"Sensuous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... master. To be critical in dealing with so successful an achievement of restoration and translation is difficult. Yet it may be admitted once and for all that Toschi has not unfrequently enfeebled his original. Under his touch Correggio loses somewhat of his sensuous audacity, his dithyrambic ecstasy, and approaches the ordinary standard of prettiness and graceful beauty. The Diana of the Camera di S. Paolo, for instance, has the strong calm splendour of a goddess: the same Diana in Toschi's engraving seems about to smile with girlish joy. In ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... attached itself to man. But from all that is deepest and noblest in man it was shut off by the reaction from Puritanism, by the weariness of religious strife, by the disbelief that had sprung from religious controversy; and it limited itself rigidly to man's outer life, to his sensuous enjoyment, his toil and labour, his politics, his society. The limitation, no doubt, had its good sides; with it, if not of it, came a greater correctness and precision in the use of words and phrases, a clearer and more ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... the cushions and drank in the sensuous loveliness of the night—the warm, scented air, the velvet and diamond sky, the fragrant orange groves—the dim, mysterious olive trees, the looming hills, the wine-colored, silken sea, with its faint edging of lace on the dusky sweep of the bay. The spirit of the South overspread ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... literary work. Abstruse essays were begun under the impression that he had something brilliant and original to say, but before they were finished a new train of thought led him captive. He dreamed delicately sensuous dreams, lapped in luxurious idleness, the rooms stifling with odorous hot-house flowers. He went clothed in soft raiment, he sunned himself in languid seas of imagination, and was too indifferent to concentrate his powers upon any great faith or belief, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... unburdened minds, and spiritualize it so that the mere drawing of breath is at once a keen delight and an inwardly felt practical act of praise to the God of a strong and beautiful world. Morris too has his sensuous element, but it is utterly unlike Chaucer's; it is dilettante, it is amateur sensualism; it is not strong, though sometimes excessive, and it is nervously afraid of that satiety which is at once its chief temptation and its most ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... meretricious accomplishments. Like all races in which the savage naturally predominates, they delight in the glitter of personal decoration, the allurements of music, dancing, and the gambling-table, and all the luxuries of idleness and sensuous folly—traits which they share pretty generally with the rest of mankind. Tropical gardens, where the thermometer is twenty degrees below zero; feasts and frolics that in a single night may leave them beggars for life; military shows; the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... enlightened contempt for the sensuous comfort he was taking in the fleshpots of the Hermitage, there was in it one element which he did not analyze merely ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... brown hair, dampened by the lake, behind her ears. They showed delicately against the two shining masses. Her forehead and chin were of noble and courageous shape. If there was fault, it was in the breadth and height of brows masterful rather than feminine. She had not one delicious sensuous charm to lure man. Her large eyes were blotted with a hopeless blankness. She waited to see what ...
— The King Of Beaver, and Beaver Lights - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... starved soul of the child was filled with summer softness, as she slowly returned along the route she had recently come, thinking of the beautiful young lady and the sensuous odor of the flowers which had penetrated to the innermost ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... thousands of hearts, the true Christ must die the bitter death upon the cross because the truest word that he inspired one of his dearest favorites to utter was besmirched by a flat lie, and his most beautiful poetical image destroyed by a grossly sensuous error. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... wonderful effect one may get by using the means proper to one art for expression in another, as though one were to write a book that should have the effect upon one of an opera, to allow the strange rhythm and sensuous beauty of Tristan and Isolde, for instance, to disengage itself from pages which were full of ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... lies in supposing that number, quantity and terms of that kind are applicable to any other than sensuous objects, but I cannot go further, at least not now. After all, it is possible here in London for one atom to be ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... Tristram Shandy is a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read Tristram Shandy at all. The man who objects to the Rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essence of The Ring and the Book is that it is the ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... had been realizing with curiously quickened pulses during the few minutes of waiting. On her way here, driving in an open victoria, through the soft summer evening, she had seemed to be pursued everywhere by a new world of sensuous suggestions. Of the many carriages which she had passed, hers alone seemed to savour of loneliness. She was the only beautiful woman who sat alone and companionless. In a momentary block she had seen a man ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the recipient of impressions from without. There is a field for consecration. The eye that looks upon evil, and by the look has rebellious, lustful, sensuous, foul desires excited in the heart, breaks this solemn law. The eye that among the things seen dwells with complacency on the pure, and turns from the impure as if a hot iron had been thrust into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... lower order of manifestation in the visible creation where spirit often finds itself in opposition and contrast to that which is not spirit. The highest being in this second order is man, who in inward essence is made in the image and likeness of God, but binds together in one personal life both sensuous elements and divine and spiritual elements which are always in collision and warfare with each other. Man has full freedom of choice and can swing his will over to either side—he can live upward ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... August day. Nature was trembling and fainting in the ecstasies of sensuous heat. Beside the railway the trenches which in spring were gurgling brooks were now dry and brown, and the reeds which had bent forward to kiss the water now leaned over from very weakness, dusty and sickly. The fields ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... chief town of the district, must be connected with other bands, and all must be initiated in the Shakti mantra—that Shakti worship which constitutes one of the most powerful and popular appeals to the sensuous side of Hindu mysticism. As for arming the bands, there are different ways of collecting arms, and in this business "there can be no considerations of right or wrong, for everything is laid at the feet of the goddess of independence." Bombs can be manufactured in secret places, ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... hospitality of Aggie Lynch, secretly reinforced from the funds of Joe Garson, Mary found herself living in luxurious idleness, while her every wish could be gratified by the merest mention of it. She was fed on the daintiest of fare, for Aggie was a sybarite in all sensuous pleasures that were apart from sex. She was clothed with the most delicate richness for the first time as to those more mysterious garments which women love, and she soon had a variety of frocks as charming as her graceful form demanded. In addition, there were as many of books ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... filed out of the crowd, looking more mystery from their liquid eyes than they could well have corroborated in word or thought, and bringing to the metropolis of the West the gorgeous and foolish magnificence of the sensuous East. What did they make of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or without rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferiority in the imperial scheme? If looks went for what looks rarely do, except in women, they should ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... this work classical severity was scrupulously observed, and the opera is full of telling points of dramatic musical coloration. In "Armide," 1777, he endeavored to show that he was equally at home in richly conceived sensuous music, and succeeded so well that the famous controversy was precipitated with the Italian composer, Piccini, who had just arrived in Paris, preparatory to bringing out his opera of "Roland." Volumes were written in praise of Italian music, and in disparagement of the roughnesses of that ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... The night—to Giles—was quite hot, and he could scarcely bear the stifling heat of the room. Windows and doors were closed, and the fire flamed up fiercely. Also some pastiles had been burnt by Olga, and added a heavy, sensuous scent to the atmosphere. Ware could not help comparing the room to the Venusberg, and the women to the sirens of that unholy haunt. Which of the two was Venus he did not take upon himself ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... clashing bells from the steeples, the shouting of the populace, the blare of trumpets and roll of drums, the lines of churchmen and officials in their grandest dresses, of citizens of every age,—the indescribable human murmur—altogether it was a scene whose sensuous splendor obliterated for a time the capacity of impressionable natures ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... the other side is statuesque enough to satisfy the requisitions of a sensuous sculptor," she rejoined, coldly; "you are wrong, Claude, let us be just! Miriam is very well formed, to say no more, and her skin is like a magnolia-leaf, where sun and wind have not touched or tanned it; then those scars will turn white after a while ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... Such definite embodiment is, however, rare in religious history, probably, as is suggested above, because it involves a large generalization and a more or less distinct symbolism. The first movement in this direction may have been naively sensuous; later, as is remarked above, the symbolic ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... a dream) the very form, the very scent, not heavy, not sensuous, but perilous—perilous— of orchids, piled in a great sheath, and folded underneath on a bright ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... scattered upon the floor. Pictures and prints which even my unpractised eyes could recognize as being of great price and rarity hung thick upon the walls. Sketches of boxers, of ballet-girls, and of racehorses alternated with a sensuous Fragonard, a martial Girardet, and a dreamy Turner. But amid these varied ornaments there were scattered the trophies which brought back strongly to my recollection the fact that Lord John Roxton was one of the great all-round sportsmen and athletes ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Although we legislate against it in saloons because of its dangerous influence there, we constantly permit music on the street to incite that which should be controlled, to degrade that which should be exalted, to make sensuous that which might be lifted into the realm of the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... in suggesting new subjects for him to paint. One day it would be a performance of the Ataboi, the languorously sensuous dance which we had first seen in the women's compound; again he would stage a scene of feasting, at which the men passed foaming shells of hoopa from hand to hand. A difficulty was that of preventing the artist from quitting work and joining his models which Swank always justified ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... have created for us! However concrete the materials with which they started, the goal of these sciences is theories, eventually mathematical formulations of laws of change. Treating the individual, sensuous, changing objects as mere unsubstantial appearances (phenomena), scientific investigation becomes a search for the universal laws which rule the timeless changes of events. Out of this colorful world of the senses, science creates a system of abstract concepts, in which the true nature ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... southern race. The face was one of singular beauty. The curved lips, the broad brow on which the dusky hair grew low, the oval cheek and rounded chin might well have served for the impersonation of some Spanish beggar-boy or Neapolitan fisher-lad. They were of the subtilely sensuous type, expressive of passion rather than of intellect or will. At present, with the usual rich, ripe colour vanished from cheek and lips, with eyes downcast, and trembling hands dropped to his sides, he was a picture of embodied shame and fear which his cousin ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... person in the play simply because in Jaques he satisfied his own need of self-revealing.] of six plays written at widely different times; in fact that, like Rembrandt, he painted his own portrait in all the critical periods of life: as a sensuous youth given over to love and poetry in Romeo; a few years later as a melancholy onlooker at life's pageant in Jaques; in middle age as the passionate, melancholy, aesthete-philosopher of kindliest nature in Hamlet and Macbeth; as the fitful Duke incapable of severity in "Measure for Measure," ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... of her tour was the production of "Carmen." The fiery, impetuous, emotional, and sensuous character of the Spanish heroine appealed to Miss Nethersole's vivid imagination, and she gave a realistic portrayal of the role that became popular and spectacular. In all parts of the country the "Carmen Kiss" became a byword. The ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... spell of gilded hair, Thy palms, like sickly weeds, shall die! God-strong Resolves, a sensuous air Shall ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... was furnished as a sitting room, but some of its appointments were obviously importations. Its keynote was orientalism, not of that sensuous yet grossly masculine character which surrounds the wealthy Eastern esthete but quite markedly feminine. There were an extraordinary number of cushions, and many bowls and vases containing hyacinths. What ...
— Fire-Tongue • Sax Rohmer
... backed in and took their places about the drummers. As Swimming Wolf stepped forward the drum-beats died to a muffled softness. The dancing sticks beat the floor in a low, sensuous syncopation that stirred the blood. The long-fringed blanket lent a wild grace to the Indian's swaying, stamping figure. His crouched steps seemed part of his ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... the Oriental tendency.[224] A poet of different calibre is Daumer, whose Hafis (Hamb. 1846) for a long time was regarded as a translation, whereas the poems of the collection are in reality original productions in Hafid's manner, just like Rueckert's Oestliche Rosen.[225] Their sensuous, passionate eroticism, however, is not a genuine Hafid quality, as we before have seen. The same criticism applies even much more forcibly to Schefer's Hafis in Hellas (Hamburg, 1853).[226] Special mention is due to the gifted, but unfortunate, Heinrich Leuthold, whose Ghaselen ...
— The Influence of India and Persia on the Poetry of Germany • Arthur F. J. Remy
... help me? And whose fault is it? Perhaps spiritual marriages! Formerly one married a wife, now, one enters into partnership with a business woman, or goes to live with a friend—and then one ruins the partner, and dishonors the friend!—What has become of love, healthy sensuous love? It died in the transformation. And what is the result of this love in shares, payable to the bearer without joint liability? Who is the bearer when the crash comes? Who is the fleshly father ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... this sensuous strife strode Temple Myrmidons—religious cops sworn to obey orders without question or hesitation—with a pickup order for ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... man's life. She must have other trophies of her beauty, and Barraclough was one. I was sorry for him, though I cannot say that I liked him. The dull, unimaginative and wholesome Briton had toppled over before the sensuous arts of the French beauty. His anxiety was for her. He had not shown himself timorous as to the result before. Doubtless she had infected him with her fears. Possibly, even, it was at the lady's suggestion that he had made ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... most successfully flatter the King, or, in the King's absence, the Royal Prince. It was intellectually a very stupid Court. Its pleasures were vulgar, its revels coarse, its whole atmosphere heavy and sensuous. Frederick was said, however, to have given some evidence of a more cultivated taste than might have been expected of a Hanoverian Crown Prince. He was said to have some appreciation of letters and music. When he settled in London ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... based on attentive introspection and perception of the immediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his somewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel oneself endure. This is a hypostasis of "true" (i.e. immediately felt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the present, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present sensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like a comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... fairy-tale of Prince Charming. They formed a frieze of bewitching groups in all the attitudes which express wooing and granting, languishing and triumphing. Each year was a Decameron, each month a sensuous Florentine tale, with a woman's name for title and contents. What a retrospect! His past life resembled a dream whose details blended indistinctly with one another, leaving only a confused recollection of sighs, kisses, and tears, melting eyes, half-parted lips, and loosened ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... heard, but frequently softening his voice, as though to convey intimate meanings. His manner had the charm of variety; he was never on two occasions alike; today he seemed to relax in a luxurious mood, due in part to the influence of sound, and in part, as his eyes declared, to the sensuous pleasure of sitting ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... what it is rather than anything else. "Things-in-themselves" are also given, of which he claims that we can know nothing: by what right, then, can he affirm their existence, even as "problematic"? If the unknowable reality projects into our perceptive faculty a "sensuous manifold" capable of fitting into it exactly, is it not, by that very fact, in part known? And when we examine this exact fitting, shall we not be led, in one point at least, to suppose a pre-established harmony between things and our mind—an idle hypothesis, ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to the mortal frame wherewith, for a little while, I walk the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust. Few of my countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... If she were white, she might pass for a Caucasian, but for that gibbous under-lip. She lacks the wide mouth and the hinted intelligent archness of the Two-Headed Nightingale, and has not the moody expression and semi-sensuous, semi-ferocious development of the muscular widows of Cetewayo; but for a negress she is handsome and well-built, and would fetch a very good price in the market. The slave-trade still flourishes in Morocco. On the next page we meet two types of young ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... world, and often made the subject of contrast there; for which, however, we seem to want exact words, and which we are obliged to describe rather vaguely and incompletely. These characters may in one aspect be called the "sensuous" and the "ascetic." The character of the first is that which is almost personified in the poet-king of Israel, whose actions and whose history have been "improved" so often by various writers that it now seems trite even ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... eyes and the mouth and chin characteristic of Burne-Jones's and Rossetti's pictures. But though she might be in appearance a Burne-Jones, she was very modern. His favourite little photograph of her that he had shown, in his moment of despair, to Dulcie, showed a charming face, sensuous yet thoughtful, under a large hat. She had fur up to her chin, and was holding a muff; it was a snapshot taken the winter before ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... Renaissance, a rebirth of the moral nature of man following the intellectual awakening of Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Italy, whose influence had been uppermost in Elizabethan literature, the Renaissance had been essentially pagan and sensuous. It had hardly touched the moral nature of man, and it brought little relief from the despotism of rulers. One can hardly read the horrible records of the Medici or the Borgias, or the political observations of Machiavelli, without marveling at the moral and political degradation ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... steady driving in a delight of motion too keen for conversation, they pulled up on the brow of a hill. A soft breeze from the south-west, sensuous with the smell of spruce and balm-o'-gilead, pressed, cool and gentle, against their faces, and far to the south-east some settler's burning straw pile lay like an orange-red coal on the lips of the prairie, from which she blew an incense of ruddy gold and ochre, ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... ages far nearer to ourselves, nay, in our own generation and our own land, are many pariahs, sitting amongst us all, nay, oftentimes sitting (yet not recognized for what they really are) at good men's tables. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears, they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand." In the very act of facing or touching a dreadful object, they will utterly deny its existence. Men say to me daily, when I ask them, ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... interpretation of life in terms of beauty; the "artist," the man in whom sensuous perception is supreme, offers us a sublime aspect of reality. He dwells in the universe constructed for him by his senses and tells us of its glories. He achieves "freedom." The veil covering reality is woven for him far ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... studious character and his literary talent endowed him with another and a worthier sobriquet "Filosofo," and he carried out the role by dressing as a Greek and living as a sybarite. Devoted to the study of the classics and encouraged by his sensuous tutor, Giovanni Francesco Zeffi, when not engaged in vulgar orgies, he translated Plato and other writers, and even composed a comedy, which ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... of station and wealth, and published, in 1758, a book, in which he carried out the principles of Condillac and of other philosophers of the sensational, or, as it is sometimes called, the sensuous school. He boldly advocated a system of undisguised selfishness. He maintained that man owed his superiority over the lower animals to the superior organization of the body. Proceeding from this point, he ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... he continued passionately, stopping abruptly before them, "to assume that others should live according to your lackadaisical, sensuous sentimentality—your divan, boudoir conceptions of life? Thoreau and Rousseau and Emerson and Ruskin were great men, but had they talked less and actually lived out the life they preached, the world might possibly ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... however, he lingered longest. He might not look upon the water and its sparkling ripples, so like sensuous life, without thinking of the Egyptian and her marvellous beauty, and of floating with her here and there through the night, made brilliant by her songs and stories; he might not forget the charm of her manner, the lightness of her laugh, the flattery of her attention, the warmth of her little ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... provided by kind nature for the wingless wild things that have their home in the tree-tops and would visit together; the larch and the pomegranate flung their purple and yellow flames in brilliant broad splashes along the slanting sweep of woodland, the sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the swooning atmosphere, far in the empty sky a solitary oesophagus slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the door was furnished with a sort of gross opulence that never failed to jar on Mr. Taynton's exquisite taste and cultivated mind. Pictures, chairs, sofas, the patterns of the carpet, and the heavy gilding of the cornices were all sensuous, a sort of frangipanni to the eye. The apparent contrast, however, between these things and their owner, was as great as that between Mr. Taynton and his partner, for Mr. Godfrey Mills was a thin, spare, dark little man, brisk in ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... behind some of the tricks. Beyond an overflowing animal vitality, and a passion for having men make love to her, there really was not much of Victorine. But it is wonderful how far these two qualities can pass in a handsome woman for other and nobler ones. The animal life so keen, intense, sensuous, can seem like cleverness, wit, taste; the passion for receiving homage from men can make a woman graceful, amiable, and alluring. Some of the greatest passions the world has ever seen have been inspired in men by just ...
— Between Whiles • Helen Hunt Jackson
... allowed his team of harness-marked horses to continue their eager drinking at the watering hole of the little stream near which the camp was pitched until, their thirst quenched, they began burying their muzzles and blowing into the water in sensuous enjoyment. He stood, a strong and tall man of perhaps forty-five years, of keen blue eye and short, close-matted, tawny beard. His garb was the loose dress of the outlying settler of the Western lands three-quarters of a century ago. ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... answer to his thoughts would flash out in a stray line or stanza, like a beacon lighting up the darkness of a troubled sea. But no such cheering word met his eyes. Keats is essentially the poet of the young, and for the old he has no comfort. Sensuous, passionate, and almost cloying in the excessive sweetness of his amorous muse, he offers no support to the wearied spirit,—no sense of strength or renewal to the fagged brain. He does not grapple with the hard problems of life; and his mellifluous murmurings ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... race for fame. Kennedy had often been seduced by whim and pleasure from his studies, but his mind was an incisive one, capable of long and concentrated efforts which ended in sharp reactions of sensuous languor. His handsome face, with its high, white forehead, its aggressive nose, and its somewhat loose and sensuous mouth, was a fair index of the compromise between strength ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... need to go so far," said she, and she beckoned with her hand. The stout man with the reddish beard came up, like some huge, dull animal called by its mistress. His sensuous, fat face was pallid with seasickness, and as he looked at Mrs. Carey there was a senile leer in ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... woman, and she was very conscious of that. Her face was tanned by the mist-filtered sunlight of Rythar; her lips were red and sensuous; her long, platinum-colored hair fell to her shoulders. She compared herself to the small, hard-faced female she had seen in the supply room. Was that a typical Earthwoman? Mryna's lips curled in ...
— The Guardians • Irving Cox
... to show how this Ideal may be concentrated in a certain abstract line, not only of sensuous, but of intellectual Beauty,—a line which, while it is as wise and subtle as the serpent, is as harmless and loving as the sacred dove of Venus. I have endeavored to prove how this line, the gesture of Attic eloquence, expresses the civilization of Pericles and Plato, of Euripides and Apelles. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... which our old distinctions of "animal," "vegetable," and "mineral" are trembling in the balance, seemingly ready to vanish like their fellows - "the four elements" of fire, earth, air, and water. No branch of science has helped so much to sweep away that sensuous idolatry of mere size, which tempts man to admire and respect objects in proportion to the number of feet or inches which they occupy in space. No branch of science, moreover, has been more humbling to the ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... gets near to the secret. Why is it possible to consider Coleridge alongside of Wordsworth and Byron, yet feel no impropriety? Coleridge's yield of verse was ridiculously scanty beside theirs, and a deal more sensuous than Wordsworth's, at any rate, and yet more manly, in a sense, than Byron's, which again was thoroughly manly within the range of emotion? Why? Because Coleridge and Meredith both have a philosophy of life: and he who has a philosophy of life may write little or much; may ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... square bulldog jaw, his massive neck and the deformity of his delicate hands and feet! I hear the ignorant patois of the East Side underworld. I smell the brimstone in his suppressed rage at my dislike. There's something uncanny in the sensuous droop of his heavy eyelids and the glitter of his steel-blue eyes. There's something incongruous in his whole personality. I was afraid of him the moment I ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... then was the priest set to con his motions and his postures, his liturgies and his lurries, till the soul by this means of over-bodying herself, given up justly to fleshly delights, bated her wing apace downward: and finding the ease she had from her visible and sensuous colleague, the body, in performance of religious duties, her pinions now broken and flagging, shifted off from herself the labour of high soaring any more, forgot her heavenly flight, and left the dull and droiling carcase to plod on in the old road ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... Van Berg, in his worship of beauty, never existed; but it was the beauty of a complete man or a complete woman. Even in his early youth he had not been so sensuous as to be captivated by that opaque fragment of a woman—an attractive form devoid of a mind. Indeed with the exception of a few boyish follies, his art had been his mistress thus far, and it was beginning to absorb ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... trinity, which frequently occurs in the form of a triangle (three points united by three straight lines), is shown how the divided and sensuous nature is led by the higher power of the number 3 to a harmony of powers and to a new unity. The symbol of reason attaining victory over matter becomes visible. A representation of trinity is possible by means ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... bit satirical in her view of things, you felt too that she was altogether good-natured, and even that, at need, she could show herself spontaneously kind, generous, devoted. And if you inferred that her temperament inclined rather towards the sensuous than the ascetic, believe me, it ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... sky seemed to soothe her, and speak of hope. Could any other country produce a sky of so deep a sapphire as the night sky of Egypt? All around was intense sensuous warmth and stillness almost ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... see scores of boys wallowing in those big tubs, six in a tub, with a bit of soap for each. They gave little grunts and shouts of joyous satisfaction. The cleansing water, the liquid heat, made their flesh tingle with exquisite delight, sensuous and spiritual. They were like children. They splashed one another, with gurgles of laughter. They put their heads under water and came up puffing and blowing like grampuses. Something broke in one's heart to see them, those splendid boys whose bodies might soon be torn to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... rising wealth of Rome, mad-brained vices and excesses took the place of the former severity of manners. Rome became the center from which debauchery, riotous luxury and sensuous refinements radiated over the whole of the then civilized world. The excesses took—especially during the time of the Emperors, and, to a great extent, through the Emperors themselves—forms that only insanity ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... it, and he endeavored to answer it in his "Essay concerning Human Understanding." The result of his speculations was, that the mind is a tabula rasa, that this tabula rasa becomes gradually filled with sensuous perceptions, and that these sensuous perceptions arrange themselves into classes, and thus give rise to more general ideas or conceptions. This was a step in advance; but there was again one thing taken for granted by Locke,—the perceptions. This led to the next step in English ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... of their portrait busts is remarkable, and gives a fair indication of the character of each of them. Thothmes has the appearance of a soft and yielding boy: he has a languishing eye, a short upper lip, a sensuous mouth and chin. Hatasu looks the Amazon: she holds her head erect, has a bold aquiline nose, a firmly-set mouth, and a chin that projects considerably, giving her an indescribable air of vigour and resolution. The effect is increased, no doubt, by her having attached to it ...
— Ancient Egypt • George Rawlinson
... made useful in the toils which white men could not endure?" Ultra-Calvinists united with politicians in building up a public sentiment in favor of slavery as the best possible condition for the ignorant, sensuous, and superstitious races who, when put under the training and guardianship of a civilized and Christian people, had escaped the harder lot which their fathers endured in the deserts and the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... just falling under the shining sickle; while in the narrow lanes you met great wagons drawn by broad-chested cart-horses, carrying home the rich golden store. To any one who has been, during the hot summer months, pent up in London, there is in the first taste of rustic life a kind of sensuous rapture scarcely to be described. George Talboys felt this, and in this he experienced the nearest approach to enjoyment that he had ever known since his ...
— Lady Audley's Secret • Mary Elizabeth Braddon
... generally made at the outset. Whatever definition of poetry we fix upon, whether that it is the language of passion or imagination formed into regular numbers; or, with Milton, that it should be "simple, sensuous, impassioned;" in any case there are great tracts in Wordsworth which, by no definition and on no terms, can be called poetry. If we say with Shelley, that poetry is what redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man, and is the record of the best and happiest moments ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... and label beauty nothing, is ignorantly to caricature God's creation, which is unjust to human sense and [5] to the divine realism. In our immature sense of spirit- ual things, let us say of the beauties of the sensuous universe: "I love your promise; and shall know, some time, the spiritual reality and substance of form, light, and color, of what I now through you discern dimly; and [10] knowing this, I shall be satisfied. Matter ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... his room, and at last made up his mind to give up the point of the blood-stain on the library floor. If the Otis family did not want it, they clearly did not deserve it. They were evidently people on a low, material plane of existence, and quite incapable of appreciating the symbolic value of sensuous phenomena. The question of phantasmic apparitions, and the development of astral bodies, was of course quite a different matter, and really not under his control. It was his solemn duty to appear in the corridor ...
— The Canterville Ghost • Oscar Wilde
... habitually promenaders, or greatly addicted to theatrical performances; they will probably find their secondary interests—the cardinal one will of course be the work in hand—in a not too imaginative prose literature, in travel and journeys and in the less sensuous aspects of music. They will probably take a considerable interest in public affairs. Their menage, which will consist of father, mother, and children, will, I think, in all probability, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... to the Latins who followed in their footsteps, as fit only for pedestrian purposes." It is more probable that, as regards prose-fiction, they did not realize that they were called upon to explain the omission of the tenth muse. Her exclusion was based on no reasoned principle, but was due to a sensuous art-instinct: the Greeks felt that the unnatural limitations of the poetic medium were more in keeping with the unnatural[10] brevity of a story which must be short. The exquisite prose tales which have been handed down to us belong to the age of their decadence as a nation; in their great period ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... quite agitated, confused, humiliated, at the idea of finding himself—the son—in the presence of this woman who had been his father's mistress. All the morality which lies buried in our breasts, heaped up at the bottom of our sensuous emotions by centuries of hereditary instruction, all that he had been taught, since he had learned his catechism, about creatures of evil life, the instinctive contempt which every man entertains for them, even though he ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... dwelling in Zion. It guards that belief from the abuses to which it was of course liable—the superstitions, the narrowness, the contempt of all the rest of the world as God-deserted, which are its perversion in sensuous natures. If Israel came to fancy that God belonged to them, and that there was only one sacred place in all the world, it was not for want of clear utterances to the contrary, which became more emphatic with each fresh step in the development of the specializing system under which they lived. The ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks and crockery and Austrian glass, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... meaning there is in that hat, Mrs. Eldred, you'd feel, as I do, that you knew something. Half the poetry that's been written has less meaning in it than that hat. That hat fulfills all the requirements of poetry. It is simple—extremely simple—and sensuous and passionate. Yes, passionate. It would be impossible to conceive a hat less afflicted with the literary taint. It stands, as I see it, for emotion reduced to its last and purest expression. In short, Mrs. Eldred, what that hat doesn't mean ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... "beach-combers"—that is, combing the beach for a living—though that, indeed, was a misnomer, for in those days, except one of these men was either a murderer or a tyrant, he did not "comb" for his living, but simply lived a life of luxurious, sensuous ease among the copper-coloured people with whom he dwelt. He had, indeed, to be of a hard and base nature to incur the ill-will or hostility of the ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... love of Juliet is a thing altogether by itself, not to be classed, never anticipated by any other author, and not imitable. It is sensuous. Look at her soliloquy, 'Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,' etc., and yet it is woven through and through with immortal threads of fidelity ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... life to life's practical version of itself, is too gradual to be noticed while the process is going on. It is only in the retrospect we see the change. There is still, for yet another stage, the same and even greater receptivity, - delight in new experiences, in gratified curiosity, in sensuous enjoyment, in the exercise of growing faculties. But the belief in the impossible and the bliss of ignorance are seen, when looking back, to have assumed almost abruptly a cruder state of maturer dulness. Between the public schoolboy and the ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... does Tragedy select subjects so awfully repugnant to the wishes and the wants of our sensuous nature? This question has often been asked, and seldom satisfactorily answered. Some have said that the pleasure of such representations arises from the comparison we make between the calmness and tranquillity of our own situation, and the storms and perplexities to which the victims ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... music provides for a century too stagnant and listless to act out its own emotions, too reflective to be frankly sensuous, a shadowy pageant of sense and emotion, that serves ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... a word has come to be judged like a note in music—as a potential element of harmony—a sound that in its own place may mean any emotion of joy or sorrow, hate or love. Whether a thought is behind these alluring rhythms, with their sensuous swing or their rush of sound, is immaterial so long as the ear has satisfaction; thus Swinburne and his school fill the place of Spenser and the elder poets, and many an "idle singer of an empty day" jostles aside the masters, who can wait, knowing that sooner or later, return ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... she said, with a sort of sensuous enjoyment in her frankness, 'and yet I have passed successfully for a beautiful woman most of my life. I am also what is ridiculously called a power in society, and I owe everything to my own will. I ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... the Grand Opra in Paris less than three years before, and for which her gifts and graces admirably fitted her. She appeared, moreover, in the company of Jean de Reszke, who was then, and who remained till his retirement, in all things except mere sensuous charm of voice, the ideal Romeo. She came fresh from her first successes at Covent Garden, which had been made in the spring of the year, and disclosed at once the lovely qualities which, when they became riper, gave promise of the highest order of things in the way of ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... because the materials of which it is constituted—that is, sound and rhythm—make an instinctive appeal to every normally equipped human being.[6] Every one likes to listen to beautiful sounds merely for their sensuous effect, just as everyone likes to look at the blue sky, the green grass and the changing hues of a sunset; so the rhythm of music, akin to the human heart-beat and to the ceaseless change and motion, which is the basic fact in all life, appeals at once to our own physical vitality. ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... admired the massive frame of "Columbus," but said not a word about the picture itself. Also, Mr. Bullivant, the sculptor, and Mr. Hemlock, the journalist, exchanging solemnly that critical small talk, in which such words as "sensuous," "aesthetic," "objective," and "subjective," occupy prominent places, and out of which no man ever has succeeded, or ever will succeed, in extricating an idea. Also, Mr. Gimble, fluently laudatory, with the whole ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... a single case where immersion seems to have been practised. I believe that, under the operation of early tendencies, of which Paul writes to the Thessalonians, the church began to prefer immersion as more sensuous, making a stronger appeal to the passions. But I believe, with the New Testament for my guide, that immersion was not practised by the apostles themselves. The word baptize had, even in the Saviour's ...
— Bertha and Her Baptism • Nehemiah Adams
... of her face suggests The sensuous scented Jacqueminots; Magnolia blooms her throat and breasts; Her hands long lilies in repose: Fair flowers all without a stain, That grow for Death to pluck again, Within that garden's radiant close, The body of La belle Helene; The garden ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... "Oh, there is no danger but I'll be that." I wondered, as I saw the laughing face, so full of the indications of the love of pleasure, if he really would be good to himself, or if he would interpret it to mean to indulge himself in all kinds of sensuous gratification. It is a great thing to be truly good to one's self, and I would give the injunction with the highest ideal. Be good to your real self with that true goodness that sees the end from the beginning, that ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... novel was featured in Argosy-All-Story-Weekly for May 14, 1921. Described as a "different" serial, it was introduced by a cover by Modest Stein. In the foreground was the profile of a girl of another dimension—ethereal, sensuous, the eternal feminine—the Nervina of the story. Filmy crystalline earrings swept back over her bare shoulders. Dominating the background was a huge flaming yellow ball, like our Sun as seen from the hypothetical Vulcan— splotched with murky, mysterious globii vitonae. There was an ancient ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... wind leaves the body. Then is seen breathlessness. The man then becomes destitute of heat, of breath, of beauty, and of consciousness. Deserted by Brahman (for Jiva is Brahman), the person is said to be dead. By those ducts through which he perceives all sensuous objects, the bearer of the body no longer perceives them. It is the eternal Jiva who creates in the body in those very duets the life-breaths that are generated by food. The elements gathered together become in certain parts firmly united. Know ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... excellence. Conscious of a worth which society ignored, he transformed his qualities into virtues, and erected his virtues into social standards of value. Prudence and economy, restraint of manner, denial of the sensuous and the sensual appeal, reserve of soul, the unmoved endurance of the pricks of fortune—these became the virtues of the Puritan because they were not the virtues of the world which despised him: by these self-erected standards he justified himself and passed judgment ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... was thrown away on Percy. But she did not think so, and he envied, hated the husband, with an absurd bitterness—envied him for several reasons, but chiefly because Nigel had now developed what had been in abeyance at the time of their youthful engagement—that real sensuous discrimination, which has comparatively little to do with taste for beauty, that power of weighing amorous values, given only to ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... production. Hebbel died in Vienna December 13, 1863. His lyric poetry, for the most part the product of his earlier years, is marked above all by a tendency towards symbolism, these symbols usually of a rich sensuous beauty and often of a rare delicacy. A homely realism is, however, by no means lacking. The musical quality of his verse attracted the genius of Robert Schumann, who set ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... swaying, sensuous thing of weirdest melodies and off-beat rhythms. Plucked and bowed strings blended with wailing flutes and an exotic tympany to produce music formed of passion and movement. Tod Denver and Darbor threaded their ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can in any way compensate for the loss of the great fundamental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. Character must show itself in the man's ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... I should be thinking of my papers, my future; but a quick perversity made me dwell for a long trotting time in a dream of feminine excellence, in a dream of feminine beauty which was both ascetic and deeply sensuous. I know hardly how to say that two eyes, a vision of lips, a conception of a figure, should properly move me as I bounced along the road with Jem Bottles. But it is certain that it came upon me. The eyes ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... judgments of conscience, the recognition of duty and responsibility, the feelings of reverence, remorse, and moral indignation,—all these could be traced, they thought, to an origin in experience, to an origin which in the last resort was sensuous, that is, due to the perceptions of the senses and the feelings of pleasure and pain ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... within a few yards of the entrance to her flat. Both of them were a little disturbed,—she, full as she was with all the generous impulses of sensuous ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with mythical monsters, singing flowers, and blooming women. Strange scarlet and mulberry threads form the woof of these tapestries, threads pulled with great labour from all the art of the past. There is, in much of his work, an undercurrent of subtle sensuous erotic poison; in one of her stories Edna Kenton tells us that chartreuse jaune and bananas form such a poison. There is a suggestion of chartreuse jaune and bananas in much of the work ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... ality. But while fanaticism and enthusiasm are being defined—a work more difficult than is commonly fancied—we will go on to consider another answer. We are told that the strength of Islam lay in the hope of their sensuous Paradise and fear of their sensuous Gehenna. If so, this is the first and last time in the world's history that the strength of any large body of people—perhaps of any single man—lay in such a hope. History gives us innumerable proofs that such merely selfish ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... every fold of her dress radiating the most delicate tones. Yet there was nothing voluptuous or sensual about it. I was raised above earthly things. Men and women were no longer men and women—they were brilliant creatures of whom I was one. It was sensuous, but not sensual. I looked at my own clothes. My everyday suit was idealised. My hands were surrounded by a glow of red fire that made me feel that they must be the hands of a divinity. I noticed them as I reached forward toward ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... had said, he had not said that he was not stronger than she. He had not relinquished his authority. She felt it, sitting almost beneath him in the slippery chair. She knew that she would yield to him. She desired to yield to him. Her mind was full of sensuous images based on the abdication of her will ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... at Tivoli. This marble is admirably adapted for such sculpture, for it gives to the ideal of the artist the warm vividness of life. And it seems a fit colour, as Nathaniel Hawthorne has said, in which to express the rich, sensuous, earthy side of nature, the happy characteristics of all wild natural things which meet and mingle in the human form and in the human soul; the Adam, the red man formed out of the red clay, in which the life of the ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the lawn and the single lighted door of the ballroom. There he found a chair and, lighting a cigarette, drifted into the thoughtless reverie that was his usual mood. Yet now it was a reverie made sensuous by the night and by the hot smell of damp powder puffs, tucked in the fronts of low dresses and distilling a thousand rich scents, to float out through the open door. The music itself, blurred by a loud trombone, became hot and shadowy, a languorous overtone to the scraping ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... true as to all departures from God and His law, but it is eminently true as to every tampering with the spirituality of worship. Jeroboam's symbolism led straight to Ahab's unblushing pagan worship of the hideous Sidonian Baal. The craving for symbolical and sensuous accessories of worship, which is strong in most Churches in this aesthetic generation, is perilous. Material aids to worship there must be, so long as we are in the flesh, but the fewer and simpler they are the better, for they are aids which very ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to perfumed respectability and condemned of prejudice and error. This is the first great reason, and the second is not unlike unto it. It is that you retard your preparation for any permanent pursuit, as a centre of your sensuous life, by passing two or three years in Europe. With respect to the first reason, not your own feelings, but those of your friends, demand some consideration. In Heaven's court will their sorrow at your departure and ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Queen Charlotte Sound. It is rather jolly to think of these things, and to realize that we were in more or less danger; though the shores are as silent as the grave, the sea sleeps like a mill-pond, and the sun sinks to rest with great dignity and precision, nightly bathing the lonely North in sensuous splendor. ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... this is the religion of the few,—of those to whom sensuous forms cannot suffice to represent super-sensuous cravings; whose god is something more than an anthropomorphic creation; to whom worship means not the cramping of the body, but the expansion ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... pillows with a groan. Yes—not a year ago there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed, feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath proffered its renovating flood. But then a year ago he could ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... indeed of age, but signs which were very becoming to him. At fifty he was a much better-looking man than he had been at thirty,—so that that foolish, fickle girl, Catherine Bailey, would not have rejected him for the cruelly sensuous face of Mr Compas, had the handsome iron-grey tinge been then given to his countenance. He, as he looked at the glass, told himself that a grey-haired old fool, such as he was, had no right to burden the life of a young girl, simply because he found her in bread ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope
... clear of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his passive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam—like Blucher, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... Gone are the sensuous stars, and manifold, Clear sunbeams burst upon the front of night; Ten thousand swords of azure and of gold Give darkness to the dark and welcome light; Across the night of ages strike the gleams, And leading on the gilded host ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... the infectious and tumultuous enthusiasm of the worship of Bacchus, with great sensuous power and vividness of conception. The obstinate unbelief of Pentheus, his infatuation, and terrible punishment by the hands of his own mother, form a bold picture. The effect on the stage must have been extraordinary. Imagine, only, a chorus with flying and dishevelled hair and dress, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... understood it, was something of deeper and wider significance than that generally accepted. It was all, in mankind and nature, that appeals to and gratifies the senses and sensuous emotions. Cornelia had been the door through which he had passed into a consciousness of its existence; the fragrant pass leading to the mighty valley. Unfortunately neither he nor she was in a position to comprehend this fact: she ...
— Bressant • Julian Hawthorne
... associations are but few, can with difficulty he conceived." But between the ages of eight and ten, an appreciation of external beauty is sufficiently common. No one doubts the accuracy of Wordsworth's account, in the Prelude of his early half-sensuous delight in mountain glory. It is impossible to define the influence of Nature, either on nations or individuals, or to say beforehand what selection from his varied surroundings a poet will for artistic purposes elect to make. Shakespeare rests ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... lies about half-way between these extreme views. There is only one passage which is objectionably coarse in the English version and in the Hebrew original obscene;[292] yet, on the other hand, I maintain that the whole poem is purely Oriental in its exclusively sensuous and often sensual character, and that there is not a trace of romantic sentiment such as would color a similar love-story if told by a modern poet. The Song of Songs is so confused in its arrangement, its plan so obscure, its repetitions and repeated denouements ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... which the Jesuit Order occupied, governed, and administered upon the lines of their prescribed discipline. These considerations are not merely irrelevant. The specific qualities of Italian music for the next two centuries were undoubtedly determined by the atmosphere of sensuous pietism in which it flourished, at the very time when German music was striking far other roots in the Chorales of the Reformation epoch. What Palestrina effected was to substitute in Church music the clear and melodious manner of ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... steps in debauchery resemble vertigo, for one feels a sort of terror mingled with sensuous delight, as if peering downward from some giddy—height. While shameful, secret dissipation ruins the noblest of men, in the frank and open defiance of conventionality there is something that compels respect even in the most depraved. He who goes at nightfall, muffled in ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... New-Englanders recognize in our idea of spring, but there was an indescribable something, sweet, fresh, gentle, that does not belong to summer, and that thrilled and tickled my heart with a feeling partly sensuous, partly spiritual. ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as I suggest, itself created. Too long has the face been degraded from its rank as a thing of beauty to a mere vulgar index of character or emotion. We had come to troubling ourselves, not with its charm of colour and line, but with such questions as whether the lips were sensuous, the eyes full of sadness, the nose indicative of determination. I have no quarrel with physiognomy. For my own part I believe in it. But it has tended to degrade the face aesthetically, in such wise as the study of cheirosophy has tended to degrade the hand. And the use ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... rare and the novel in shivers, or universal impressions: sensuous, mental, and aesthetic, Maryan went once with the baron, and a second time alone, on a journey through Europe. He visited many countries and capitals. To investigate the Salvation Army, he joined its ranks for a period in England. In Germany he was connected ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... the religious sense, beyond any of the Aryan peoples. Their religion had become a part, the main part, of their daily lives. They believed it, not with the languid logic of the Romans, not with the sensuous pleasure of the Greeks, but fiercely, fervidly, with a passion that swept all reason to ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... front room a low fire and two lamps shaded with orange silk gave all the light, so that the corners were full of deep and somnolent shadows. The hostess, moving about in a dark-figured gown of loose chiffon, seemed to accentuate the already sensuous atmosphere. For a while they were all four together, tasting the sandwiches that waited on the tea table—then Gloria found herself alone with Captain Collins on the fireside lounge; Rachael and Captain Wolf had withdrawn ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald |
