"Stern" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... straight on up the creekâa messenger to the village. Some of the command, who had followed him, stirred up the village and accelerated its departure. We finally got back to the main force, and then learned that we had made a great mistake. Now commenced another stern chase. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... be seen how completely the colonists had given themselves up to the dominion of the overshadowing range that stayed their western progress. It required the stern hand of necessity to compel them to at last force that "stupendous barrier," as ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... hand over the smooth sheen of her dress; her gown was chaste, even stern, in its simplicity—the expensive simplicity that is ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... in the career of Henry Hudson which can never be forgotten by Americans. One is in the first week in September, 1609. A little vessel, of eighty tons, is lying on the smooth waters of a large harbor. She has the mounded stern and bluff bows of the ships of that day; one of her masts has evidently been lately stepped; the North American pine of which it is made shows the marks of the ship-carpenter's ax, and the whiteness of the fresh wood. The square sails have been rent, and mended with seams and ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... that murder lay in that savage heart, and with a little cry of horror she sprang forward to plead with the ape-man. But her fears were more for Tarzan than for Canler. She realized the stern retribution which justice ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was filled with righteous wrath and a stern determination to "make things hot" for the cause of the "accident" as, led to the attack by the active but dripping Mr. Knight whom he designated in his heart as that "little cur of a parson," much ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... most probable that the physical type of the later Babylonians was nearly that of their northern neighbors. A somewhat sparer form, longer and more flowing hair, and features less stern and strong, may perhaps have characterized them. They were also, it is probable, of a darker complexion than the Assyrians, being to some extent Ethiopians by descent, and inhabiting a region which lies four degrees nearer to the tropics ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 4. (of 7): Babylon • George Rawlinson
... The elder man's somewhat stern features relaxed, and he sat back in his chair with a chuckle. "Do it at once," he requested, "and make it a stiff one. You know their characteristics; give it to them hard. I feel pretty sure of Cyrus, but Cornelius—" He shook his head ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... nothing so good (in my judgment) as Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth, but there is nothing like Hamlet, or Lear, or Othello, or Macbeth. There is nothing, I believe, in the majestic Corneille, equal to the stern pride of Coriolanus, or which gives such an idea of the crumbling in pieces of the Roman grandeur, 'like an unsubstantial pageant faded,' as the Antony and Cleopatra. But to match the best serious comedies, such ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... pushed off from the Tower Bridge, below the iron gateway. It gleamed with red and gold; flags and sails flapped lazily in a gentle breeze. The Cardinal sat on the stern-deck surrounded by his little court; most of his attendants he had left at home in York Palace, later known as Whitehall. His face was red both from the reflection of his red dress as from the wine which he had been drinking at noon with King Henry VIII in the Tower, and also from the new French ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... looked so very stern that Tom was quite frightened, and sorry that he had been so bold. But she was not angry with him. She only answered, "I look after them all the week round; and they are in a very different place from this, because they knew ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... every branch and tendril, that fruit to eternal life will grow. Christian graces are the products of the indwelling divine life, and nothing else will succeed in producing them. All the preachings of moralists and all the struggles after self-improvement are reduced to impotence and vanity by the stern, curt sentence—'a corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit.' Surely it should come to us all as a true gospel when we feel ourselves foiled by our own evil nature in our attempts to be better, that the first thing we have to do is not to labour ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... any truth in the theory of magnetism or not, it is certain that Dorcas Knight—stern, harsh, resolute woman that she was toward all others—became as submissive as a child in the presence ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... by the hem over the oars, and immediately she had a very fair substitute for a tent, to shield her from the blazing sun. Then, apparently quite contented, she sat down in the bottom of the boat, adjusting the cushion from the stern seat, for a back. She had her face towards the island, and, when she was comfortably settled, she ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... moment before turning to his books, George Marshall looked out of the window, far away to the blue, misty harbor. There he saw again old Fort Defiance, standing grim, stern, and dark against the morning sky—the only object that marred the brightness of the blue heaven and the blue water, melting together in ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... Tendernesse, though less Smiling than usualle, and eagerlie accepted mine offered Visitt. Then she ran off to find Roger, and I heard them talking earnestlie in a low Voice before they came in. His Face was grave, even stern, when he entred, but he held out his Hand, and sayd, "Mistress Milton, you are welcome! how is it with you? and how was Mr. Milton when he wrote to you last?" I answered brieflie, he was well: then came a Silence, and then Rose took me to my Chamber, which ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... "And stern to the haughty, but humble to thee, This soul, in its bitterest blackness, shall be; And our days seem as swift, and our moments more sweet, With thee by my side, than with worlds at ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... received on his return to Quebec in October 1786. It was not without reason that the people of Canada rejoiced to have him back as their leader. All that the Indians imagined the Great White Father to be towards themselves he was in reality towards both red man and white. Stern, when the occasion forced him to be stern, just in all his dealings between man and man, dignified and courteous in all his ways, a soldier through every inch of his stalwart six feet, he was a ruler with whom no one ever dreamt of taking liberties. But neither did ...
— The Father of British Canada: A Chronicle of Carleton • William Wood
... strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a Hound demanded, and the miller tried to be stern in calling out, "No trifling!" but lost effect by gently adding, "Friends." The unbelievers laughed, but the miller's retreat from the bold stand he had taken was covered by Redfield's threat that if those fellows kept ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... and by Navarre without as well as by revolt within, the loss of Gascony seemed close at hand; but in a few months the stern rule of the new Seneschal had quelled every open foe within or without its bounds. To bring the province to order proved a longer and a harder task. Its nobles were like the robber-nobles of the Rhine: "they rode the country by night," wrote the Earl, "like ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... minds and hearts and light up your whole lives with a great awakening, light as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn." Follow him through the golden flood to the shore of that "holy land," where he lies dying as men say—dying as bravely as he lived. You may be near when his stern old aunt in the duty of her Puritan conscience asks him: "Have you made your peace with God"? and you may see his kindly smile as he replies, "I did not know that we had ever quarreled." Moments like these reflect more nobility and equanimity perhaps than geniality—qualities, however, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... on entering the boat was to place the goat on his knees. He took a position in the stern; and the young girl, whom the stranger inspired with an indefinable uneasiness, seated ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... more domestic events—always the same excuse. I began to calculate that the population must be rapidly on the increase in that place. It was too much. I entered the last house of that straggling village with a stern resolve that not even new-born twins should bar my claim ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... amphitheatre, in whose depths men of large and solemn mien added daily to the sum of human discomfort. He returned to see the important city of Boston, but with no overwhelming desire to come in closer contact with its forbidding inhabitants. He quickly forgot the city in what those stern sour men had to tell him. For to them he owed that revelation of the tragic justice of the American cause which enabled him to begin with the pen his part in the Revolution, forcing the crisis, taking rank as a political philosopher when ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... of the passengers on the Belchar, and on such occasions the frightened screams of women could be heard. Once, as the smoke cleared away, a woman, with a child in her arms, giving a backward glance toward the flames that were now enveloping the stern of the vessel, attempted to ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... be constructed, if such an idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and were dishonoured together; so that, the soul's occupation being gone, she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage of an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical illusion into some green and ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and at times a very mischievous personage. The joys and griefs which really interest him are of the very tangible and solid kind which affect men and women to whom the struggle for existence is a stern reality. Here and there his good-humoured but rather clumsy ridicule may strike some lady to whom some demon has whispered 'have a taste;' and who turns up her nose at the fat bacon on Mr. Tovell's table. He pities her squeamishness, but thinks ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Raja who was very rich. He was a stern man and overbearing and would brook no contradiction. Not one of his servants or his subjects dared to question his orders; if they did so they got nothing but abuse and blows. He was a grasping man too; if a cow or a goat strayed into his herds he would return the animal if its owner claimed in ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... enlisted in behalf of their woes that we condemn the letter as harsh and unfeeling. When we think for how many ages the people of France had been crushed into poverty and debasement, we rejoice to hear stern and uncompromising truth fall upon the ear of royalty. And yet Madame Roland's letter rather excites our admiration for her wonderful abilities than allures us to her by developments of female loveliness. This celebrated letter was presented to the king on the ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... men, and for some time appeared to be in great doubt, whether they should come near us or not, as they shortened sail and consulted together several times; at last, however, they came under our stern, which was the only way in which they could approach, as their long outriggers, projecting 10 or 12 feet on each side of their narrow canoes, prevented ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... emotions which whirled through Montgomery's mind pictured themselves in his face as he confronted the stern old gentlewoman opposite. The silence in the room was unbroken save by the roar of the tempest, and it seemed an age before she ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... three in the shire, and Colin—a Cornal—and both of Keils. The Sheriff's lady might leave me out of her routs if she pleasured it, but she has no cause to put my brothers to an insult like this." She said "my brothers" with a high hard sound of stern and proud possession that was very fine to hear. Even Gilian, as yet only beginning to know the love and pride of this little woman, had, at her accent, a sudden deep revealing of her ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... legitimate means be induced to screw home into their places, was perforce obliged to rest the machine upon two chairs and wriggle underneath it, where he reclined upon his back with grimy oil dripping upon his forehead. Red in the face, he crawled out to breathe at intervals, and Helen made stern efforts to conceal her mingled alarm and merriment, when Thomas ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... was the stern reply. "We will have peace in England, and we will, by the help of the Lord's strong arm, rid this realm of these recalcitrant spirits. For you, sir, you shall return to your estate at Enderby, and we will use you abroad as opportunity shall occur. Your son has taken ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... dynasty. Here General Feng Kuo-chang interrupted with the remark that the people of South China would not oppose such a change ultimately, though they thought it was too early to talk about it just now. Thereupon the president's features became stern and he declared in a heightened voice: "You and others seem still to believe that I harbour secret ambitions. I affirm positively that when I sent my sons to study in England, I privately ordered the purchase of a small estate there as a possible home. ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... through the benches rang; But as the plot began to open more (A shallow plot) the claps less frequent grew, Till by degrees a gentle hiss arose; This by a catcall from the gallery Was quickly seconded: then followed claps; And 'twixt long claps and hisses did succeed A stern contention; victory being dubious. So hangs the conscience, doubtful to determine When honesty pleads here, and there ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... seized Ralph as he listened. He could see nothing, for the lantern had been placed in a bucket the moment that he touched the deck. At this moment a hail came from the stern of the vessel, and Ralph's fears were at once realized, for it was in French. The reply was in the same tongue, and he was led aft. "Take him down below, Jacques, and let's see what he is like. We have suffered no ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... fine-drawn as the accidental rent in an unfinished skirt, escaped the hirsute stitcher: a melancholy reflection upon the infinite deal of nothing in his various pockets, and the slow revolving of the Brixton wheel in stern perspective, wrung from the quodded wretch a slow assent: Sir Peter sent a City officer with his warrant to secure the nearest barber: a few sharp clickings of the envious shears—and all was over! Crime fell ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... holes in their ears, wherein they wear such stuff as in their noses. They are very dexterous, active fellows in their proas, which are very ingeniously built. They are narrow and long, with outriggers on one side, the head and stern higher than the rest, and carved into many devices—viz., some fowl, fish, or a man's head painted or carved; and though it is but rudely done, yet the resemblance appears plainly, and shows an ingenious fancy. But with what instruments they make their proas ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... continued furious, and would not take a denial, except from my own mouth, upon which, with the approbation of Lord B—, I indulged him with an interview. He entered the apartment with a stern countenance, and told me I had used him ill. I pleaded guilty to the charge, and begged his pardon accordingly. I attempted to reason the case with him, but he would hear no arguments except his own, and even tried to intimidate me with threats; which provoked me to such a degree, that I defied ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... spear and glaive Two Barons proud their banners wave. I saw the Moray's silver star, And marked the sable pale of Mar.' 'By Alpine's soul, high tidings those! I love to hear of worthy foes. When move they on?' 'To-morrow's noon Will see them here for battle boune.' 'Then shall it see a meeting stern! But, for the place,—say, couldst thou learn Nought of the friendly clans of Earn? Strengthened by them, we well might bide The battle on Benledi's side. Thou couldst not?—well! Clan-Alpine's men Shall man the Trosachs' shaggy glen; Within Loch ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... portion of Tuscany consists of loam and sandy deposits, forming the basin between two mountain-ranges—the Apennines and the chalk hills of the western coast of Central Italy. Seen from the eminence of some old Tuscan turret, this champaign country has a stern and arid aspect. The earth is grey and dusty, the forms of hill and valley are austere and monotonous; even the vegetation seems to sympathise with the uninteresting soil from which it springs. A few spare olives cast their shadows on the lower slopes; here and there a copse of oakwood ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... Fuller was, in early life, when a farmer lad at Soham, famous as a boxer; not quarrelsome, but not without "the stern delight" a man of strength and courage feels in their exercise. Dr. Charles Stewart, of Dunearn, whose rare gifts and graces as a physician, a divine, a scholar, and a gentleman, live only in the memory of those few who knew and survive him, liked to tell how Mr. Fuller used ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... and Max thought it safer to watch all night, but told us to go to sleep. It was a strange spot to sleep in—a raft in the middle of a boiling stream, with a wilderness stretching on either side. The moon made ghostly shadows and showed H., sitting still as a ghost, in the stern of the boat, while mingled with the gurgle of the water round the raft beneath was the boom of cannon in the air, solemnly breaking the silence of night. It drizzled now and then, and the mosquitoes swarmed over us. My fan and umbrella had been knocked overboard, so I ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... men;—that with them the power of the tyrant ends with the coercion of the body—that the soul is free, and the inner man retaining the original uprightness of the image of God. You may know them by the stern sobriety of their countenances, and the contempt with which they regard the jests and pastimes of their miserable and degraded companions, who, like Samson, make sport for the keepers of their prison-house. These ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Supernatural facts, livingly apprehended, are necessary for supernatural peace and power in this formidable natural world. But then, on the other side, it is a fallacy almost as fatal to preach the supernatural fact and truth without a constant and practical application of them to the crude and stern realities of life. A young pastoral preacher was once, in my hearing, warmly and lovingly thanked for his pulpit-work, on the eve of his quitting his Curacy; and the point on which his humble friends dwelt was that he ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... a moment or two talking to some of the men mending their nets on the jetty, called down to Dick, who was lying—he was always reclining on something—basking in the stern of his anchored boat; then she went, more slowly, up the ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... right. One of the objects which, in the distance, resembled so closely the floating carcass of an ox was in reality an overturned canoe, and to the stern of that canoe Herr Winklemann was clinging. He had been long in the water, and was almost too much exhausted to see or cry. When the boat passed he thought he heard voices. Hope revived for a moment, and he uttered a feeble shout, but he failed to hear the reply. The canoe happened to float between ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... the stern of the Coquette yielded to the pressure of her enemy, whose sails were all drawing, and she was soon in a position to enable her head-yards to be braced sharp aback, in a direction opposite to the one in which she had so lately ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... lips of the man himself a confession that conditions were not right at the lumber mill of which Barry Houston now formed the executive head; to receive the certain statement that somewhere, somehow, something was wrong, something which was working against the best interests of himself and the stern necessities of ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... portentously dull juvenile books, "it will be found as interesting to the young as to the old." Though the dullest of dramas, it is so brightened by brilliant legs that it dazzles every beholder. Why, then, should the stern advocate of the legitimate drama refuse to acknowledge that the Twelve Temptations has its redeeming legs? How runs the ancient proverb, "Singed milk is better than it looks;" or that equally ancient philosophical maxim, "There is no use in crying ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... in possession of the powers of government the Bolshevik leaders soon had to face the stern realities of the conditions essential to the life of a great nation. They could not escape the necessity of intensifying production. They had not only promised peace, but bread, and bread comes only from labor. Every ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... noon when the Dunottar Castle finally weighed anchor at Funchal and started on her long, unbroken voyage to the southward. Side by side in the stern, Weldon and Ethel looked back at the blue harbor dotted with the myriad little boats, at the quaint town backed with its amphitheatre of sunlit hills and, poised on the summit, the church where Nossa Senhora do Monte keeps watch and ward over ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... mere success, together with the commercial vices which it stimulates, should be increased rather than diminished. Not at all by this hero-worship grown into brute-worship, is society to be made better; but by exactly the opposite—by a stern criticism of the means through which success has been achieved; and by according honour to the higher and less selfish ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... Francesca di Rimini and her lover, which appeared in the Great Exhibition last year, would come under the same law of banishment. It realised so perfectly the hopelessness of hell, that at sight of it we swooned in spirit as Dante did in reality. Life has so many stern realities for most of us, that in art we need relief, and generally desire to find renewed hope and faith through delight ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... the time allowed us, we ran through a passage in the reef called Mother Cary's passage, because few things but the birds think of swimming there. The merchant-boat went first, our gig next, and as I sat in the stern of the large boat that was to follow, it was beautiful, but something fearful, to see them dash through that boiling surf between the rocks and rise over the wave secure beyond it, nor was the sensation less mixed when we followed. ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... little launch had noisily chug-chugged its way among the various craft, small and large, and had finally come to a standstill beside a beautiful boat, upon whose bow and stern was engraved ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... pacing backward and forward, his face very grave, but not so stern. Rose watched ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... imminent peril could not keep his eyes open, then presently awoke with a start, for in his sleep he thought he heard the sounds of paddles beating the quiet water. Yes, there dimly seen through the mist, was a canoe, and seated in the stern of it Fahni. So that danger had gone ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... the center of attraction. It was the mysterious fairy that bound all hearts together and welded all types of personality into a sympathetic friendship that gathered round it. It was the stern and fiery monarch, ordering all assembled to be quiet that it might sing and moan and whisper the messages that it had gathered from the winter storms or from the ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... We go out every other week and sit under these very same trees. Sam paints the branches wiggling down in the water, and I do leaky boats. When I get the picture home, I put Jane Hoggson fishin' in the stern." ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... seated in the stern Mr. Carr turned for a moment, stared all Oyster Bay calmly in the face through his monocle, then, untying the painter, fairly skipped into the boat with a ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... the exact style of the Old Testament. The name of God is coupled with every trifling incident in life, and they believe in the continual action of Divine special interference. Should a famine afflict the country, it is expressed in the stern language of the Bible—"The Lord has sent a grievous famine upon the land;" or, "The Lord called for a famine, and it came upon the land." Should their cattle fall sick, it is considered to be an affliction by Divine ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... hour, it hardly seems possible that it can be so difficult to induce our fellow-men to make the short step from hesitant desire to definite decision. The truth is, of course, that in the making of almost any important decision there is a stern conflict between conflicting desires. Take, for example, a man buying an automobile. Under the skilful persuasive power of the salesman, he has vividly pictured to himself enjoying possession. But this is not his only mental picture. Perhaps he has a picture ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... want to say anything about him, only you ought—not—to abuse him—before me." By this time Dorothy was beginning to sob, but Miss Stanbury's countenance was still very grim and very stern. "He's coming home to Nuncombe Putney, and I ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... armies, as though the royal house were in danger. The trick succeeded; for in the hurry-skurry that ensued the impassive girl positively laughed outright. Later on, when a real attack was made upon the capital by barbarian hordes, and the beacon-fires were again lighted, this time in stern reality, there was no response from the insulted nobles. The king was killed, and ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... them shuddering shall seize him, They rear their bodies, none can resist their breast. Vipers she made, terrible snakes.... ... raging dogs, scorpion-men ... fish men.... Bearing invincible arms, fearless in the fight. Stern are her commands, not to be resisted. Of all the first-born gods, because he gave her help, She raised up Kingu in the midst, she made him the greatest, To march in front of the host, to lead the whole, To begin the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... and outside the hunting field the most finely bred of them are too apt to be noisy nuisances. When I say that the beast in question was quite an American dog, obviously of no breeding whatever, my dismay will be readily imagined. Rather impulsively, I confess, I threw him to the floor with a stern, "Begone, sir!" whereat he merely crawled to my feet and whimpered, looking up into my eyes with a most horrid and sickening air of devotion. Hereupon, to my surprise, my hostess gayly ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... of irony that the laborious mind projects, irresistibly, over labour conscientiously performed. The Professor had always been a hard worker. If he was an indulgent friend to his ideas, he was also a stern task-master to them. For, in addition to their other duties, they had to support his family: to pay the butcher and baker, and provide for Jack's schooling and Millicent's dresses. The Professor's household was a modest one, ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... open occurred another sanguinary struggle. Stuart still pressed on with his elated troops, although his men were beginning to show signs of severe exhaustion. Franklin's and Mott's brigades, says Sickles, "made stern resistance to the impulsive assaults of the enemy, and brilliant charges in return worthy ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge
... pleasantest but the greatest part of England. Devonshire was a great maritime county when the foundations of our representation were fixed; Somersetshire and Wiltshire great manufacturing counties. The harsher climate of the northern counties was associated with a ruder, a stern, and a sparser people. The immense preponderance which our Parliament gave before 1832, and though pruned and mitigated, still gives to England south of the Trent, then corresponded to a real preponderance in wealth and mind. How opposite the present contrast is we all know. And the case gets ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot
... Beresford is trying to forget that he kissed my hand the other night, for he called me "Little Miss Barbara" today, meaning little in the sense of young. I gave him a stern glanse. ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... already standing in the stern of the boat, and had taken up an oar. Charlotte got in, and Edward with her—he took the other oar; but as he was on the point of pushing off, he thought of Ottilie—he recollected that this water-party would keep him out late; who could tell when he would get back? He made up his mind shortly ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... All the same it has to be done: and surely no one will care to deny that the fleet which has practised in quiet years the system that must be followed in war will start with a great advantage on its side when it is at last confronted with the stern ...
— Sea-Power and Other Studies • Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge
... afternoon, one of the carpenter's mates fell overboard, and was drowned. He was over the side, fitting in one of the scuttles, from whence it is supposed he had fallen; for he was not seen till the very instant he sunk under the ship's stern, when our endeavours to save him were too late. This loss was sensibly felt during the voyage, as he was a sober man and a good workman. About noon the next day, the rain poured down upon us, not in drops but in streams. The wind, at the same time, was ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... air, the forest was green, and his work approached completion. There remained, indeed, but some final shaping and rounding off, and the construction, or rather cutting out, of a secret locker in the stern. This locker was nothing more than a square aperture chiselled out like a mortice, entering not from above but parallel with the bottom, and was to be closed with a tight-fitting piece of wood driven in ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... the conventional war-writers' idioms, and gives his work a place in literature and history. Here is found the stern actuality of war's fearful tug; here the beautiful pathos of pure manly sentiment flowing from the heart of many a brave soul on the battle's eve; here the scenes of sad and solemn burial where warriors weep. The din of battle on one page, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... Consolation; he is the schoolmaster whose face is often stern. But I did not come to tell you of him whom you know; I am going to take you—back,' ...
— The Little Pilgrim: Further Experiences. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... pistols," said Mr. Random in a stern accent to his son, "is very well in a proper place, but quite inadmissible in a room full of company. Now, sir, what business had you to take this pistol out of ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... stop; upon which I commanded Strap to halt also, while I walked forward; resolving, if possible, to come to an explanation with my challenger, before we should come to battle. Nor was an opportunity wanting; for I no sooner approached than he asked, with a stern countenance, what business I had in Mr. Topehall's garden so early in the morning? "I don't know, my lord," said I, "how to answer a question put to me with such magisterial haughtiness. If your lordship will please to expostulate calmly, you will have no cause to repent ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... a young man was among them, of course—they poured from the freight cars that in the main they occupied. And they were willing to talk; more than willing, indeed. They told of how the Germans had come. First the Uhlans riding through, stern and silent, willing to leave the inhabitants alone, as a rule, if they themselves were let alone. Then the infantry, rolling along in great grey masses. And with them came the spoiling ...
— The Boy Scouts on the Trail • George Durston
... directed towards the stern, since there, chiefly, the negroes, at present, were clustering. But to kill or maim the negroes was not the object. To take them, with the ship, was the object. To do it, the ship must be boarded; which ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... been a Parthian shot. The ship was out of the house altogether by then, and the roof had settled back over its joists at a rakish angle. The whole after part of the house was mashed into a neat concavity which would have made a perfect mold for the Minnie Williams' stern, and the Minnie Williams was in the stream again, with not ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... unskilled fingers, disjointed members,—sorry relics of past pleasures,—one by one Miss Terry seized them between disdainful thumb and finger and tossed them into the fire. Her face showed not a qualm at parting with these childhood treasures; only the stern sense of a good housekeeper's duty fulfilled. With queer contortions the bits writhed on the coals, and finally flared into dissolution, vanishing up chimney in a shower of sparks to the heaven of ...
— The Christmas Angel • Abbie Farwell Brown
... there, leaning her forehead against the cool pane, footsteps sounded from around the transverse; and two figures, arm in arm, strolled nearer. They glanced at the dusky transom, laughed over the tardiness of their stern editor-in-chief, and sat down on a convenient ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... should shut from the dreamer's eye his pleasant fancies, and with them the dying flames, the loud barking of dogs, soon succeeded by hurried steps and voices, aroused the half-conscious master of Kennons to the stern reality ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... tortures I endure no words can tell, Far greater these, than those which erst befell From the dire terror of thy consort, Jove— E'en stern Eurystheus' dire command above; This of thy daughter, Oeneus, is the fruit, Beguiling me with her envenom'd suit, Whose close embrace doth on my entrails prey, Consuming life; my lungs forbid to play; ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... Christian ecclesiastical building, from the first century to the fifteenth; but the moral habits to which England in this age owes the kind of greatness that she has,—the habits of philosophical investigation, of accurate thought, of domestic seclusion and independence, of stern self-reliance, and sincere upright searching into religious truth,—were only traceable in the features which were the distinctive creation of the Gothic schools, in the veined foliage, and thorny fretwork, and shadowy niche, and buttressed pier, ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Gibraltar, and every thought of his heart toward Edna. Burke and Shirley both noticed a change in him. After he left the Rackbirds' cove, until he had sailed into the South Atlantic, his manner had been quiet, alert, generally anxious, and sometimes stern. But now, day by day, he appeared to be growing into a different man. He was not nervous, nor apparently impatient, but it was easy to see that within him there burned a steady purpose to get on as fast as the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... those who bear that name here have little resemblance to the glorious forest heroes that live in the Leatherstocking tales, and in spite of my desire to find in them something poetical and interesting, a stern regard for truth compels me to acknowledge that the dusky beauty above described is the only even moderately pretty squaw that I ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... not survive this decree long enough to complete his system respecting the New England colonies, or to establish a new government for Massachusetts. He died early in the following year; and his successor, from whose stern temper, and high toned opinions, the most gloomy presages had been drawn, was proclaimed, in Boston, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... upon a foreign soil, which he never considered as his country, remaining faithful in the devotion of his affections to the eternal widowhood of his own. He was a Poet of a mournful soul, full of reserve and complicated mystery, and familiar with the stern face of sorrow. ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... my unused sketch-pad behind me, gazing back regretfully over the yellow flood. The men pushed the boat out on to the waters and sprang in themselves, each armed with a long paddle; one taking his stand in front of us, one at the stern, and directed our little craft to the centre of the huge and sullen stream. It rolled from side to side as it shot out over the surface, but as soon as the men got their paddles to work, evenly with long alternate strokes, the flood bore us along, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... the St. Jeromes, was the finest specimen of the old English residence extant. It was the perfection of the style, which had gradually arisen after the Wars of the Roses had alike destroyed all the castles and the purpose of those stern erections. People said Vauxe looked like a college: the truth is, colleges looked like Vauxe, for, when those fair and civil buildings rose, the wise and liberal spirits who endowed them intended that they should resemble, as much as possible, ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... been an inmate of Ravana's harem. In vain Sita urges that she has been faithful throughout. Rama refuses to credit her purity; so the poor little wife, preferring death to disgrace, begs permission to die on a funeral pyre. Even then her stern husband shows no signs of relenting, but allows her to enter a fierce fire, whence the god of the flames bears her out unharmed, and restores her to her husband, declaring that, as her chastity has withstood this fiery test, he can receive ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... words to those we have quoted; and we cannot but love the man for being able to joke when he is telling of the rebuff he has received. It must have been an additional pang to him, that he for whom he had written his book should receive it with stern rebuke. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... presently decide what is to happen to Ruggedo," said he in a hard, stern voice. Then, turning to the throng of Kings and Queens, he continued: "Tik-Tok has spoken truly, for his machinery will not allow him to lie, nor will it allow his thoughts to think falsely. Therefore these people are not our enemies and must be treated with ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... empire was justified by a specious and reasonable motive. The widow of Valentinian, Eudoxia, whom he had led captive from Rome to Carthage, was the sole heiress of the Theodosian house; her elder daughter, Eudocia, became the reluctant wife of Hunneric, his eldest son; and the stern father, asserting a legal claim, which could not easily be refuted or satisfied, demanded a just proportion of the Imperial patrimony. An adequate, or at least a valuable, compensation, was offered by the Eastern emperor, to purchase a necessary peace. Eudoxia and her younger daughter, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... us. Nothing at all has happened as there usually does on my travels, and I've met no interesting people. But I've had a really thrilling time just guessing what my future is to be like. I've imagined Mrs. Dudley Blythe to be every kind of a woman that would be likely to employ a secretary, from a stern-eyed suffragette to a modern Mrs. Jellyby interested in the heathen. All I've had to build on was Madam Chartley's night letter and Mrs. Blythe's telegram in answer to mine, and naturally ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... of view that young man at Rome, without a status, without a settled prospect in life, would have seemed an amiable dreamer, destined to wake suddenly, and not very pleasantly, to the stern realities of life. If anything seemed unlikely, it was that an English gentleman, a man of good birth and of independent fortune, should give his daughter to this poor young German at Rome. Yet this ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... the discovery my dream was broken. The golden web which had been woven around me shrank beneath the iron hand of necessity, and fell in fragments at my feet. I knew that it was useless to speak to Blanch of marriage, for her father, a stern and exacting man in his domestic relations, had often declared that he would never give his daughter to a husband who had no fortune. If I sought his permission to address her now, my fate was fixed. There was no alternative, therefore, but to wait until ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... honoured as a god by the people; him, as he was flying before him, Eurypylus, then, the illustrious son of Evaemon, struck in the shoulder in his flight, rushing on with his sword, and cut off his heavy hand: then the gory hand fell in the field; but blood-red death and stern fate seized ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... could be shared with any friend. It shows that although he was now well-nigh convinced of the truth of Catholicity, yet that he still felt a lingering indecision, produced, perhaps, by a haunting memory of the stern front of "discipline" he had encountered in Bishop Hughes. This seemed like a phantom of terror to the young social reformer, whose love of liberty, though rational, was then and ever afterwards one of the passions of his soul. Yet we rarely find now in these pages any statement of specific ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... the thick muddy flow of the stream. His face in repose was almost stern. Helen glanced at it timidly and could hardly realise that she was sitting so near to a real hero, one who had risked his life to ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... its broader sense,—i.e., the attempt to evade reality,—is a common mode of reaction in primitive man, the child of today and in the undeveloped mind, in all of these instances signifying an inability to meet stern reality in the face, and that, therefore, malingering, when it does occur, should at least not be looked upon as an aggravating circumstance, which is not infrequently the case when the malingerer happens to be facing ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... meeting the Doctor approached, my courage oozed from every pore, distilling a malignant dew of mistrust that not even the optimism of Ajax could evaporate. As we sat at meat I noted with apprehension the stern features of Standish, who occupied an adjoining table. He ate sparingly, as became an old man, and drank no wine. His granddaughter, a charming girl, with eyes that reminded me of Gloriana, chattered gaily to him, but he replied in monosyllables. Doubtless ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... her questions tremblingly, for she feared the stern, strange face of the boy in knickerbockers. She had seen him playing and shouting in the square on other days, and the change was so great that she felt death alone could have wrought it. But he answered ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... hour of need, and had the courage to keep to their own self-selected paths. This is no slight title to fame, for, as a rule, the unusual rouses envy and distrust, but the cheap, average wisdom, which never prompted action, appears as a refined superiority, and it is only under the pressure of the stern reality of war that the truth of Goethe's lines ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... thing he saw on entering the door was Dr. Hale seated before a cup of steaming tea, with a great weariness in his eye, who, when he saw Matt, threw a look of rebuke, and in somewhat stern ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... cheers of the disappointed remainder. We mourn our sad lot at being left out of the detail, when presently comes a second detail: Second Lieutenant Treadwell, Sergeant Ogle, Corporal Funk, and twenty privates, of whom you, Jenkins, are one. As you get ready, you adopt stern resolves, stiffen that upper lip, and confide a short message for some one to one of the survivors, in case, as you proudly hint, you should not return. The survivor rewards you with a pressure of the hand, and a look of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... up. It shone obliquely down into all that rock-lined basin, surrounded by the stern, forbidding hills—the ancient, burned-out furnace of gold that man was reheating with his passions. Afar in all directions the lighted tents presented a ghostly unreality, their canvas walls illumined by the candles glowing within. A jargon of dance-hall ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... Pierre Fontaine drove his pole against the bank and held the stern of the boat against the current. This thrust the bow in, till a nimble breed climbed ashore with the painter and ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... the German colors appeared at the stern of the approaching steamer, and the signal flag, which at the same time was quickly hoisted at the foretopmast, proclaimed the ship to be the German steamer Danzig, hailing from Hong-Kong. Immediately afterwards a boat was lowered from the ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... Devereux's stern, low voice shook ever so little as he spoke those last words; and we both sat very silent after them for a good while. Only when he could trust his utterance ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... abideth in Christ sinneth not. Whosoever sinneth hath not seen him, neither known him. Little children, let no man deceive you. He that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil." So sharp, and stern, and strictly virtuous is apostolic religion, as displayed in these letters. Is it possible then that these converted heathens did really even approach this standard of morality? Did this gospel of Christ actually produce any such ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... apertures, which might be supposed to light the staircase, that doubtless climbed the interior towards the battlemented and machicolated summit. With this last-mentioned warlike garniture upon its stern old head and brow, the tower seemed evidently a stronghold of times long past. Many a crossbowman had shot his shafts from those windows and loop-holes, and from the vantage height of those gray battlements; many ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... constellations gliding together through the silent sky, Arcturus, the rainy Hyades and the twin Oxen, and scans Orion in his armour of gold. When he sees the clear sky quite unbroken, he gives from the stern his shrill signal; we disencamp and explore the way, and spread the wings of our sails. And now reddening Dawn had chased away the stars, when we descry afar dim hills and the low line of Italy. Achates first raises the cry of Italy; and with joyous ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... my countrymen, and tell me what you see. You see a fair domain of forest, mountain, plain, and fertile valleys, sweeping from ocean to ocean. Look from the sturdy rocks of old New England, pledged to posterity by the stern religious hardihood of the Pilgrim Fathers, across the corn-bearing midland country, that land of milk and honey, won for us by the pluck and endurance of the indomitable pioneers, to where in sunshine roll the ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... self-possession, but his face was stern and his manner abstracted. Even the marked and careful kindness of his friends seemed secretly to annoy him, for it constantly suggested the something by which it had been prompted. Mr. Alfred Barton, however, whether under the influence of Fortune's friendship, ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... seeking her grace by bowing down unto him with her head. "If, O Lord, this is not to be without me, then thy command I place upon my head. Listen, however, to what I say. Let covetousness, wrath, malice, jealousy, quarrel, folly and shamelessness, and other stern passions tear the bodies of ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... lieutenant of the county; and in the disturbed districts, to give to magistrates a power of seizing arms believed to be collected for unlawful purposes, and also to apprehend and detain persons so carrying arms. All these bills met with stern opposition, except that for the prevention of secret military training. A clause in the act concerning blasphemous and seditious libels, which decreed the punishment of transportation on a second ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... with some extraordinary dream of coming back to Bladesover, stern, powerful, after the fashion of Coriolanus. I do not recall the details, but I have no doubt ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... turned him ill with loathing and contempt. Brutality in any form was horrible to him, and the thought of the pretty, spiritual child under the control of the coarse, stern man was almost more than he could bear. Then memory added fuel to the present. It was that man who had conjured up some kind of opposition to his mother—had made living problems harder for her until she had won the confidence of others. The man must be, Travers ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... pigs," said the girl in a subdued mutter, and then she went on to recount, quaintly and in a half incoherent jumble, the salient facts of her life. I glanced at Mick. He was leaning forward, peering through another slit. His face had its old set look; stern, condemnatory. Twice I had had to reach out and grip his wrist. He wanted to interfere; I was ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... came where the corpse lay, she stood for some moments looking down upon it without uttering a sound, nor was there any emotion in the fixed gaze of her eye. She had been brought up in a stern and nowise pitiful school. She made neither solemn reflection, nor uttered hope which her theology forbade ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... instant only, and the old habit of reverence quickly effaced it. But he had exposed her weakness; had forced her to see it, naked and pitiful, with no chivalry—either manly or brotherly—covering it; and seeing it with nothing to depend upon, she learned for the first time in her life the high, stern lesson ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch |
