"Onlooker" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Laundry presents another aspect to the onlooker, and he doubtless decides on the spur of the moment that all is drudgery here. Girls are then assorting countless pieces received on Mondays from students and teachers. They are placing the assorted articles ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... had arrived in the room. They exhibited that Southern vivacity which is a trifle tiresome to the onlooker, and they all listened to themselves while they spoke. The Neapolitan and two or three of his friends were introduced to Caesar; but they showed him a certain ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... loftiness of her spirit and the generous nature of her impulses. In person she was tall and as she leaned to take Violet's hand, the difference between them brought out the salient points in each, to the great admiration of the one onlooker. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... not monks they will be libertines," remained with her. Doubtless Heath knew himself. She thought of those who have pursued their art through wildness—Heath's expression—with an inflexibility quite marvellous, an order in the midst of disorder, which to the onlooker seems no less than a miracle. But they were surely Bohemians born, and full of characteristics that were racial. Such characteristics did not exist in Heath, she thought. She pondered. He was surely not a Bohemian. And yet he did not ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... man who had called himself Andy, lying now at ease upon his bed of leaves, one great arm underneath his head, the injured hand nursed upon his broad breast. Those big eyes which had so appalled Kerry upon a first view yesterday were closed. The onlooker noted with a sort of wonder how sumptuous were the fringes of their curtains, long and purple—black, like the thick, arched brows above. To speak truly, Kerry, although he was a respectable member of the police force, had the artistic temperament. The harmony of outline, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... All four were civilization's triumphs, and if you persist that a command of the English language is part of our inheritance, one can only reply that beauty is almost always dumb. Male beauty in association with female beauty breeds in the onlooker a sense of fear. Often have I seen them—Helen and Jimmy—and likened them to ships adrift, and feared for my own little craft. Or again, have you ever watched fine collie dogs couchant at twenty yards' distance? As she passed him his cup there was ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... at his tone, and Dr. Stone, an interested onlooker, marveled at the fleeting flash of disdain which lighted her dark eyes. Stone's interest grew. The McIntyre family had always been particularly congenial, and the devotion of Colonel McIntyre (left a widower when the twins were in short frocks) to his daughters had been ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... General Trochu, the Governor of the capital, did not mention Napoleon's name in his proclamation to Paris. He himself hardly dared to send any messages. After having been obliged to surrender the supreme command, he followed the army, like a mock emperor, a kind of onlooker, a superfluous piece on the board. People said of him: "On croit qu'il se promene un ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... As a matter of fact, she was glad when any casual onlooker confirmed her own secret hopes as to the seriousness ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... her war work by an onlooker, and a slight sketch of Miss Macnaughtan's character, may form an appropriate ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... silver "pesos" were exchanged over the results. But it was cruel work, and the crouching spectators were often scattered right and left by the furious birds, whilst on one occasion a too venturesome onlooker received a rather ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... inquiry as to the absence of Lady Borrodaile was met by reference to Sophia. In short, where other attractive husbands brought a boring wife, Lord Borrodaile brought an undecorative daughter. While to the onlooker nearly every aspect of this particular young woman would seem destined to offend a beauty-loving, critical taste like that of Borrodaile, he was probably served, as other mortals are, by that philosophy of the ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... copiousness, their clearness, their finish—and in all these respects they are truly admirable—but they strike us even more by the semi-poetic feeling that transforms the mere representation of a process into an animated scene of human life, stirring the sympathy and touching the imagination of the onlooker as by something dramatic. The bustle, the dexterity, the alert force of the iron foundry, the glass furnace, the gunpowder mill, the silk calendry are as skilfully reproduced as the more tranquil toil of the dairywoman, the embroiderer, the confectioner, the setter of types, the compounder of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... continually fresh supplies of warriors added to the forces of the assailants, so that the danger of the situation was greatly increased. Diaz, an onlooker, thus wrote: ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... never failed to chain the interest of the onlooker. The furious galloping of the Indian braves—Sioux, Arapahoe, Brule, and Cheyenne, all in war paint and feathers; the free dash of the Mexicans and cowboys, as they follow the Indians into line at break-neck speed; the black-bearded Cossacks of the Czar's light cavalry; the Riffian Arabs on ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... this, at the apex of his career, behind the scenes of the greatest World Congress ever held, following the greatest War the world had ever known. And he had been behind the scenes as had no other man, in Europe as a privileged onlooker with both belligerents, and in America as the confidant ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... apiece. Hahn laid the fingers of his right hand lightly across the top of the case, the fingers of his left hand curled about it. It had come down to the last turn of the deal again. Every player and onlooker knew what the three cards were—a queen, a five and a deuce. The checking-board showed that the queen had lost twice and won once, the five had won three times and the deuce had won twice and lost once. Most of the players shifted their bets accordingly, the queen to win, the five and ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... the onlooker was about to rush forward, for what purpose he had but the vaguest idea. But even as he took the first step he felt himself seized forcibly by the arm from behind. And Diane's ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... sleeping man than suddenly to be enveloped in a mass of cold, clammy canvas. Mr. Jerome, in Three Men in a Boat, speaks amusingly of his efforts at putting up a tent; by the same token, his description as an onlooker of the efforts of sixteen sleepy but infuriated soldiers, indifferently protected by a ground-sheet against the cold blast and the pouring rain, struggling to erect a tent in ankle-deep mud would have been deliriously comic. One ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... look at the curves of, the blossom-like cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful, but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker might be; [289] but that head does not really belong to the discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to compare with that version in the British Museum the most authentic of all derivations from ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... agent at Hamburg had prevented foreigners from investing in the Scots company. English colonists had been forbidden to aid the Scottish adventurers. Two hundred thousand pounds, several ships, and many lives had been lost. "It is very like 1641," wrote an onlooker, so fierce were the passions that raged against William. The news of the surrender of the colonists increased the indignation. The king refused (November 1700) to gratify the Estates by regarding the Darien colony as a legal enterprise. To do so was to incur war with Spain and the anger of his English ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... Her sweet young face was looking drawn, and, as she had told her that very morning, she looked like a woman who had gone through all the trials of rearing a young family on insufficient means. Now she was here she meant to have it out with Eve. She was going to abandon her role of sympathetic onlooker. She was going to delve below the surface, and learn the reason of Eve's present ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... that two ropes were now fastened to the mainmast of the "Trident," their other ends being fixed to a heavy anchor buried in the sand on shore. One of these ropes was the thick hawser, the other the whip; but as this whip was an endless or revolving rope, as has been explained, to an onlooker it appeared that there were three ropes stretched between the vessel and the shore, two of ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... officer, who all along had remained silent and simply an onlooker, was seated on the top of the wood box, rapping his heels on the side of it and whistling softly to himself with a look on his face which might have been taken for one of blissful ignorance or secret ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... in watching the dance. It was a wonderful performance, sensuous and weirdly unusual. He had never seen a dance exactly like it before. The violin notes sounded like actual words, and the dancer answered them with responsive movements of her limbs, so that without speech the onlooker saw a love-drama enacted before his eyes. Chaldea—so he interpreted the dance—swayed gracefully from the hips, without moving her feet, in the style of a Nautch girl. She was waiting for some one, since to right and left she swung with a delicate hand curved behind her ear. Suddenly ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... constellation, is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there is thus no 'all,' there are only the 'eaches'—at least ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... part of my time in this college that I intend to become a priest. Marry and bring up children, or enter the Church! There is nothing between, so you say, having regard for my Catholicism. But there is an intermediate state, the onlooker. However strange it may seem to you, I do assure you that no man in the world has less vocation for the priesthood than I. I am merely an onlooker, the world is my ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... with a hat drawn over his face and with a finger laid on his lip, as though he had cause to be silent, or to wish others so. The man had a forked beard and a kind of secret smile, as if he mocked the onlooker; and he seemed unpleasantly natural to the boy, as though he divined his thought. He was half minded to put the stone back; but the secrecy of the thing pleased him. Moreover as he held the stone to the light, it seemed ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... head. Nor had Michael thought about the man at all, much less attempted any analysis of him. Something had been wrong with that hand—the perfunctory way in which it had touched him under a show of heartiness that could well deceive the onlooker. The feel of it had not been right. There had been no warmth in it, no heart, no communication of genuine good approach from the brain and the soul of the man of which it was the telegraphic tentacle and transmitter. In short, the message or feel had not been a good message or feel, and Michael ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... happy thing, if the certain ruin she is bringing on her husband's head is cut short by the needful interference of Sir Cresswell Cresswell? There are cases in which tarring and feathering would soothe the moral sense of the right-minded onlooker. And even where things are not so bad as in the case of which we have been thinking, it remains the social curse of this age, that people with a few hundreds a year determinedly act in various respects as if they had as many thousands. The dinner given by a man with eight hundred a year, in certain ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... about feebly on the thin neck devoid of muscles. The toothless gums chew whatever comes along. The wondering eyes look feebly, aimlessly about, without focus or concentration. The future human being, to the cold-blooded onlooker, is a useless little atom added to the ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... of the pursuer's presence; always he could see the picture of Spurling's uplifted face and the pleading that was in his eyes as the assailant, with his back turned towards the onlooker, poised the axe above his head. That he might not share that fate he broke away into the greyness, tripping over snow ridges, falling into drifts, and bruising his body against the trunks of trees in the madness ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... him. The American sharpness was not always so keen as it sometimes seemed. His face would have betrayed his uneasiness to the dullest onlooker. ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pine stump, beside the blaze, which he was feeding with a hemlock bough, sat a battered-looking yet lively personage. Had he been standing upright upon the remnant of trunk, he would certainly, in the bright but changeful firelight, have deceived an onlooker into believing him to be a continuation of it; for the baggy tweed trousers which he wore on his immense legs, and which partially hid his loose-fitting brogans, or woodsman's boots, his thick, knitted jersey, his ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... prudence I call in you meanness. The same thing which you call in yourselves generous living, you call in your friend filthy sensualism. That which, to the doer of it, is only righteous indignation, to the onlooker is passionate anger. That which, in the practiser of it, is no more than a due regard for the interests of his own family and himself in the future, is, to the envious lookers-on, shabbiness and meanness in money ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a boyish onlooker, as Dick faced the plate, ball in hand, "better call the game and let the Centrals play ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... searching eyes was filled with admiration for the skill and enterprise that had transplanted one of civilisation's most advanced products here on the desperate coast of Labrador. Many of the forest whispers of Sachigo had been incredible. But this left the onlooker ready to believe ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... debatable point, much as men discuss politics, and incidentally with far less heat. . . . It was a question of interest, and the fact that the Gunner had lost his leg made no difference to the matter at all. An onlooker would have listened in vain for any note ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... his chest. Such praise from the girl he loved was like divine, enchanting wine. He took her to his bosom, as they say. But the fond embrace was cut short by a snicker from the onlooker. He had not risen from the recumbent position in which Alexander's prowess had placed him. Antoinette's beloved turned angrily on him, "Get you gone, you vile dog!" he exclaimed theatrically. And then he kicked him, not ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump
... bearded man, perhaps the watchman of the closed theatre, passed along the sidewalk, going east. It was Trencher's impression that the man had gone on by without halting. However, on that point he could not be sure. What the onlooker had seen—if indeed there were an onlooker—could have been only this: Two men, one fairly tall and dressed in a sprightly fashion, one short and dark, engaged in a vehement but whispered quarrel there in the ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... An onlooker might have noticed that both of them gripped hands heartily and looked each other squarely ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... with trim round-about jackets, and were the "cynosure of all eyes." Their parting words were said to their lady friends in the intervals of the music, and the pretty dramatic effect of it all suggested to an onlooker the famous parting scene in "Belgium's capital" which "Childe Harold" has made ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V1 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Thus, to the onlooker, and in accordance with the general misinterpretation of the law of karma, he will be thought to have reaped a "bad" karma, while as a matter of reality, he will be making very rapid strides on the path to godhood. Said ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him, compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon. Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward to that side ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... Congressional Record. Senator Allen of Nebraska quoted more than thirty authorities, ranging from the Pandects of Justinian to enlivening doggerel poetry. Feeling ran high. In the West, Jones, Allen and others were looked upon as heroes; in the East, as villains. To a satirical onlooker it seemed that the nation had become insanely obsessed with the question ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... out all that was worst in both of them. It is a mistake to suppose love only elevates; it can debase. It was a mean struggle for what to an onlooker must have appeared a remarkably unsatisfying prize. The loser might well have left the conqueror to her poor triumph, even granting it had been gained unfairly. But the old, ugly, primeval passions had been ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... on the subject. Having spoken it, he gave his attention to the meal before him, and concluded it with a deliberate disregard for Kelly's depressed countenance that an onlooker might have found ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... should not have that redemption of its body for which unwittingly it groaned. And the man was one of those childlike natures which may indeed go a long time without discovering this or that external fault in themselves, patent to the eye of many an inferior onlooker—for the simple soul is the last to see its own outside—but, once they become aware of it, begin that moment to set the thing right. At the same time he had not enough of knowledge to render it easy to show him by words wherein any fault consisted—the nature, the being ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... sped along. It was not very significant, perhaps, or it would not have seemed so to the casual onlooker, but life is measured by its inward rather than its outward processes, and Kate felt herself being enriched ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... onlooker might have suspected from his expression that he had deliberately created a diversion of confusion, and was congratulating himself upon its success. "Get out?" cried he. "Not I. I go where I please and stay as long ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... the dread and the submission, or on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize opposite aspects of what lies before ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... school sick, his brain benumbed by this strange opium. The story of Louis Lambert is a monograph of his own mind. During his youth and in the moments snatched from his profession, to what did he turn his attention? Still to general ideas. We find him an interested onlooker at the quarrel of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, troubling himself about the hypothesis of the unity of creation, and still dealing with mysticism; and, in fact, his romances abound in theories. There is not one of his works from which you cannot obtain abstract thoughts ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... cap of red woollen, which had been the emblem of the emancipation of a slave in ancient Rome. One night at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre mounted the tribune, dressed with his usual elaborate neatness, and still wearing powder in his hair. An onlooker unceremoniously planted on the orator's head the red cap demanded by revolutionary etiquette. Robespierre threw the sacred symbol on the ground with a severe air, and then proceeded with a discourse of much austerity. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... Egyptian could not choose the overflow, but he chose to work and make channels for the fructifying waters, and Egypt became the land of corn. Shall man, whose soul is set in the royalty of discernment and resolve, deny his rank and say, I am an onlooker, ask no choice or purpose of me? That is the blasphemy of this time. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory. Let us contradict the blasphemy, and help to will our own better future and the better future of the world—not renounce our higher gift ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... conception. Perhaps the same may be said for 1000, though this could not be postulated with equal certainty. But what of 10,000? If that number of persons were gathered together into a single hall or amphitheatre, could an estimate be made by the average onlooker which would approximate with any degree of accuracy the size of the assembly? Or if an observer were stationed at a certain point, and 10,000 persons were to pass him in single file without his counting them ...
— The Number Concept - Its Origin and Development • Levi Leonard Conant
... To an onlooker it certainly didn't seem so simple. I never knew the meanness, the trickery, of the mining business, the sheer obstinate determination of the bigger capitalists not to make money when they might, till I heard the accounts of Jeff's different mines. Take the case of Corona Jewel. There was a ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... "Have you seen the 'Onlooker'?" he said—a journal at the time in much favor with the more educated populace. "There is a review in it that ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... from the corner trolley, and were hovering about the door self-assertively. It was most apparent to an onlooker that this was a good opportunity for an introduction, but the two young people were entirely oblivious. The man touched his hat gravely, a look of great admiration in his eyes, and said, "Good night" like a benediction. Then the girl turned and went into the plain little ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... Street was full of farmers, cows, and other animals, the majority of the former well on the road to intoxication. It is, of course, extremely painful to see a man in such a condition, but when such a person is endeavouring to count a perpetually moving drove of pigs, the onlooker's pain is sensibly diminished. Charteris strolled along the High Street observing these and other phenomena with an attentive eye. Opposite the Town Hall he was button-holed by a perfect stranger, whom, by his conversation, ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... principles which should govern high art-work, as well as new ideas as to what should constitute the equipment of the painter, and that not only as regards the technique of his art, but in the effect to be produced on the onlooker in viewing the skilled work of one who, above all accomplishments, should be lovingly and intimately in contact ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... since we had entered the house. He looked to me as if his every faculty was strained in the act of listening,—not a muscle in his body seemed to move; he was as rigid as a figure carved in stone. Presently the rigidity gave place to what, to an onlooker, seemed causeless agitation. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... there was no hope, only waiting for the end,—the waiting that saps courage from the heart of the onlooker, and makes endurance seem a thing impossible; the torture of seeing suffering that is not to be relieved; suffering that seems all unnecessary, since death is to ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... the Emperor's new projects. I began to criticize them, but remembered my rules and my benefactor's words—that a true Freemason should be a zealous worker for the state when his aid is required and a quiet onlooker when not called on to assist. My tongue is my enemy. Brothers G. V. and O. visited me and we had a preliminary talk about the reception of a new Brother. They laid on me the duty of Rhetor. I feel myself weak and unworthy. Then our talk turned ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... upon delightful paper, all about the events of twenty-four hours, in which, when you come to consider it afterwards, nothing very much happened. The heroine thought about eloping with the chauffeur, and the onlooker, who tells the tale, thought about falling in love with the sister of the same. In both cases thought is subsequently translated into action, but only after the curtains fall. Meanwhile an affair of hesitations, suggestions, moods and (as I hinted above) rather too many words. It is ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... still another psychological effect which must not be disregarded from a social point of view. It awakes to an unusual degree the impulse to imitation. The seeing of rhythmic movements starts similar motor impulses in the mind of the onlooker. It is well known that from the eleventh to the sixteenth century Europe suffered from dancing epidemics. They started from pathological cases of St. Vitus' dance and released in the excitable crowds cramplike impulses to imitative movements. But we hear ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... "that was Helen Harley. She was with me when you came. She may have known your footstep, too, and if not, she guessed it from my face, so she went out at once. She did not wish to be a mere curious onlooker when a mother was greeting her son, come home after three years ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... Tuileries the red Swiss look to their priming. Amid a double rank of National Guards the royal family "marches" to the assembly. The Swiss stand to their post, peaceable yet immovable. Three Marseillaise cannon are fired; then the Swiss also fire. One strangest patriot onlooker thinks that the Swiss, had they a commander, would beat; the name of him, Napoleon Bonaparte. Having none——Honour to you, brave men, not martyrs, and yet almost more. Your work was to die, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... an onlooker would have seemed interminable, the two men faced each other. Up from the street came the ring of a heavy hammer on a sweet-voiced anvil, as Jim Donovan, the blacksmith, sharpened anew the breaking ploughs which were battling the prairie ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... why she moves!" marveled an onlooker. "That tug looks like a water bug 'itched to ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... fashionable society amidst sports and amusements, scandals and intrigues, every race and every tongue contributing its share of good and evil. A motley crowd swarms their streets, presenting to the eye of an onlooker the picturesque spectacle that the contrast of costumes always produces. They are people of different colours, dress and education, attracted thither by the loadstone of wealth. The fortunate, the clever, the unscrupulous have already gained the victory ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... presently aware that someone was telling him that nobody was to blame. Details were volunteered, and he listened quietly, like a dispassionate onlooker. "Hits you pretty ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... the playgoer of the nineteenth or twentieth century. To the latter Shakespeare is presented in a dazzling plenitude of colour. Music punctuates not merely intervals between scenes and acts, but critical pauses in the speeches of the actors. Pictorial tableaux enthral the most callous onlooker. Very striking is the contrast offered by the methods of representation accepted with enthusiasm by the Elizabethan playgoer and those deemed essential by the fashionable modern manager. There seems a relish of barbarism in the ancient system ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... the Governor did not proceed with his proposed investigation. No explanation was given, but to the onlooker it was clear that one of two reasons, or perhaps both, was the cause of silence on the part of the chief lawmaking body of the state—either the lifted curtain would reveal "the pot calling the kettle black," or so extensive and noxious a ...
— Woman Suffrage By Federal Constitutional Amendment • Various
... projecting upper stories, its shops with their swinging signs, and noisy apprentices crying their masters' wares or playing or quarrelling in the open street, and its throngs of passers by, from the blind beggar to the gay court gallant, provided a shifting and endless panorama of entertainment to the onlooker, which pretty Mistress Cherry certainly appreciated, if no one else in that grave Puritan household did the like. But possibly she thought that her aunt's question must not be too literally answered, for she hastily skipped across the panelled chamber, ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Violet's return seemed to have a happy effect upon the invalid. Never had daughter been more devoted, more loving, fuller of sweet cares and consolations for a dying mother, than this daughter. Seeing the mother and child together in this supreme hour, no onlooker could have divined that these two had been ever less fondly united than mother and child should be. The feeble and fading woman seemed to lean on the strong bright girl, to gain a reflected strength from her fulness of life and vigour. It ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... many things, much depends upon the way that illusions are cherished. When this dramatic sense is bestowed upon a heavy-handed, imperceptive, egotistical person, it becomes a terrible affliction to other people, unless indeed the onlooker possesses the humorous spectatorial curiosity; when it becomes a matter of delight to find a person behaving characteristically, striking the hour punctually, and being, as Mr. Bennet thought of Mr. Collins, ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... seven in the evening, and the crowd began to murmur at the long delay. At length the criminal reappeared. An onlooker who saw him go to the Hotel de Ville, and who was carried by the movement of the crowd to the foot of the scaffold, says that when handed over to the executioner he took off his clothes himself. He kissed the instrument of punishment with ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - DERUES • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... but some are blinder than others who use the various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the "radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than ...
— The Mind in the Making - The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform • James Harvey Robinson
... walking near barracks; see man looking quietly at building. Suddenly fires the sentry with his long distance rifle, so that the straight onward through the harmless onlooker's heart and through my never sufficiently to be regretted right arm passing bullet in the remote distance a child kills. Long live our good Emperor and his glorious army! Carried ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 16, 1892 • Various
... knows) sleep in their wigs. The latter are the swells, and include the judges; whom, however, we have seen in the public thoroughfares without their wigs, a horrible sight that has doubtless led many an onlooker to crime. ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... for their mother, smothered her with "Bunnie" hugs, and then from the shelter of her arms cast quick, questioning glances across the fireplace. There was in their glance a keenness, a curiosity, almost amounting to awe, which would at once have arrested the attention of an onlooker. It was not in the least the smiling glance of recognition which is accorded to a member of the household on meeting again after one of the short separations of the day; it resembled far more the half-nervous, ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... The anger of the onlooker was so intense that he did not see Gowan riding towards him from the left. The puncher dismounted and came forward, his cold ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... believed him to have committed some great crime; but none rightly knew his history, and his present sanctity and power and holiness were never doubted. A single look into that stern, worn, powerful face, with the coal-black eyes gleaming in their deep sockets, was enough to convince the onlooker that the man was intensely, even terribly in earnest. His was the leading spirit in that small and austere community, and he began at once to exercise a strong influence upon each of the three youths so unexpectedly thrown across ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... most startling and revolutionary views of Blake. For instance, in the poems called "Holy Thursday" in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, he paints first of all with infinite grace and tenderness the picture of the orphan charity children going to church, as it would appear to the ordinary onlooker. ...
— Mysticism in English Literature • Caroline F. E. Spurgeon
... in his suite, to serve, if needful, as hostages. The Carians and Ionians, who felt themselves disgraced by the defection of their captain, called loudly for them just before the commencement of the action. They were killed immediately in front of the lines, their father being a powerless onlooker; their blood was thrown into a cask half full of wine, and the horrible mixture was drunk by the soldiers, who then furiously charged the enemy's battalions. The issue of the struggle was for a long time doubtful, but the Egyptians were ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... Billy Falstar had so luridly described was enacted again and again, until he felt as if he, Jude, had been the onlooker. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... being an onlooker," the Prince reflected. "There go the spirit of Russia and the spirit of Germany. You dabble in these things, my friend Dorminster. Can you guess what they are met for—for ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "on" a little before he is wanted, Miss Terry throws her arms round him and kisses the pretty little fellow tenderly with, "There, run away for a moment, darling; we're not quite ready for you." It is this sweet and all-pervading womanliness of Miss Terry's which fascinates the onlooker. Suddenly, from some dark recess, her voice floats out with an eminently practical suggestion, a shrewd idea as to effect, some playful query. It comes from every quarter of the theatre, and is marvellously thrilling, with all ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... August morning, in the plentitude of his success, lounging in a wicker chair on the shady lawn of the Hotel de l'Europe. He wore white buckskin shoes—I begin with these as they were the first point of his person to attract the notice of the onlooker—lilac silk socks, a white flannel suit with a zig-zag black stripe, a violet tie secured by a sapphire and diamond pin, and a rakish panama hat. On his knees lay the Matin; the fingers of his left hand held a fragrant ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... dispassionate onlooker from another planet might have found it curious to notice, in contrast to this uniformity, that no two women dressed alike on these occasions, and no woman who could help it wore the same gown twice. Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Carew, to be sure, wore their "little ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... pattern regular as diaper. By this time the Collector, when he glanced up from his book, had an ample view of the square, for the crowd had thinned. The punishment of the stocks was no such rare spectacle in Port Nassau; and five hours is a tedious while even for the onlooker—a very long while indeed to stand weighing the fun of throwing a handful of filth against the cost of a thrashing. The men-folk, reasoning thus, had melted away to their longshore avocations. The women, always more patient—as to their nature ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... interrupted Connie. "Was it canned milk? 'Cause if it was you don't need to worry. I've got about a dozen cans out there on the toboggan. Wait and I'll get it." He turned to the Indian who had been a silent onlooker. "Come on, Joe, crawl into your outfit. While I get the grub and blankets off the toboggans, you rustle the wood and water—and go kind of heavy on the wood, 'cause, believe me, there ain't any thermometer going to tell us how ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... teacher offers little excitement to the onlooker; and all that can be done here is to give a slight sketch of the various directions in which Moorman's energies went out. The first task that lay before him was to organise the new department which had been put into his hands, to make English ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... the photograph. If it were at all a likeness, the woman who gazed frankly out upon the onlooker from the card-mount must have been a striking creature indeed. It was an amateur production, for the detectives were baffled in that no professional photographer's signature or studio was appended. Across a corner of the ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... the Englishwoman was his wife, his treatment of myself was certainly not warranted, and I was not the man to play zero. I could not disguise the fact, however, that any onlooker would have pronounced me to be playing ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... when the lovers met, in April 1826, an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that Bulwer's "bearing had that aristocratic something bordering on hauteur" which reminded the onlooker "of the passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The same observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the loveliness of Miss Wheeler, judged that it would be best "to regard her as we do some beautiful caged wild creature of the woods—at a safe and secure distance." It would ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... he told the tale of the end of Morgan plainly and in few words, yet in such skilful wise that as he spoke I could seem to see once more our hall and myself and Elfrida at the dais, even as though I were an onlooker. ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler
... year after year, in spite of difficulties and discouragements, the careful systematic effort to inform and arouse the home church—these are marked features of the present foreign-mission campaign. They are such as to awaken the deepest admiration of any thoughtful onlooker. In all of this the modern Church is ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... structure of man ought to work, and keeping the bearings right and the machinery properly levelled up. Never mind. Next time you have use for a miracle, it'll be along on schedule time, without you knowing what name you need to call it. You're that sort." With that curious, onlooker's smile of his and with a nod of farewell, ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... who sees most of the game and Aunt Amy was an ideal onlooker. Always self-effacing and silent, she was now more silent and self-effacing still. Consequently the principal actors tended to forget their parts when in her presence. No one explained anything to Aunt Amy but no one concealed anything from her. She simply "didn't matter." So far as the playing ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... engineer for every pound of steam—and at that moment (I am told) much of the machinery was already red-hot. The ship was sheered well to starboard of the Vandalia, the last remaining cable slipped. For a time—and there was no onlooker so cold-blooded as to offer a guess at its duration—the Calliope lay stationary; then gradually drew ahead. The highest speed claimed for her that day is of one sea-mile an hour. The question of times and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... what should have been a festive farewell banquet. And Comus, in whose honour the feast was given, did not contribute much towards its success; though his spirits seemed strung up to a high pitch his merriment was more the merriment of a cynical and amused onlooker than of one who responds to the gaiety of his companions. Sometimes he laughed quietly to himself at some chance remark of a scarcely mirth-provoking nature, and Lady Veula, watching him narrowly, came to the conclusion that an element of fear was blended with his seemingly ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... August 24, 1914. He was accompanied by Field Marshal Baron von der Goltz, recently appointed Governor General of Belgium. Previous to the former Balkan War he had been employed in reorganizing the Turkish army. An onlooker in Namur thus describes the German Field Marshal:—"An elderly gentleman covered with orders, buttoned in an overcoat up to his nose, above which gleamed ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... dress meant much more than it does now. Dress helped to tell the story. Men then might not dress according to their likes and dislikes, they were obliged to dress according to their rank. Therefore it helped the Elizabethan onlooker to understand the play when he saw a king, a courtier, or a butcher come on to the stage dressed as he knew a king, a courtier, or a butcher dressed. Had he seen a man of the sixth century dressed as a man of the sixth ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... cases that of death—which was at once carried out, the only difference consisting in the mode of execution; some of the unfortunate wretches being secured to the crucifixion tree in one way, some in another; but it was very difficult for a mere onlooker to decide which of the plans adopted inflicted the most suffering. These victims, it should be explained, were doomed to remain fastened to the tree until death should ensue from hunger, thirst, exposure, and the ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... this time the little girl had been but a mildly interested onlooker. She was seated, with the other States, just behind the row of prominent citizens, listening less to the exercises than to the buzz about her, and refraining from talking only when the band rendered a number. The colonel's son was down in front and facing her, so she divided ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... immediately made themselves clear. Firstly, he was viewing the world through literature—through works of fiction in some cases, through guide-books in more. Everything was a spectacle, with himself quite outside as an onlooker; and nothing was a spectacle until it had been ranged and appraised in print. Secondly, if he was outside of things, America was still farther outside; it existed as a remote province not yet drawn into the ...
— On the Stairs • Henry B. Fuller
... own beautiful little angel, It is quite'—what's this? hop-picking? no—'heart-breaking that I can't get back to you for another week. Tobacco Trust was beaten by a short head, as of course you know, but Onlooker is a dead certainty ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... had successfully hidden his body in the coal-pile. He had been no comrade of other boys or of girls, and his acquaintances of a recent period were only a few fellow-invalids and the nurses at the Hood Sanitarium. All his life Bibbs had kept himself to himself—he was but a shy onlooker in the world. Nevertheless, the startled gaze he bent upon the unexpected lady before him had causes other than his shyness and her unexpectedness. For Mary Vertrees had been a shining figure in the little world of late given ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... tail puffed up and swollen, and lashing restlessly from side to side, each muscle tense and strung, and an undulating movement perceptible like the motions of a huge snake, a crouching tiger at bay is a sight that strikes a certain chill to the heart of the onlooker. When he bounds forward, with a roar that reverberates among the mazy labyrinths of the interminable jungle, he tests the steadiest nerve and almost daunts ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... will have a tendency to draw the eyes of the audience to that point also. The sitters or audience will always look at the point closely watched by the magician—their eyes have a tendency to follow his, and wherever he looks, there will the onlooker look also. Needless to say, the magician makes use of this fact, and many tricks and illusions are dependent upon it for their successful ac- complishment. Whenever the magician or medium looks intently at one hand, therefore, the OTHER hand should ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... seldom sees. Its sluggish current bears along remarkable knowledge, great reflection, and the imagination of a fertile as well as a precocious brain. It is a stream which carries with it things new and old, and serves to stir the mind of the onlooker with unwonted thoughts. Were it but one fourth as long, it would still remain a favorite poem. Even now it has passed through numerous editions, and been but lately republished in sumptuous form after fifty years of life; and in the catalogue of higher metaphysico-religious ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... unconsciously crooning her song, strong and unquestioned at the centre of her own universe. And Gudrun felt herself outside. Always this desolating, agonised feeling, that she was outside of life, an onlooker, whilst Ursula was a partaker, caused Gudrun to suffer from a sense of her own negation, and made her, that she must always demand the other to be aware of her, to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... his face, the young fellow kicks, struggles and puffs up the dust. Meanwhile a tall, dour man in a straw hat is rolling up a shirt-sleeve, and alternately bending and stretching a long arm, whilst a lithe, white-headed young stripling is hopping, sparrow-like, from one onlooker to another, and exclaiming ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... very interesting and pretty, is quite mirth-provoking to the onlooker, especially if indulged in by a number of swimmers. Unlike the vast majority of tricks performed in the water, it does not call for ability to float well, the only qualification being that one must ...
— Swimming Scientifically Taught - A Practical Manual for Young and Old • Frank Eugen Dalton and Louis C. Dalton
... winter was tormenting the ancient haggard boughs, and the trees looked as if they were weary of the world, and longing after the garden of God; yet more when the snow lay heavy upon their branches, sorely trying their aged strength to support its oppression, and giving the onlooker a vague sense of what the world would be if God were gone from it—then the old avenue was a place from which one with more imagination than courage would be ready to haste away, and seek instead the abodes of men. But Donal, ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... meet him at dinner—Father Healy, Mr. Green, Dr. Marsh, and a few others. Not that he feared to face the town, but because he could not bear to enter it as a mere visitor; to stand, as it were, on one side, as an onlooker ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... to ascertain that no onlooker was near. As soon as the sleigh was 'round the corner of the street I hailed a public conveyance and directed the driver to take ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... and his opportunities were such as gave him all ease as an onlooker. He saw closely those who sat with knit brows and cautiously hovering hand at the great chess-board which is formed by ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... only a clerk, and an onlooker, as you may say. But if you accept MacMorrogh's bid, and he doesn't do the square thing by you and Mr. Frisbie, you may call me in as a witness, Mr. Ford. Does that clear ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... much did the persecution of this poor man affect her, that an onlooker would have been compelled to seek the cause in some yet deeper sympathy than that commonly felt for the oppressed, even by women. And such a sympathy existed, strange as it may seem, between the beautiful girl (for many called her a bonnie lassie) and this "tatter of humanity". ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... delegate was invited by the President to take the platform; she did so with quiet dignity, but scarcely had she reached the stand when all around her on the platform itself, and among the officers of the Convention, began that disgraceful row, which led an onlooker in the gallery to cry out, "Are those men drunk?" I have no wish to dwell upon that cowardly transaction, but this remark I am bound in honor to make: If any man says that Antoinette Brown forced the subject of "Woman's Rights" on that Temperance ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... Barrow sitting motionless, sternly agreeing, and beyond him Jenny Barrow and then Elspeth and Gilian. Out of kirk, in the kirkyard, he gave them good day. He studied to keep strangeness out of his manner; an onlooker would note only a somewhat silent, preoccupied laird. He might be pondering the sermon. Mr. M'Nab's sermons were calculated to arouse alarm and concern—or, in the case of the justified, stern triumph—in the human breast. White Farm made no quarrel with ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... together, and Monte grubbed hungrily for every look she vouchsafed him, for every word she tossed him. She had been more than ordinarily vivacious, spurred on partly by Beatrice and partly by Peter. Monte had felt himself merely an onlooker. That, in fact, was all he was. That was all he ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... by a peep through the front drawing-room window that he was positively at watch behind the vines, I went directly to the kitchen, procured a chair and carried it into the library, where I put it to a use that, to an onlooker's eye, would have appeared very peculiar. Planting it squarely on the hearthstone,—not without some secret perturbation as to what the results might be to myself,—I mounted it and took down the engraving which I have already described as hanging ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... one or two other girls raised their previous offers. The price for the coral rose and rose. Soon a large sum was offered for it, and still the bids kept rising. Rosalind and Maggie were once more alone in the field, and now any onlooker could perceive that it was not the desire to obtain the pretty ornaments, but the wish for victory which ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... not as easy as an onlooker often thinks to shoot an animal, even a large one, in rapid motion, particularly among trees and brush; something constantly gets in the way. Both animals were now tearing along the brink of the deep stream, stumbling headlong one second, up the next, plunging on. As often ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... out, The Emperor, to be rid of a dangerous onlooker who could give an account of the disposition of his forces, suggested to Count Haugwitz that it was not very safe for him to remain between two armies which were about to come to blows, and persuaded him to go to ...
— The Memoirs of General the Baron de Marbot, Translated by - Oliver C. Colt • Baron de Marbot
... was that Edgar Caswall was, if not mad, close to the border-line. Madness in its first stage—monomania—is a lack of proportion. So long as this is general, it is not always noticeable, for the uninspired onlooker is without the necessary means of comparison. But in monomania the errant faculty protrudes itself in a way that may not be denied. It puts aside, obscures, or takes the place of something else—just as the head of a pin placed before the ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... onlooker, he would have thought Jerry had gone suddenly mad. He rushed frantically about, turning and twisting his course, now his nose to the ground, now up in the air, whining as frantically as he rushed, leaping abruptly at right angles as new scents reached him, scurrying here ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... onlooker, he ran up to Nevada, where the new gold-mining boom was fairly started—"just to try a flutter," as he phrased it to himself. The flutter on the Tonopah Stock Exchange lasted just ten days, during which time his smashing, wild-bull game ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... back to the upper air presently, followed by a cheer from the mine force below. The miners had watched Steering perform one of those supernatural feats of strength and endurance that an onlooker can never explain afterward. Usually the performer knows that the thing was a matter of ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... serve the purpose of prefaces to the Jugurtha and Catiline of Sallust, we find something of the same sad tone, but it does not ring true like Livy's exordium; Sallust was a man of altogether coarser fibre, and seems to be rather assuming than expressing the genuine feeling of a saddened onlooker. In one of his earliest poems, written perhaps after the Perusian war of 41 B.C.[583] even the lively Horace was moved to voice the prevailing depression, fancifully urging that the Italian people should migrate, like the Phocaeans of old, to the far west, where, as Sertorius ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... God, even more truly than other men, have contending principles fighting within them. It was the same Apostle who with oaths denied that he 'knew the man,' and in a passion of clinging love and penitence fell at His feet; but for the mere onlooker it would be hard to say which was the true man and which would conquer. The sons of God, like other men, have to express themselves in words which are never closely enough fitted to their thoughts and feelings. David's penitence ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... doctrines with a shake of their metallic heads. An onlooker would have fancied he heard the ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... To the onlooker who does not know its hazards faro is a funereal game. The dealer slides one card and then a second from the box. The case-keeper moves a button or two on his rack. The dealer in the meantime is paying winners and collecting chips from losers, all with the utmost listlessness. In his high chair ...
— When the West Was Young • Frederick R. Bechdolt
... to take in the details that I have described before I was enveloped in the folds of the fog. I mean this quite literally, for I am firmly convinced that an onlooker from behind would have seen the grey masses fold in like a sheet when I drove against them. It must have looked as if a driver were driving against a canvas moving in a slight breeze—canvas light and loose enough to be held ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... man's face lit up with a quick appreciation, and the flash of his eyes as he looked at her would have told any onlooker that he felt here was a girl in a thousand, a girl with an angel spirit, if ever such a one walked ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill |
