nothing but her humming-birds, and carried the tray out ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... watchful over the helpless, and extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring for themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"—or the more sportive adage, that "the fairies take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion itself, in addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely less general love of the marvelous, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... up with them. On through the afternoon they soared along, sometimes swooping low above an alluring bit of scenery and again heading their machines skyward in pure exuberance of spirits. Their troubles at Meadville forgotten, they flew their machines like sportive birds; never had any of them experienced more fully the joy of flight, the sense of freedom that comes from traveling ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... of whom Lamb, at all events, was entirely ignorant. They wore, moreover, the subject of a caricature by Gilray, in which Lamb and Lloyd were portrayed as toad and frog. I cannot think, with Sir T. Talfourd, that all these libels were excusable, on the ground of the "sportive wit" of the offending parties. Lamb's writings had no reference whatever to political subjects; they were, on the contrary, as the first writings of a young man generally are, serious,—even religious. Referring to Coleridge, it is ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... and terrible traits, of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny—more powerful than sportive—found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... treacherous guest! And fair OLYMPIA folds him in her breast; Now lows a milk-white Bull on Afric's strand, And crops with dancing head the daisy'd land.— With rosy wreathes EUROPA'S hand adorns 240 His fringed forehead, and his pearly horns; Light on his back the sportive Damsel bounds, And pleased he moves along the flowery grounds; Bears with slow step his beauteous prize aloof, Dips in the lucid flood his ivory hoof; 245 Then wets his velvet knees, and wading laves His silky sides amid the ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... be completely familiar with all the interlocutors, and understand thoroughly all their minutest relations, and points of common knowledge and common feeling with each other. He who does not, must be perpetually in danger of misinterpreting sportive allusion into serious statement; and the man who was only recalling, by some jocular phrase or half-phrase, to an old companion, some trivial reminiscence of their boyhood or youth, may be represented as expressing, upon some person or incident casually tabled, an opinion which he had never ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... recited by pious Jews at the Seder." Ay, the Passover celebration, the Seder, remained in the poet's memory till the day of his death. He describes it still later in one of his finest works:[97] "Sweetly sad, joyous, earnest, sportive, and elfishly mysterious is that evening service, and the traditional chant with which the Haggada is recited by the head of the family, the listeners sometimes joining in as a chorus, is thrillingly tender, soothing as a mother's lullaby, yet impetuous and inspiring, so ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Why, even to-night, in the bosom of your family, as it were, your presence lay so like a wet blanket upon us all that, 'pon my soul, I nearly cracked my voice trying to keep those girls from noticing it! Seriously, I am delighted, of course, that you should feel so sportive, and it is high time indeed that the neighbourhood should see something of you, but I fear you are reckoning beyond your strength. Anyhow, command me. I shall be anxious to help you all I can in this novel departure. What ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... mysteries of the universe. Fancy turns her sister's wizard instruments into toys. She takes a telescope in her hand, and puts a mimic star on her forehead, and sallies forth as an emblem of astronomy. Her tendency is to the child-like and sportive. She chases butterflies, while her sister takes flight with angels. She is the genius of fairies, of gallantries, of fashions; of whatever is quaint and light, showy and capricious; of the poetical part of wit. She adds wings and feelings to the images of wit; and delights as much to people ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... nothing but "gorgons and hydras, and chimeras dire." His subtlety exceeds that of all other dramatic writers, insomuch that a celebrated person of the present day said that he regarded him rather as a metaphysician than a poet. His delicacy and sportive gaiety are infinite. In the MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM alone, we should imagine, there is more sweetness and beauty of description than in the whole range of French poetry put together. What we mean is this, that we will ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... can be better. In fact the volumes exhibit, not George Selwyn, the only one whose letters we should have cared to see, but those who wrote to him. And the disappointment is not the less, that in those letters constant allusions are made to his "sparkling, delightful, sportive, characteristic, &c. &c., epistles." Great ladies constantly urge him to write to them. Maids, wives, and widows, pour out a stream of perpetual laudation. Men of rank, men of letters, men at home, and men abroad, unite in one common ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... peculiar skill in mounting a horse. Resting his left hand upon the horse's neck, as he sprang into the saddle he simultaneously swung the sharp scimiter in his right hand so deftly as to cut off the head of the groom who held the bridle. From his behaviour in these sportive moods one may judge what he was capable of on serious occasions. He was a fair sample of the Barbary monarchs. The foreign policy of these wretches was summed up in piracy and blackmail. Their corsairs swept the Mediterranean and ventured far ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... was sleeping peacefully in the cradle; two or three of the other little ones, weary with their sportive play, had been laid in their cribs. Henric and Lewis, two lovely boys of five and six years old, having promised to be very good, if allowed to sit up till their father's return, were watching their mother, who was employed in roasting ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sea murmured as they turned to rejoin the revellers, and that sportive kiss was borne away on the ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... than vile esteem'd, When not to be receives reproach of being; And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem'd Not by our feeling, but by others' seeing: For why should others' false adulterate eyes Give salutation to my sportive blood? Or on my frailties why are frailer spies, Which in their wills count bad what I think good? No, I am that I am, and they that level At my abuses reckon up their own: I may be straight though they themselves ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... monthly parts. A cover was produced by Kenny Meadows, and then for January, 1844, Richard Doyle, the latest recruit, whose merit had been quickly gauged, was employed to execute the new one. This wrapper was far more in accord with the true spirit of Punch. More sportive and rollicking, and with less attempt at grace, it threw over the style of the "Newcastle School"—of which Landells was a member—and gave the general idea of the latest of all covers. This was not executed until January, 1849, when several changes ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas, taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would have left any but a most ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... merry, sportive, frolicsome, lively, exhilarating, vivacious, jolly, blithe, airy, boon, convivial, jovial, joyous; brilliant, dashing, gallant, showy; garish, gaudy, flashing, tawdry; ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... say, "Poor girlie, you do have a hard time, don't you, with me?" but he reflected instantly how such a remark would be received. He meditated, holding his book in his hand above his knee, looking at the purling water that flowed and flowed in sprinkling showers over the sportive marble figures of mermaids, a Triton, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... must have found it rather more difficult to avoid matrimony than to achieve it. He might be married when he was tipsy; he might be married when he was comatose from the effects of a stand-up fight with Mohawks; his name might be assumed by some sportive Benedick of his acquaintance given to practical joking, and he might find himself saddled with a wife he never saw; or if, on the other hand, of an artful and deceptive turn, he might procure a certificate ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... astral corpse still remains, but when it is quite without any trace of its former life we call it a "shell". Of itself a shell cannot communicate at a seance, or take any action of any sort; but such shells are frequently seized upon by sportive nature-spirits and used as temporary habitations. A shell so occupied can communicate at a seance and masquerade as its original owner, since some of his characteristics and certain portions of his memory can be evoked by the ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling's tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children! But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... very end. But the precise nature of the Cumnor jury's verdict is unknown, and Elizabeth's words about 'the attempt at her house' prove that something concealed from us did occur. It might be a mere half-sportive attempt by rustics to enter a house known to be, at the moment, untenanted by the servants, and may have caused to Amy an alarm, so that, rushing downstairs in terror, she fell and broke her neck. The coincidence of her death with the words of Cecil would thus be purely ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... fire of logs. They had finished their private affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... His Macbeth has been known to nod. But he always seemed to me to be particularly alive to pointed and witty dialogue. The relaxing levities of tragedy have not been touched by any since him—the playful court-bred spirit in which he condescended to the players in Hamlet—the sportive relief which he threw into the darker shades of Richard—disappeared with him. He had his sluggish moods, his torpors—but they were the halting-stones and resting-place of his tragedy—politic savings, and fetches of the breath—husbandry ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... now is. Buonamico began the work, and had already completed the greater part of it, when a very curious circumstance occurred; and this, according to Franco Sacchetti, who relates it among his Three Hundred Stories, was as follows. The bishop had a large ape, of extraordinary cunning, the most sportive and mischievous creature in the world. This animal sometimes stood on the scaffold, watching Buonamico at his work, and giving a grave attention to every action: with his eyes constantly fixed on the painter, he observed him mingle his colors, handle the various flasks and ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... must acknowledge that Walpole's chief excellence is in his letters. His sportive spleen, his polished sarcasm, and his keen insight into the ways of men, place him at the head of all epistolary authorship. He has had but two competitors for this fame,—it is remarkable that they were both women,—De Sevigne in France, and Lady Wortley ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... my foot in it again,' said Mr Meagles, thus corrected. 'I can't keep my foot out of it here, it seems. Perhaps, if I had thought twice about it, I might never have given her the jingling name. But, when one means to be good-natured and sportive with young people, one doesn't think twice. Her old friend leaves a kind word for her, Miss Wade, if you should ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... first place, what can be more dear and precious than life itself? and yet for this are none beholden, save to me alone. For it is neither the spear of throughly-begotten Pallas, nor the buckler of cloud-gathering Jove, that multiplies and propagates mankind: but my sportive and tickling recreation that proceeded the old crabbed philosophers, and those who now supply their stead, the mortified monks and friars; as also kings, priests, and popes, nay, the whole tribe of ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... shady woods and sunny lawns The maiden and the youth now wander, gay As the bright birds, and happy as the fawns, Their sportive rivals, that around them play; Their light hands linked in love, the golden hours Unconscious fly, while thus they graceful roam, And careless ever till the voice of home Recalled them from their sunshine find their flowers; For then they parted: to his lonely pile The orphan-chief, for though ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... Bounding and free, O soothe me to sleep with thy sweet lullaby! As when a child, Sportive and wild, Thy waves and ...
— Rowena & Harold - A Romance in Rhyme of an Olden Time, of Hastyngs and Normanhurst • Wm. Stephen Pryer
... and tranquil bounds of quiet married life. The viscount was too young to be not merely a lover and tender husband, but also a sober counsellor and cautious instructor in the difficult after-day of life; and Josephine was too innocent, too artless, too sportive and genial, to avoid all those things that might give to the watchful and hostile family of her husband an opportunity for ill-natured suspicions, which were whispered in the viscount's ear as cruel certainties. It may readily be conceived, then, ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... other wonders of the sportive shears Fair Nature misadorning; there were found Globes, spiral columns, pyramids, and piers With spouting urns and budding statues crowned; And horizontal dials on the ground In living box, by cunning artists traced, And galleys trim, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... A sportive contest arose among the maidens, as to the comparative beauty of the Spanish and Moorish forms; but the Mauritanian damsel revealed limbs of voluptuous symmetry that seemed to ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... two the fire would die out against that barrier, always provided the west wind did not rise and in sportive mockery fling showers of sparks across to start a hundred little fires burning in the woods behind their line of defense. A forest fire was never beaten until it was dead. The men rested, watched, patrolled their line. They looked at the sky and sighed for rain. A little knot ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gathering he was so gay and sportive that he infected the great company, and it was the most hilarious banquet in the society's history. The old warriors sighed, and wondered at his eternal youth. When he sprang upon the table and sang his old camp-song, "The Drum," he looked the boy they remembered at Valley Forge and Morristown. ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... her "poor dear papa" had been in the habit of frightening obstreperous White Boys, who might assail the sacred premises of Ballybrogue Castle—the ancestral seat of the Earls of Planetree in sportive Tipperary, as I believe I've told you before. The weapon, she informed me, was a most efficient one, having once been known—when missing the advocate of "young Ireland" it was aimed at—to demolish a whole litter of those little gentlemen with curly ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sword doth cry. Nor less AEneas with his threat defies, "Stand off," he shouts, "who ventures to draw nigh, His town shall perish, and himself shall die." Onward, though maimed, he presses to his prey. Twice five times circling round the field they fly; For no mean stake or sportive prize they play, Lo, Turnus' life and blood are wagered ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... scientist with untruth, and attaches to his concepts the predicate of unreality. The fact that the concepts of science are selected, and only inadequately true of reality, should not be taken to mean that they are sportive or arbitrary. They are not "devices" or abbreviations, in any sense that does not attach to such symbolism as all thought involves. Nor are they merely "hypothetical," though like all thought they are subject to correction.[142:7] ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... sportive vein, Which help'd me to sustain Love's first assault, the only arms I bore; This flinty breast say who Shall once again subdue, That I with song may soothe me as before? Some power appears to trace Within me Laura's face, Whispers her name; and straight ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch |
