"Suppleness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... perform a distinguished part. But he is content with the liberty of a private station, as a spectator only, and, perhaps, in that he shows his wisdom; for undoubtedly such men are not cordially received among hereditary statesmen, unless they evince a certain suppleness of principle, such as we have seen in the conduct of ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... tradesmen dealing in suspicious wares (in most instances unshrewdly, since they rarely get rich, which aggravates their position); while what they call performers are looked upon by them as mere tricksters or jugglers, who profit by the dexterity of their fingers, as dancers and acrobats by the suppleness of their limbs. The painter whose works decorate their saloons figures in the budget of their expenses on a line with the upholsterer, whose hangings they speak of in the same breath with Church's "Heart of the Andes," and Rosa ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... instant that he was in combat with a man larger and more powerful than himself, but his own youth and suppleness were in ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... back into the mountains, but at present they are quite equal to the tall race, and the "salt-water men" are even a little afraid of their small neighbours inland. What they lack in size and strength they make up in speed and suppleness and temperament. The barrier between the races has disappeared, and the mixing process is hastened by the fact that the small race frequently sells its women to the tall one. It is rare for a woman from the coast to settle in the mountains, still, it occurs ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... and a reel over the off-side; a woman's cry rang again, clear, and shrill, and agonized on the night; a moment more, and he would have fallen, head downward, beneath the horses' feet. But he had ridden stirrupless and saddleless ere now; he recovered himself with the suppleness of an Arab, and firm-seated behind the collar, with one leg crushed between the pole and Maraschino's flanks, gathering in the ribbons till they were tight-drawn as a bridle, he strained with all the might and sinew that were in him ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... are nervous and full of muscles, that they may, as well as the back, be often in action and sustain the greatest fatigue of all the body. The hands are a contexture of nerves and little bones set one within another in such a manner that they have all the strength and suppleness necessary to feel the neighbouring bodies, to seize on them, hold them fast, throw them, draw them to one, push them off, disentangle them, and ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... of her profile—a profile becoming clearer cut as she grew older—features wrought with delicacy and yet imbued with strength, suggestive of carved ivory. Delicacy imbued with strength was betokened, too, by the tall slenderness of her figure, whose silence and suppleness of movement came—in Conquest's imagination at least—from her far-off ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... left sober analysis far behind in the race. The girl's exuberant vitality asserted itself all over her, from head to foot. Her figure—taller than her sister's, taller than the average of woman's height; instinct with such a seductive, serpentine suppleness, so lightly and playfully graceful, that its movements suggested, not unnaturally, the movements of a young cat—her figure was so perfectly developed already that no one who saw her could have supposed ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... style, it is limpid, accurate, easy and strongly marked, with a sound framework and having the suppleness of ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... your jacket," mildly remarked by dear uncle as he savagely flourished a cowhide of most formidable aspect and alarming suppleness. ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... proud, delicate youth of twenty-four years, having only a superficial knowledge of public affairs, scarcely known to the Ministers, and endowed with a narrow pedantic nature which was to be the bane of his people. He lacked alike the sagacity, the foresight, and the suppleness of Leopold. Further, though his inexperience should have inspired him with a dread of war for his storm-tossed States, yet that same misfortune subjected him to the advice of the veteran Chancellor, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... too strong for her, that habit of honesty of thought and action. If this struggle with it had come years before she could have mastered it, flinging against it the irresistible suppleness and lightness of her ignorant youth. But now, freighted heavily with experience of reality, she could not turn and bend ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... measured ballet-step, which Julia performed in her own masterly style, folding and unfolding in turn, like two garlands, her peri's arms; then the rhythm becoming more and more animated, she struck the floor with her rapid and repeated steps, with the wild suppleness and the wanton smile of a young bacchante. Suddenly she brought the performance to a close with a long slide that carried her, all panting, before Monsieur de Lucan, seated opposite to her. There, she bent one knee, lay with rapid gesture both her hands upon her hair, and tossing about at the same ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... horrified at first at the wanderings off after nightfall of women who had nursed like scientific angels by day, accompanied by men who were never more men than when any moment might turn them into carrion. But with her mental suppleness she had quickly readjusted her point of view. There is nothing as sensual as war. It is the quintessential carnality. Renan once wrote a story of the French Revolution, "The Abbess Juarre," in which his thesis was that if warning were given that the world would end in three days the entire population ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the conqueror kept his word, and having made a king of Bavaria to give them to, gave them to the king of Bavaria, Messieurs the senators, with a suppleness and a docility which would have done credit to Debry (who after proposing, as a republican, to organise 1,200 'tyrannicides' and murder all the kings and emperors of the earth, begged Napoleon to make him a baron), made haste to come and prostrate themselves ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... weakness, anaemia, and dyspepsia are common. Even though most of the joints become useless, there is often sufficient suppleness in the fingers to allow of their use, as in writing or knitting. In old men the disease is seen attacking one joint alone, as the hip, shoulder, knee, and spine. Children are occasionally sufferers, and in young women it may follow frequent confinements or nursing, and often ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various
... of retired colonels and such-like derelicts, owe their salvation of body and soul to the absurd but hygienic pastime—and with a naturally true eye and a harmonious body trained to all demands on its suppleness in the gymnasium, proficiency had come with little trouble. He was a born golfer; for the physically perfect human is a born anything physical you please. But he had not played for a long time. Half-crowns had been very scarce on this last disastrous tour, and comrades ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... coward calls black white, white black, At bidding, or in fear of death; Such suppleness, thank God, I lack, To die is but to lose my breath. Is death annihilation? No. New worlds will open on my view, When persecuted hence I go, The right is right,—the ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... Rose made up in superior suppleness of limb for the pent-up malice of the other. Grace aimed her thrusts at her opponent's face. She tried to reach her eye. Once the sharp steel just pricked Sheeny Rose's cheek and drew blood. In the ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... saint's and poet's love of things for their own sakes, the vision of the charitable heart, which is the secret of union with Reality and the condition of all real knowledge. This brings with it the precious quality of suppleness, the power of responding with ease and simplicity to the great rhythms of life; and this will only come when the ungainly "lump" of sin is broken, and the verb "to have," which expresses its reaction to ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... so?" he said. "I think her grace is her strong point, 'la grace encore plus belle que la beaute,' and longer-lived beside. Few women move as she does, making it a pleasure to follow her with the eyes. And her height and suppleness: at twenty-five ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... and his hands were the hands of a sailor, except that they were smooth. Pleasant had an eye for sailors, and she noticed the unused colour and texture of the hands, sunburnt though they were, as sharply as she noticed their unmistakable looseness and suppleness, as he sat himself down with his left arm carelessly thrown across his left leg a little above the knee, and the right arm as carelessly thrown over the elbow of the wooden chair, with the hand curved, half open and half shut, as if it had just let ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... In the large cities you can see dozens of them squatting along the streets performing their sacred offices, shaving the heads and oiling the bodies of customers. Cocoanut oil is chiefly used and is supposed to add strength and suppleness to the body. It is administered with massage, thoroughly rubbed in and certainly cannot injure anybody. In the principal parks of Indian cities, at almost any time in the morning, you can see a dozen or twenty men being oiled and rubbed down by barbers or by friends, and ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... long eyelashes; the damp, red, half-open lips challenged a kiss. Her frame was strong but compliant; with a bust and arms strongly developed, as in figures drawn by the Caracci, she yet seemed active and elastic, with a panther's strength and suppleness, and in the same way the energetic grace of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... disagreeable to me as they were new. One evening, under the pretext that I had purposely jostled him in running, he struck me, and we fought. Although he was probably stronger than I, as he was heavier and older, my suppleness enabled me to get the better of him in a wrestle; and I got him under me, when the master, attracted by the shouts of the boys, made his appearance. He separated and reproved us, and sent us off in disgrace to our respective rooms. From that time Balty Mahu treated me with ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... to keep out of the trap it had laid for him. He had fallen into this trap on the threshold and had only scrambled out with his honour. He had a talent for appearance, and that was the fatal thing; he had a damnable suppleness and a gift of immediate response, a readiness to oblige, that made him seem to take up causes which he really left lying, enabled him to learn enough about them in an hour to have all the air of having converted them to his use. Many ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... unflinching look, its fearlessness, won his admiration. In her slim suppleness, vibrant, feminine to the finger tips, alluring with the unconscious appeal of sex, there was a fine courage to face frankly essential facts. But he was a hard man to move once he had made up his mind. For all his frivolous impudence and his boyish good nature, he knew his own mind, and ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... packed forward again, and Dolores found herself fighting desperately against men maddened into steel-armed wolves, thirsty for her blood in payment for that split. She more than held her own by sheer skill and suppleness for a space; but assailed from all sides save the back she speedily felt her limbs growing heavy and awkward, and a cutlas sang above her bent head when her foot had failed, leaving her without guard ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... living woman—asks me in her purring voice what sound I heard, hiding a smile as she stoops low over her work, and I answer lightly, and, moving towards her, put my arm about her, feeling her softness and her suppleness, and wondering, supposing I held her close to me with one arm while pressing her from me with the other, how long before I should hear the cracking of ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... exciting the Liegese to rebellion, and forgetting the fact just when he was coming to place himself in his enemy's hands. Far, however, from losing his head, Louis displayed in this perilous trial all the penetration, activity, and shrewdness of his mind, together with all the suppleness of his character; he sent by his own servants questions, offers, and promises to all the duke's servants from whom he could hope for any help or any good advice. Fifteen thousand golden crowns, with which he had provided himself ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... philosophic induction, but at first hand, because he is a Jew by birth and breeding. He, unlike Heine, has never tried to conceal the fact that he is a Jew. In Israel Zangwill all the tenderness and sympathy, all the tenacity, the suppleness and adaptability, and it may be added, the baffling ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... out to the courtyard and Flann began to climb the Fairy Rowan Tree with all suppleness, strength and cunning. The cats that were below felt him going up the tree and the cats that were above humped themselves up. Flann passed the first branch on which a cat was crouched. He went above where the rowan berries were, and bending down he picked ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... resembled his mother; he had her beautiful golden hair, her lovable mouth, the same curving fingers, the same soft, delicate, and purely white skin. Though slightly resembling a girl disguised as a man, his physical strength was Herculean. His muscles had the suppleness and vigor of steel springs, and the singularity of his black eyes and fair complexion was by no means without charm. His beard had not yet sprouted; this delay, it is said, is a promise of longevity. The chevalier was dressed in a short coat of black velvet like that of his ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... trampled upon by men of bolder and more hardy breeds. Courage, independence, veracity, are qualities to which his constitution and his situation are equally unfavorable. His mind bears a singular analogy to his body. It is weak even to helplessness, for purposes of manly resistance; but its suppleness and its tact move the children of sterner climates to admiration not unmingled with contempt. All those arts which are the natural defence of the weak are more familiar to this subtle race than to the Ionian of the time of Juvenal, or to the Jew of ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... a scrambling as there was! Ann Hicks showed her suppleness by being one of the first to land and beating some of the boys; but she did ...
— Ruth Fielding on Cliff Island - The Old Hunter's Treasure Box • Alice Emerson
... nothing else, there are thirteen s-s to five in the original. Even Crashaw, whose translation of Strada's "Music's Duel" is a masterpiece for litheness of phrase and sinuous suppleness of rhythm, quails before the "Dies Irae," and contents himself with a largely watered paraphrase. No one has ever yet succeeded more than tolerably ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... a huge Bohemian rubber, and Scanlon agreed to accept his ministrations. After a bath and a shower, the Bohemian kneaded and punched some suppleness into him; an hour's sleep followed this, and he was pleased to find himself in a mood ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Criminologist • John T. McIntyre
... open-air laboratory, gave me a definite answer. Knowing the points frequented by the two Megachiles, I planted in their work-yard, overgrown with briar and lilac, two outlandish plants which seemed to me to fulfil the required conditions of suppleness of texture, namely, the ailantus, a native of Japan, and the Virginian physostegia. Events justified the selection: both Bees exploited the foreign flora with the same assiduity as the local flora, passing from the lilac to the ailantus, from the briar to the physostegia, leaving the ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... prey: the beak of the eagle, but the eye of the vulture. His cheeks were hollow; the arms, crossed on his breast, were long and fleshless. Yet in that skeleton form there was a something which conveyed the idea of a serpent's suppleness and strength; and as the hungry, watchful eyes met my own startled gaze, I recoiled impulsively with that inward warning of danger which is conveyed to man, as to inferior animals, in the very aspect ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Little she cared save to be at my side, To ride with me, and ever to ride, From San Saba's shore to Lavaca's tide. She was as bold as the billows that beat, She was as wild as the breezes that blow: From her little head to her little feet, She was swayed in her suppleness to and fro By each gust of passion; a sapling pine That grows on the edge of a Kansas bluff And wars with the wind when the weather is rough, Is like this Lasca, this love of mine. She would hunger that I might eat, Would take the bitter ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... half inclined to laugh himself. Either one of them could have strangled him with a finger and a thumb if he could have got hold of him; but getting a good hold was the trouble. An Indian makes up in suppleness and activity what he lacks in strength, and it takes a good man to handle one. Of course the troopers were sorry for their wounded comrade, but they had "got a joke" on him, and it was a long time before he heard the last ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon
... the Sierras. Suffice it to say that her fall from grace had been rapid, though her dissolute career had in no way diminished her beauty. Indeed, her features were well-nigh perfect, her skin transparently clear, if dark, and her form was suppleness itself as she danced. And that she was the undisputed belle of the evening was made apparent by the number of men who watched her with eyes that marvelled at her grace when dancing, and surrounded her ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... wenches go—hair as black as a January night in stormy weather, and eyes as big and as bright and as yellow (o' my word)—as yellow as two crown pieces! They looked out from under her thick eyebrows like sunlight peeping from a heavy cloud. And she was made like a lad for suppleness. Taller than her mother by head and shoulders, and within a full inch o' my forelock. By'r lay'kin! how she could sing too! She would troll thee a ditty i' th' voice o' a six-foot stripling, but for a' that, as sweet as bells far away on a still noon in summer-tide. And she was always ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... you think of that?" said he, giving it two or three switches in the air to try its suppleness and toughness; "don't that look like a whip? Now we'll see how ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... that corrupt heart—his love for Romola—is almost from the first tainted by the same selfishness. From the first he recognises that his relation to her will give him a certain position in the city; and he feels that with his ready tact and Greek suppleness this is all that is needed to secure his further advancement. The vital antagonism between his nature and hers bars the possibility of his foreseeing how her truthfulness, nobleness, and purity shall become the thorn in his ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... sea, but the physical culture and maxims of education, consistently enforced by the State, thus affected both the being and the development of the population. These measures were calculated to combine beauty, strength and suppleness of body with wit and elasticity of mind, both of which were transmitted to the descendants. True enough, even then, in comparison with man, woman was neglected in point of mental, but not of corporal culture.[86] In Sparta, that went furthest in the corporal culture ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... which is also known in Brazil as the "barbado," was of large size. The suppleness and stoutness of his limbs proclaimed him a powerful creature, as fit to fight on the ground as to leap from branch to branch at the tops of ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... Carthaginians, Romans, Goths, Arabs and Spaniards have made of it the preferred seat of their business and pleasure. In his so often unsparing verses, Martial, even, celebrates with an erotic rapture the undulating suppleness of the ballet dancers of Gades, who are continued in our day by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 832, December 12, 1891 • Various
... plentiful on the frontier), and was appalled by the fact that my own lines corresponded but too well, alas! with those of the Staff. Ah, me! were the days, then, of Lieutenants forever past and gone? The days of suppleness and youth, the careless gay days, when there was no thought for the future, no anxiety about education, when the day began with a wild dash across country and ended with a dinner and dance—-were they over, then, for ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... were strangely agile; their movements were quick, their step was light, like a cat's, and she noted how they lifted their feet. She did not know the prospector gets the habit by walking through tangled bush and across rough stones. They had a suppleness that came from using the long ax, and toil in the wilds had given them a fine-drawn look. In some ways both were modern, but in some they belonged to the past, when the fortress peels were built and the marsh-men fought ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... of a large estate, and having lost her mother in her infancy, was committed to a governess, whom misfortunes had reduced to suppleness and humility. The fondness of Turpicula's father would not suffer him to trust her at a publick school, but he hired domestick teachers, and bestowed on her all the accomplishments that wealth could purchase. But how many things are necessary to happiness which money cannot ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... tawny—on the scent of his tracks. Then the mist passed over it. When he beheld it again it had approached nearer and was creeping rapidly toward the door. His listless eyes grew fascinated by its motions—its litheness, suppleness, grace, stealth, exquisite caution. Never before had he seen a dog with the step of a cat. A second time the fog closed over it, and then, advancing right out of the cloud with more swiftness, more cunning, its large ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... happiness, I am tormented by the desire to know why I am doing it, and I am not satisfied with the answer I usually get. The patient may not be cured when he is relieved of his anaemia, or when his emaciation has given place to the plumpness and suppleness and physical strength that we call health. The man whom we look upon as well, and who has never known physical illness, is not well in the larger sense until he knows why he is working, why he is living, why he is filling his life ...
— The Untroubled Mind • Herbert J. Hall
... nor let them rove From the mark where shafts of love Their flight wing. Try, my girl, O try what bliss Young men render when they kiss! Youth is alway sturdy, straight; Old age totters in its gait. These delights of love we bring Have the suppleness of spring, Softness, sweetness, wantoning; Clasp, my Phyllis, in their ring Sweeter sweets than poets ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... assistant he has been. Now, besides superintending the putting up of the tent, he thinks out and arranges the packing of the sledge; it is extraordinary how neatly and handily everything is stowed, and how much study has been given to preserving the suppleness and good running qualities of the machine. On the Barrier, before the ponies were killed, he was ever roaming ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... shares with the domestic pig; though in the case of the pig it is generally spoken of as obstinacy. But the leader—General, Prime Minister or Captain of Industry—is distinguished from the pig by a certain intellectual suppleness which makes his obstinacy a more effective though less showy thing. The pig, being determined to go his own way, has no better idea than to tug desperately against the rope which is tied round his ankle. He tugs unwaveringly ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... smooth surfaces neatly padded beneath, and velvet linings to their singing-pipes, are not so common among us as that other pattern of humanity with angular outlines and plane surfaces, and integuments, hair like the fibrous covering of a cocoa-nut in gloss and suppleness as well as color, and voices at once thin and strenuous,—acidulous enough to produce effervescence with alkalis, and stridulous enough to sing duets with the katydids. I think our conversational soprano, as sometimes overheard in the cars, arising from a group of young persons, who may have taken ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... her own room, and after removing the blanket, placed her in a chair. Elsie stared about, too frightened and tired even to whimper. The whip fell to the floor and Tess picked it up. For a long time, she held it in her hand, meditatively trying its strength and suppleness while she glared at the child. Then she slipped quietly into the hall, still carrying the riding ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... camp by the assurance of economic ease, and what is more, he may be kept in order after he has been taken by the consciousness of his gain. Among hardheaded and highly practical peoples, such as the Jews and the French, the dot flourishes, and its effect is to promote intellectual suppleness in the race, for the average child is thus not inevitably the offspring of a woman and a noodle, as with us, but may be the offspring of a woman and a man of reasonable intelligence. But even in France, the very highest class of men tend to evade marriage; they resist ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... great as his suppleness. One day, at Fiesole, a foreign doctor presumed to challenge Monsignore to a debate, and the offer was accepted. While the two stood together in Cristoforo's wagon, and the intruder was haranguing the people, the quack, without a movement of his face or a twitch ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... performances in which expressive and elaborate gestures and movements were left to tell the whole tale. For this kind of piece the actors naturally required not only uncommon cleverness but also great suppleness of body. As usual, these qualities, together with the qualities of voice, the magnificent dress, and the carefully cultivated long hair, won for the actor demoralising influence over too large a number of the more impressionable and ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker
... mother and Allie—so well that he ought to love all women because they were of the same sex. Yet how impossible! Had these creatures any sex? Yet they were—at least many were—young, gay, pretty, wild, full of life. They had swift suppleness, smiles, flashing eyes, a look at once intent and yet vacant. But few onlookers would have noticed that. The eyes for which the dance was meant saw the mad whirl, the bare flesh, the brazen glances, ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... a couple of minutes the swords clashed, and then the captain lunged, but the major, recovering his old suppleness of wrist, parried in a masterly style, and if he had returned the attack Burle would have been pierced through. The captain now fell back; he was livid, for he felt that he was at the mercy of the man who had just spared him. At last he understood ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... stripped, there was ohs! and ahs! of delight. His body was perfect, alive with easy suppleness and health and strength. The skin was white as a woman's, and as smooth. All grace, and resilience, and power resided therein. He had proved it in scores of battles. His photographs were in all the physical ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... power of an aristocracy. The system of Lycurgus was agreeable to his stern and inflexible temper. His integrity was republican—his loftiness of spirit was patrician. He had all the purity, the disinterestedness, and the fervour of a patriot—he had none of the suppleness or the passion of a demagogue; on the contrary, he seems to have felt much of that high-spirited disdain of managing a people which is common to great minds conscious that they are serving a people. His manners were austere, and he rather advised than ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heard the bolt grate stealthily against the door of the little temple in which I was imprisoned, and was minded to give these brutish rebels somewhat of a surprise. I had rid myself of my bonds handily enough; I had rubbed my limbs to that perfect suppleness which is always desirable before a fight; and I had planned to rush out so soon as the door was swung, and kill those that came first with fist blows on the brow ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... grouse was one which, having been seriously wounded by other hands some days previously, had come up to the hills to shuffle off its mortal coil in seclusion, arguing thus from its total absence of heat and suppleness. ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... stated that in the batching department various qualities of jute are mixed as judiciously as possible in order to obtain a satisfactory mixture. Fibres of different grades and marks vary in strength, colour, cleanness, diameter, length and suppleness; it is of the utmost importance that these fibres of diverse qualities should be distributed as early as possible in the process so as to facilitate ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... then tripping through the measure on Hawtrey's arm, was native born. She was young and straight—straighter in outline than the women of the cities—with a suppleness which was less suggestive of the willow than a rather highly-tempered spring. She moved with a large vigor which barely fell short of grace, her eyes snapped when she smiled at Hawtrey, and her hair, which was of a ruddy brown, had fiery gleams in ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... to vanish, one after another, under the combined efforts of secret influence and patient and persistent suppleness. Then when the moment had arrived at which it was necessary for the Duke of Savoy to decide upon a matter that affected so closely the personal expedience of his daughter, and to set M. de Torcy in ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... ore the most formidable enemies the little turtles have. Humboldt justly remarks, When we reflect on the difficulty that the naturalist finds in getting out the body of the turtle, without separating the upper and the under shell, we cannot enough admire the suppleness of the jaguar's paw, which empties the double armor of the arraus, as if the adhering parts of the muscles had been ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... his right hand. Prescott observed his thin, almost ascetic face, smooth-shaven and finely cut. Both General Wood and the Secretary were mountaineers, but the two faces were different; one represented blunt strength and courage; the other suppleness, dexterity, meditation, the power of silent combination. Had the two been blended here would have been one of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... will and character has been tempered by this holy fire takes on something of the suppleness, hardness, and firmness of steel, of which a delicate blade will cut the grosser iron of which that blade itself was a part before it was subjected to the refining process that made ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... the sixth dress, which was green. In this she reached the utmost bounds of loveliness, outvying in slender straightness the tawny spear-shaft, and in suppleness and flexile grace the bending branch, whilst the splendours of her face outshone the radiance of the full moon. Indeed, she transcended the fair of all quarters of the world and all hearts were broken by her loveliness; for she was even as says ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... instructor explains the importance of good footwork and impresses on the men the fact that quickness of foot and suppleness of body are as important for attack and defense as is the ability to parry and deliver ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... is formed, and in which it lives. Men of great ability have taken it in hand, each in his own day, and have done for it what the master of a gymnasium does for the bodily frame. They have formed its limbs, and developed its strength; they have endowed it with vigour, exercised it in suppleness and dexterity, and taught it grace. They have made it rich, harmonious, various, and precise. They have furnished it with a variety of styles, which from their individuality may almost be called dialects, and are monuments both of the powers of the language and the genius ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... becomes hard as the nether millstone, the other (just as after constant 'pinching' a limb becomes insensible) grows callous, and also (though it seems like a contradiction in terms) sometimes acquires a certain dreadful suppleness. Nothing is more monstrous than the generally received opinion with respect to a moderate competence; that 'fatal gift,' as it is called, which encourages idleness in youth by doing away with the necessity for exertion. I never hear the same ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... tough as cordwood hands a bunch of knots; legs like snubbing-posts, body quick-moving; brain quick-thinking; alert as a dog when on duty, calm as a sleepy cat beside a stove when his time was his own. Sixty only in years, this man; forty in strength and in skill, twenty in suppleness, and a one-year-old toddling infant in all that made for guile. "Uncle Ike" some of the younger men once called him, wondering behind their hands whether he was not too old and believing all the time that he was. "Uncle Ike" they still ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... which it moved. Then he planted himself with his back to the wall. Whoever came up the well hunting the cause for the failure would be facing the other way. Ross crouched a little, pushing the cape well back on his shoulders to free his arms. There was a feline suppleness in his stance just as a jungle cat might wait coming of ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton
... up the slope to the big house. A fishing costume is not a thing of grace, but the one this girl wore could not eclipse the elastic suppleness of the slender figure or the joy in life that animated the vivid face with the black curls straying from beneath the jaunty cap. The long hip waders she wore so briskly gave her the look of a modern Rosalind. To deny her beauty ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... at this moment, for so many slight, easy, human pleasures were new to her. She sat curved on the ground, with the ease and suppleness of a greyhound ready to spring, whereas Sir Edmund was forty and a little more ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward
... Blanc thus esteems her: "In short, Mme. Le Brun belonged entirely to the eighteenth century—I wish to say to that period of our time which rested itself suddenly at David. While she followed the counsels of Vernet, her pencil had a certain suppleness, and her brush a force; but she too often attempted to imitate Greuze in her later works and she weakened the resemblance to her subjects by abusing the regard noye (cloudy or indistinct effect). She was too early in vogue to make all the necessary studies, and she too often contented ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... slightly pitted, however, and his eyelids had not suffered. Men were inclined to call him ugly; women thought him interesting. His frame was badly built from the athlete's point of view; but it had the suppleness which makes the graceful dancer, and was an elegant scaffolding on which to hang the picturesque costume of the day. For the rest, all that he was he had made himself, during those eighteen years of intelligent self-culture, which had been ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... long time, also, since he had seen her so well and so near in the daylight: she was growing more beautiful that spring; she was pretty, pretty!—Her bust had become rounder and her waist thinner; her manner gained, day by day, an elegant suppleness. She resembled her brother still, she had the same regular features, the same perfect oval of the face; but the difference in their eyes went on increasing: while those of Arrochkoa, of a blue green shade which seemed fleeting, avoided the glances of others, hers, on the contrary, black ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... these parts a woman who followed a band of mountebanks and jugglers, who stretched out her legs in such an extraordinary manner, and raised up her feet to her head, before and behind, with as much suppleness as if she had neither nerves nor joints. There was nothing supernatural in all that; she had exercised herself from extreme youth in these movements, and had contracted the habit ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... the return to the palace, the visitors were welcomed by the sound of melancholy music, speedily interrupted, however, by the barking and fantastical dancing of the prince's fool, who showed wonderful agility and suppleness. To this dance, or rather to these postures of a bayadere, succeeded the excitement of vingt-et-un, followed by well-earned repose. Next day there were new entertainments and new exercises; beginning with wrestling-matches for grown men and for youths, and proceeding ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... along the high bank of a watercourse, and sneaking under the shadowing border of a belt of jungle, is to understand his cunning and craftiness. His attitude, when he is crouching for the final bound, is the embodiment of suppleness and strength. All his actions are graceful, and half display and half conceal beneath their symmetry and elegance the tremendous power and deadly ferocity that lurks beneath. For a short distance he is possessed ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... first thing that the cat said, that Rudy understood. "It is all imagination about falling; one does not fall, when one does not fear to do so. Come, place your one paw so, and your other so! Take care of your fore-paws! Look sharp with your eyes, and give suppleness to your limbs! If there be a hole, jump, hold fast, ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen
... NAPOLEON together, somewhat out of breath. With careless suppleness she slides down on a couch and fans herself. Now that the candle-rays reach her they show her mellow complexion, her velvety eyes with long lashes, mouth with pointed corners and excessive mobility beneath its duvet, and curls of ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... forethought, is not without interest for those who would classify the elements of a style that will wear and hold its colors well. His diction, if wanting in the more hardy evidences of muscle, has a suppleness and spring that give proof of training and endurance. His "Defence of Rhyme," written in prose (a more difficult test than verse), has a passionate eloquence that reminds one of Burke, and is more light-armed and modern than the prose of Milton fifty years later. ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... before their eyes. The merchant's clerk will not write like the lawyer or the poet. Even nations are distinguished by their writing; the vivacity and variableness of the Frenchman, and the delicacy and suppleness of the Italian, are perceptibly distinct from the slowness and strength of pen discoverable in the phlegmatic German, Dane, and Swede. When we are in grief, we do not write as we should in joy. The elegant and correct mind, which has acquired the fortunate habit of a fixity of attention, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... to a happier and more courageous frame of mind, Peveril stiffly gained his feet, moved his limbs, and rubbed them until a certain degree of suppleness was restored. He was about to build a fire, but refrained from so doing upon reflection that his stock of fuel must be limited, and that a fire might be of infinitely greater value ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... instinct from beginning to end with the spirit of the drama, while we find in him the seeds and rudiments even of its form. His function as a reciting minstrel greatly aided him herein. Again, he had in his language an instrument unrivalled for its facility, suppleness, and versatility, for the large range of what would in music be called its register, so that it embraced every form and degree of human thought, feeling, and emotion, and clothed them all, from the lowest to the loftiest, from the slightest to the most intense and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... vanity. Next she was seized with a sense of the great indelicacy and unpardonable impropriety of letting her mind run at all upon a person of the other sex; and shaking her lovely shoulders, as much as to say, "Away idle thoughts," she nestled and fitted with marvelous suppleness into a corner of the carriage, and sank into a sweet sleep, with a red cheek, two wet eyelashes, and a half-smile of the most heavenly character imaginable. And so she glided along till, at five in the afternoon, the carriage turned ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... fluids are all in a better and more healthy state. In proof of this, I might mention in the first place that superior agility, ease of motion, speed, and power of endurance which so distinguish vegetable-eaters, wherever a fair comparison is instituted. They possess a suppleness like that of youth, even long after what is called the juvenile period of life is passed over. They are often seen running and jumping, unless restrained by the arbitrary customs of society, in very ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... names," she sighed, changing her position beneath the lace with the swift suppleness of a kitten. "And what luck hunting?" she asked, as she loosened ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... be termed nice. Spruce is applied to the show and affectation of neatness with a touch of smartness, and is always a term of mild contempt; as, a spruce serving man. Trim denotes a certain shapely and elegant firmness, often with suppleness and grace; as, a trim suit; a trim figure. Prim applies to a precise, formal, affected nicety. Dapper is spruce with the suggestion of smallness and slightness; natty, a diminutive of neat, suggests ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... her, as she made her repast, with the most profound attention. THe suppleness of her motions sent a thrill of delight through my frame; my heart beat madly as she turned her beautiful eyes in the direction of the spot in which I stood. What would I not have given to have had the power to precipitate myself into that luminous ocean and float with her through ...
— The Diamond Lens • Fitz-James O'brien
... telephone conversation, had presence of mind enough to open the door and receive a square box tied with purple ribbon. She dexterously untied the loose bow knot, and withdrew from its tissue wrappings, a fragrant bouquet of violets. An envelope enclosing a card fell to the floor. With suppleness hardly to be expected from one of her years, she stooped to pick it up, and in a twinkling had the ...
— Out of the Ashes • Ethel Watts Mumford
... figurehead of the democracy had a comparatively easy part assigned him. Had it been necessary for him to persuade, he would probably have failed, for he lacked the gifts of the orator and the suppleness of the intriguer; but he was expected only to confirm, and better confirmation was to be gained from his martial bearing and his rugged manner than from his halting words. The speaking might be done by ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... that, old horse, isn't it? And yet ten years from now you'll be no good, and thirty years from now I'll be near the end of the deal. And Clyde! Why, Shiner, we can't think of her as an old lady, can we? With her smooth cheeks a little withered and the suppleness gone from her body, and her eyes dim and her glorious hair white. Lord, horse, we mustn't think of it! She'll always be the same dear Clyde to us, won't she? 'Sufficient unto the day,' my equine trial and friend. Others will ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... would have stimulated an Egyptian mummy, Carley thought, and the subdued rose lights, the murmur of gay voices, the glide and grace and distortion of the dancers, were exciting and pleasurable. Morrison had the suppleness and skill of a dancing-master. But he held Carley too tightly, and so she told him, and added, "I imbibed some fresh pure air while I was out West—something you haven't here—and I don't want it ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... a bowl," Billy Fairfax said. "I never saw such suppleness. You wouldn't think they had ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... just the busy useful life of an Italian farm, lived in groups—in monastic families, under the rule and inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a Father who really was the spiritual parent of his monks, and sought to train them in the humility, obedience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character which are the authentic fruits of the Spirit. This ideal, it seems to me, has something still to say to us; some reproof to administer to our hurried and muddled existence, our confusion of values, our failure to find time for reality. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... should train them as your husband intends to train Phil. It may be that he will never be called upon to draw a sword, but the time he has spent in acquiring its use will not be wasted. These exercises give firmness and suppleness to the figure, quickness to the eye, and briskness of decision to the mind. A man who knows that he can, at need, defend his life if attacked, whether against soldiers in the field or robbers in the street, has a sense of power and self reliance that a man, untrained ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... she smiled. She had a string of opaque white, wax-like beads around the neck of her dress, and the contrast of the pearly whiteness of the bauble with the creamy whiteness and softness of her throat was marked with much finish. Her figure was hardly of medium height, and, despite the suppleness of youth, as "plump as a partridge," according to the familiar saying. The clear iris of her eyes gave an impression of quick shifting, and by them one could see her mood change ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... flexibility, suppleness, pliancy, limberness, ductility, malleability. Antonyms: inflexibility, rigidity. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... by no means as unmoved as she gave out. She had always admired and liked Captain Haney, though he never moved her in the same way that the young barber did (for Ed Winchell had youth as well as comeliness, and there is a divine suppleness in youth), yet he had been a welcome guest. "A hundred thousand dollars a year! And yet he's been coming to our little hotel ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... sided with the weaker. On his return from Jerusalem, William found the situation extremely strained, and he endeavoured to relieve it by concessions of various kinds. None of them, however, were regarded as adequate. Thereupon, with the suppleness which costs him so little when it is a question of sacrificing his most devoted and valuable servant, the Emperor, King of Prussia, sacrificed Herr von Lucanus, the head of his private household, an almost legendary personage who had had a hand in every important act of William's ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... the value and importance of the melos was, indeed, one of his cardinal tenets; and he is, in his practice,—whether writing for the voice, for piano, or for orchestra,—inveterately and frankly melodic: melodic with a suppleness, a breadth, a freshness and spontaneity which are anything but common in the typical music of our day. It is a curious experience to turn from the music of such typical moderns as Loeffler and Debussy, with its ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... to account. He has no liking for their insinuating and discreet ways;[3326] he regards them as merely good domestics for parade; all he esteems in them is their ceremonial significance, that innate suppleness which permits them to be at once servile and dignified, the hereditary tact which teaches them how to present a letter, not from hand to hand, but on the rim of a hat, or on a silver plate, and these faculties he estimates at their true worth.—On the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... his own training. No one else can do it for him. The assumption of superiority over his opponent will riot develop his suppleness of body and strength of muscle. To be sure, faith and courage are essential to—victory, but they must be backed by careful and persistent training. Vainglorious boasting alone will not ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... delicately striped, and shining black polished shoes, upon which glittered large buckles set with precious stones. If to this we add that his gait was the elegant gait of a dancing master, that he had a certain cat-like suppleness of body, and that his little legs had a strange knack of knocking the heels together on fitting occasions,—for instance, when leaping across a gutter,—it could not fail but that the little decorator got himself singled out everywhere as an extraordinary ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... to the woman, and looked at her as he would study a blurred trail in the forest. She bore his scrutiny well, and he grunted approval. Now that he had risen he was impressive. He was tall, and had that curious, loose-jointed suppleness that, I have heard women say, comes only from gentle blood. As he stood beside Father Nouvel it came to me that the two men were somewhat kin. One face was patrician and the other savage, but they were both old men who bore their years with wisdom ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... powers work more briskly to prepare the needed nourishment, and the blood circulates more rapidly to carry the material for repair to the parts that need it, so that by moderate physical exercise, judiciously distributed, the whole body is built up and strengthened, and the result is a suppleness of frame and a clearness of head that ...
— The Royal Road to Health • Chas. A. Tyrrell
... a splendid girl, a perfect type of a race, a sort of lovely and stupid Venus. She was sixteen, and I have rarely seen such perfection of form, such suppleness and such regular features. I said she was a Venus; yes, a fair, stout, vigorous Venus, with large, bright, vacant eyes, which were as blue as the flowers of the flax plant; she had a large mouth with full lips, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... of the greatest names in the history of political literature. There have been many more important statesmen, for he was never tried in a position of supreme responsibility. There have been many more effective orators, for lack of imaginative suppleness prevented him from penetrating to the inner mind of his hearers; defects in delivery weakened the intrinsic persuasiveness of his reasoning; and he had not that commanding authority of character and personality ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... represented the fast disappearing type of gentleman, and I knew that for him this was possible through an extraordinary suppleness of mind, fineness of tact and feeling, and a ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... and a talent for strategy. He played his game himself, not liking to receive any suggestions from his chiefs, intending to follow his own ideas. The battle once begun, he invariably attacked the strongest enemy and pursued those comrades who occupied the highest rank. With the marvelous suppleness of a cat, he climbed trees, flung himself to the ground, crept along barriers, slipped between the legs of his adversaries, and bounded triumphantly off with a number of brassards. It was a great joy to him to bring the trophies of his struggles ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... composition. Such vulgarisms are common—the Greeks fell to their old trade of one tribe expelling another—the scene is always at Athens, and all the pother is some little jilting story—the haughty Roman snuffed at the suppleness. If such diction had not been usual with good writers at that period, I should not have quoted Blackwall. Middleton, in his "Life of Cicero," though a man of classical taste, and an historian of a classical era, could not preserve ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... even lower that answered him. The sharp tap of a pipe on the mantelpiece cancelled the words. And perhaps Jacob only said "hum," or said nothing at all. True, the words were inaudible. It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... bitter enmity. But the bare record of what he did and endured reveals him sufficiently. His qualities speak through his actions, so that he who runs may read. His most conspicuous defect was a want of suppleness—a certain rigidity of spirit which, when he succeeded, was called firmness, and when he failed, obstinacy. Yet the charge so often brought against him, that he allowed himself to be misled by evil counsellors, shows ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... the Points of the Salts, and restores the usual Softness to the Blood, like as Spirit of Wine united with Spirit of Salt, makes a soft Liquor of a violent Corrosive. This same sulphurous Unctuosity at the same time spreads itself in the solid Parts, and gives them, in some sense, their natural Suppleness; it bestows on the Membranes, the Tendons, the Ligaments, and the Cartilages, a kind of Oil which renders them smooth and flexible. Thus the Equilibrium between the Fluids and the Solids is in some measure re-establish'd, the Wheels and Springs of our Machine mended, ...
— The Natural History of Chocolate • D. de Quelus
... chief, a noble and leonine head carried by a splendid torso. His skin was as fine and clean as a child's. He weighed nearly two hundred pounds and had no fat on him. He was the weight-throwing rather than the running type of athlete, but so tenaciously had he clung to the suppleness of his adolescent days that he could stand stiff-legged and lay his ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... wilder and lonelier paths traced by smaller animals, they made their way through the forest, travelling with considerable speed, which was increased, as the warmth of exercise gradually restored their native suppleness to the soldier's limbs. ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... and the War between the States would undoubtedly have led to no little sophistication of the facts. Historical parallel bars are usually set up for exhibiting feats of mental agility. The mental agility is often moral suppleness, and nobody expects a critical examination of the parallelism itself. He was not an historian of the first rank, but a phrase-making rhetorician, who is responsible for the current saying, History is philosophy teaching by examples. ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... place of feeling, and the curious incoherencies in the poet's speech which led the dwarf to make his rather cruel comment. At certain points of Canalis's discourse, when Monsieur Mignon, Dumay, Butscha, and Latournelle wondered at the man's utter want of logic, Modeste admired his suppleness, and said to herself, as she dragged him after her through the labyrinth of fancy, "He loves me!" Butscha, in common with the other spectators of what we must call a stage scene, was struck with the radiant defect of all egoists, which Canalis, like many men accustomed to perorate, ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... character is a mixture of ignorance, simplicity, cleverness, stupidity, and grace; he is a kind of sketch of a man, a tall child, yet with gleams of reason and wit, and all whose mistakes and follies have something arch about them. The true mode of representing him is to give him suppleness, agility, the playfulness of a kitten, with a certain grossness of appearance, which renders his conduct more absurd; his part is that of a patient, faithful valet, always in love, always in hot water, either on his master's ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... those brilliant dark eyes of his, so, with infinite care and effort, he strove to attune his words to the even cadence and harmony with which he wished to amaze us, for, as A.J. Balfour said, "he was a man of the finest and most delicate imagination, a style which, for grace and suppleness, for its power of being at once turned to any purpose which the author desired, has seldom been matched." It is difficult for those who knew him before he had, by pure hard work, won his way to fame, to realise how one physically so fragile, of so light-somely versatile ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... grasping thunderbolts, and rising to the roof: the Deva-kings, like impersonations of hurricane power; the Ni-O, guardians of long-vanished temple gates. Also there were forms voluptuously feminine: the light grace of the limbs folded within their lotos-cups, the suppleness of the fingers numbering the numbers of the Good Law, were ideals possibly inspired in some forgotten tune by the charm of an Indian dancing-girl. Shelved against the naked brickwork above, I could perceive multitudes ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... with a charming, youthful grace, made up of a suppleness and litheness which suggested almost the movement of a fluid. Craven noted it with a little thrill of unexpected pleasure, against which an instant later something in ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... found himself in the process. He was tall and well built, broad in the shoulders, but lean as a greyhound, with grave eyes, rather stern, and a moustache turning grey. I judged him to be about sixty years of age, but his movements showed a suppleness of strength and agility that contradicted the years. The face was full of character and resolution, the face of a man to be depended upon, and the straight grey eyes, it seemed to me, wore a veil of perplexed anxiety that he made no attempt to disguise. The whole appearance of the ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... holiday task. In exactly a fortnight from this date, the vacation came to an end, and, as yet, he did not know a note of them. Through the motionless heat of the paved streets, he went home, and turning Frau Krause out of his room, sat down at the piano to scales and exercises. Not until he felt suppleness and strength coming back to his fingers, did he allow his thoughts to wander. Then, however, they leapt to Louise; after this break in his consciousness, he seemed to have been absent from ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... like a bird for flight, stark naked, his satin skin shining like gold and silver in the rising sun, stood a youth, tall, slim of body, not fully developed but with muscles promising, in their faultless, gently swelling outline, strength and suppleness to an unusual degree. Gazing down into the pool formed by an eddy of the river twenty feet below him, he stood as if calculating the distance, his profile turned toward the man who had just emerged from ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... depths, the green and gold sky and his Lily, his faultless Lily, haloed in light! Every hope was permissible when he looked at his Lily, his joy, his handiwork! His New Zealander on Wheels! That india-rubber suppleness, those little nerves of iron, his Lily, his glory, his star, his own star! He romanced about her, dreamed of an imperial tour, a steamer of his own, a floating Barnum's show, with Roofers, elephants, rhinoceroses, Ave Marias, dogs, monkeys, the whole boiling; ...
— The Bill-Toppers • Andre Castaigne
... keep still, but kept seeing spectres and fires, hearing shouts and turning round quickly, imagining that some one had touched her on the shoulder. The good man gave us a soothing draught to overcome our fatigue, and the next day a very hot bath brought back the suppleness to our limbs. It was then six days since we had left Paris, and it would take about twenty more hours to reach Homburg, for in those days trains went much less quickly than at present. I took a train for ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... delighted to have a home, feeling sure of having strength to bear this burden. To have confidence in one's self is strength, but it is also weakness. Because you love me you do not know me; you do not see me as I am. In reality, I am not sociable, and I lack, absolutely, suppleness, delicacy, politeness, as much in my character as in my manners. Being so, how can I obtain a large practice, or succeed, unless it is by some stroke of luck? I have counted on the luck, but its hour has not yet sounded. Because I lack suppleness I have not been able to win the ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... "Then—until to-morrow night, General." He bowed with almost extravagant submission, and turning walked sharply away, energy and suppleness in every line of his slight figure, leaving Sir Terence to the unpleasant, almost desperate, thoughts that reflection must usher in as his ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender as that of the great Michael's David pictured in the living-room; a figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... variations in this respect. They have seldom much beard. In physical qualities the Indians thus make a somewhat close approximation to the Mongolian type. There is also a certain remarkable feebleness of constitution, combined, it may be, with vigour, suppleness and strength of body. At least, the aboriginal races do not resist well the epidemics introduced by the whites; and many tribes have been exterminated by the effects of the 'firewater' and the vicious habits brought in by more civilised men. The Red man is usually proud and reserved; serious, ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... countenance. His body, however, seemed to lag behind, and was no match for his sublime spirit. But when fired by his position as Conductor, or when at the piano, the slender body was nerved to a point where it seemed all suppleness and sinewy strength. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... du Barry." "Good heaven," I exclaimed, "how delighted I should be to have the friendship of this lady, whose wit and amiable manners are so greatly talked of." "Yes," said de Maupeou, laughing, "she is a type of court ladies, a mixture of dignity and suppleness, majesty and condescension, which is worth its weight in gold. She was destined from all eternity to be the companion of the king's female friends." We both laughed; and the chancellor went on to say: "There are others ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... encouraged in the French army, and, when not carried to excess, they are of the greatest use, particularly in developing the strength of young men, giving suppleness and confidence to raw recruits, and facilitating their manoeuvres. Running was naturally a portion of these exercises, although it was rarely permitted in the evolutions of French troops, since it was found to produce much disorder. The Tirailleurs were so trained, however, that they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... Buttm. Lexil. p. 66. I. e. "a belt which he could easily move, and which, from its suppleness and flexibility, yielded to the ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... representing tender, effeminate youths, illustrate further the departure which Praxiteles marks from the restraint of Pheidias. Another of his masculine figures is the graceful Apollo with the Lizard. The god, strong in his youthful suppleness, is leaning against a tree threatening with his darts a small lizard which is seeking to climb up. Still another type of masculine grace left us by Praxiteles is his statue of the Satyr, of which a copy exists in the Capitoline Museum. The Satyr, in the hands of ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... the sympathies of the industrious little people. They spread over the field, and before sundown the seed was all in except one, and as the sun was setting over the western skies a lame ant hobbled along with that grain also. Some of us have youth and vigor and suppleness of limb; some of us are crippled with years or infirmities, and we are at best but little ants. But we can all limp along with some share of our country's burden, and thus help her in this terrible hour to win the desire of her heart." ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... muscles to every limb; that is all. Strike out from the shoulder with your clenched hand; once your arm was loose-jointed and shaky; now it is firm and tense, and begins to feel like a natural arm. Moreover, strength and suppleness have grown together; you have not stiffened by becoming stronger, but find yourself more flexible. When you first came here, you could not touch your fingers to the ground without bending the knees, and now you can place your knuckles on the floor; then you could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... as the wife of an eminent politician, had long since cultivated the art of mental suppleness and had learned to fascinate the most diverse intelligences and egos. Gisela, who was always warmly responsive to personal charm when not too obviously insincere, enjoyed the hour on the ice so exclusively devoted to her by the distinguished American ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... piano are concerned, there is a mine practically inexhaustible and from which new treasures are constantly brought to light. For Recital purposes, the choice and sequence of a programme is second in importance only to its execution. And although suppleness and adaptability are valuable, even necessary, qualities, in a concert-singer, he will sometimes find that certain songs—admirable in themselves—are unsuited to him, for reasons which it is not always possible to define. In such cases ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... persecution of the Chinese Government. Even in the fifth century Buddhist monasteries were accused of organizing armed conspiracies and many later sects suffered from the panic which they inspired in official bosoms. But both difficulties were overcome by the suppleness of the clergy. If they outraged family sentiment they managed to make themselves indispensable at funeral ceremonies.[576] If they had a dangerous resemblance to an imperium in imperio, they minimized it by their obvious desire to exercise influence through the Emperor. ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... stone, while the cedar, being light and elastic, lent buoyancy and suppleness, all that we could ...
— Voyage of the Liberdade • Captain Joshua Slocum
... it, a continual Yes. When the heart is in union with God, there is no Nay,—it is Yes, be it so, which reverberates through the soul. This Yes, this suppleness, renders the heart agreeable to the heart of the Spouse. It was thus with Mary, the mother of our Lord, when the angel messenger came to her, she replied, "Behold, the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... 1757, Charles X., King of France and Navarre, was entering his sixty-eighth year at the time of his accession to the throne. According to the portrait traced by Lamartine, "he had kept beneath the first frosts of age the freshness, the stature, the suppleness, and beauty of youth." His health was excellent, and but for the color of his hair—almost white—he would hardly have been given more than fifty years. As alert as his predecessor was immobile, ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... supremely unlucky, as we have shown by the foregoing sketch of him, was one of those men who cannot reach the heart of a woman except by way of the altar and the mayor's office. Endowed with the suppleness of a steel-spring, he yielded to pressure, certain to revert to his first thought. This treacherous habit is prompted by cowardice; but the business training which Sibilet underwent in the office of a provincial notary had taught him the art of concealing this defect under ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... last of October that Billy began to notice her husband's growing restlessness. Twice, when she had been playing to him, she turned to find him testing the suppleness of his injured arm. Several times, failing to receive an answer to her questions, she had looked up to discover him gazing ...
— Miss Billy Married • Eleanor H. Porter |
