"Sterner" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... studied his face, the strong jaw set a little now, the lips molded in sterner lines, and for all her outward show of composure, she knew a sick dismay. And for a moment she neither moved nor spoke. What he would do next, she did not know; but she knew quite well that he had not the slightest intention of leaving her here undisturbed to carry out her plan, unless—unless, ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard
... the public garden at Cosenza, its noble view over the valley of the Crati to the heights of Sila; that of Catanzaro is in itself more striking, and the prospect it affords has a sterner, grander note. Here you wander amid groups of magnificent trees, an astonishingly rich and varied vegetation; and from a skirting terrace you look down upon the precipitous gorge, burnt into barenness save where a cactus ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... she gazed at the mantel-shelf, shone the light of undying fires within—fires which at a touch could blaze forth after endless years, transforming the wrinkled face, softening the sterner lines of character. And suddenly there was a new bond between the two. So used are the young to the acceptance of the sacrifice of the old that they lose sight of that sacrifice. But Austen saw now, in a flash, the years of Euphrasia's self-denial, the years of memories, the years ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Paris Commune was too moderate for the taste of many British Socialists, who favour sterner measures. The philosopher of British Socialism informs us; "The Commune had one special fault, that of a fatuous moderation in all its doings. Probably never since history began have any body of men allowed themselves and theirs to ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... engrossed in the immediate results; not too far off to lose the sympathy for the religious chivalry which inspired the Holy War. Earlier, in the intensely prosaic period that immediately succeeded, the romance of the Crusades was gone; later, Europe was girding itself for the sterner task of reformation. Before the time of Tasso, Peter the Hermit would have been deemed a foolish enthusiast; later, he would have been sent to a lunatic asylum. But just at the time when Tasso wrote there was much, especially in Italy, of that spirit which roused and ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... please," and that invitation still stands over the ruined doorway of the abbey. Many years before this bogus abbey, with its congregation of irreverent jesters, was founded, there stood upon this same spot a monastery of a sterner kind, whose monks were of a somewhat different type to the revellers that were to follow them, five hundred ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... dying 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
... 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 ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... vinegar to drink." History says, "They gave Him vinegar to drink mingled with gall," when He said "I thirst." You are not surprised then, that after the fulfilment of so many and varied predictions, Jesus should have spoken to the two doubting disciples with a somewhat sterner voice than was his wont: "O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... is out of work," mused the head of the family. Head, thought the governess! When they wound him about their fingers! She liked men of sterner stuff. In her mountain country the men did as they wished, and sometimes beat their wives by way of showing their authority. Under no circumstances, she felt, would this young man ever beat his wife. He ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... for dressing foolishly, extravagantly, but to what end do they do it? To be attractive to men; and the reason they continue to do it is that it is successful. Many a woman has found that it pays to be foolish. Men like frivolity—before marriage; but they demand all the sterner virtues afterwards. The little dainty, fuzzy-haired, simpering dolly who chatters and wears toe-slippers has a better chance in the matrimonial market than the clear-headed, plainer girl, who dresses sensibly. A little boy once gave his mother directions as to his birthday ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... was a miracle how the man had kept up thus far. But at length he had begun to fall behind; every day he straggled more and more, and the previous evening had reached camp nearly an hour after the tent had been pitched. But he was a plucky fellow, of sterner stuff than the sailing-master, Adler, and had no thought ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... the despatch bearer in his private room, looking taller, thinner and sterner than ever. Although a Kentuckian by birth, he had been bred in the far South, but had little of that far South about him save the dress he wore. He was too cold, too precise, too free from sudden emotion to be of the Gulf Coast State that sent him to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... of sterner stuff, and was inflexible. In fact, however, the difference of dogma, if any existed, was trivial. The clergy used the cry of heresy to excite odium, just as they called their opponents Antinomians, or dangerous fanatics. To support these accusations the synod gravely accepted every unsavory ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... with an ethical tone higher and sterner than Campbell's, offers in other features a marked contrast to him. He is careless in details, and indulges no poetical reveries; he scorns sentimentalism, and throws off rapid sketches of human action with great pomp of imagery, but he seldom touches the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... 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 and ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... the last time, up the road to Sheerness. Nothing moved upon it. He was rid of Mrs. Hallam, if face to face with a sterner problem. He had a few pence over ten shillings in his pocket, and had promised to pay the man four times as much. He would have agreed to ten times the sum demanded; for the boat he must and would have. But ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... known Grace from her childhood, and felt what the declaration must have cost her. Sir Thomas Purcel was cast in a sterner mould. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... she spoke a dark form stepped from a doorway into the corridor in front of them. Marie retreated several steps; but her little escort proved that he was made of sterner stuff. He placed himself valiantly in front of his young mistress, laid his gun against his cheek, and aiming directly for the stranger's breast, said, in ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... great subject as to whether Madame Zairoff would or would not appear that evening, was again freely discussed. That it was an equally interesting probability to the sterner sex was soon made evident by the unusual alacrity with which they joined the circle. They broke up into groups and knots, scattered through the length of the handsome, brilliantly lighted room, but a curious restlessness ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... to shame, And seek to blast the honours of thy name: Turn to the few in Ida's early throng, Whose souls disdain not to condemn the wrong; Or if, amidst the comrades of thy youth, None dare to raise the sterner voice of truth, 30 Ask thine own heart—'twill bid thee, boy, forbear! For well I ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... the days of Theodoric owed his inheritance to the cross of Roman weaklings with Roman slaves. He was not weak because he was "mongrel" but because he sprang from bad stock on both sides. The Ostrogoth and the Lombard who tyrannized over him brought in a great strain of sterner stuff, followed by crosses with captive and slave such as always accompany conquest. To understand the fall of Rome one must consider the disastrous effects of crossings of this sort. Neither can one overlook the waste ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... English sailor nor the Coromantee sea-cook were individuals of the yielding kind. They were both made of sterner stuff,—and even when the chase was undoubtedly going against them, they were heard muttering to each other words of encouragement, and a mutual determination never to lay down their oars, so long as six feet of water separated them ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... cases were prevented from precipitating themselves into the valleys below merely by the support of the trees against which they reclined. Deep ravines, in various directions, gave an air of still sterner solemnity ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... Louisiana another Union officer; but made of sterner stuff. This was Colonel W. T. Sherman, Superintendent of the State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy at Alexandria, up the Red River. He was much respected by all the state authorities, and was carefully ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... (CASSELL) can be recommended to anyone in need of light refreshment after a course of sterner literature. Here we are back again in the world of small things; but if "M.E. FRANCIS'S" theme is trivial there is no denying the art with which she handles it. Just a quartette of characters occupies her rural stage—an old grandmother, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 9, 1917 • Various
... Professor was quite right when he said that I had not reached to an adequate delineation of their virtues; and I fear that I must go on blotting their characters in endeavouring to reach the ideal in my mind. These letters were, however, combined with others from the sterner sex, and some of them were not altogether free from personal invective. But, notwithstanding, I kept to my purpose, and I am happy to know that many of those who at first condemned me are ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... of this strange house, get protection and something like comfort. They sat silent close to the fires. Jaspar Hume was writing with numbed fingers. The extract that follows is taken from his diary. It tells that day's life, and so gives an idea of harder, sterner days that they had spent and must yet spend, on ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... effect of this bold challenge was a stern reprimand from Bishop Frederik Munter, accompanied by a solemn warning that if he ever again ventured to voice a similar judgment upon his fellow pastors, sterner measures would at once be taken against him. Besides this, his enemies raved, some of his few remaining friends broke with him, and H. C. Oersted, the famous discoverer of electro-magnetism, continued an attack upon him ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... was of sterner stuff. In the back of his mind, Joe was thinking, even as the other seized a bottle by its long neck and broke off the base on the edge of the table, Now this one's from the Pink Army, an old pro, and a Russkie, sure as ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... to pay the costs, but the Chairman (Mr. T. J. Price) remarked that if such breeches were repeated the magistrates would have to adopt sterner measures."—South ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 6, 1914 • Various
... 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
... 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, ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland
... the sterner duties of life while following the bent of his inclination toward the solving of the ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... think of love than of retribution, or of the arm that shelters or upholds us than of the hand that smites; but the real question should be—"Is it true, this declaration that as we sow we reap, that the wages of sin is death, death of faculty, death of hope?" It is foolish to blink the sterner aspects of life. The fruit of such blinking and turning aside is very often the very thing we do not like to think of—indulgence and its retribution. Divine love and goodness and long-suffering cannot occupy too much of our thoughts and prayers; for it is through these that the ...
— Sermons at Rugby • John Percival
... accept or decline, because of her independence. Women are capable of and adapted to a large number of employments, which have hitherto been kept from them, and some of these they are slowly wrenching from the hands of the sterner sex. In order that women may enter the ranks of labor which she is forcing open to herself, she needs a special education and training to fit ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... characterized him even in moments when most ordinary mortals—he was a man sui generis—might, with some show of reason, be perturbed or excited. Even in the most critical period of the Franco-German war his unruffled quietness remained the same, sterner perhaps in look, more silent than ever. Though the warrior king, amidst the carnage of the battle-field might feel depressed; though Bismarck, man of "iron and blood," might be anxious at the progress of events, Moltke, seated on his great black horse, calmly surveyed, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... many an acre of choice monastic land. But they never influenced his policy. No man was ever advanced to political (p. 242) power in Henry's reign, merely because he pandered to the King's vanity or to his vices. No one was a better judge of conduct in the case of others, or a sterner champion of moral probity, when it did not conflict with his own desires or conscience. In 1528 Anne Boleyn and her friends were anxious to make a relative abbess of Wilton.[686] But she had been notoriously unchaste. "Wherefore," wrote Henry to Anne herself, "I ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the braves, having recovered from their first shock, stood fast this time, but trembled much and glared horribly. The chief, who was made of sterner stuff than many of his followers; did not move, though his face flushed crimson with suppressed emotion. As to the sea-birds, curiosity seemed to have overcome fear, for they came circling and wheeling overhead in clouds so dense that they almost darkened the sky—many of them swooping ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... moderation, the Indians were getting to be incited by this taste of blood. The principal chiefs became sterner in their aspects, and the young men began to manifest some such impatience as that which the still untried pup betrays, when he first scents his game. All these were ominous symptoms, and were well understood ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... unaffected benevolence, which invested even Scott's bodily presence with a kind of natural aroma, perceptible, as it would appear, to very far-away cousins. But Carlyle is on his guard, and though his sympathy flows kindly enough, it is rather harshly intercepted by his sterner mood. He cannot, indeed, but warm to Scott at the end. After touching on the sad scene of Scott's closing years, at once ennobled and embittered by that last desperate struggle to clear off the burden of debt, he concludes with genuine feeling. 'It can ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 Stoick's word ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... above his Head would sing So sweetly that her pleasant Music stole Between the Saint and his severer Soul, And made him sometimes [heedless of his] Vows Listening his little Neighbour in the Boughs. Until one Day a sterner Music woke The sleeping Leaves, and through the Branches spoke— 'What! is the Love between us two begun And waxing till we Two were nearly One For three score Years of Intercourse unstirr'd Of Men, now shaken by a little Bird; And such a precious Bargain, and so ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Finnerty exchanged glances, which, however, did not escape the observation of the wife, who thoroughly understood those changes of expression, which reflected her husband's darker and sterner purposes. ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... helmet set atilt, His bombing waistcoat sagging low, His rifle slung across his back: Poised in the very act to throw. And let some graven legend tell Of those weird battles in the West Wherein he put old skill to use, And played old games with sterner zest. ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke
... the men picked out and put to perilous tasks. No one spoke of the accidents that had happened, or even the fatal fall of a lineman who a few weeks before had ventured once too often. Every rod of road surveyed made the engineers sterner at their task, just as it made them keener to ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... aghast at the sight, would have retreated, but the officers, formed of sterner materials, persuaded him to stay, although he showed such evident signs of fear and perturbation as seriously to injure a cause in which resolution and presence of mind alone could avail. The mutineers, at the ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... so engaged in recapitulating their sorrows, sitting side by side on a tombstone, like a pair of monumental figures, that they had neither ear nor eye for any thing else; but my English nature was made of sterner stuff, and thinking that at the last I could but die, I took the lantern and set sturdily to work to examine the gate. It was soon evident that it could be neither undermined nor broken down by any strength of ours; but it was also ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... scenes of fancied bliss, adieu! On rose-leaf beds amid your faery bowers I all too long have lost the dreamy hours! Beseems it now the sterner Muse to woo, If haply she her golden meed impart, To realise the ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Covenainters at Philliphaugh, the Anabaptists of Munster, and the early Mormons of Utah, all found their murderous impulses fortified from this unholy source. Its red trail runs through history. Even where the New Testament prevails, its teaching must still be dulled and clouded by its sterner neighbour. Let us retain this honoured work of literature. Let us remove the taint which poisons the very ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hatred of the Austrians; but I had never been inclined to regard this as being more than a bit of private theatricals, and I was astonished to find her withdrawing herself from the butterfly, fashionable career she seemed to follow, and taking so much interest in sterner matters as her presence there seemed ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... short narrative poem, Mother and Poet, Mrs. Browning claims for her heroine the sterner virtues that have been denied her by the average critic, who assigns woman to sentimental verse as her proper sphere. Of course her most serious consideration of the problem is to be found in Aurora Leigh. She feels that making her imaginary poet a woman is a departure from tradition, ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... though it must be confessed, since our country furnishes no so-called "leisure class," the art of letter-writing has, in great measure, fallen into feminine hands, the cares of business and professional life ofttimes preventing the sterner half of creation from mere friendly exercise of the pen. It is among women, therefore, that we will find in the present, as we have found in the past, the best ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... writes these strong words: "President Lincoln was dead against the confiscation of estates, and bent upon restoring a powerful landed aristocracy, with a wretched dependent peasantry free in name only.... A far sterner nature than his was wanted, which understands that Justice to the oppressed must go before Mercy to the guilty; and I believe they have got the right man ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... the man to return with sugar and apples, Pat watched him take himself off with mild anticipation. But as the man did not return he bethought him after a time of his sterner hunger, and took prompt step in the direction of a tuft of grass. Instantly he felt a sharp twitch at his ankles and fell headlong. For a moment he lay dazed, utterly at a loss to understand, thrashing about frantically ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... impedimenta beneath a tarpaulin, and took their places in solemn rows amidships across the thwarts of the boat slung overside. The importance of the occasion sat upon them heavily; they were going ashore—in Africa—to Slay Wild Beasts. They looked upon themselves as of bolder, sterner stuff than the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... plant potatoes unless steps are taken to destroy the insect pests. A Peterborough farmer has written a poem in The Daily Express against those pests, but we fancy that if a permanent improvement is to be effected it will be necessary to adopt much sterner ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... message of sterner irony than this to the Church of Sardis: "Thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead"! We may suppose that it was a church of apparent prosperity, with all the machinery of church life, its ritual, and ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... having the means of overwhelming the Master of Burrell within his reach, he suffered the Jew to continue a series of questions to Colonel Jones, while he spoke to Robin—soothing and caressing him as a father would have soothed and caressed an afflicted child. But this unbending of his sterner nature was lost upon the unhappy Ranger; he could not have replied if he would; all his faculties were suspended, and he remained in silence and without motion, unconscious of the Protector's ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... castellated heights frown over the rushing waters, which have something of the majesty of their "exulting and abounding" rival. Winding around the curving hills, the scene is constantly varied, and the little willowed islets clasped in the embrace of the stream, mingle a trait of softened beauty with its sterner character. ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... King Dushyanta, he who goes before Your son in battle, and who rules the earth, Whose bow makes Indra's weapon seem no more Than a fine plaything, lacking sterner worth. ...
— Translations of Shakuntala and Other Works • Kaalidaasa
... these sterner methods we add a brief account of one such expedition led by one of us (C. H.) in the year 1904, in his capacity of Divisional Resident of the several Rejang districts; an expedition which, there is reason to hope, may prove to be the last of the series. The purpose ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the tone is distinctly literary, abounding in verse (sometimes repeated from other portions of The Nights), and in Saj'a or Cadence which the copyist sometimes denotes by marks in red ink. The wife of Attaf is a much sterner and more important personage than in my text: she throws water upon her admirer as he gazes upon her from the street, and when compelled to marry him by her father, she "gives him a bit of her mind" as forcibly and stingingly as if she ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... the waters, a voice monotonously soothing, helped him to find himself,—and to find himself newer, fresher, a more vital personality. This newer Peter Champneys was not going to be, perhaps, so easy-going a chap. He was more insistent, he was sterner; to the art-conscience, in itself a troublesome possession, he was adding the race-conscience, which questions, demands, and will have nothing short of the truth. He had been forced to see things as they are, things ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... the range of their vision is so narrow, have sterner logic in their teachings. That which tends to a man's happiness is good, and must be followed, and the contrary shunned as evil. So far so good. But the practical application of the doctrine is fraught with mischief. Cribbed, cabined, and confined, by rank Materialism, within the ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... was the smile of a brave man, and kindly. His men knew it as well as they knew his sterner looks. Sunni thought it ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... vipers" to God, they attained that happy state when, as expressed by Judge Sewell's child, they were afraid that they "should goe to hell," and were "stirred up dreadfully to seek God." God was made sterner and more cruel than any living judge, that all might be brought to realize how slight a chance even the least erring ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... Exit comes, I shall encounter there, Stronger than fate, or time, or love, And sterner ...
— Behind the Arras - A Book of the Unseen • Bliss Carman
... of any thing she did not desire to approve. Per contra, she had no hesitation in referring to the negroes to support any of her statements which their testimony would strengthen. This was not altogether feminine weakness, as I knew several instances in which white persons of the sterner sex made reference to the testimony of slaves. The majority of Southern men refuse to believe them on all occasions; but there are many who refer to them if their statements are advantageous, yet declare them utterly unworthy of credence ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox
... writing, and how much letter-paper the creature tore up and wasted in answering the long letters that came, at first every week, then every fortnight, and at last irregularly, longer and longer apart. She became uneasy, and I could see that Hannah grew sterner and more ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... vision, it shone with the effulgence of the sun. His friends had no pity for him. He had placed his wife in the fire; what could he expect but that she would be burned? It did not alter the case that Mrs. Sharp had been also in the fire, but came out unconsumed. She was made of sterner stuff. Stubble would burn, but ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... in England, about this period, sterner disputes arose among men than those mere individual matters which generate duels. The men of the Commonwealth encouraged no practice of the kind, and the subdued aristocracy carried their habits and prejudices elsewhere, and fought their duels at foreign courts. Cromwell's ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... what you all think. You think me a useless kind of girl, willing enough to hang on Cap'n Billy and take all he can give. And I know that you think him soft and, maybe, silly, because he hasn't been sterner with me. But you're all wrong! Cap'n Daddy and I haven't been wasting our time. We've got awfully close to each other while we've lived alone and had only ourselves. I've been thinking a long time of how I could help him best. I didn't want ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... that ran together "like warp and woof" in the web of a singularly enviable life. And every day he felt that he was knowing more, and acquiring a strength and power which should fit him hereafter for the more toilsome business and sterner struggles of common life. ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... 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. Every memorable outburst of the fiercer passions of ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... present was a fact of inestimable value, but to him it was a matter of course. He never had believed, since he had thought out the subject in early manhood, that God would continue existence if He did not make it a blessing. But to others who, like many before him, had intelligently accepted of a sterner theology, and who had been struggling through years of chaotic doubts and fancies for footing on which to rest, he saw that these assurances gave real strength and support. An hour had passed amidst these manifestations—the interest ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... unanswered to-day. The stream of summer journeyings to Europe has swollen to a river; it has overflowed to the Arctic Ocean, to the Baltic, to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. The Pyrenees—a garden not only, but a land of sterner scenery as well,—almost alone remain by our nation ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... he raised his glaive, but wilder, sterner, still, without, Swelled the tempest, burst the thunder, yelled the winds with maniac shout; While the lightning, red and vivid, quivered through the skies in ire, Till the chamber with its flashes seemed a blazing hall ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... doctor, his voice becoming harder and sterner, "I am to understand no boy here is able to throw any light on the mystery. ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... very affecting; however, it isn't to the point. Do you know," he continued, in a sterner tone, "that I could have you arrested for entering and breaking open my ...
— Adrift in New York - Tom and Florence Braving the World • Horatio Alger
... a sort of religion with God "blacked out." His is an extremely interesting case. He is a writer who was formerly a Roman Catholic priest, and in his reaction from Catholicism he displays a resolution even sterner than Professor Metchnikoff's, to deny that anything religious or divine can exist, that there can be any aim in life except happiness, or any guide but "science." But—and here immediately he turns east again—he ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... everlasting snows Of HINDOO KOSH, in stormy freedom bred, Their fort the rock, their camp the torrent's bed. But none of all who owned the Chief's command Rushed to that battle-field with bolder hand Or sterner hate than IRAN'S outlawed men, Her Worshippers of Fire—all panting then[106] For vengeance on the accursed Saracen; Vengeance at last for their dear country spurned, Her throne usurpt, and ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... dainty figures crowding ballroom floors, but triumphant, cruel, proud, with throbbing drum-beat—steadying the tramp of weary feet over red battle fields. Its unswerving hurry, its terrible, calm excitement, brought before his vision long blue lines—the fixed faces sterner than death, with steady eyes and quickened breath—the nervous clutch of muskets, as the rattle of small arms and boom of cannon came nearer and nearer, the fluttering silken banners, the calm sunshine, and sweet May breath—and the quick, questioning note of a ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... part, was visiting Daisy Musgrave every day, and sedulously imbibing her woman's wisdom. He had immense faith in her insight and her intuition, and when she entreated him to move slowly and without impatience he took a sterner grip of himself and resolutely set himself to cultivate the virtue ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... Somerset, of the 7th Dragoon Guards (then quartered at the Cape, and mounted as light cavalry), displayed an enterprise and courage which entitled him to much honour. He was wise in council, energetic in business, indomitable in resolution, and heroic in battle. To these qualities of a man's sterner nature, he added those of a humane and amiable heart. The colonel was on the watch for an opportunity to strike a severe blow against these freebooters, and on the 8th of June opportunity was afforded. On the previous evening a party of burghers and Fingoes scoured the Fish River bush, and performed ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... I can see in the tragedies of war is that they bring us all face to face with the realities of human life, as it has been in all ages, giving us sterner and yet more loving, more human, and more divine thoughts about ourselves, and our business here, and the fate of those who are gone, and awakening us out of the luxurious, frivolous, and unreal dream (full nevertheless of hard judgments) in which we have ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... have left him Robert Hall, instead of those execrable Typhons! But would that medicine have suited his case, or must grim Experience write sterner prescriptions with ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and daring men had found themselves hampered by the conservative views of a large class of colonists, who feared lest some one should take a step not exactly according to the law. But while the "wise and prudent" were deliberating upon a legal method of action, there were those, who, "made of sterner stuff," reasoned right to the conclusion, that they had rights as colonists that ought to be respected. That there was cause for just indignation on the part of the people towards the British soldiers, there is no doubt. But there is reason to question ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... husband fall, and heard the order, dropped her bucket, sprang to the cannon, seized the rammer, and, vowing that she would avenge his death, fired it with surprising skill, performing the duty probably as well as if she had belonged to the sterner sex. ...
— Elsie's Vacation and After Events • Martha Finley
... answered the King with earnest affection. "Thou hast able assistants in some of thy older matrons, and may after a while call in the aid of Father Denis, whose kindly nature is better fitted for gentle conversion than either Francis, or thy still sterner chaplain, Torquemada. Thy kindness has gained thee the love of this misguided one; and if any one have sufficient influence to convert, by other than sharp means, it can ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... burn, these pleasant fields whiten and bleach with the bones of their owners, and these streams run blood. It will be upon us, it will be upon us, if, failing to maintain this unseasonable and ill-judged declaration, a sterner despotism, maintained by military power, shall be established over our posterity, when we ourselves, given up by an exhausted, a harassed, a misled people, shall have expiated our rashness and atoned for our ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... and without our doors. Jael complained in an under-key of stinted housekeeping, or boasted aloud of her own ingenuity in making ends meet: and my father's brow grew continually heavier, graver, sterner; sometimes so stern that I dared not wage, what was, openly or secretly, the quiet but incessant crusade of my existence—the ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... primitive nervous systems. We may have our little failings, but we ask no pity for them from people whom we so utterly scorn, as we do the denizens of the elder world. Art! Culture! AEstheticism! Bah! Pouf! Away with all such degrading, debasing, dehumanizing trumpery! We are men of a harder, sterner, simpler mould than the emasculate degeneracies of modern England! We are the pioneers and founders of a new Britain, of a ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... accomplishments and self-indulgence; kind certainly, but never so as to endure any disagreeables, or make any exertion. But as soon as she entered into the true spirit of our calling, did she not begin to seek to live the sterner life, and train herself in duty? The quiet way she took always seemed to me the great beauty of it. She makes duties of her accomplishments by making them loving obedience ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... Republic? Are we negligent of the serious menace that confronts any people when it loses its hold upon those goods of life that are far more precious than commercial prestige and individual aggrandizement? Are we losing our hold upon the sterner virtues which our fathers possessed,—upon the things of the spirit that are permanent ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... that with the same evil facts M, the man's reaction x is exactly reversed; suppose that instead of giving way to the evil he braves it, and finds a sterner, more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can yield in triumphing over pain and defying fear; suppose he does this successfully, and however thickly evils crowd upon him proves his dauntless subjectivity to be more than their match,—will not every one ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... was in fine spirits; only Missy, at the first, had a few bad moments. WOULD he mention it? He might think it his duty, think that mother should know. It was maybe his duty to tell. Preachers have a sterner creed of duty than other people, of course. She regarded him anxiously from under the veil of her lashes, wondering what would happen if he did tell. Mother would be horribly ashamed, and she herself would be all the more ashamed ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... puff of that narcotic breath drowse deep all watching dragons, and make for him the sleeping beauties of his will? And, presto, there they are! and, oh! ye houris of the South, with what a smile and glance between the azure puffs! Well let me not forget myself. With a sterner morality he sees how the bending Bedouin fashions his pipe in the moistened ground; he sees the slender Indian reed with the flat bowls of Lahore and Oude, the pipe of the Anglo-eyed celestial, the red clay of Bengal, and the glittering gilded ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... 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 elephant guns, despite their desperate valour, had ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... aside with one hand and looks out. As he gazes his face grows sterner, and he lifts his hand above his head in menace. LAVARCAM looks on with terror, and as he drops the curtain and looks back on her, she lets her face sink ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... problems," explained Peggy demurely. "Thou art the only belle in the Social Select Circle, and having been instructed in French, I hear very thoroughly, thou hast waxed proficient in matters regarding the sterner sex." ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... was engaged in the pleasurable triumph of the coming Water Festival. All day he seemed engaged in planning it. But I knew that he was engaged secretly with far sterner things concerning the Cold Country, which lay a day's journey from us. But what they ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... whole world of Covent Garden Theatre had been thrown into panic-stricken dismay by the fact that Miss O'Mahony had something the matter with her throat. This was the second attack, the first having been so short as to have caused no trepidations in the world of music; but this was supposed to be sterner in its nature, and to have caused already great alarm. Before March was over it was published to the world at large that Miss O'Mahony would not be able to ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... suspicious of its novelties and shallowness, and clinging with his whole soul to ancient ways and sound Church of England doctrine reflected in the Prayer Book. And from John Keble's influence he passed under the influence of Thomas Keble, the Vicar of Bisley, a man of sterner type than his brother, with strong and definite opinions on all subjects; curt and keen in speech; intolerant of all that seemed to threaten wholesome teaching and the interests of the Church; and equally straightforward, ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... with me again," she ended rather vaguely and wistfully; for it had been her heart's desire to wed Sylvia's beauty and Quarrier's fortune, and the suitability of the one for the other was apparent enough to make even sterner moralists wobbly in their creed. Quarrier, as a detail of modern human architecture, she supposed might fit in somewhere, and took that for granted in laying the corner stone for her fairy palace which Sylvia was to inhabit. ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... progress through the preaching of a certain Menno Simonszoon. The followers of this man were called Mennonites. Meanwhile Lutheranism and Zwinglianism were in many parts of the country being supplanted by the sterner doctrines of Calvin. All these movements were viewed by the emperor with growing anxiety and detestation. Whatever compromises with the Reformation he might be compelled to make in Germany, he ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson
... tender to her because of her prettiness, and because he had loved her as a child? We must own that it was a fault. The crooked places of the world, if they are to be made straight at all, must be made straight after a sterner and a juster fashion. ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... wireless telegraph and telephone, refrigerating apparatus, and everything to make the owner and his guests comfortable. But her beautiful furnishings were tumbled this way and that in preparation for the sterner duties that lay before her. The lower deck was cumbered with sacks of coal lashed down. A transatlantic voyage in January is likely to be a lively one for ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... have a more satisfactory answer than that," said the Chief Inquisitor, "otherwise we must try what a sterner method ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... dwelt in the lad something which leaped in response to the clarion call of beauty, Lescott had read in that momentary give and take of their eyes down there in the hollow earlier in the afternoon. But, since then, the painter had seen the other and sterner side, and once more he was puzzled and astonished. Now, he stood anxiously hoping that the boy would permit himself further expression, yet afraid to prompt, lest direct questions bring a withdrawal again into the shell of taciturnity. After a few ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... and then 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 ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall |
