"Sureness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hours he discovered that he was lost. Then came the usual confusion of mind and the hurry to get somewhere. Mexico was anxious to redeem the situation, twisting with alacrity along the tortuous labyrinths of the jungle. At the moment his master's sureness of the route had failed his horse had divined the fact. There were no hills now that they could climb to obtain a view of the country. They came upon a few, but so dense and interlaced was the brush that scarcely could a ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... personal satisfaction, in taking apart and re-assembling the machinery of a work, in separating the pieces forming the structure of a compound exhalation, and his sense of smell had thereby attained a sureness that ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... spider in the blackness of night an unseen hand had begun to run these dark lines, to turn and twist them about her life, to plait and weave a web. Jane Withersteen knew it now, and in the realization further coolness and sureness came to her, and the fighting courage ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... your fellow-worker! I thank you for giving me your confidence and employing my services! Tonight—the most important night of my destiny—Fate has determined that I shall perform the greatest task of all you have ever allotted to me; and that with swiftness and sureness in the business I shall kill the King! He is my marked victim! I am his chosen assassin!" Here interrupting himself with a bright smile, he said: "Will someone restrain my two friends, Max Graub and Axel Regor from springing out ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... no other way by which the externals can be made right than by setting a watch on the door of our hearts and minds, and this inward discipline must be put in force before there will be any continuity or sureness in the outward aim. We want, for that direction of the life of which I have been speaking, a clear perception and a concentrated purpose, and we shall not get either of these unless we fall back, by ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of flying, as we watched it from below, it seemed the safest and simplest thing in the world. The machines left the ground so easily, and mounted and descended with such sureness of movement, that I was impatient to begin my training. I believed that I could fly at once, after a few minutes of preliminary instruction, without first going through with all the tedious rolling along ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... badly I just cried over both of them—howled. But I knew there was only one man in the world I could ever marry. I had made up my own mind for once and it was real easy, too. It's very delightful to feel so sure, and know it's your own sureness and ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... dear—if you think that, in such a complicated matter, every day, every hour, doesn't more or less modify one's surest sureness!" ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... his blunt chivalry and boyish, whimsical philosophy, but she avoided Glenister, feeling a shrinking, hidden terror of him, ever since her eavesdropping of the previous night. At the memory of that scene she grew hot, then cold—hot with anger, icy at the sinister power and sureness which had vibrated in his voice. What kind of life was she entering where men spoke of strange women with this assurance and hinted thus of ownership? That he was handsome and unconscious of it, she acknowledged, and had she met him in her accustomed circle of friends, garbed in the conventionalities, ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... firm possession of his crown, and to take even, I think, a harmless pleasure in our sense of having from so far back been sure of it. I was sure of it, I must properly add, but as an effect of my brother's sureness; since I must, by what I remember, have been as sure of Paul Delaroche—for whom the pendulum was at last to be arrested at a very different point. I could see in a manner, for all the queerness, what W. J. meant by that beauty and, above all, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... opinions either off-hand or well digested, on the first literary productions of Bailly, contributed to throw him into the pursuit of science. Still, for the sake of principle, it seems just to protest against the praises given to the foresight of Lanoue, to the sureness of his judgment, to the excellence of his advice. What was it in fact? A lad of sixteen or seventeen years of age, composes two tolerable tragedies, and these essays are made irrevocably to decide on his future fate. We have then forgotten that Racine had already ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... case have I been able to obtain any clear conception of its connotation in the mouths or minds of those who use the phrase. The new heaven and the new earth which they promise are no doubt to be very different from our own old earth and heaven; of that they are sure, and their sureness does not fail to make itself plain. But what the flora and fauna, the biology and geology of the new heaven and earth are to be, I have never succeeded in ascertaining. The country would appear to be like that Land of ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... that, with generous impulses and quick sympathy, would do for any one in dire need. She would leave behind her an inescapable longing, an emptiness, a memory of sweetly disturbing visions. MacRae seemed to see with remarkable clarity and sureness that he would be penalized for yielding to that bewitching fancy. By what magic had she so suddenly made herself a shining figure in a golden dream? Some necromancy of the spirit, invisible but wonderfully potent? Or was it purely physical,—the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... weak," said Wada, plucking it from the dead man's breast. Taking a longer shaft from his quiver, he shot it with such force and sureness of aim that it passed through the armor and flesh of the Taira bowman and fell into the sea beyond. Yoshitsune emptied his quiver with similar skill, each arrow finding a victim, and soon the tide ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... fell upon the brass date indicator on the table. It marked the 2nd of October. On that day five years ago he had entered on his duties at Drane's Court. He laughed softly. Five years ago he was a homeless wanderer. Now princesses were begging him to rescue them from Egyptologists. With glorious sureness all his dreams were ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... situation in South Africa addressed by Lord Milner to Mr. Chamberlain from Capetown on February 6th, 1901. Among all the notable documents which he furnished to his official chief, none affords more convincing evidence of cool judgment, mastery of South African conditions, and sureness of statecraft than this. It is a letter, and not a despatch, and as such it contains some personal details which would not have found a place in ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... opened the Gates of Memory, whether she might be truly Mirdath. And I, utter weak and shaken strangely because of this splendour of fulfilment, could make no instant answer. And she asked again, but using mine old love-name, and with a sureness in her far voice. And still I was so strangely dumb, and the blood to thud peculiar in mine ears; and this to pass; and speech to ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... another keen-edged arrow he cut in twain the gold-decked bow of Kripa. And they also, with many sharp-pointed shafts, that mighty car-warrior smote in great wrath, seeming to dance (the while). And beholding his lightness of hand, the very gods were gratified. And in consequence of Abhimanyu's sureness of aim, all the car-warriors headed by Bhishma regarded him to be possessed of the capacity of Dhananjaya himself.[335] And his bow, emitting a twang like that of Gandiva, while stretched and re-stretched, seemed to revolve like a circle of fire.[336] Bhishma ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... material in the Nun's Priest's Tale of the Fox and the Cock, the humor takes the form of boisterous farce; but much more often it is of the finer intellectual sort, the sort which a careless reader may not catch, but which touches with perfect sureness and charming lightness on all the incongruities of life, always, too, in kindly spirit. No foible is too trifling for Chaucer's quiet observation; while if he does not choose to denounce the hypocrisy of the Pardoner and the worldliness of the Monk, he has made their ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... his florid face had lost its color. The jaunty cock-sureness of the man had flickered out like the flame ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... immense variety of phenomena which are brought to light by the application of principles to facts, and in which nothing is absolute or permanent, in which, on the contrary, everything is relative and successive, acquire that sureness of touch and correctness of vision which are among the most ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... what ingenuity and sureness dragon-flies distinguish, follow, and catch the smallest insects on the wing. Of all insects, they have the best sight. Their enormous convex eyes have the greatest number of facets. Their number has ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... have no difficulty in understanding how it is that we make our calling and election sure. It is not in the power of the elect to make their election surer in itself than it really is, for this is a sureness which is not capable of receiving any addition. It is not in the power of the elect to make it surer to God—for all futurity is submitted to his all-seeing eye, and his absolute knowledge stands in need of no confirmation. ...
— The Calvinistic Doctrine of Predestination Examined and Refuted • Francis Hodgson
... 93: An eminent annotator observes on this passage:—"The praise of Lord Braxfield's capacity and acquirement is perhaps rather too slight. He was a very good lawyer, and a man of extraordinary sagacity, and in quickness and sureness of apprehension resembled Lord Kenyon, as well as in his ready use of his profound ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... when one heard it, for it was a hard and very mocking laugh. I had always attributed that sort of reply to an artifice which the occasion required. It was intended, I thought, to accentuate the danger she incurred and the contempt that she felt for it, thanks to the sureness of the thrower's hands, and so I was very much surprised when the mountebank ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... well done, 'mlungu," exclaimed the king, with just the faintest suggestion of a feeling of relief in the tones of his voice; "that was marvellously well done! But for thy quickness and sureness of eye and hand I should have been overthrown, and the Basutos might have been obliged to choose another king. 'Mtala," to the induna, "let them see to yonder clumsy fool who allowed the buffalo to catch him; and if he be not dead let four of ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... conjoint action of the two, by reason of the mutual checks established, a far higher degree of certainty is attained to, yet even in this, the utmost vouchsafed to the individual, there is not, as both Greeks and Indians ascertained, an absolute sureness. It was the knowledge of this which extorted from them so many melancholy complaints, which threw them into an intellectual despair, and made them, by applying the sad determination to which they had come to the course ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... dispelled by marriage—and the starlit mysteries of Aruna and the intriguing complexities of Roy, a breath of Lance would be tonic as a breeze from the Hills. He was so clear and sure; not in flashes and spurts, but continuously, like sunshine; because the clearness and sureness had his whole personality behind them. And he could be counted on to deal faithfully with Roy; perhaps lure him back to the Punjab. It would be sad losing him; but in the distracting circumstances, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... you know that with such sureness?" she cried. "No, no, Major Carew; in your heart you know otherwise. But you just let her go away without a word, without a hope, and one or two of us know what this hasty engagement means. Diana calls it martyrdom. She wrote me to send ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... men in and bring them to bay. He caused his men to begin that mighty system of earthworks by which the Romans carried on their attacks, compassing their victim round on every side with a deadly slowness and sureness, by those broad ditches and terraced ramparts that everywhere mark where their foot of iron was trod. Eleven miles round did this huge rampart extend, strengthened by three-and-twenty redoubts, or places of defense, where a watch was continually kept. Before ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... trophies were one or two rough sketches of the mountain regions beyond Kashmir; desolate stretches of glacier and moraine, or groups of stately peaks, the colouring washed in with a singular sureness of touch. There were also maps, finely executed by hand, of Thibet and Central Asia. To these fresh names and markings were added, from time to time, with a thrill of satisfaction only to be gauged by the man for whom the waste places of earth are a goodly heritage, and who would sooner ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... Moliere, "my opinion is nothing compared to that which your Majesty has just expressed, such is your sureness of judgment and your tact. I know by experience that those scenes of my comedies which, at a first reading, are applauded by your Majesty, always win most applause from the ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... demand. If Laurence did not naturally gravitate toward that bright particular set of rather rapid young people which presently formed itself about the brilliant figure of Hunter, the two did not dislike each other, though Hunter, from an older man's sureness of himself, was the more cordial of the two. I fancy each watched the other more guardedly than either would like to admit. They represented opposite interests; one might at any moment become inimical to the other. ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... man the foreman showed an agility that was really wonderful, as he leaped from log to log with the swiftness and sureness of a chamois. He had been lumbering all his life, and there was nothing that fell to the lumberman's experience with which he was not perfectly familiar. Yet it is doubtful if he ever had a more difficult or dangerous task than that before him now. The "key-piece" of the jam was fully exposed, ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... chief characters—the mean and cruel king, the noblehearted and desperately wronged Constance, and the soldierly humourist, Faulconbridge—are in all essentials of his own invention, and are portrayed with the same sureness of touch that marked in Shylock his rapidly maturing strength. The scene, in which the gentle boy Arthur learns from Hubert that the king has ordered his eyes to be put out, is as affecting as any passage ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... indeed too high-priced for poor New England colonists. The natural and singular pace of these Narragansett horses, which did not incline the rider from side to side, nor jolt him up and down, and their remarkable sureness of foot and their great endurance, rendered them of much value in those days of travel in the saddle. They were also phenomenally broad-backed,—shaped by ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... remains, shows that they either did not know or they willfully misrepresented, Egyptian abstract thought; about the only works, outside of the papyri and the monuments, from which we can gather as to it with any sureness, meagre details; are the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistos; the Osiris and Isis, of Plutarch; the work ascribed to Horapollon, and the book of Iamblichus, entitled: A Treatise on the Mysteries. The Greek writers upon Ancient Egypt, Herodotus, Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill and sureness of eye will bring him out ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... a tale of love subduing and purifying the savage instincts in man—her art advanced in sureness and in strength. Singularly accessible to external influences, singularly receptive of ideas, the full significance and relations of which she failed to comprehend, she felt the force of intelligences stronger than her own—of Lamennais, of Ledru-Rollin, of Jean ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... his machine within his adversary's dead angles, he fell on him as a stone falls. He shot as near to the enemy as he could, at the risk of being shot first himself, and even of interlocking their machines, though in that respect the sureness of his maneuvering sufficed to disengage him. If he failed to take the enemy by surprise, he did not quit the combat as prudence exacted; but returned to the charge, refusing to unhook his clutch from the enemy airplane, and held him, and wanted ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... sat silent in her corner of the car, glancing intently at the old scenes that were so new and unexpected. From time to time she directed the chauffeur when he was in doubt, the old turnings of the streets coming back to her with astonishing sureness. At last, at Shepard Street, she told him to turn off the South Road, and at once they were in the maze of brick and mortar that had been Clark's Field,—the old Clark pasture. The bulky car had to move slowly through the narrow ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... that he was blind, but it was more than the dimness, the blankness in his eyes, more than scarred eyeballs, made for the change in Karl's face. He and life did not dwell together as they had once; a freedom and a gladness and a sureness had gone. The loss of those things meant the loss of something fundamentally Karl. And the sadness—and the longing—and the marks of struggle which the light of ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... sweetness, Tober Mhuire. O thy sureness and completeness, Tober Mhuire. O this life I would be leaving, With the greyness of its grieving, And the deeps ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... ways was that red cross abused. He wastes his time who tries to teach the Boers some new trick. In this war they have amply proved that in that matter they have nought to learn, except the unwisdom of it all, and the sureness of the retribution it involves. Even in battle and battle times ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... chair a stiff, conservative aristocrat who cares no more for the laboring classes of Roma than he does for its work-horses—(or its mules) or a young woman of good ancestry, but no actual knowledge of municipal affairs— only an inherited cock-sureness of opinion on any and every subject ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow
... sleet stings) Upon the lightheart-hope which only clear sight knows. And slowly drifts, Lingering among the snows Nor, though the snow lifts, Ever goes The wistful heartache as the fresh Spring flows With slipping sureness to the time of the rose, and the withered rose. Down here the hawthorn.... And heaping blossom stirred By a joy-swift bird. White mists are blinding me, White mist of hedgerow, white mist of wings. The bird's flight flings Deep carpetings Over the wrack ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... began to pat and arrange the little curls upon her forehead, then to take out and replace a hairpin or two, so as to fasten the golden mass behind a little more securely. The white fingers moved with an exquisite sureness and daintiness, the lifted arms showed all the young curves of the ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... seen a back somersault upon a high wire. I have never heard of it before. There may be whole generations of artists gifted in this particular stunt. You have here, nevertheless, a moment of very great beauty in the cleanness of this man's surprising agility and sureness. The monkey costume hinders the beauty of the thing. It should be done with pale blue silk tights against a cherry velvet drop, or else in deep ultramarine on an old ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... the pupil acquires a permanent tendency to fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of action beside that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence upon extraneous suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take the place of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who have not been sophisticated by "education") confront the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... hundred blows like that—a grim and ferocious Achilles with but one vulnerable point, the end of his jaw. David waited and watched for his opportunity as he gave ground slowly. Twice they circled about the blood-spattered arena, Brokaw following him with leisurely sureness, and yet delaying his attack as if in that steady retreat of his victim he saw torture too satisfying to put an end to at once. David measured his carelessness, the slow almost unguarded movement of his great body, his unpreparedness for a coup de main—and like a flash he launched ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... English troops on their right, who shared their success. General Currie, who became the Canadian Corps Commander, did not spare his men. He led them forward whatever the cost, but there was something great and terrible in his simplicity and sureness of judgment, and this real—estate agent (as he was before he took to soldiering) was undoubtedly a man of strong ability, free from those trammels of red tape and tradition which swathed round so many ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... ready to dash off yonder by the lower track which you can see leading downward through those hills. I say dash off, but only if the enemy make for you. If you are not followed hasten slowly for your horses' sake. Remember that he who goes softly goes far, and I want sureness more than speed." ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn
... had her thoughts as well as Malcolm. Already life was not what it had been to her, and the feeling of a difference is often what sets one a-thinking first. While her father lived, and the sureness of his love overarched her consciousness with a heaven of safety, the physical harmony of her nature had supplied her with a more than sufficient sense of well being. Since his death, too, there had been times when she even fancied an enlargement of life in the sense of freedom and power ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... democratic mind; and there is no reason why an intelligent Tory should not praise Shakespeare for what Whitman deplored in him. There is every reason, however, why the portraiture of Shakespeare as a Tory, if it is to be done, should be done with grace, intelligence, and sureness of touch. Mr. Whibley throws all these qualifications to the winds, especially the second. The proof of Shakespeare's Toryism, for instance, which he draws from Troilus and Cressida, is based on a total misunderstanding of the famous and simple speech of Ulysses about the necessity of observing ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Hollow," as Arline had named their destination, in Elfreda's and Arline's automobiles. During the past year the latter had become greatly interested in automobiles, and drove her own high-powered car with the sureness of ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... read many of the private Stainton Moses' records (thanks to my friendship with the executor, with whom these journals were left), and in all those referring to Imperator's communications, there was to my mind the same note of cock-sureness ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... in Monterey to wait while Pepe worked, was sorrowful. As sometimes happens to us when we are confronted by the certainty of great happiness, she was possessed by a gloomy sadness that came of dark forebodings in her mind. The very greatness and sureness of this happiness awed her into doubt. She knew that to take her good fortune in this faint-hearted way was not wise in itself, and was not what Pepe would approve; and that she might please Pepe she berated herself roundly and tried to laugh away her fears—though they scarcely ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... two ringing bars, masterfully, like a man; she seemed to lift it, and its sounding wires, with her two hands, with the strength and certitude of maleness. And then, as only he had heard men do it, she sank, or leaped—he could scarcely say which—to the sureness and pureness and ineffable softness of the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... style. There was, in modern Danish prose, no author who unreservedly appealed to me; in German Heinrich Kleist, and in French Merimee, were the stylists whom I esteemed most. The latter, in fact, it seemed to me was a stylist who, in unerring sureness, terseness and plasticism, excelled all others. He had certainly not much warmth or colour, but he had a sureness of line equal to that of the greatest draughtsmen of Italian art. His aridity was certainly not winning, and, in reading him, I frequently ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... considerable aptitude for such comic parts as those of stupid servants, for everywhere that we went I became the public's Benjamin. I made the people laugh, and they asked for nothing better. All were surprised that, young and inexperienced as I was, I should have so much cleverness of manner and such sureness of delivery. My father was more surprised than anybody, for he had expected far less of my immaturity and total lack of practice. It is certain that from that time I began to feel that I was somebody. I had become ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles
... put on an aeger and seen others similarly afflicted, so that I can describe it with equal certainty more than the narrative of another not having done so, but relying on the incredibility of historians more than the sureness ...
— The Casual Ward - academic and other oddments • A. D. Godley
... most acute criticism in our language—"classical" in its tone (i.e., with a preference for conformity) but with its respect for order and tradition always tempered by good sense and wit, and informed and guided throughout by a taste whose catholicity and sureness was unmatched in the England of his time. The preface to his Fables contains some excellent notes on Chaucer. They may be read as a sample of the breadth and perspicuity ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... of the greatest importance to the secure and perfect establishment of a believer's peace, that it should be a matter of believing, and believing only. It is also an imperative necessity that the comfort and confidence should spring from the proper object of belief, which is the sureness of God's own testimony, and not from the consciousness of love or gratitude, or any moral ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... gift of the Wise One. Presently, he reached that point where he himself dared go no farther. The choking vapors floated round him, but the Pit itself, yawning wide and terrible, was still some distance from where he stood. Now he must trust to the strength of his arm, to the sureness of his aim. He drew himself to his full height; he threw back his arm, and hurled the magic charcoal straight to its mark. "Descend into this Pit!" he cried, as it left his hand. "Descend, and make this evil ...
— The Shadow Witch • Gertrude Crownfield
... traditions, and superstitions of the Borderers. Forty-three of the ballads in the "Minstrelsy" had never been printed before; and of the remainder the editor gave superior versions, choosing with sureness of taste the best among variant readings, and with a more intimate knowledge of local ways and language than any previous ballad-fancier had commanded. He handled his texts more faithfully than Percy, rarely substituting lines of his own. "From among a ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... the preaching of our fathers, crude enough, much of it, no doubt; lacking, perhaps, many of the literary excellencies and graces of the preaching of our later days, yet mighty because of its very sureness, because of its splendid dogmatism. The complaint goes that the pulpit of our time lacks this positive note; that by word or tone the preacher conveys the impression that he is "not quite sure." It is ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... to prepare for the descent. Hudson and I again consulted as to the best and safest arrangement of the party. We agreed that it would be best for Croz to go first, and Hadow second; Hudson, who was almost equal to a guide in sureness of foot, wished to be third; Lord Francis Douglas was placed next, and old Peter, the strongest of the remainder, after him. I suggested to Hudson that we should attach a rope to the rocks on our ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... and draughty tunnel, however, called Mas d'Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores its way through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingered on in a sad state of decay. The old sureness of touch in the matter of carving bone had left them. Again, their painting was confined to the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects, that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something like them ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... want to see you get licked," denied Craig irritably. "All I ask is that you shelve some of your cock-sureness. I'm not so dead-broke that I must swallow all of it. I've warned you that he is a strong man. He used to be one of the best ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... him when he suddenly rallies, and proposes that, as death is certain, they shall all go and have a hot bath. In the little confusion that follows, the narrator and his friend slip quietly away. This scene of exquisite fooling is quite unique in Greek or Latin literature: the breadth and sureness of touch are almost Shakespearian. Another fragment relates the famous story of the Matron of Ephesus, one of the popular tales which can be traced back to India, but which appears here for the first time in the Western world. Others deal with literary criticism, ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... the boulders above the wood her sureness, both of the depth of her own feeling for Ishmael and for the country method of life that went with him, had been declining, as from some crest set in too rarefied an air for her to breathe with comfort. Poise had been slipping from her, and she was genuinely distressed. ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the ordinary fact writer is his cock-sureness. Why, here is a man (I have not yet dropped him out of the window) who has written a large and sober book explaining life. And do you know when he gets through he is apparently much discouraged about this universe. This is the veritable moment when I am in love ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... ditch, dashes through a closing gate, or escapes an infuriated enemy at a moment's notice. This natural wisdom is exercised spontaneously in him, it is the result of inborn theorems of which he may not even be aware, but which he uses with a sureness that defies the book-learning of all our teachers of mathematics. He uses speed, force, space, mass, and time with so small an effort, and by the ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... paper the men looked closely at the joinings of the box. They seemed rather puzzled in spite of the cock-sureness of the first individual. ...
— Joe Strong The Boy Fire-Eater - The Most Dangerous Performance on Record • Vance Barnum
... no difficulty in locating Hart Jones, for he was striding from lathe to workbench to boring mill, issuing his orders with the sureness and decision of a born leader of men. He welcomed me in his most brisk manner and immediately assigned me to a portion of the work in the chemical laboratory—something I was at least partly ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... means to me complete control of the fingerboard, a being at home in every position, absolute sureness of fingering, absolute equality of tone under all circumstances. I remember Ysaye playing Tschaikovsky's Serenade Melancolique, and using a fingering for certain passages which I liked very much. I asked him to give it to me in detail, but he merely laughed and said: 'I'd like to, but ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... that there is any existing force capable of opposing him, and imagines that he has but to go on in his own way to grasp all worlds and the secrets of their being. At this juncture, so often arrived at by many, a kind of super-sureness sets in, persuading the finite nature that it has reached the infinite. The whole mental organisation of the man thrilled with an awful consciousness of power. He said within himself "I hold the lives of millions at ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... truth which you have not more deeply felt than I; but glad in the thought that my less experience, and way of life sheltered from the trials, and free from the responsibilities of yours, may have left me with something of a child's power of help to you; a sureness of hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that can be helpful to men who have done too much not to have often failed in doing all that they desired. And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but now be in many things apprehensive. For this at least we all know too ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... style more delightful, of its kind, than Dryden's? Was ever style more heavy and monotonous than that of Swedenborg in his theological works? But I have read Dryden, not indeed without pleasure in his masterly exquisite ease and sureness of statement and his occasional touches of admirable good sense, yet with no slightest liberation of spirit, with no degree, greater or less, of that magical and marvellous evocation, of inward resource, whose blessed surprise now and then in life makes for us angelic moments, and feelingly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... able to play the scores of my operas himself, he had them performed for him by Saint-Saens, whom he apparently patronised. I thus learned to appreciate the skill and talent of this young musician, which was simply amazing. With an unparalleled sureness and rapidity of glance with regard to even the most complicated orchestral score, this young man combined a not less marvellous memory. He was not only able to play my scores, including Tristan, by heart, but ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... saw others with the Red Cross badge, working, working with the same feverish haste with which he kept at his task. A sort of dreadful haze came over him. He labored with desperate haste, with strong certainty and sureness of touch, but he seemed to feel nothing of human anguish or human sympathy. He was a machine set in motion by the pressing needs of battle, and he went on and on in a haze. Men died in his arms or were transported to the First Aid where the doctors ...
— Shelled by an Unseen Foe • James Fiske
... admit it to herself, but she set about doing it. With the sureness of instinct that great affection brings, the awkward, ignorant girl contrived immediately to find the road by which she might reach her beloved's heart. She did not turn directly to him. But as soon as she was better and could once more walk about the house ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... and stalked very stiffly, though no longer with his old time cock-sureness, for the last time out of the National Union Club, and spent the afternoon in the rear room of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... under conditions which have the disadvantage of existing, the American is not without gentleness of speech and spirit. He is not always in a hurry. He is not always elbowing his way, or quivering with ill-bred impatience. Turn to him for help in a crowd, and feel the bright sureness of his response. Watch him under ordinary conditions, and observe his large measure of forbearance with the social deficiencies of his neighbour. Like Steele, he deems it humanity to laugh at an indifferent jest, and he has thereby earned for himself the reputation ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... is strongly but not clumsily built, short-coupled, with none of the snipy speedy range of the valley animal. You will select preferably one of wide full forehead, indicating intelligence, low in the withers, so the saddle will not be apt to gall him. His sureness of foot should be beyond question, and of course he must be an expert at foraging. A horse that knows but one or two kinds of feed, and that starves unless he can find just those kinds, is an abomination. He must not jump when you throw all kinds of rattling and terrifying ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the sureness in Skag's voice, that made some choking tightness way back in the boy's soul let go; whole vistas of possibilities ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... emotion whatever but a certain grim sureness of himself, he at last adjusted the entirely red cravat. He gloated upon this flagrantly. He hastily culled seven cravats of neutral tint and hurled them contemptuously into a waste-basket. Done with ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... you who watch." Which—to the painter's secret amazement—was a literal truth. The gray rock with the splash of sunshine that would not come right, ceased to trouble him, now. Stimulated by her presence, he worked with a freedom and a sureness that was a delight. ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... something in her voice, or was it the repetition of the last two words? Whatever it was that caused it, Keith turned away with a jerk, walked with the swift sureness of long familiarity straight to the set of shelves and took down a book. "Then I'll not disturb you any further—as long as you're not needing me," he said tersely. "I only came for this." And with barely a touch of his cane to the floor and door-casing, ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... his mother. Then he seized the head of the boar, and bare it to Atalante, and said, "Take, maiden, the spoils are rightly thine. From thy spear came the first wound which smote down the boar; and well hast thou earned the prize for the fleetness of thy foot and the sureness ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... efficient young man. The old gang that had fitted out the gymnasium had drifted away, and the thought of going once more into regular training, with a pupil all his own, was breath to his nostrils. He assumed charge of the ceded hour with skilled sureness. Rain or shine, the Doctor was to take half an hour's hard walking in the air every day, over and above the walk to the office. Every afternoon at six—at which hour the managerial duties at Stark's terminated—he ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... light, it was his own incomparable genius that raised thievery from the dangerous valley of experiment, and set it, secure and honoured, upon the mountain height of perfection. To a natural habit of depredation, which, being a man of letters, he was wont to justify, he added a sureness of hand, a fertility of resource, a recklessness of courage which drove his contemporaries to an amazed respect, and from which none but the Philistine will withhold his admiration. An accident discovered his taste and talent. At school he attempted to kill a companion—the one ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... I know not whether startled or in joy, whether ashamed of her dark garb, or unconscious of it in the proud sureness of her beauty, dropped loose a portion of the shadows of her robe, and stood forth radiant, clad with the dazzling beauty of her stars. Then she raised her hand and ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... to rest His magnificent crest, The mountain-cock, shrilling In quick time, his note; And the clans of the grot With melody's note, Their numbers are trilling. No foot can compare, In the dance of the green, With the roebuck's young heir; And here he is seen With his deftness of speed, And his sureness of tread, And his bend of the head, And his freedom of spring! Over corrie careers he, The wood-cover clears he, And merrily steers he With bound, and with fling,— As he spurns from his stern The heather and fern, And dives in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... remember that not one of the hills around—not the giant tree on the heights of Lugliano, nor the tempting strawberry-gardens on the mountain of Benabbio—could be attained without their help. A few veteran ponies, it is true, now claim equal sureness of foot, but the popular feeling still leans towards the long-eared auxiliaries, who always lead the way on such excursions, displaying an accuracy of judgment which would not discredit their far-famed relations in the frightful passes ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... what I could to block his way. I am too sure he will not return. The first months comprise all the shocks of disappointment that are likely to disgust a new-comer. The sphere of opportunity opens slowly, but to a man of his abilities and culture—rare enough here—with the sureness of chemistry. The Giraffe entering Paris wore the label, "Eh bien, messieurs, il n'y a qu'une bete de plus!" And Oxonians are cheap in London; but here, the eternal economy of sending things where they ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... deeper into human motives after it would seem that the heart and mind could disclose no further secrets. Such skill shows a mastery of language rarely surpassed in fiction. At his best, James has a fineness and sureness of touch, and a command of perfectly fitting words, as well as elegance ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... and there he saw those whom he called "his people" walking across a neat English park toward a peaceful little English church. To them came presently a young person; a young person clad in pink cotton, who walked with a certain demure sureness of tread, as if she knew her own mind and other things besides. Her path came into the park from the left, and among the trees into which it disappeared behind her there stood the red chimneys ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... apprehended and always made to pay the penalty for their crimes. Toward the achievement of this ideal we have as yet done very little. We are still woefully behind such a country as England, where justice is administered with relative rapidity and sureness. Second, the reform of criminal procedure aims to prevent the law from bearing with undue weight upon the poor and ignorant. Here we are making greater progress. Let us notice what is being done to guarantee justice to persons who ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... in conclusion, concerning some of the modern decorative draughtsmen. Of those who work in the sixteenth century manner, Mr. Howard Pyle is unquestionably the superior technician. His line, masterly in its sureness, is rich and charged with feeling. Mr. H. Ospovat, one of the younger group of English decorators, has also a charming technique, rather freer than that of Mr. Pyle, and yet reminding one of it. Mr. Louis Rhead is another of the same school, whose designs are deserving of study. The example ...
— Pen Drawing - An Illustrated Treatise • Charles Maginnis
... dexterously crossing one leg over the other when taking a seat. Also, his mildness of diction, his discreet moderation of word and phrase, survived in, if anything, increased measure, and he bore himself with a skill which caused his tactfulness to surpass itself in sureness of aplomb. And all these accomplishments had their effect further heightened by a snowy immaculateness of collar and dickey, and an absence of dust from his frockcoat, as complete as though he had just arrived to attend a nameday festival. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... no sign of having heard him, unless it was that her hands stopped for an instant in the deft rapidity of their task. Within a few seconds they had resumed their work, though, it seemed to him, with less sureness in the supple movement of the fingers. Beyond the upturned collar of her coat he saw the stealing of a warm, ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... the folds of the mysterious curtain beneath whose shelter are laid the veritable foundations of the home, let us endeavour to form some conception of the sureness of vision, the accurate calculation and industry our little people of emigrants will be called to display in order to adapt this new dwelling to their requirements. In the void round about them they must lay ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... one of the pointed sticks at the knight, with such force and with such sureness of aim that it went in between the bars of his vizor and pierced the eye, and entered into the brain of the knight. Whereupon he ...
— King Arthur's Knights - The Tales Re-told for Boys & Girls • Henry Gilbert
... the only picture he had ever finished, one that the connoisseurs had pronounced excellent, had just been destroyed in a fire in the Dolfino palace. It was an historical subject, treated with a spirit and a sureness of touch almost worthy of Titian himself. Sold to a rich Senator, this canvas had met with the same fate as a great number of other previous works of art; the carelessness of a valet had turned it to ashes. But this Pippo counted the least of his misfortunes; ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the safe and commenced to work the combination with a swift sureness which told McTee at once that the old buccaneer came here many times a day to gloat over his treasure. At length the door of the safe fell open. Inside was a great mass of little canvas bags. McTee was panting as if he had run a ...
— Harrigan • Max Brand
... influence of the great masters declined, painting acquired the same sort of character. The carelessness and rapidity of Tintoretto, which, in his case, proceeded from the lightning speed of his imagination and the unerring sureness of his brush, became a mechanical trick in the hands of superficial students. True art had migrated elsewhere—to the homes of Velasquez, Rubens, and Rembrandt. As art grew more pompous it became less emotional. Painters ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... a perilous charm—of French literature is, before all else, its incomparable clearness, its precision, its neatness, its point; then, added to this, its lightness of touch, its sureness of aim; its vivacity, sparkle, life; its inexhaustible gayety; its impulsion toward wit,—impulsion so strong as often to land it in mockery; the sense of release that it breathes and inspires; its freedom from prick to the conscience; its exquisite study and choice of effect; its deference paid ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... Earle at once got to work, displaying a quiet activity and sureness of himself that at once excited the young Englishman's amazement and admiration. Bidding the Indians to stand back a few paces, and taking the lighted lantern from them, the American deposited a mahogany case upon the ground, which, upon being opened, proved to contain ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... at the time of his death, had many subjects in it beside furniture and cabinet-making. His sideboards, card-tables, sewing-tables, tables of every kind, chairs—in fact, everything he made during his best period—have a sureness and beauty of line that makes it doubly sad that through the stress of circumstances he should have deserted it for the style of the Empire that was then the fashion in France. One or two of his ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... gravely and earnestly, and fortified their positions with statistics from which there was no appeal. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose words have with the light, graceful beauty of the Damascus blade its swift sureness in cleaving to the heart of things, wrote an article for the "Atlantic Monthly" called "The Murder of the Innocents," which we wish could be put into every house in the United States. Some changes in school organizations ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... time afterwards, when, recovered from all that, Augustin speaks to us of the Divine love, he will know fully the infinite value of it from having gone through all the painful entrancements of the other. And he will say to us, with the sureness of experience: "The pleasure of the human heart in the light of truth and the abundance of wisdom—yea, the pleasure of the human heart, of the faithful heart, and of the heart which is holy, stands alone. You will find nothing in any voluptuousness ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... the smack of leather against leather as the pigskin was sent soaring high into the air, to be caught expertly as it descended swiftly toward the earth. A few of the regulars were out, and it was easy even for a stranger to distinguish them by the deftness and quick sureness of their actions. The others sometimes missed hard catches, but these veterans, with clocklike precision, were always in position to make the most difficult catches without even ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... set forth with admirable sureness of analysis, and the author has been able to represent with impressive intensity the mysterious fatality which demands the death of the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... prepared to triumph when it came. At most some chancelleries whispered for delay, postponement; they knew the clash to be inevitable; if not today, tomorrow. Avoid war! What else have they lived for, what else prepared for, what else have they inculcated in the mind of youth than the sureness of the conflict and the great glory of offering themselves to this ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... degrees of mind as there are cubits betwixt this and heaven. But as touching the estimate of men, 'tis strange that, ourselves excepted, no other creature is esteemed beyond its proper qualities; we commend a horse for his strength and sureness of foot, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne |
