"Subtly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... places for planting telegraph poles and for swinging wires along which thoughts travel between country and country with the velocity of lightning. We see that the world with its swarming populations is growing more and more like some great organism whereof the nerve-centres are subtly, delicately connected by sensitive nerve-tissues. Even now, using a lady's thimble, two pieces of metal, and a little acid, we can speak to a friend across the Atlantic gulf, and before ten years are ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... the illusion. No, of course Mr. Laurie would never come to the shack. It had been absurd to think it for a moment. And even if he did, it would only be as a lofty and unapproachable spectator. Mr. Fernald's words were a subtly designed flattery intended to put him in good humor because ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... followed this conventional little speech, and the toast was honoured in the usual way, Lucy bowing and smiling her thanks to all present. And then there ensued one of those strange impressions—one might almost call them telepathic instead of atmospheric effects—which, subtly penetrating the air, exerted an inexplicable influence on the mind;—the expectancy of some word never to be uttered,—the waiting for some incident never to take place. People murmured and smiled, and looked and laughed, but there was an evident embarrassment among them,—an under-sense of something ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... an oval of gold. Before he perceived my intention, I had picked it up, and almost at the same moment his hand fell on my arm. I looked up quickly. His face was close to mine, closer than I had ever seen it, placid still, but somehow changed, somehow so subtly different that I wrenched myself free, and stepped a pace away. Brutus dropped the coat he was folding, and ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... fair face towards me with surprise in his keen glance, which (as though he had seen through me in an instant and found nothing objectionable) changed subtly into friendliness. On the matter of the shipwreck he did not say much. He only told me that it had not occurred in the Mediterranean, but on the other side of Southern France—in the Bay of Biscay. "But this is hardly the place to enter on a story of that kind," he observed, looking round at the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... own social and intellectual rank, and that of the one we are addressing. In company we unconsciously assume a bearing quite different from that of the home circle. After being raised to a higher rank the whole behavior subtly and unconsciously changes in accordance with it." And Schofield adds to the last sentence: "This is also the case in a minor degree with different styles and qualities of dress and different environments. Quite unconsciously we change our behavior, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... my flesh, and yet so subtly linking New selfs with old, all things that I have been With present joys beyond my former thinking And future ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... most felicitously handled. With equal success the author has developed the plot of the story which, in a few memorable scenes, attains to truly dramatic scope and power. More admirable than everything else, however, is the subtly realistic treatment of the psychological processes in Fritz Nettenmair. His gradual deterioration, step by step, from self-indulgent joviality, through envy and jealousy, to the hatred of despair that does not even shrink from fratricide, is depicted with masterly insight ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... night blew down the Love That in the dimmest corner of the park So subtly used to smile, bending his arc, And sight of whom did ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... the world? for the world hast thou wrought? Or wast thou but as one who aims to fling The weight of some unutterable thought Down like a burden? what from questioning Too subtly thy own spirit, and to speech But half subduing ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... seemed undistinguishable by any special gifts; yet when you had realized her there was no other woman in the room. She had the eyes of an angel, only they were generally veiled; she had the figure of a miniature Venus, soft and with delicate curves, which seemed somehow to be always subtly asserting themselves, although she affected in her dress an almost puritanical simplicity. Her presence in a room was always felt at once. There are some women, beautiful or plain, whose sex one scarcely recognizes. She was not one of these! She seemed to carry ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... know what to say." Eva smiled subtly to herself. "Of course, it may be only my imagination. I daresay you make Mr. Rose as happy as any woman could do. I expect he works too hard and that's ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... character as an American citizen. He has simply signed on for the post graduate course where one learns how to exercise authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty. The nature of his trusteeship has been subtly expressed by an Admiral in our service: "The American philosophy places the individual above the state. It distrusts personal power and coercion. It denies the existence of indispensable men. It ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... carousal was the home-coming of Eyelids and, as Granger had subtly put it, "the celebration of his own entrance into the family of Ericsen." However, in a country from which there is no means of escape, save through the magic doors of imagination, and where men get so bored with themselves, and their environment, and one ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... river bank he went where he saw a footprint in the soft loam, and presently it turned deeper into the great woods and he swung forward into those depths whose sweetness had called him subtly for these many days. ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... overwrought capacities; and when pinned down where they sat to the acquirement of some short rule or passage, they explained sorrowfully that that had not been Mr Moss's method. In divinity they raised discussions on questions of dogma, and so subtly evaded challenge on questions of Greek Testament construction and various readings. In history they fell back on a few stock answers, which rarely possessed the merit of having any connection with the questions which they pretended ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... said another—"Surely not in vain My substance from the common Earth was ta'en, That He who subtly wrought me into Shape Should stamp me back ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... to you impertinent, but I believe nothing more subtly and powerfully affects men than the aristocratic feeling. Do not misunderstand me,' he added, seeing that they would protest; 'it is not my own experience alone that guides me. All history bears witness ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... exceptional opportunities for becoming acquainted with and studying the development of German mentality and morality under the influence of Prussianism. That development filled him with horror and dismay. Long before the war he realized the terrible menace to the entire world which was subtly concealed in the poison growth of Prussianism. As he himself here puts it in one of his speeches: "From each successive visit to Germany for twenty-five years I came away more appalled by the sinister ...
— Right Above Race • Otto Hermann Kahn
... him quite correctly. He did not say it was through his influence that all these things had happened—for that would have been coarse; be merely conveyed that idea; conveyed it so subtly that I only caught it fleetingly, as one catches vagrant faint breaths of perfume when one traverses the meadows in summer; conveyed it without offense and without any suggestion of egoism or ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... justice on which we had builded most, even this flew like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser. Indeed, the flying had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America "international" Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom of industrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively: Were they not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape? High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfully manipulated result of slavery in Africa ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... sir," and started to conduct him off the dock. But now, having gone a little distance, he began to utter the most violent threats against the woods person, declaring, in fact, he would pull the fellow's nose. However, I restrained him from rushing back, as I subtly felt I was wished to do, and he at length consented again to ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... devotion, the same washstand with the same tiny jug and basin, the same rusted, fireless grate. The wardrobe, like her own, was merely a pair of moth-eaten tartan curtains, concealing both pegs and garments from her curiosity. The only sense of difference came subtly from the folding windows, below whose railed balcony showed another view of the quarter, with steam-trams—diminished to toy trains—puffing past to the suburbs. But as Madame Depine's eyes roved from these to the mantel-piece, ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... intensified—by the thrill of exultation I experienced at the reflection that man, puny as is his strength compared with the mighty forces of Nature, has been endowed by his Creator with an intellect capable of devising and framing a structure so subtly moulded and so strongly put together, that it is able to face and triumphantly survive such a mad fury of wind and sea as then ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... refer it to the act of two or three individuals. It was not so much a movement as a "spirit afloat;" it was within us, "rising up in hearts where it was least suspected, and working itself, though not in secret, yet so subtly and impalpably, as hardly to admit of precaution or encounter on any ordinary human rules of opposition. It is," I continued, "an adversary in the air, a something one and entire, a whole wherever ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery, at once the delicatest and ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... her marriage. It was of dark blue crepe-de-chine, simply but becomingly made, the very richness of its folds shedding a new luster over her quiet graciousness and large proportions. Even her kind, capable hands seemed subtly ennobled as they emerged from the luscious, well fitting sleeves, and the high collar, with its narrow edge of lace, stressed the nobility of her fine head. When she came home from church, she did not, as she would have heretofore, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... have danced the entire evening with one man; but she knew that even in Eau Claire other girls with less position and less pulchritude were given a much bigger rush. She attributed this to something subtly unscrupulous in those girls. It had never worried her, and if it had her mother would have assured her that the other girls cheapened themselves and that men ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his race, could usually provide a sin to place himself on a footing with the disgraced one. Perhaps he would remember that he had forgotten to put the hitching-strap in the back of the buggy on some recent occasion, and had been reprimanded by the doctor. Then these two would commune subtly and without words concerning their moon, holding themselves sympathetically as people who had committed similar treasons. On the other hand, Henry would sometimes choose to absolutely repudiate this idea, ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... There was a breathless silence, while each man and woman in that crowded tent was subtly, overpoweringly conscious of a new presence filling the atmosphere around—the presence of Fear! Heavy as a palpable presence it pressed upon them; it lapped them round; the fumes of it ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the cabin they found Allie had left her room. From appearances Neale concluded that she had made little use of the things he had brought her. He was conscious of something akin to impatience. He was not sure what he did feel. The situation had subtly changed and grown, all in that brief talk with Slingerland. Neale slowly walked out toward the brook, where he expected to find her. It struck him suddenly that if she had watched for him all week and had run when he came, then she must have wanted to see him, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... between the knee and the heavily spiked "cork boots"—all these were distinctive enough of their class, but most interesting to me were the eyes that peered from beneath their little round hats tilted rakishly askew. They were all subtly alike, those eyes. Some were black, some were brown, or gray, or blue, but all were steady and unabashed, all looked straight at you with a strange humorous blending of aggression and respect for your own business, and all without ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... would willingly bribe you from the service of his Grace of Canterbury to come into mine. But it may be that I shall not long outlive these days. Therefore I enjoin upon you these things: Serve well your master; guide him, for he needeth guidance, subtly as to-day ye would have guided him. I will not take you from him for this cause, that there is little need in one house of two that think alike. One sufficeth. For two houses with like minds are stronger than one that is bicephalous. Therefore ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... me," he says, "that I am about as popular in Film City as a cloudburst at a picnic! I am snubbed, ridiculed, vulgarly and subtly insulted! Also I am white and human and—ah—I must confess it has penetrated my skin. You are ...
— Kid Scanlan • H. C. Witwer
... teaching, healing diseases, and gathering round Him as disciples a few of the more advanced souls. The rare charm of His royal love, outpouring from Him as rays from a sun, drew round Him the suffering, the weary, and the oppressed, and the subtly tender magic of His gentle wisdom purified, ennobled, and sweetened the lives that came into contact with His own. By parable and luminous imagery He taught the uninstructed crowds who pressed around Him, and, using the powers of the free Spirit, He healed ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... the success of the night adventure, Agamemnon next day assumes the offensive. To consider thus is perhaps to consider too curiously. But it is clear that the Achaeans have been much encouraged by the events of Book X., especially Agamemnon, whose character, as Kiene observes, is very subtly and consistently treated, and "lies near the poet's heart." This is the point which we keep urging. Agamemnon's care for Menelaus is strictly ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... money, though he allows that about two hundred millions of pounds sterling are spent yearly in the States on strong drink; but he mourns most because of the steady ruin which he sees overtaking the social happiness of his country. The saloon is subtly corrupting the men of America, and the ghastly plagues of selfishness, brutality, and immorality are spreading with cruel swiftness. The great author's conclusion is more than startling, and I confess to having caught my breath ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... purchase of tape or riband, or into the grocer's—for she was an epicure in her humble way—to buy a tin of potted meat for her supper, the homage of the young men behind the counter did flatter and exhilarate her. As the homage of men became for her, more and more, a matter of course, the more subtly necessary was it to her happiness. The more she won of it, the more she treasured it. She was alone in the world, and it saved her from any moment of regret that she had neither home nor friends. For her the streets that lay around her had no squalor, since ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... keeping the guest of honor away. Peter's face, as he listened, underwent a curious change. It first slowly gained color, then slowly lost it; and all of it, from the top of his forehead to the end of his chin, seemed subtly to ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... identify her with the gifted Daisy Dawn, and she would be going out on the aesthetic's money for the further expansion of her spirit in Europe. Somebody would be obliged to fall in love with her, and she would sacrifice her career for a man who was her inferior, as we should be subtly given to understand at the close. I think it's going to be as distinguished by and by not to like books as it is not to write them. Lurella is a prophetic soul; and if there's anything comforting about her, it's her being so merely ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... suffered by Thy will To call for aid—as Thou art God most High, Who to all beings wilt Thy strength impart; Who smoothest every change by secret art, With fond care tempering the force of fate, Necessity and concord, power and thought, And love divine through all things subtly wrought— I am persuaded, when I iterate My prayers to Thee, some comfort I must find For these pangs poison-fraught, Or leave the sweet sharp lust ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... ceremony give thee cure! Think'st thou, the fiery fever will go out With titles blown from adulation? Will it give place to flexure and low bending? Can'st thou, when thou command'st the beggar's knee, Command the health of it? No, thou proud dream, That play'st so subtly with a king's repose, I am a king, that find thee: and I know, 'Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball, The sword, the mace, the crown imperial, The enter-tissu'd robe of gold and pearl, The farsed title running ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... the humble Ghetto garret. Against all reasoning, she continued to feel something antipathetic in Henry's clothes and even in his occupation—perhaps it was really the subconscious antagonism of the old clo' and the new, subtly symbolic of the old generation and the smart new world springing up to tread it down. Henry himself was secretly pleased at her refusal. In the first ardours of courtship he had consented to swallow even the Polish crone who had strangely mothered his buxom British Fanny, but for his own part he ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... pierce the cause." "It is no marvel, if thy fingers foil'd Do leave the knot untied: so hard 't is grown For want of tenting." Thus she said: "But take," She added, "if thou wish thy cure, my words, And entertain them subtly. Every orb Corporeal, doth proportion its extent Unto the virtue through its parts diffus'd. The greater blessedness preserves the more. The greater is the body (if all parts Share equally) the more is to preserve. Therefore the circle, whose swift ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... Hilda had subtly presented was of a mercenary little creature, lured by the glitter of gold—off with the old and on with ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... the breeze having blown the minor part away. Such unambitious, quiet, unconscious melody! It is one of the most characteristic sounds in nature. The grass, the stones, the stubble, the furrow, the quiet herds, and the warm twilight among the hills, are all subtly expressed in this song; this is what they are at ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... young MacDonald's request for fifty thousand dollars in securities, as well as the attitude of the other editors—Hyssop, Braxton, Ricketts, and so on—who had proved subtly critical, Cowperwood conferred with ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... over her, as if she had found her genius. She knew this must be Paul Irving and that Mrs. Rachel Lynde had been right for once when she prophesied that he would be unlike the Avonlea children. More than that, Anne realized that he was unlike other children anywhere, and that there was a soul subtly akin to her own gazing at her out of the very dark blue eyes that were ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... manifestations by means of science and research—and such study is of greatest value—still we must find ourselves brought to a point where we cannot progress further. Matter melts into mystery—Force resolves itself into something else—the secret of living-forms subtly elude us—and mind is seen as but the manifestation of something even finer. But in losing these things of appearance and manifestation, we find ourselves brought up face to face with a Something Else that we see must underlie all these varying forms, shapes and manifestations. ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... that, in some inexplicable, subtly mysterious fashion, there was a kind of affinity between Mr Gladstone ...
— The Ffolliots of Redmarley • L. Allen Harker
... was drowned in a velvet gloom. Here and there sharp lamps stung the dusks. There was a babble of voices. The lights of the orchestra gleamed subtly. The pit was a mist of lilac, which shifted and ever shifted. A chimera of fetid faces swam above the gallery rail. Wave after wave of lifeless heads rolled ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... hardly as brilliant as Pride and Prejudice, shows much more maturity than Sense and Sensibility. Much of it is quite consummate, the character of Mrs. Norris especially: and for subtly interwoven phrase without emphasis, conveying knowledge and criticism of life, it has few equals. But it has an elopement. Emma, which has perhaps on the whole been the most general favourite, may challenge that position on one ground ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... gifts, and after a spirited but brief tourney, conquered with flying colours. My aim was to pin her down to something definite ... like an impaled butterfly: hers was to flutter over a vast garden of irrelevances; but she did not long evade the spike. I tipped its point with the subtly poisonous suggestion that all arrangements must be made in the hour, otherwise complications might arise. There seemed to be so many people who had been attracted by that simple little advertisement of mine, and really, I must be able to say that I and ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... made too subtly, of too multiple warp and woof, for prophecy. When he surveys the world around, the wondrous things which there abound, the prophet closes foolish lips. Besides, as the historian tells us: "Writers ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... were not so apparent at first sight in Mrs. Levine, the golden, full-blown flower of the Brodricks. They had mixed so thoroughly and subtly that they merged in her smoothness and her roundness. And still the facial substance showed in the firm opacity of her skin, the racial soul asserted itself in her poised complacence ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... Atlantic. He was speaking rather earnestly to Miss Cahere, who listened with an expression of puzzled protest on her pretty face. She had wondering blue eyes and a complexion of the most delicate pink and white which never altered. She was slightly built, and carried herself in a subtly deprecating manner, as if her own opinion of herself were small, and she wished the world to accept her at that valuation. She made no sign of having perceived her uncle, but nevertheless dismissed the fourth officer, who reluctantly ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... heart beat quickly as he sat there waiting for her. For the first time a definite doubt possessed him. A woman cannot change her soul. Then it was the woman herself who was changed. Anna was not "Alcide" of the "Ambassador's," whose subtly demure smile and piquant glances had called him to her side from the moment of their first meeting. It ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that earl of the strangers, and men brought the gifts and the gold; White steeds from the Eastland horse-plain, fine webs of price untold, Huge pearls of the nether ocean, strange masteries subtly wrought By the hands of craftsmen perished and people ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... bye, how subtly Mr. Tennyson has embodied all this in The Princess. How he shows us the woman, when she takes her stand on the false masculine ground of intellect, working out her own moral punishment, by destroying in herself the tender ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... of my ugly maid has subtly changed. It radiates, in its own way, beauty and good cheer. Her harsh voice is gentle, her manner is kind, her tastes are becoming refined, her ways are those ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... schoolroom, this caricature of the country cousin, is akin in her simplicity, sweetness, and depth of nature to that other Gretchen whose figure lives for ever in the greatest of German poems. Just as the women of Shakespeare and the women of Miss Austen are subtly kin to each other, inasmuch as they are English women, so Goethe's girl and the girl of the poor little schoolroom story are German in every pulse and fibre. And this national essence, the honesty, goodness, and sweetness of the girl, are the real things, the ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... glass roof. The Ossified Man, sworn by clause of contact impervious alike to heat and cold, urged his reclining wheel-chair an imperceptible inch toward the neighboring sway of Miss Hoag's palm-leaf. She widened its arc, subtly. ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... of late subtly sophistical advocates of socialism who would set up in opposition to these American ideas the system of State paternalism, and assert the doctrine that the State should not let a man alone to make the ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... for a moment without speaking. A feeling of loathing such as he had never known before welled up in his heart against this girl. He hated the sight of her face. He almost imagined he could see its soft, warm tints changing subtly into the gray, putty-like complexion of his oldtime enemy. A beastly jowl seemed suddenly to spread from her smooth round cheek and sag heavy over her neck; her smile, bewitching to other eyes than his, took ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... lure of the man—the wealth of easement and rest that was promised by every caressing intonation of his voice, by the mere touch of hand on hand or the faint impact of his breath on neck or cheek. The man could not express himself by word nor look nor touch without weaving into the expression, subtly and occultly, the feeling as of a hand that passed and that in passing stroked softly and soothingly. Nor was this all-pervading caress a something that cloyed with too great sweetness; nor was it sickly sentimental; nor was it maudlin with love's madness. It was vigorous, compelling, masculine. ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... means follows that a grandly carved and completed model has for its counterpart an equally bold yet subtly refined outline; on the contrary, I have seen just the reverse, as I have also seen most wretched modelling wedded to an outline fit to grace the finest instrument extant. But it is not often so, for, as a rule, where a ...
— Violin Making - 'The Strad' Library, No. IX. • Walter H. Mayson
... turn up again?" The further she went the further he always saw himself able to follow. "I don't want your formula—I feel quite enough, as I hinted yesterday, your abysses. Spent!" he echoed. "If that's how you're arranging so subtly to send me I thank you for ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous—he refused to analyze it too closely—it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... her eyebrows in surprise. As he reinserted himself halfway across the portals of the realm where she queened it his recent moroseness was quite gone from him. About him now was the suggestion, subtly conveyed, that here stood one who, after profound cogitation, had found out what ailed him and, by the finding out, was filled with a gentle, chastened satisfaction. He seated himself on the kitchen door-step, facing outward so that comparative safety might be attained with a ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... specimens of Heine's wit are perhaps to be found in the works which have appeared since the "Reisebilder." The years, if they have intensified his satirical bitterness, have also given his wit a finer edge and polish. His sarcasms are so subtly prepared and so slily allusive, that they may often escape readers whose sense of wit is not very acute; but for those who delight in the subtle and delicate flavors of style, there can hardly be any wit more ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... receptacles for food and drink; and five minutes after my arrival he had me seated (in spite of some meek protests) in a wicker chair with a pitcher of the right Three Pigeons cider on the table before me, while he subtly dictated what manner of dinner I should eat. For this interval Amedee's exuberance was sobered and his badinage dismissed as being mere garniture, the questions now before us concerning grave and inward matters. His suggestions were deferential but insistent; his manner ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... are in themselves stylistic. Alone, and apart from any context, they incorporate that cognate appeal of significance and sound which is the secret of style. Thus far the matter is extremely simple. But there are also many words which denote other things than sounds and yet somehow convey subtly to the ear a sensuous suggestion of their content. Such words, for instance, are "mud," "nevermore," and "tremulous." Any child could tell you that words like these "sound just like what they mean"; and yet it would be impossible for the critical intellect to explain exactly ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... wandered to the figures on the fire-screen, faintly visible by the light of the dying logs. On the mantelpiece a great white rose in one of the vases was dropping its petals softly, languidly, one by one, giving an impression of something subtly feminine and sensuous. The cup-like petals rested delicately on the marble, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... pension nor retaining fee, but, if they deemed him worthy, would they write him a testimonial? It might be useful to him later, if others, their friends, came over the Passes. He begged them to remember him in their future greatnesses, for he 'opined subtly' that he, even he, Mohendro Lal Dutt, MA of Calcutta, had ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... as a water-hen, but she could see that, in spite of it, her sacrifice in having her party transferred from the glamorous evening hour had been justified. Both the Old Squire and his sister were obviously interested in Ellen Alce—he in the naive unguarded way of the male, she more subtly and not without ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... the gods very subtly fashion Madness with sadness upon earth: Not knowing in any wise compassion, Nor holding pity ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... between two oak logs, where it shrivelled instantaneously. Unfortunately science is not chivalric, and divulges the unamiable and ungraceful truth, that perverted female natures from even the lower beastly types are more implacably vindictive, more subtly malicious, more ingeniously cruel than the stronger sex; and when a woman essays to track, to capture, ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... her spinning wheel A pleasant chant, ballad, or baracolle; She thinketh of her song, upon the whole, Far more than of her flax; and yet the reel Is full, and artfully her fingers feel, With quick adjustment, provident control, The lines, too subtly twisted to unroll, Out to a perfect thread. I hence appeal To the dear Christian Church, that we may do Our Father's business in these temples mirk Thus, swift and steadfast; thus, intent and strong; While, thus, apart from toil, our ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... of witchery subtly sweet, When every hill and tree finds heart, When winter and spring like lovers meet In the mist of noon and part— In the ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... opposite is a beautiful lyric poem. She might be called "A Hymn to the Night." Every line of her figure is musical, every move suggested, rhythmical. Seen at night, she croons you a slumber song. How subtly Mr. Weinman has told you that she comes to fold the world within her wings - to create thru her desire a "still and pulseless world." The muscles are all lax - the head is drooping, the arms are closing in ...
— Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts • Juliet James
... to their balconies, and linger there for hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling their buckets from ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... and then uttering a word or two that would make the other jump and writhe with the sting. Jim told me these scenes were terrible. It was indeed a strange thing to come upon in a wilderness. The endlessness of such a subtly cruel situation was appalling—if you think of it. The respectable Cornelius (Inchi 'Nelyus the Malays called him, with a grimace that meant many things) was a much-disappointed man. I don't know what he had expected would be done for ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Motto, where nothing exceeds. Or ought to wast, for there's good Husbandry To be observ'd, as Art in Cookery. Which of the Mathematicks doth pertake, Geometry proportions when they bake. Who can in paste erect (of finest flour) A compleat Fort, a Castle, or a Tower. A City Custard doth so subtly wind, That should Truth seek, she'd scarce all corners find; Platform of Sconces, that might Souldiers teach, To fortifie by works as well as Preach. I'le say no more; for as I am a sinner, I've wrought my self a stomach to a dinner. Inviting Poets not to tantalize, But feast, (not surfeit) ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May
... is the perfection of decoration, with the subject well subdued, yet so subtly placed that notwithstanding its modesty, the eye promptly seeks it. The castle in the distance, the motive holding aloft the sign of the Zodiac, are seen even before the splendid columns and the ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... clever in the writing as it is entertaining in the reading. It is actual comedy of the most artistic sort, and it is handled with a freshness and originality that is unquestionably novel."—Boston Transcript. "A feast of humor and good cheer, yet subtly pervaded by special shades of feeling, fancy, tenderness, or whimsicality. A merry thing in prose."—St. ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... time I tried, I came back to the word "baconless." The word took on exquisite overtones of gray meaning, and I worked up those overtones until I had a perfectly wrought melancholy poem of one word—"Baconless." For, after all, a poem never existed upon paper, but lives subtly in the consciousness of the poet, and in the minds of those who understand the poet through the suggestiveness of his written symbols, ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... up an hour's studious reflection in the dubious conclusion that Good Form had something subtly to do with being able to sit cross-kneed and look arrogantly into the impertinent lens of a camp-follower's camera—to be impudently self-conscious, that is—to pose and pose and get ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... came the answer in the subtly-deferential tone of the aristocracy of menialdom, conjuring for Craig, with the aid of the woman herself and that aristocratic old room, a complete picture of the ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... evidently nursing his wrath, she faced the storm without protest, took all that was said quietly, helped in the fields and endeavoured to make up for her unfortunate words in every helpful way possible. In all, she was so subtly generous with her assistance that it was impossible to bring on a quarrel with her, and the sour demeanour of her father was so carefully handled that Friday arrived without an open break having occurred. A new dress had been one of the longed-for accomplishments ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... further, this solemn emblem stands for impurity. And we have only to consult our own hearts to feel how true it is about us all, that we dwell in a region all darkened, if not by the coarse transgressions which men consent to call sins, yet darkened more subtly and oftentimes more hopelessly by the obscuration of pure selfishness and living to myself and by myself. Wherever that comes, it is like the mists that steal up from some poisonous marsh, and shut out stars and sky, and drape the whole country in a melancholy veil. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... me see it all now through a mist of glamour? Unsuspected by us, that atmosphere of time tints everything. Few things but look lovelier seen down the vista of the years. Indeed, sentiment is a kind of religion; or is it religion that is a kind of sentiment? Both are so subtly busy canonizing the past, and crowning with aureoles very every-day things as well as very ordinary people. Not men alone take on a sanctity when they are no ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... and is the spectacle of a man preaching Christ with a taint of sidelong personal motives quite unknown to this day? We may press the question still more closely home and ask ourselves if we are entirely free from the influence of such a spirit. No man who knows himself and has learned how subtly lower motives blend themselves with the highest will be in haste to answer these questions with an unconditional 'No,' and no man who looks on the sad spectacle of competing Christian communities ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... religious yearnings by instructions from a learned philosopher. But the tables were subtly turned: my new teacher, far from offering intellectual aridities, fanned the embers of my God-aspiration. Unknown to Father, Swami Kebalananda was an exalted disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya. The peerless guru had possessed thousands of disciples, silently drawn to him by the irresistibility ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... made allowances for every English tradition. My English maids loved her without understanding her in the least. I never knew any one that had such a way as she had of turning your little vagaries and habits and fads to your notice with their funny side out, so that all the time you were subtly flattered and ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... No engine, however subtly devised, can evade this law of equivalence, or perform on its own account the smallest modicum of work. The machine distributes, but it cannot create. Is the animal body, then, to be classed among machines? ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... need be only trivially referred to, the incident, indeed, being generally regarded as a most cordial and pressing variety of foreign politeness), but also—in the lack of highly-spiced actuality—with subtly-imagined and truly objectionable instances. These calumnies they have not hesitated to commit to the form of printed books, which, falling into the hands of the ignorant and undiscriminating, may even suggest to their ill-balanced ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... has taken more than one form. There is the monopoly of certain occupations by corporations, prominent in the minds of eighteenth-century French reformers. There is the reservation of public appointments and ecclesiastical patronage for those who are "born," and there is a more subtly pervading spirit of class which produces a hostile attitude to those who could and would rise; and this spirit finds a more material ally in the educational difficulties that beset brains unendowed with wealth. I need not labour points ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... The subtly infernal enchantment of girl and music was felt by everybody; but several among the illuminati and the fair ultra-modernettes had now reached their limit of breadth and tolerance, and were becoming bored and self-conscious, when abruptly Marya's figure straightened to a lovely severity, her mouth ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... That we especially protest against this present attempt to force all the people to follow the religious dictates of a part of the people, as establishing a precedent for the entrance of a most dangerous complicity between Church and State, thereby subtly undermining the foundation of liberty, so carefully laid by the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... became subtly conscious, as women always are, that somebody's eyes were fixed upon her, for she awoke fully, and looked up as ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... yet never cold, but rather impassioned full of imaginative despair. He was driven on to discourse of the men who will not see light, of the men who draw thick blinds to shut out light. And then he was led, by the egoism that so subtly guides even the best among men, to speak of those fools who, by fostering darkness, think to compel sunshine, as a man may mix dangerous chemicals in a laboratory, seeking to advance some cause of science and die in the poisonous fumes of his own devilish brew. Can good, impulsive and radiant, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... grape—look out of season. Children in the withering wind are like the soft golden-pink roses that fill the barrows in Oxford Street, breathing a southern calm on the north wind. The child has something better than warmth in the cold, something more subtly out of place and more delicately contrary; and that is coolness. To be cool in the cold is the sign of a vitality quite exquisitely alien from the common conditions of the world. It is to have a naturally, and not an artificially, different ...
— The Children • Alice Meynell
... his way Barefooted, fasting long, with many prayers; But even as one who, followed unawares, Suddenly in the darkness feels a hand Thrill with its touch his own, and his cheek fanned By odors subtly sweet, and whispers near Of words he loathes, yet cannot choose but hear, So, while the Rabbi journeyed, chanting low The wail of David's penitential woe, Before him still the old temptation came, And mocked him with the motion and the shame Of such ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... That no man talk aside In secret with the judges The while his case is tried, Lest he should show them reason, To keep the matter hid, And subtly lead the questions Away ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... things had shown Ariel that the feeling of the place, influenced by "public sentiment" without, was subtly and profoundly hostile to Joe and his client; she read this in the spectators, in the jury, even in the Judge; but it seemed to her that day by day the inimical spirit gradually failed, inside the railing, and also in those spectators who, like ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... codes enter so subtly and so pervasively into the making of public opinion. The orthodox theory holds that a public opinion constitutes a moral judgment on a group of facts. The theory I am suggesting is that, in the present state of education, a public ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... from freightin' round speciments—naw, sir, ye can't, not till the fool-killer has finished his job." Ben Swift charged the table with the statement as the prosecution subtly appeals to the high grade of intelligence on the part of the jury. The point told. Eudora, wavering in her donation of hot flapjacks, ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... too exacting. He loved too well the sweet intricacies of Spenser, the majestic and subtly interwoven harmonies of Milton. These made him impatient of the simpler strains ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and silently go his way hillward. As he vanishes into the shadows, the crimson sun, sinking into the unknown wilderness beyond the mountains, pours its last glow on the roof of the cabin and on the group near its walls. With unfelt fingers, subtly, it puts the red touch of the West in the faces of the men—who have just declared, through the building of a cabin, that here is Journey's End ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... lay in a sick fever her heart went out to Joe. If she only could be at his side, nerve him to the fight, protect him and soothe him. She knew that his whole old life had been consumed in that fire, and lay in ruins, and she felt subtly that he had been taken from her. By one blow, at the very moment of the miracle of their love, they had been torn from each other. She did not want to live; she hoped that she had some serious disease that ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... state of affairs continued until shortly after five bells in the first watch, when we became aware that the atmosphere was being subtly and gradually suffused with ruddy light, coming from we knew not where. The change was so gradual that it was impossible to say just when it began, but within half an hour of our first perception of it the light had grown ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... down From fiery tongues, or angel choirs unseen. Thus like high gods on mountain-tops of joy Those happy listeners sat. The body quelled— With all that body's might usurped to cramp Through ceaseless, yet unconscious, weight of sense Conceptions spiritual, might more subtly skilled Than lusts avowed, to sap the spirit's life— In every soul its nobler Powers released Stood up, no more a jarring crowd confused Each trampling each and oft the worst supreme, Not thus, but grade o'er grade, in order due, And pomp ...
— Legends of the Saxon Saints • Aubrey de Vere
... he would not have owned it—the man was now dimly conscious of a new force at work upon him; of a change, slowly, subtly taking place somewhere deep within. He was feebly cognizant of emotions quite unknown; of unfamiliar sentiments, whose outlines were but just crystallizing out from the thick magma of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... tact and patience. He proved to the satisfaction of the authorities that he had acted in a perfectly honest spirit, though with a high hand, and that substantial justice had been done. Also, he subtly indicated that, if it came to the point, he should defy them to do their worst. Lastly, he was able, through the medium of the United States Ambassador, to bring certain soothing influences ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... his dressing-room, and which is now in my possession. He used to come on to the stage looking precisely like the Vandyck portraits, but not because he had been busy building up his face with wig-paste and similar atrocities. His make-up in this, as in other parts, was the process of assisting subtly and surely the expression from within. It was elastic, and never hampered him. It changed with the expression. As Charles, he was assisted by Nature, who had given him the most beautiful Stuart hands, but his clothes ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... gain! One least leaf plucked for chaffer from the bays Of their dear praise, One jot of their pure conquest put to hire, The implacable republic will require; With clamor, in the glare and gaze of noon, Or subtly, coming as a thief at night, But surely, very surely, slow or soon That insult deep we deeply will requite. Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity! For save we let the island men go free, Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts Will curse us from the lamentable coasts Where walk the frustrate dead. ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... writers, but the fact is that our consciousness at a given moment is never free from the ingredient of expectancy. Every one knows how when a painful thing has to be undergone in the {78} near future, the vague feeling that it is impending penetrates all our thought with uneasiness and subtly vitiates our mood even when it does not control our attention; it keeps us from being at rest, at home in the given present. The same is true when a great happiness awaits us. But when the future is neutral and perfectly certain, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... for India was but the sequel to the century-old conflict with the Moslem, a more subtly conceived crusade. Losing their hold on the Spanish Peninsula, the Moors were still intrenched in Africa; and in 1415 a Portuguese fleet, crossing to the northern point opposite Gibraltar, took and plundered the fortress and city of Ceuta. It was on this occasion, ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker
... eventually caught the eye of a subordinate agent of Von Bork, who recommended me as a likely man, you will realize that the matter was complex. Since then I have been honoured by his confidence, which has not prevented most of his plans going subtly wrong and five of his best agents being in prison. I watched them, Watson, and I picked them as they ripened. Well, sir, I hope that you are ...
— His Last Bow - An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... unlikeness to the rest of them had, by this time, penetrated to Mr. Clacton, who was not naturally observant, and he was wondering who she was; this same unlikeness had subtly stimulated Mrs. Seal to try and make a convert of her. Mary, too, looked at her almost as if she begged her to make things easy. For Katharine had shown no disposition to make things easy. She had scarcely spoken, and ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... carried in my right hand, now pointing with my left to this or that conspicuous example of the genius of a Rubens, a Rembrandt or a Titian, and, I presume, had been thus engaged for the better part of two hours, when a sudden subconscious instinct subtly warned me that I was alone. Astonished, I spun on my heel. My youthful companions were no longer with me. Five minutes before they had been at my skirts; of that I was sure; in fact, it seemed but a few moments since ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Plato is a work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in any words but the writer's own. There are so many half-lights and cross-lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of sophistry adhering—rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are so subtly intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously blend with germs of future knowledge, that agreement among interpreters is not to be expected. The expression 'poema magis putandum quam comicorum poetarum,' ...
— Symposium • Plato
... churches crowded. I found just the contrary. It was the French churches that were crowded, not the Spanish; and the difference between the truth—what one really sees and hears—and the printed legend happens to be very subtly illustrated in this case of religion. The French have inherited (and are by this time used to, and have, perhaps grown fond of) a big religious debate. Those who side with the national religion and tradition emphasize their opinion in every possible ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... for an instant and then subtly resumed their most ingratiating twinkle. "We cannot all be peacocks," he said quietly. "You will see the Prince, his court and all the distinguished men of the city and the army. You will also see that the man who rides beside the Prince's carriage wheel is an American, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... all. He said: "I have been reading books by Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank and Ben Hecht and Konrad Bercovici and Joseph Hergesheimer, and I can see that they are important books, but I feel that the essential point to which all this newly awakened literary consciousness is tending has somehow subtly eluded me. American and English writers both use the same language, and so do Scotch and Irish writers, but I am not puzzled when I read Scotch and Irish books as I am when I read these new American books. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... his cause, was the man to spread the charge against Louis broadcast over the land. The truth of the death is not proven. Frequent mentions of Guienne's condition occur through the letters of the winter '71-72. The story was that the poison, administered subtly by the king's orders, caused the illness of both the prince and his mistress, Mme. de Thouan. She died after two months of suffering, December 14th, while he resisted the poison longer, though his health was completely shattered and his months of longer life were unutterably wretched and painful, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam |
