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Sterner   Listen
noun
Sterner  n.  A director. (Obs. & R.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Sterner" Quotes from Famous Books



... thus coarsely flow: Their morals, like their pleasures, are but low; For, as refinement stops, from sire to son Unalter'd, unimprov'd the manners run; 230 And love's and friendship's finely pointed dart Fall blunted from each indurated heart. Some sterner virtues o'er the mountain's breast May sit, like falcons cow'ring on the nest; But all the gentler morals, such as play 235 Through life's more cultur'd walks, and charm the way, These far dispers'd, on timorous pinions fly, To sport and flutter in ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... companions were books and dogs and horses; he was given to scientific researches and wrote much for the reviews; he travelled a great deal. So much I knew in a vague way. I even saw him occasionally in church, and never thought the years had changed him much, save that his face was sadder and sterner than of old and his hair had become iron-grey. People said that he had inherited and cherished the old hatred of the Shirleys—that he was very bitter against us. I believed it. He had the face of a good hater—or lover—a man who could play with no emotion ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... thereby the gentler means are employed. With what infinite patience were the Children of Israel led throughout their chequered career; with what divine compassion were the faltering disciples guided along the way of salvation! But where gentler means fail or are inapplicable, sterner measures are unhesitatingly sanctioned. The Bible knows nothing of the pernicious Manichaean objection to the use of physical force to attain moral ends. In the beginning the rebellious angels were overthrown in battle by Michael and his hosts. The consummation of all things is to be reached ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... may be that this trait was merely confirmed in the African by foreign musical influence. For it seems that the leading-note, the urgent need for the ascending half-tone in closing, belongs originally to the minstrelsy of the Teuton and of central Europe, that resisted and conquered the sterner modes of the early Church. Ruder nations here agreed with Catholic ritual in preferring the larger interval of the whole tone. But in the quaint jump of the third the Church had no part, clinging closely to ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... actually hear the skirl of the bagpipes. Whittier knew the artiste of the world and talked to us about Raphael and Burns with clear-sighted, affectionate interest. His poems show varied characteristics; the love of the sterner aspects of nature, modified by the appreciation of the humble flower; the conscience of the Puritan, tinged with sympathy for the sorrowful; the steadfastness of the Quaker, stirred by the fire ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various

... government. As a general thing, it will be found that the laws are best, and most rigidly enforced, when iniquity prevails. A man is safe in Paris when he is not in Boston, but we do not infer from this fact that society is higher, but that there is a sterner necessity on the part of government to restrain crime. The laws of the Romans give the impression of the necessity of a constant watchfulness and supervision to prevent the strong preying upon the weak. Other influences are more necessary than laws to keep men virtuous and orderly. Laws ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... made the victim of almost every practical joke which the ingenuity of my fellow-mids could devise. It is not my purpose to recount these tricks, for stirring times were at hand, and adventures of a sterner and far more interesting nature were to meet me at the very outset of my career, crowding thick and fast upon each other's heels; and it is in the recital of these adventures that I hope to excite and gratify the curiosity of my readers. A few—and only a few—words are necessary ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... sockets. He had been called suddenly—unexpectedly to meet thee. A tearful wife and children gathered around the bed, formed an interesting group, and strove in vain to allay the agony of the husband and father. But a sterner blow, and that wife was a widow, those children fatherless. Thou hadst taken that father to "that undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler e'er returns." That weeping wife and those children ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna

... while others asserted that she looked like a drum-major. She was a tall woman with large features and coarse hair falling low over her forehead. However, everyone agreed that she knew very well how to fool the sterner sex. She had fine eyes and was wont to fix them with a bold stare on the gentlemen of the divan, who colored and became like wax in her hands. She also had the reputation of possessing a wonderfully fine figure, and southerners appreciate ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola

... three before the son and heir—there was less of religious friction, since women have not the pious privileges and burdens of the sterner sex. When the eldest, Deborah, was married, her husband received, by way of compensation, the goodwill of the Sudminster business, while S. Cohn migrated to the metropolis, in the ambition of making 'S. Cohn's trouserings' a household word. He did, indeed, achieve considerable ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... says Miss Priscilla, with an air of self-defence. This thought, that she can actually be accused of having treated the sterner sex in a hardhearted fashion, is cakes and ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown

... no doubt that there were two forces at work in Johannesburg, as, indeed, I had surmised during our voyage out: the one comprising the financiers, which strove to attain its ends by manifesto and public meeting, with the hint of sterner measures to follow; and the other impatient of delay, and thus impelled to seek the help of those who undoubtedly became freebooters the moment they crossed the Transvaal border. Certainly Dr. Jameson's reported words seemed to echo with reproach ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson

... Sir Morton's face grew sterner and harder as he heard everything to the finish; and he was just about to speak, when Master Rayburn ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn

... yore, when fools were held in fashion, Tho' now, alas! all banish'd from the nation, A merry jester had reform'd his lord, Who would have scorn'd the sterner ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... murmur even of approval—stern faces had only grown sterner, hard eyes harder, and that was all. Again the mountain secretary of state rose, started to speak, and stopped, looking over the upturned faces and toward the street behind them; and something in his look made every man who saw it turn his head. A whisper started on the outer edge of the crowd ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... the pleasantest things in the world; they are the last chapter, or last chapter but one, in the book of youth. But I must soon roll up the enchanted manuscript, come to sterner things, and leave many serene hours unnumbered. Especially do I regret to pass over the long days spent on the river in a four, with a cox and a good luncheon and tea hamper in the stern, and a sixth man in the bows. Those, indeed, were sweet hours and the fleetest ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... here, far other harvest here Than that which peasant's scythe demands, Was gathered in by sterner hands, ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how, time after time, until near the period of the gray dawn, this hideous drama of revivification was repeated; how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death; how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe; and how each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change in the personal appearance of the corpse? Let me hurry to ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... not meant, we are told, to describe himself. But it does describe one side of him very well, and the origin and conduct of a number of his earlier poems. But now, having changed his manner, even the principles of his poetry, he describes himself as different from that—as a sterner, more iron poet, and the work he now does as more likely to endure, and be a power in the world of men. He was ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... partition between the sexes; a consuming emotion not quite of this world nor of the next. The barren rebellion which stirred Botticelli's bosom never quite assumed the concrete. His religious subjects are Hellenised, not after Mantegna's sterner and more inflexible method, but like those of a philosophic Athenian who has read and comprehended Dante. Yet the illustrations show us a different Dante, one who would not have altogether pleased the gloomy exile. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker

... and sentiments, of virtues and graces, were wanting in a world to which faith, hope, and charity were unknown! A dramatic Raphael was impossible in antiquity; it was the spirit of the Redeemer which inspired his Holy Families. Their morality, accordingly, is of a sterner cast than any thing with which we are acquainted in modern times. They were full of admiration of the qualities which formed the patriot and the hero, and have portrayed them to perfection in their dramas; but they were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... lightning bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguished face and flying hair, Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false impossible shore. And sterner comes the roar Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom, Fainter and fainter wreck ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude

... sense of a sterner time, His hand's flight clomb as a bird's might climb Calvary: dark in the darkling air That shrank for ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... For had I not come without dishonor through a new and remarkable experience, and even defied the Mystery of the White Wolf, at perhaps more risk to myself than at the time I had imagined. For, as I found afterwards, there were those among the company at the Swan that night of sterner mould and more serious ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett

... shrinking into their coats as if they would withdraw as far as possible from the nipping cold, he strode slowly and breathed deep, showing a strong man's conscious enjoyment of Nature in one of her sterner moods. His manner displayed a consciousness of something else also, of the position he meant to grace. He was already beginning to appreciate the discomfiture of his enemies. They had thought to find him bewildered and inefficient, and had ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins

... wretched Stiggins—a pothouse Tartufe just capable of imposing upon the friends of Mrs. Gamp. Its own religion was that kind of vapid philanthropic sentiment which calls itself undenominational; a creed of maudlin benevolence from which all the deeper and sterner elements of religious belief have been carefully purged away, and which really corresponds to the moods which Mr Pickwick stimulated by indulgence in milk-punch. When it came face to face with death, and sin, and suffering, it made them mere occasions for displays of sentimentalism, disgusting ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... sympathies. His soul seems once to have been rich and glorious, like the garden of Eden; but the desert-wind has passed over it, and smitten it with perpetual blight. Despair has overshadowed all the fair visions of his youth; or if he hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression of the bitter ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... 785 During the time of his life. 'Tis told us in books, How from on high the humble one came, The Treasure-hoard of honor, to the earth below In the Virgin's womb, the valiant Son of God, Holy from on high. I hope in truth 790 And also dread the doom far sterner, When Christ and his angels shall come again, Since I kept not closely the counsels my Savior Bade in his books. I shall bear therefore To see the work of sin (it shall certainly be) 795 When many shall ...
— Old English Poems - Translated into the Original Meter Together with Short Selections from Old English Prose • Various

... delivered by the messenger and which brought on this sickness—of which the leech Ulsenius had ere this warned him—might have shaken the heart of a sterner man; for my Uncle Christian lodged in the Imperial Fort as its warder, and his duty it was to guard it. Near it, likewise, on the same hill-crag, stood the old castle belonging to the High Constable, or Burgrave Friedrich. Now the Burgrave had come to high words with Duke Ludwig the Bearded, of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... think of Mliss. It was a selfish instinct, perhaps, which made him try to fancy his feeling for the child was foolish, romantic, and unpractical. He even tried to imagine that she would do better under the control of an older and sterner teacher. Then she was nearly eleven, and in a few years, by the rules of Red Mountain, would be a woman. He had done his duty. After Smith's death he addressed letters to Smith's relatives, and received one answer from a sister of Melissa's mother. Thanking the master, she ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... brothers, and anxiously watched intercourse with the members of the Ducal suite, their knowledge of the sterner sex was absolutely wanting. It was in vain that Cosimo expostulated with his consort; she was inexorable, and, indeed, she stretched her system so far as to exclude the ladies of the Court. Perhaps she was right in this, for the Duke himself was the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... tributes paid by those of grosser mould to that high quality. Certainly, she was heroic. Yet her heroism was not of that simple sort so dear to the readers of novels and the compilers of hagiologies— the romantic sentimental heroism with which mankind loves to invest its chosen darlings: it was made of sterner stuff. To the wounded soldier on his couch of agony, she might well appear in the guise of a gracious angel of mercy; but the military surgeons, and the orderlies, and her own nurses, and the 'Purveyor', and Dr. Hall, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... heart! No more lovely or better girl could be found to do so;—of that she was sure. To the latter assertion the Doctor agreed, telling her that, as it was so, she ought to have a stronger trust in her daughter's charms,—telling her also, with somewhat sterner voice, that she should not allow herself to be so disturbed by the glories of the Bracy coronet. In this there was, I think, some hypocrisy. Had the Doctor been as simple as his wife in showing her own heart, it would probably have been found that he was as much ...
— Dr. Wortle's School • Anthony Trollope

... do. Now tell me, O King, plump and plain, will you give your daughter to my son as wife?' The King listened to the end of the old woman's strange request, but every moment his face grew blacker, and his features sterner; till all at once he thought to himself, 'Is it worth while that I, the King, should be angry with this poor old fool?' And all the courtiers and counsellors were amazed when they saw the hard lines round his mouth and the frown on his brow grow smooth, and heard the mild but mocking tones ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various

... how the girl flushed up, and how furious Sasha's eyes were! I bit my tongue and did not go on. Zinotchka gradually turned pale, clenched her teeth, and ate no more dinner. At our evening lessons that day I noticed a striking change in Zinotchka's face. It looked sterner, colder, as it were, more like marble, while her eyes gazed strangely straight into my face, and I give you my word of honour I have never seen such terrible, annihilating eyes, even in hounds when they overtake the wolf. I understood their expression perfectly, when in the middle of ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... manhood's tears. It seems natural for a woman's feelings to find vent in weeping; and though all our sympathies are enlisted in her behalf, we deem it an April shower, which we hope to see ere long give place to the sunshine of a smile; but tears are foreign to the sterner nature of man, and any emotion powerful enough to call them forth indicates a depth and intensity of feeling which, like the sirocco of the desert, carries all before it in its resistless fury. Fanny must have been more ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... want a spirit of content To work where'er thou'lt wish my labor spent, Whether at home or in a stranger's clime, In days of joy or sorrow's sterner time; I want a spirit passive to be still, And by thy power ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various

... Leveller and Baptist, Brownist and Fifth Monarchy Man, one and all stood up and made proclamation, crying, "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth; for I am God, and there is none else." Well might Cromwell adjure them in that war of words which followed the sterner conflict on the heights of Dunbar, "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris

... Gordon, in a sterner voice than Clemency had ever heard him use toward her, "never speak, never think, of that woman or that man again. Now go out ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman

... a hospital, and pronounces {147} every patient an incurable—it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each, but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a conclusion from which ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... denied in an ethnological sense that the Celtic nature is peculiarly sensitive; any more than it can be denied historically that its good feelings have been too often systematically crushed, and its generous impulses seared. If the Teutonic mind illustrates in sterner traits the manhood of human intelligence, the Celt shows its gayer youthfulness, if not indeed the lighter phases of its reckless childhood: and it has been a second nature for the Saxon to hold mastery over the Celt, as a weaker race is everywhere subject ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... race without hopelessly undermining our confidence in its intelligence. Beyond the fact that it records deeds of brave men the book has no mission, and its cheerful detachment might not, in the absence of sterner chronicles, be salutary. But as long as there are enough Commissions to publish scathing reports on this or that phase of national ineptitude it is not the publishers' business to provide cathartics for the fatted soul of a self-satisfied people. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various

... to ensnare the uncaged bird, and this fact was alone in the mind of the anxious mamma. But the entrance of the bridal party put an end to all talk concerning the sterner sex. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour

... have imagined his headless address to them to be also without a distinct termination, for he seemed to have ended as abruptly as he had begun; so long was the pause before, with a wearied lifting of his body, he pursued, in a sterner voice: ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Ebley was made of sterner stuff—she was horribly shocked, her feelings had been bruised in their tenderest parts, the laws of convention had been ruthlessly broken by her niece, and forgiveness ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn

... friends, but our relations were cast in a sterner mould, and they were not to take the road of well-being. This became manifest when the now growing dawn lightly touched the eastern door of the Pass at its highest crag. The Black Colonel put his hand ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne

... scenes of violence here depicted?—Neither do I, O gentle reader, delight in them. But the book that would be a mirror of evil times, must show some repulsive features. And this book was written, not to please merely, but for a sterner purpose. ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge

... villages become household words. It was still unknown to history, a peaceful and pastoral district, remote from the beaten tracks of trade and travel, and inhabited by a quiet and industrious people. To-day there are few regions which boast sterner or more heroic memories. To the right, rolling away in light and shadow for a score of miles, is the great forest of Spotsylvania, within whose gloomy depths lie the fields of Chancellorsville; where the breastworks of the Wilderness can still be traced; ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... should take a father, and trust me to deal with this matter as a clergyman and a man of the world—or understand distinctly that I shall take the whole story to Dr Skinner, who, I imagine, will take much sterner measures ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler

... me too! This child's play of the heart, Which sterner duty has repressed in me, Makes even captives bold. (Aside.) I ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair

... fields have drunk enough The time demands a Muse of sterner stuff; No more one bard, exempt from vulgar throng, May sing through Roman towns the Ascraean song, Or court in Learning's elmy bowers relief From individual shame or general grief: Silence is music to a soul outworn With the wild clangor of the warlike ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... far as change of scene was concerned, but her idea of a complete rest was an immediate and very active affiliation with her suffering sisters in a crusade for their "rights," and the overthrow of the oppression of the sterner sex. She sailed for England, and once in London became one of the most rampant of ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... salvation for us in man, that political economists had declared such to be the law and constitution of society, and that our rulers had believed that message, and were determined to act upon it;—if all these things did not go far towards maddening us, we must have been made of sterner stuff than any ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... extended a record, and it was bright with honor from the beginning to the end. His pre-eminent reputation, as a disciplinarian and artillerist of the highest class, was uniformly maintained. He added to the sterner qualities required by professional duty a polished urbanity of manners, and a dignified and commanding aspect and bearing. His ashes rest beneath the sod of his ancestral acres in ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... manifested unto him," etc. And so the strong-minded man is commended to Friends across the seas. In the records of the meetings for sufferings in England are certain of his letters from the jail. How his character descended to my sterner parent, and, through another generation, to me, and how the coming in of my mother's gentler blood helped in after-days, and amid stir of war, to modify in me, this present writer, the ruder qualities of my race, I ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell

... all things, that he sometimes gave undue prominence to the facts which supported his theory. It was only fair and reasonable that critics should draw attention to this characteristic of Froude as an historian. That he deliberately falsified history is a baseless delusion. A sterner moralist, a more strenuous worker, it would have been difficult to find. An artist he could not help being, for it was in the blood. Once his fingers grasped the pen, they began instinctively to ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul

... they were parted. He was not a man to linger much over the sweetness of a caress when sterner work was in his hands to be done. "Lady Lovel," he said, "you must see that this opposition is fruitless. Ask your cousin, Lord Lovel, and he will tell you that ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope

... by any human power; who, when they speak of Freedom, mean the Freedom to oppress their kind, and to be savage, merciless, and cruel; and of whom every man on his own ground, in republican America, is a more exacting, and a sterner, and a less responsible despot than the Caliph Haroun Alraschid in his angry ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... always, in the background of them, a hue of settled black. Easy to say, "Resist till we die;" but to go about, year after year, practically doing it, under cloudy omens, no end of it visible ahead, is not easy. Many men, Kings and other, have had to take that stern posture;—few on sterner terms than those of Friedrich at present; and none that I know of with a more truly stoical and manful figure of demeanor. He is long used to it! Wet to the bone, you do not regard new showers; the one thing is, reach the bridge ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... of pink the coyotes hanging on the flanks of the great encampment raised their immemorial salutation to the dawn. Their clamorings were stilled by a new and sterner voice—the notes of the bugle summoning sleepers of the last night to the duties of the first day. Down the line from watch to watch passed the Plains command, "Catch up! Catch up!" It ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... make over a bluestocking in an eye's twinkling. Mother, of course, stayed home on Sunday to "pick up" and get ready for supper in the absence of the servant girl. A later generation had the grace to elevate these slatternly drudges to the title of maid, but a sterner ancestry found it expedient to be more practical and less pretentious in its terms. On these drab Sundays Helen Somers had passionately envied the children of foreign breed, who seemed less hedged about by sabbatical ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... free us from the rule of dogmatist and moralist, but he would free us from these without plunging us into a yet sterner ascesis. The tone and temper advocated by him is one eminently sane, peaceful, quiet, friendly and gay. He does not free us from a dark responsibility to God to plunge us under the yoke of a darker responsibility to posterity. He would free us from every kind of responsibility. ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... Judge Penfold's face was a trifle sterner than before. Mr. Woodward looked pleased, as if ...
— True to Himself • Edward Stratemeyer

... route. If they cannot be cajoled or enticed by promises of an easy time, plenty of money, fine clothes and the usual stock of allurements—or a fake marriage—then harsher methods are resorted to. In some instances the hunters really marry the victims. As to the sterner methods, it is of course impossible to speak explicitly, beyond the statement that intoxication and drugging are often used as a means to reduce the victims to a state of helplessness, and sheer physical ...
— Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls - War on the White Slave Trade • Various

... answer, his whole face was the expression of having just discovered one of the senses. He was a splendid man and, if the word may be employed of the sterner sex, one of beauty. His features were even; that is to be noted, his nose chiselled straight and to perfection, the eyes of a peculiar sombreness and lustre almost burning, of a black of such intensity as to verge into red and to be devoid of pupils, and yet, for all ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... with her jug hanging by a strap from the saddle horn, had a swift, rapturous vision of alluring, mossy banks, canopied by rustling leaves, before she was called back to the stern hills of her native Kansas and the sterner necessity of forcing a hundred head of maddened cattle to keep within the confines ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... day they fight, and one by one they fall. Comrades and friends drop at each other's sides; sons drop by fathers, and brothers by brothers. The smoke rises in the valley, and the home is blotted out. All that makes life worth living goes, then life itself. What sterner test can a nation be put to than this? It is a torture long and slow; the agony and bloody sweat. I know well that if my own country were invaded I should, or hope I should, behave exactly as these men are doing; ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps

... a soft whisper. 'There's more sore hearts i' t' world than one reckons for!' But after a while, she bethought her again of Kester's account of his sister's 'softness'; and she thought that it behoved her to give some good advice. So she added, in a sterner, harder tone—'Still, yo' say yo' know nought about him; and tramps is tramps a' t' world over; and yo're a widow, and it behoves yo' to be careful. I think I'd just send him off as soon as he's a bit rested. Yo' say he's plenty ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... drew forth an even sterner rebuff, for the housewife, before Janice had said half of her speech, cried, "Be off with you, you Tory! think you I would give help to such ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... as well as a strict observance of deferential respect from the men towards the women, while these last seem to assume that superiority accorded to them in manner, if not entertained in fact, by the sterner sex. ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner

... He was in truth handsome with a delicate fairness one did not see often among the Germans, who were generally cast in a sterner mold. ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler

... called upon to die for their revolutionary faith did so with the greatest heroism. Nor is the picture true of all revolutionaries; some of the noblest men it has ever been my good fortune to meet were Russian revolutionaries. But these were the product of an earlier and sterner school, the puritanical "Nihilism" of the 'eighties; and it is impossible to deny the substantial truth of the above description as far as the rank and file of the modern revolutionary school are concerned.[1] Such people were divided by a whole universe from the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... enjoyment of her mere physical perfection, his pleasure in the admiration she excited, and in the envy of other men. Life's river glided smoothly, gayly in the sunshine; then ugly snags began to appear, and reefs, fretting the surface of the water, and hinting of sterner difficulties below; then a long stretch of tossing, troubled water, growing more and more turbulent as it proceeded, boiling and bubbling into angry whirlpools and sullen eddies. The boat of married happiness was hard among the breakers, tossed from side to side, the sport of every wind of passion; ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries the Italian presses poured forth some four thousand novelle, all avowedly tracing from Boccaccio.[6] Many of these, it is true, were imitations of the gayer strains of Boccaccio's genius. But a considerable proportion of them have a sterner tone, and deal with the weightier matters of life, and in this they had none but the master for their model. The gloom of the Black Death settles down over the greater part of all this literature. ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter

... Civilisation began to lay down and enforce sterner rules for the game of life, and peaceful methods promised to prove more profitable than violent, the Ingerfields became traders and merchants of grave mien and sober life; for their ambition from generation to generation remains ever the same, their various ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... in Ninon's agony that disturbed Laval. Scarcely a night passed but some victim like herself writhed under his remorseless eyes. Their mortal fear and sufferings were his recreation before the sterner business of sorcery that followed; and the more demonstrative they were in their pain, the more highly spiced was his pleasure. At first Ninon's beautiful and expressive face kept his whole attention; but after a time he began to note the strange-appearing little ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe

... his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the necessary small-change of existence—somebody's cold, somebody's dress, somebody's marriage or death. When she addressed him on sterner subjects, the ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at her as if she were a baby, he listened with stubborn resentment, and strode away a confessed boor. There was no contact anywhere between them, and he was a slow exasperation to her.—What can we do ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... November of 1698 the Governor passed from this life in Castle St. Louis at the good old age of seventy-eight. He had demonstrated—demonstrated in action so that his enemies acknowledged the fact—that the sterner virtues of the military chieftain go farther towards the making of great nationhood than soft sentiments ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... 'his fair mistress' opened a new chapter in Southampton's career, and life's tempests began in earnest. Either to free himself from his mistress's toils, or to divert attention from his intrigue, he in 1596 withdrew from Court and sought sterner occupation. Despite his mistress's lamentations, which the Court gossips duly chronicled, he played a part with his friend Essex in the military and naval expedition to Cadiz in 1596, and in that to the Azores in 1597. He ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee

... the Hebrew words for 'not' and 'to it,' have led to a mistaken reading. The joy is described in words which dance and sing, like the gladness of which they tell. The mirth of the harvest-field, when labour is crowned with success, and the sterner joy of the victors as they part the booty, with which mingles the consciousness of foes overcome and dangers averted, are blended in this gladness. We have the joy of reaping a harvest of which we have not sowed the seed. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... ascertained, were made by the direct orders of Colonel Durnford, must be attributed the terrible disaster that followed. There are two ways of fighting a savage or undisciplined enemy; the scientific way, such as is taught in staff colleges, and the unscientific way that is to be learned in the sterner school of experience. We English were not the first white men who had to deal with the rush of the Zulu impis. The Boers had encountered them before, at the battle of the Blood River, and armed only with muzzle-loading 'roers,' or ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang

... rejoicing. This little entertainment took place during the first week of his imprisonment and served the unhappy purpose of convincing his captors that Richard's nerves were not susceptible to frivolous attacks. Thereafter they concentrated on sterner measures. Food was reduced to a minimum and frequently doped with chemicals that caused him acute internal suffering. When the pain was at its height either Van Diest, Laurence or Hipps would pay him a visit and over and over again the ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee

... Brutus is an honorable man. He hath brought many captives home to Rome, Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill: Did this in Csar, seem ambitious? When that the poor have cried, Csar, hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious, And Brutus is an honorable man. You all did see, that, on the Lupercal, I thrice presented him a kingly crown, Which he did thrice refuse. Was this ambition? ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... from civilization, conventional veneer soon wears away. Love, hate, and revenge spring up, and after the sterner passions have had their sway the man and the woman are left alone to ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths

... transferred, in the seventeenth-century New England, to the minister. The minister imposed himself upon the popular imagination, partly through sheer force of personal ascendency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy,—the actual governing of the Commonwealth by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Hawthorne that shadowed his countenance with a black veil. The church organization, too,—though it may have lacked its bishop,—had a despotic power over its communicants; ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry

... helped me pack my pony, and saddled Buell's horse. It was one thing to admire the big bay from the ground, and it was another to be astride him. Target—that was his name—had a spirited temper, an iron mouth, and he had been used to a sterner hand than mine. He danced all over the glade before he decided to behave himself. Riding him, however, was such a great pleasure that a more timid boy than I would have taken the risk. He would not let any horse stay near him; he pulled ...
— The Young Forester • Zane Grey

... Vincennes clothed him in its mists and dreams. No matter what way the weather blew its breath, cold or warm, cloudy or fair, rain or snow, the peace in his soul changed not. His nature seemed to hold all of its sterner and fiercer traits in abeyance while he domiciled himself absolutely within his narrow and monotonous environment. Since the dance at the river house a new content, like a soft and diffused sweetness, ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... show interest; for after the house came the land—and the land, well she knew it, was made of sterner stuff. A shriek from Pearl told Elmer that his wife had found her tongue, as he phrased it. The fact is she had caught sight of Hat Tyler standing over her like an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... to call up revolting associations, which as a matter of good taste should be banished, and which were far enough away from the mind of Plato. These and similar passages should be interpreted by the Laws. Nor is there anything in the Symposium, or in the Charmides, in reality inconsistent with the sterner rule which Plato lays down in the Laws. At the same time it is not to be denied that love and philosophy are described by Socrates in figures of speech which would not be used in Christian times; or that nameless vices were prevalent at Athens and in other ...
— Phaedrus • Plato

... literature, and art; Huggins, her mother's name, was impossible, and Hilliard, more sounding, clearly out of the question; while the Shelbys, to whom she turned in last resort, seemed hopelessly commonplace. Ross's father, to her own knowledge, had done little but drink; and the grandfather, though of sterner stuff, as became a pioneer, was handicapped by his unlucky distillery. The governor's own notions about his family were the vaguest. Like many Americans, he had the impression that its beginnings traced to two brothers who immigrated to this country prior to the Revolution ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... prematurely at the same time; but it proceeded from the same essential cause: physical laws disobeyed and bodies exhausted. The evil is, that what in the debauchee is condemned, as suicide, is lauded in the devotee, as saintship. The delirium tremens of the drunkard conveys scarcely a sterner moral lesson than the second childishness of the pure and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various

... politicians testified their belief in the honesty of Welles without saying a word for Cameron. There is every reason to think he was not personally dishonourable. Lincoln believed in his complete integrity, and so also did sterner critics, Chase, an apostle of economy and uprightness, and Senator Sumner. But he had to go. He opened the door for his removal by a circular to generals on the subject of slaves, which was comparable to Fremont's Proclamation and of which Lincoln had ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... knew that when he affected that winning, cajoling manner, he was always the most dangerous, and most to be suspected. So her only answer or acknowledgment was a low courtesy, and the blood mantled in her cheek, but whether from gratitude or some sterner feeling the Count was unable ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her sterner stuff—not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the juice of the grape, and Puck's mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is, after all, a tribute which his enemies pay him when ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... she stopped, arrested by her own word. How was it possible to present reality to eyes that looked out through such maze of ignorance and folly; it seemed easier to take up a sterner theme and comment upon the wickedness of disobedience and secrecy. Yet all the time her words missed the mark, because the true sin of these two pretty criminals was utter folly. Surely if the world, and their fragment of it, had been what they ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... be able to converse with him suitably and to encourage him in his work; but, at last, unable to delude her own mind any longer, she weeps with her children over the approaching destruction of their home, and the grief wears her out and kills her. Luckily the daughter, Marguerite, is made of sterner stuff than her mother. And, with her brother, she toils to pay her father's debts and to keep the home together. At the end, Claes himself dies, still absorbed in his chimera, and his last words are an endeavour to formulate the marvellous revelation which ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... way or in that doubtless my end will find me, for, if you refuse this office, there are others of sterner stuff. The knife that smote Steinar is not blunted. Yet, before I die, who am come here but to die, I pray you hear the truth, that my memory may be somewhat less vile to you in the after years. Olaf, you think me the falsest of the false, yet I am not altogether ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard

... Kormak and Steingerd, and the poet's unconscious translation of AEschylus[175] as he says, "Eager to find my lady, I have scoured the whole house with the glances of my eyes—in vain," dwell in the memory as softer touches. And for the sterner, nothing can beat the last fight of Olaf Trygveson, where with the crack of Einar Tamberskelvir's bow Norway breaks from Olaf's hands, and the king himself, the last man with Kolbiorn his marshal to fight on the deck of the Long Serpent, ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... defeat, and many a man would have retired from the political field, never to show himself again. But Theodore Roosevelt was made of sterner stuff. He held his ground and went his way as before, resolved to do his duty as it should ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer

... opinions. There are people whom the sea depresses, whom mountains exhilarate. Personally, I want the sea always—some not populous edge of it for choice; and with it sunshine, and wine, and a little music. My friend on the mountain yonder is of tougher fibre and sterner outlook, disapproves of the sea's laxity and instability, has no ear for music and no palate for the grape, and regards the sun as a rather enervating institution, like central heating in a house. What he likes is a grey day and the wind in his face; crags at a great altitude; ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... my sire have said, And what my dam, had anybody told them The time would come when I should occupy A felon's cell? O the disgrace of it The scandal, the incredible come-down! It masters me. I see i' my mind's eye The public prints—'Sharp Sentence on a Monk.' What then? I thought I was of sterner stuff Than is affrighted by what people think. Yet thought I so because 'twas thought of me, And so 'twas thought of me because I had A hawk-like profile and a baleful eye. Lo! my soul's chin recedes, soft to the touch As half-churn'd butter. Seeming ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm

... downwards; or its weight Straining aloft, with oft exerted power! Ixion whirling, too; with swift pursuit, Thou follow'st, and art follow'd! Belides! Your husband-cousins who in death dar'd steep, And ceaseless draw the unavailing streams! All Juno view'd with unrelenting brow; But, view'd Ixion sterner far than all: And when on Sisyphus again she cast Her eyes, behind Ixion, angry cry'd;— "What justice this?—of all the brethren he "Sharp torture suffers! Shall proud Athamas "A regal dwelling boast,—whose scornful taunts, "And scornful spouse have still ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... blended with the spirit of religious devotion which entered into the organization and practices of chivalry, forms one of the most fascinating features in the study of its development; and this gentler side, no less than its sterner aspects, is faithfully presented in the brilliant examination of Gautier. And the heroic sentiment and action which inspired and accomplished the sacred warfare of the Crusades are not less admirably depicted in ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... man,—the words God, Immortality, Duty,—pronounced, with terrible emphasis, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensed law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... took a sterner and a darker hue. The sight of the animal wearied him, and he flung it contemptuously aside. It disappeared in the direction of the ramparts; and almost at the same moment he heard a slight sound, resembling the falling of several minute particles ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins

... and no doubt the natural sympathies of the Acadians were with the French. But the British were now formidable. For them the founding of Halifax in 1749 had made all the difference. They, too, had a menacing fortress at the door of the Acadians, and their tone grew sterner. As a result the Acadians were told that if, by October 15, 1749, they had not taken an unconditional oath of allegiance to George II, they should forfeit their rights and their property, the treasured farms on which they and their ancestors had toiled. The Acadians were in acute distress. ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong



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