"Wildness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... poor; he was amative; he was unsatisfied. This vigour, therefore, led in his actions to a mere wildness; clothed in this wildness the rare fragments of his life have descended to us. He professed to teach, but he haunted taverns, and loved the roaring of songs. He lived at random from his twentieth year in one den or another along the waterside. Affection brought him now to his mother, ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... too wild, his mother considered. The boy's high spirits amused her husband: that was because there was such a large amount of surplus energy in him. But Kate felt somewhat surprised at so much wildness—no, she was not really surprised, she knew too well where all that wildness came ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... rushing into the sea, clothes and all, overturned the guide in his hurry to save his master. I had swam out a few strokes, when hearing a noise, I turned about and saw Clinker, already up to his neck, advancing towards me, with all the wildness of terror in his aspect — Afraid he would get out of his depth, I made haste to meet him, when, all of a sudden, he seized me by one ear, dragged me bellowing with pain upon the dry beach, to the astonishment of all the people, men, and ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and Aunt Isabelle laughed too, holding on to herself, so that she might not show in face or gesture the wildness of ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... wasn't any mystery—we were only——" She stopped, for she felt that Helena's eyes were fixed on her, and Freda was not by nature an untruthful child. It was through her heedlessness and wildness that she often got into what she would have called "scrapes," from which there seemed often no escape but by telling falsehoods, or at least allowing what was not the ...
— The Christmas Fairy - and Other Stories • John Strange Winter
... to the reader on the ground that "there is not a wicked action in any part of it but is first or last rendered unhappy and[22] unfortunate." The moral of Fielding's novels, if moral it can be called, is simply the importance of that prudence which his heroes might have dispensed with, but for the wildness of their animal license. Yet both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he describes with the ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... who of the three was by far the most vehement in his adherence to the verdict. 'The man is a notorious drunkard. And he has that look of wildness which bad characters always bring with them ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... and led me on with such heedless rapidity, that I stumbled over stones and bushes, and entangled myself on every wreath of vines which opposed my progress. At length, having wandered where chance or the wildness of my fancy led, till the lateness of the evening alarmed me, I regained the chaise as fast as I could, and arrived between ten and eleven at the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... of the walls, resisted the most vigorous of their puny efforts, and forced them to remain contented with mutilating that which they could not destroy—with tearing off roofs, defacing marbles, and demolishing capitals. The rest of the buildings remained uninjured, and grander even now in the wildness of ruin than ever it had been in the stateliness of perfection ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... one hand, and the rampart of rocks on the other; there occurs along its entire length no other human dwelling than a lonely summer shieling; for full one-half the way we saw no trace of man; and the wildness of the few cattle which we occasionally startled in the hollows showed us that man was no very frequent visitor among them. About half an hour before sunset ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the plants in her 'bed of sweet odours,' as she calls it." Then presently, as the men sat talking, Maria having gone into the house, our summer work seemed to lie accomplished and complete before me, even as you once saw your garden of dreams before its making,—the knoll restored to its wildness, ending not too abruptly at the garden in some loose rock; the bed of sweet odours filling the gap between it and the gate of the little pasture in the rear; straight beds of hardy plants bordering the vegetable squares; the two seed beds topping ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... Port Essington, on her way to Java to refit. On the way they passed a succession of islands, known by scarcely more than name to the English navigator. They all seem to be volcanic, though their volcanoes may sleep; and rapid as the glance of the voyagers was, they all, even in the wildness of precipitous shores and mountain ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... good fortune ever befell a bookish man, I should choose this lodge for my own residence, with the topmost room of the tower for a study, and all the seclusion of cultivated wildness beneath to ramble in. There being no such possibility, we drove on, catching glimpses of the palace in new points of view, and by and by came to Rosamond's Well. The particular tradition that connects Fair Rosamond with it is not now in my memory; but if Rosamond ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... feature by feature, these nocturnal scenes on the Orinoco, because, having but lately embarked on it, we were as yet unaccustomed to their wildness. They were repeated for months together, every night that the forest approached the edge of the river. Despite the evident danger by which one is surrounded, the security which the Indian feels comes to communicate itself to your mind; you become persuaded with him, that all the tigers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... dark flames of huge, funereal candles. These wooded lawns are more beautiful than English park scenery; all the more beautiful for the air of neglect about them, as if not much care of men were bestowed upon them, though enough to keep wildness from growing into deformity, and to make the whole scene like nature idealized—the woodland scenes the poet dreamed of—a forest of Ardennes, for instance. These lawns and gentle valleys are beautiful, moreover, with fountains flashing into marble basins, or gushing like natural ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... admiration appeared indefinably and strangely transformed to pain. The wedding ring was placed upon her hand—a thin crystal goblet broken by Ferdinand, on the marble at his feet—and the rites were concluded. An almost convulsive embrace from her father—the unusual wildness of his voice and manner, as he blessed, and called her his own precious child, who this day had placed the seal upon his happiness, and confirmed twenty years of filial devotedness and love—awoke her from ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... course. He had managed to get some distance ahead, pretending not to hear the shouts above the wind; the bird shot they had sent after him had only stung his rump, bringing from him a little involuntary yelp, but not causing him to turn. The wildness of the day had infected him. A high wind blowing out of a sunny, cloudless sky ran in waves over the tawny level fields of broomstraw, and from a body of pines to his right rose a ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... that El Rey was gaining, slowly, steadily, surely. The splendid bay horse was running magnificently, but El Rey ran like a super-horse. His silver head was straight as a level, his ears laid back, his nostrils wide and flaring, red as blood, his big eyes glowed with the wildness of savage flight. ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... separated from my fellow-traveller, I had to stay in a miserable-looking hut close to a creek, the habitation of a backwoodsman. This person's appearance was extremely unprepossessing. The air of ferocity and wildness which characterized his countenance, added to his unhealthy, cadaverous aspect, would have been sufficient in any other country to make one feel unpleasant at passing the night alone under his roof. He resided in this unhealthy situation, because the land was extremely fertile; ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... ore-dust, and gleamed in the fitful lamp-light with trickling rivulets of perspiration. The car-pushers were all foreigners—Italians, Bohemians, Hungarians, or Poles—and the uncouth jargon of their shouts intensified the wildness of their appearance. Theirs was the very lowest form of mine drudgery, and but few of them were possessed of intelligence or ambition sufficient to raise them ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... of their employment or of their season of action, that is, of a brown heath and cloudy evening. Thus examples of what might condemn their conduct were never offered to them, and immemorial custom seemed as it were to sanctify their wildness. Every border-man, almost without exception, was brought up in a state which we would call unhappy, and every circumstance of his life tended to confirm his partiality for an uncertain ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... at a turn of the height before descending, where fields could be seen stretching to the horizon, woods fair and clean as parks, without the wildness of the American forest, and vineyards of bushy vines that bore the small black grapes. Eagle showed me the far boundaries of Paul's estates. Then we drove where holly spread its prickly foliage near the ground, where springs from ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Confederate prisoners, smoking about a fire, appeared to be taking the "horrors of captivity" very quietly and comfortably. At the quarters they heard the sound of negro-singing, half barbaric in its wildness. ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... into a long ellipse, then gathered itself up into the semblance of a huge red urn, lengthened out to a long perpendicular bar with rounded ends, and finally became triangular. It can hardly be imagined what added wildness and strangeness this blood-red distorted moon gave to a scene already wild and strange. We seemed to have entered upon some frozen abandoned world, where all the ordinary laws and phenomena of Nature were suspended, where animal and vegetable ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... his father's ravings, goes out to pluck the fruits in the moonlight wildness. Cain's soliloquy. Child returns with a pitcher of water and a cake. Cain wonders what kind of beings dwell in that place—whether any created since man or whether this world had any beings rescued from the Chaos, wandering like shipwrecked ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to me that you reply in a much altered voice; I see all of a sudden a certain wildness in your looks; this abrupt change surprises me. What can be the cause of it? May ...
— Don Garcia of Navarre • Moliere
... more of the "fair sect," but hoped that "estimable lady her mother, wouldn't feel like visiting her often, as mothers were very apt to make mischief." Sally Furbush was the only cool and collected one present, and she did the honors of the house so gracefully and well, that but for the wildness of her eyes and an occasional whispering to herself, the bride would never ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes
... in nestling birds, though it is strengthened by experience, and by the sight of fear of the same enemy in other animals. But fear of man is slowly acquired, as I have elsewhere shown, by various animals inhabiting desert islands; and we may see an instance of this, even in England, in the greater wildness of all our large birds than of our small birds; for the large birds have been most persecuted by man. We may safely attribute the greater wildness of our large birds to this cause; for in uninhabited ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... reaching to his hocks. Horns, he had, too—black horns, long and strong, and tapering to a sharper point than is the case with horned cattle, generally speaking. But the feature to which the monster chiefly owed his singular wildness of appearance was his mane, which, in shaggy luxuriance, flowed from neck, shoulders and breast, covering the legs to the knees, and veiling the face almost to the ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... converted men (Gen 4:28). But Ishmael was a figure of man by nature; and the Holy Ghost, as to that, saith this of him, 'And he will be a wild man' (Gen 16:12). This man, I say, was a figure of all carnal men, in their wildness or estrangedness from God. Hence it is said of the prodigal, at his conversion, that he came to himself then; implying that he was mad, wild, or out of his wits before (Luke 15:17). I know there is a difference sometimes betwixt one's being wild and mad; yet sometimes ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... glance at Alida de Barberie was scarcely necessary to betray her mixed descent. From her Norman father, a Huguenot of the petite noblesse, she had inherited her raven hair, the large, brilliant coal-black eyes, in which wildness was singularly relieved by sweetness, a classical and faultless profile, and a form which was both taller and more flexible than commonly fell to the lot of the damsels of Holland. From her mother, la ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... he had ready to discharge at me, his followers imitating his very disagreeable example. His legs and feet were entirely bare. The handle of his sword, as also his quiver, were profusely ornamented with tufts of hair, which added to the wildness of his general appearance; indeed, altogether my assailants were as savage a band of warriors as a single man would ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... own park. The road that led up to the house wound alongside the river, whereof the banks had suddenly risen into a craggy wildness. All recollection of the marshland was left behind. The ground mounted on either side of the stream towards fell-tops, of which the distant lines could be seen dimly here and there behind the crowding trees; while, at some turns of the road, where the course of the Greet made a passage ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... to stupendous height, The mountain billow lifts its awful head, And, curving, breaks aloft with roarings dread. Sublimer still the mighty waters rise, And mingle in the strife of nether skies. All wildness and uproar, above, beneath, A world immense of ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... opportunity to settle the city perfectly into quietness. For having brought matters to a pretty hopeful condition, he found everything carried away and plunged again into confusion by Alcibiades, through the wildness and vehemence of his ambition, and all embroiled again in war worse than ever. Which fell out thus. The persons who had principally hindered the peace were Cleon and Brasidas. War setting off the ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... one, her presence in the Danish camp,—for surely, as a chieftain's daughter, she would have been sent on to the care of the Lady of Northampton! Was it not thoroughly in accordance with her elfish wildness to have chosen man's attire and the roughness of camp-life in order to remain near her lover? Her lover! The young noble's lips curled as he glanced at the warrior beside him, at the coarse face under the unkempt locks, at the huge ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... disciples shuddered, and would gladly have persuaded the Master to return. He pointed to the high mountains, and said: "What frightens you, My children? When the races of men are becoming satiated and stupid, such wildness ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... made by the British government after the conquest to loyalists, Protestant clergy, and speculators—grants calculated to keep large sections of the country in a state of wildness—the seigniorial estates had to be cultivated and settled within a reasonable time if they were to be retained by the occupants. During the French dominion the Crown sequestrated a number of seigniories for the failure to observe the obligation of cultivation. As late as 1741 we find ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... grander in the bold contours of its cloud-capped tors, but the wildness of Exmoor is blended with a sweet and gentle charm which is all its own. It presents us with a panorama of misty woods, gleaming water, and glowing heather; a combe-furrowed moorland clothed with scrub oaks and feathery larches. After ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... of the dacoits, though far from beautiful, possessed a certain charm, arising from their curious wildness. Unlike those of the generality of Tibetan women, their teeth were very good, and their complexion was not specially dark, the black ointment with which their cheeks, noses, and foreheads were smeared ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... bluntness. "It's your pride. Just because they're your daughters they are above reproach.... What have you to say about the war babies in town? Did you ever hear of that ten years ago? You bet you didn't. These girls are a speedy set. Some of them are just wild for the sake of wildness. Most of them have to stand for things, or be left ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... confidential character. Evidently the man's qualities were not over-praised in the letter of introduction, for, on meeting him once or twice and knowing him better, Cargrim found occasion to present him to the bishop. Baltic's descriptions of his South Sea labours fascinated Dr Pendle by their colour and wildness, and he suggested that the missionary should deliver a discourse of the same quality to the public. A hall was hired; the lecture was advertised as being under the patronage of the bishop, and so many tickets were sold that ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... dancers was one who danced with peculiar spirit and brilliancy, and her little cry had a ring and a wildness that never failed to set the others going ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... feel a wildness in his head. He had derided Wessner at that same hour yesterday. Now his own eyes were ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... many autumn and winter evenings as we sat by his kitchen fire. The earlier of these memories were always the best to me, because they took one back sixty years or more, to a time when there was more wildness in the earth than now, and a nobler wild animal life. Even more interesting were some of the memories of his father, Isaac Bawcombe, whose time went back to the early years of the nineteenth century. Caleb cherished an admiration and reverence for his father's memory which ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... muddy-yellow waters pouring down from the late rains of the upper Potomac; the green heights on the south side of the river before me. The single cannon from a neighboring fort has just been fired, to signal high noon. I have walk'd all around Analostan, enjoying its luxuriant wildness, and stopt in this solitary spot. A water snake wriggles down the bank, disturb'd, into the water. The bank near by is fringed with a dense growth ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... spray cloud revealing it among the thick green; or breaking out into tiny delicate fountains—garden fountains, you would think—among the ilexes and grottoes under the little round Temple; a wonderful mixture of wildness and art, a place, with its high air, its leaping waters and glimpses of distant plain, such as one would really wish for a sibyl, and might imagine for Delphi. An enchanted place with its flight and twitter of birds above the water. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... individual appearance upon the stage of history, the picture of him is one of the most attractive ever made, the happiest and brightest chapter in the tragic story of the Stewarts. Youth with that touch of extravagance which becomes it, that genial wildness which all are so ready to pardon, and an adventurous disposition, careless of personal safety, gave a charm the more to the magnificent young King, handsome, noble, brave, and full of universal friendliness and sympathy, who comes forth smiling ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... that they were guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... willows and cotton-trees which shaded the deserted banks, green oaks rose up, and the landscape terminated in the line of the foggy mountains. All looked strange and imposing, and rarely had the foot of a white man pressed this desert clothed in its virgin wildness. Perhaps Marcos Arellanos and Cuchillo were the only white men who had ever wandered to this remote place. A vague sentiment of awe caused the hunters involuntarily to lower their voices before the supernatural charm of this austere landscape. Those hills, enveloped in mist—even ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... taste my pleasures through thy lips, To sail with thee o'er foaming waves and feel Our spirits rise together with the reel Of waters and the wavering land's eclipse; To see thy fair hair damp with salt sea-spray And in thine eyes the wildness of ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley
... that Man is all alone on earth; that most animals don't know he is here, and that the rest of them have no use for him. That even flowers and crops will desert him and run again to wildness, if Man turns his back on them for a minute. So will his horse, his cow and his sheep. They graft on him for a living, and they hate or ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... was creating anxieties in which she had no share. Her paroxysms of exhilaration, followed by a gnawing sense of failure and uselessness, were known to her mother only as "wildness" and "low spirits," to be combated by needlework as a sedative, or beef tea as a stimulant. Mrs. Wylie had learnt by rote that the whole duty of a lady is to be graceful, charitable, helpful, modest, and disinterested ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... wildness of the elements afforded him the chance he desired, as, though Kalei was counted among the most agile and quick of rock-fishers, that morning, when she did come, and alone, as her usual companions were deterred by the rough weather, she made several unsuccessful springs to escape a high threatening ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... unsightly trunks. There is usually no fence around the school yard, and the outbuildings are frequently a disgrace, if not a positive menace to the children's morals. If a choice had to be made it would be better to allow children to grow up in their native liberty and wildness without a school "education" than to have them subjected to mental and moral degradation by the vicious suggestions received in some of these places. Weak teachers have a false modesty in regard to such conditions and school boards are often ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... blood in their veins, were "extremely wild in confinement, and would not eat swill like common English pigs." Mr. Hewitt, who has had great experience in crossing tame cock-pheasants with fowls belonging to five breeds, gives as the character of all "extraordinary wildness;"[105] but I have myself seen one exception to this rule. Mr. S. J. Salter,[106] who raised a large number of hybrids from a bantam-hen by Gallus Sonneratii, states that "all were exceedingly wild." Mr. Waterton[107] ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... the town. Buildings have not extended so densely in this direction but that a semblance of ascetic retirement is still preserved. Between the monastery and the city lies the city park, which is not much patronized by the citizens, and for good reasons. To the rich wildness of nature is added the wildness of man. Hordes of desperadoes, "the barefoot brigade," the dregs of the local population, have taken up their residence there every spring, of late years, in the ravines and the caves which they have excavated, in humble imitation of the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... 200; distance &c 196; size &c 192; volume; hypervolume. latitude, play, leeway, purchase, tolerance, room for maneuver. spare room, elbow room, house room; stowage, roomage^, margin; opening, sphere, arena. open space, free space; void &c (absence) 187; waste; wildness, wilderness; moor, moorland; campagna^. abyss &c (interval) 198; unlimited space; infinity &c 105; world; ubiquity &c (presence) 186; length and breadth of the land. proportions, acreage; acres, acres ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to me. During those fits of despondency she was sure to follow me if I happened to leave the room and go outside. She would join me and spend hour after hour in childish prattle with me, and her merriment and wildness knew no limits. Little by little I got used to her, and fell, in turn, a longing for her company during ...
— In Those Days - The Story of an Old Man • Jehudah Steinberg
... The wildness began to appear again in Anne Silvester's eyes. She made feebly impatient signs with her hands. Lady Lundie bent over her, and heard her whisper, ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... imposed duty, or offered pardon, he mysteriously disappears; and is seen no more, till the burden is again upon him, and forces him to come forth and speak. There is a fire in his eye, but it is inspiration, not wildness. There is a majesty in his gait, as though he is either great himself, or is employed by one who is. There is a solemnity of countenance and a nobility of manner, which say that he is not often among mortals, but dwells in a higher sphere. In language which more ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... happened. Like wild beasts whelped, for den, In a wild part of North England, there lived once two wild men, Inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut, Time out of mind their birthright: father and son, these,—but,— Such a son, such a father! Most wildness by degrees Softens away: yet, last of their line, the wildest ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... but Mr. Dalzell, and Mr. Rennie as her guardian was a little alarmed, but on inquiry he found that Moss Tower was not very deeply dipped after all; Mrs. Dalzell had her jointure off it, but he was an only son, and any little wildness or extravagance of youth was likely to be put an end to by marriage. Laura was a somewhat troublesome ward, so passionate and so self-willed that even at school she had carried her point against him by sheer determination over and over again, and he wished heartily to be well freed of her by ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... was observed to be more abstemious in the pleasures of the table, and to neglect the beauteous dancing girls who used formerly to occupy so much of his attention. He was sometimes gloomy and reserved, and there was an unnatural wildness in his eye which gave indications of incipient madness. Still his discourse was as reasonable as ever, his urbanity to the guests that flocked from far and near to Champtoce suffered no diminution; and learned priests, when they conversed with him, thought to themselves ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... train that it would seem we should disperse them with fright. "I wept when I must see my good friend, Capitaine, the Count de Lasselles, depart from our ship in one of those tug boats. It was a pain in my breast that he must leave me to go into the wildness of Canada." ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... hadn't been broke proper, and didn't know how to act with them; but I laid out to get this girl, and I did fairly well. There's something wild in every woman that needs to be tamed, and it isn't like the wildness that runs in wood critters; you can win that over by gentleness, but you have to take it away from a woman. Every live thing that couldn't talk was my friend; but I made the mistake of courting my own kind the same way, not knowing that when two of any ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... form, striding before him, was the one barrier between himself and freedom. Freedom was a thing of which he knew, indeed, nothing,—a thing which, to most of his kind, would have seemed terrifying rather than alluring. But to him, with that inherited wildness stirring in his blood, it seemed the thing to ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... compensated for by the heavy luxuriant masses of blue-black hair, straight nose, large, dark piercing eyes that shone from beneath delicately penciled, broad arching brows, and the mysterious hawk-like wildness of her gaze and appearance and general air of strength and power, baffling and inscrutable as the origin of her race; a face and figure which exemplified the perfect type of a race that carried one back to the forgotten days ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... the scene around had its charms for me. Its very wildness was charming, and, even within the circumscribed circle of my view, I saw much to gratify my curiosity and ...
— Ran Away to Sea • Mayne Reid
... everything to make a garden delightful. And yet, after all, the word 'garden' scarcely describes it—it was more like a home for honeysuckle and eglantine than like what we generally call a garden, with trimly-cut beds and parterres of brilliant roses. There was a beautiful wildness about it and yet it was perfectly in order—there was no sign of withering or decay, no dead leaves lying about, no broken or dried-up branches on the trees, though they were high and massive and covered with foliage—it was all fresh and blooming ...
— The Boys and I • Mrs. Molesworth
... It can well be imagined that though Pierre and his son said little to each other, they were enjoying themselves just like two boys playing hookey from school. They had spent the winter in the freedom and wildness of the woods and a month of the dreary grind in the saw mill had made them as restive ...
— Bob Hunt in Canada • George W. Orton
... Sessorium: in front, the Lateran, the obelisk of Sesostris, the Porta San Giovanni, and great part of the ancient walls; and thence the view extended to the foot of the Apennines. All this part of Rome is a scene of magnificent desolation, and of melancholy yet sublime interest: its wildness, its vastness, its waste and solitary openness, add to its effect upon the imagination. The only human beings I beheld in the compass of at least two miles, were a few herdsmen driving their cattle through the gate of San Giovanni, and two or three strangers who were sauntering ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... also the hills are simply jumbled heaps of granite boulders, fantastically piled one upon the other, barren and naked, and without any vegetable growth to soften their forbidding wildness. ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in wildness; it is their wildness which is their virtue;—that the thyme is sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their crime,—"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Rusten leads to a cold and bleak upper valley. Here we noticed the blight of late frost on the barley fields, and were for the first time assailed by beggars. Black storm-clouds hung over the gorge, adding to the savage wildness of its scenery; but the sun came out as we drove up the Valley of Dovre, with its long stretch of grain-fields on the sunny sweep of the hill-side, sheltered by the lofty Dovre Fjeld behind them. We ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... degrade the abolitionists in the opinion of the house, by showing the wildness and absurdity of their schemes. It was again insisted upon that emancipation was the real, object of the former; so that thousands of slaves would be let loose in the islands to rob or perish, and who could never be brought back again into habits ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the - Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the British Parliament (1839) • Thomas Clarkson
... form and colour, has always been exquisite; their delight in gardens, in music, and poetry has had a certain refinement, and with many terrible faults—in especial falsehood and cruelty, the absence of the Turkish stolidity, the Arab wildness, and the Hindoo pride and indolence—has always made them an attractive people. Their Mahommedanism, too, is of a different form from that of the Arab and Turk. Theirs is the schismatical sect of Ali, which is less rigid, and affords more scope for the intellect and fancy, ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... grown sleek at Rosny, and losing something of the wildness which had marked him, presented in the dress M. de Rosny had given him a very creditable appearance; being also, I fancy, the only equerry in Blois who could write. A groom I engaged on the recommendation ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... bidding defiance to any vehicle except of the strongest construction, still the place was not without a certain charm, mainly, however, derived from its seclusion. The scenery was stern and sombre, the hills were dark and dreary; but the very wildness of the place was attractive, and the old house, with its grey walls, its lofty chimneys, its gardens with their clipped yews, and its rook-haunted trees, harmonised well with ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... feeling the influence of a new soil. At the top of the hill he saw over into vineyards, and a new strange valley with a winding river, and jumbled, entangled hills. Strange wild country so near the town. It seemed to keep an almost virgin wildness—yet he saw the white houses dotted here ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... returning light Again when eve bids day retreat, O'er other climes to dart its rays; Pensive those cruel stars I view, Which influence thus my amorous fate; And imprecate that beauty's blaze, Which o'er my form such wildness threw. No forest surely in its glooms Nurtures a savage so unkind As she who bids these sorrows flow: Me, nor the dawn nor sleep o'ercomes; For, though of mortal mould, my mind Feels more than passion's mortal glow. Ere up to you, bright orbs, I fly, Or to Love's bower speed down my ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... painter of conscious immorality or of what is stigmatised as sensuality, would be as ridiculous as to class his seraphic beings among the products of the Christian imagination. They belong to the generation of the fauns; like fauns, they combine a certain savage wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy of inspiration, a delight in rapid movement as they revel amid clouds or flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading sweetness of the master's style. When infantine or childlike, these celestial sylphs are scarcely to be distinguished ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... have attempted to describe the scene, no words can do adequate justice to its savage wildness. I felt, I doubt not, like the rest. In a moment all recollection of the past vanished; I thought only of punishing the foe, of gaining the victory. I saw others killed and wounded near me, but it never occurred to me that at any moment their ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization. You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... absolutely nude and peculiarly white of skin, while the former wore rude skirts of coarsely woven cloth fastened about the waist, their long hair in many instances trailing upon the ground, yielding them a wildness of aspect beyond description; yet withal they were not uncomely of features. These newcomers thronged about us with scowling faces, and, when sternly forced back by the lowered weapons of the guard, either joined the procession, or else ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... The wildness of the scene caught upon her erratic fancy, speeding it for a quick moment into the realms of romance. She was an Indian maiden of the far past, fleeing and seeking with her dusky lover some wild and solitary retreat ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... his body really belongs to him; he has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman's hand, but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... wringing their Hands, beating their Breasts, tearing their Hair, or after some other manner visibly agitated with Vexation. Our Sorrows were heightened by the Influence of what we heard and saw, and one of our Number was wrought up to such a Pitch of Wildness, as to talk of hanging himself upon a Bough which shot temptingly across the Path we travelled in; but he was restrained from it by the kind Endeavours of ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... other respect," she says, "he had the purest of morals, having always dreaded wildness as the enemy of talent; and he nearly always cherished women solely in his heart and in his head, even in his youth. He pursued chastity on principle; and his relations with the fair sex were those merely of curiosity. When he found a curiosity ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... of his mother. Macbeth is conquered by fate, but not by his adversary.—He grasps the sword with a desperate hand;—he knows that he is about to die;—but wishes to try whether human strength cannot triumph over destiny. There is certainly in this head, a fine expression of wildness and fury—of trouble and of energy; but how many poetical beauties do we miss? Is it possible to paint Macbeth plunged in guilt by the spells of ambition, which offer themselves to him under the shape of witchcraft? How can painting express the terror which he feels? That terror, ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... be a match for death, it first must conquer life, and the early story of the power of Orpheus over the wild beasts, restoring, as it does, an earthly paradise in which there is nothing but gentleness, marks the conquest of life by love. All life's wildness and savagery, which seem to give the lie to love continually, are after all conquerable and may be tamed. And the lesson of it all is the great persuasion that in the depth of things life is good and not evil. When we come ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... very fiercely. And yet, with it all, what thrilled him so was not mere anger, or bitterness, or resentment. It was more than all that. It was the warring within him of inherited respect for man's authority with acquired wildness; with his acquired freedom of the wild folk. The conflict of instinct and emotions in Finn was so ardent as almost to overcome consciousness of the great hunger which was his real master at this time; the furious hunger which had made him chew savagely at the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... Mariner; the Monthly borrowed Southey's figure of the Italian and Flemish painters, and called The Ancient Mariner "the strangest story of a cock and bull that we ever saw on paper ... a rhapsody of unintelligible wildness and incoherence." The belated review in the British Critic was probably written by Coleridge's friend, Rev. Francis Wrangham, and was somewhat more appreciative than the rest. For further details, consult Mr. Thomas Hutchinson's reprint (1898) ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... else in him," said the Senator earnestly. "It was born in him as fightin' an' general wildness was born in you an' me. Look into his face an' you'll see it. Fine? The boy hasn't his like in the city or the land. I'll back him for any sum—I'll stand to it that he'll be archbishop ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire? The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy. And lest the moralists of my day and country be more prone to outraged virtue, in reading ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and women walked with quiet feet and spoke to one another in whispers, saving in the darkened room where Desmond O'Connor chattered unceasingly, and now shouted or laughed in the wildness of delirium. A nurse was installed in his room, a quiet and gentle little lady, never hurried yet never slow; always patient, with a coaxing manner and a soft voice. When he was sensible Desmond called her the Angel ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... the Mulattoes have not. I fancied that I discovered in the features of most of them a disposition towards cruelty and low cunning; and I could never contemplate their physiognomy without feeling sensible uneasiness. From the staring wildness of their eyes, a stranger would immediately set them down as a nation of lunatics. The treachery and malevolence of their character are manifested in their plundering excursions against the Negro villages. ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... the clearing, then the hut, and those within it. The inky sky was without a star. The puffs of rain rattled dismally on the roof of the old cabin. But all this somberness of nature brought comfort and lightness of heart to the besieged. Paul's spirits rose with the blackness of the night and the wildness of ...
— The Forest Runners - A Story of the Great War Trail in Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... are kind beasts. Their wildness was partly gone; they had lost their likeness to the wolf, and had become more like Duke, the finished model of the canine race,—in a word, they were becoming civilized. Duke could certainly claim a share in their education; he had given them lessons and an example in good manners. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... That your good beauties be the happy cause Of Hamlet's wildness: so shall I hope your virtues Will bring him to his wonted way ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... its place. The steward served and moved about with ease and apparent unconcern, although I noticed an occasional anxious gleam in his eyes when he poised some dish at a moment when the ship pitched and flung with unusual wildness. ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... state, were fearful dreams, and visions of the night, which often made him cry out in his sleep, and alarm the house, as if somebody was about to murder him, and being waked, he would start, and stare about him with such a wildness, as if some real apparition had yet remained; and generally those dreams were about evil spirits, in monstrous shapes and forms, that presented themselves to him in threatening postures, as if they would have taken him away, or torn him in pieces. At some ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Gringos. Padre Francisco has not been able to convince the ex-commandante of the power of the great United States. He knows not it can cancel or reject his title to the thousands of rich acres where his cattle graze and his horses sweep in mustang wildness. Even from his very boundaries the plough can now be seen breaking up the breast of the virgin valley. The Don will take no heed. He is blinded by prejudice. Maxime promises the good priest to visit him. He wonders if the savage ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... lulled, the sun shone brightly, and the sea was much less violent. The waves had subsided, and, no longer hurried on by the force of the hurricane, broke majestically and solemnly, but not with the wildness and force which, but a few hours before, they had displayed. The whole of the beach was strewed with the fragments of the vessel, with spars and water-casks; and at every moment was to be observed the corpse of a negro turning round and ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... scenery had that attractive aspect which can be found only where immemorial culture, without excessive invasion of the axe, has left nature in the undiminished possession of her chief beauties, without a trace of the savage wildness—a nature which hints at art. It was classic without being formal, but no description can give an idea of the charm of it in contrast with the general ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... must be a wealthy man. The third was one of disappointment; everything was so quiet, so still. There was no rush or bustle. No horsemen riding around with cracking whips; no shouting, no atmosphere of wildness. And, worst of all, there were no droves of cattle tearing around. Just a few old milch cows near by, peacefully grazing their day away, and philosophically awaiting milking time. These, and a few dogs, a horse or two loose in the corrals, and a group of men idling ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... name, too, through the awful crash as the old Sagamore rises and falls to a sea. That noise and that awful shock make him clear out of the cabin. He collects his senses on the poop. But his heart sinks a little at the black wildness of the night. Chances that he will get drowned himself before long. Puts his head down the companion. Through the wind and breaking seas he can hear the noise of Stafford's beating against the door and cursing. He listens ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... ground. Alan, leaning against a pine tree, looked down at her. The sunlight fell through the swaying boughs on her glory of burnished hair and lighted up the curve of cheek and chin against the dark background of wood brown. All the defiance and wildness had gone from her for the time and she seemed like a helpless, weary child. He wanted to take her in his arms ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... the habits he had learnt at Goettingen; his wild freaks, his noisy entertainments, were the talk of the countryside; the beverage which he has made classical, a mixture of beer and champagne, was the common drink, and he was known far and wide as the mad Bismarck. These acts of wildness were, however, only a small part of his life; he entered as a lieutenant of Landwehr in the cavalry and thereby became acquainted with another form of military service. It was while he was at the annual training that he had an opportunity of shewing his physical strength and courage. ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... I cannot describe to you the conditions that surround me. The boundless extent of the country, the wildness and beauty of the prairies, the roughness of this frontier town, above all the people themselves. The house I am living in is unlike anything you ever saw; but yet it is very comfortable. And my hostess, Mrs. Spurgeon, ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... and outlet to the men—a vent for their feelings of victory, returning peace, &c. Morning, noon, and afternoon, spontaneous, for occasion or without occasion, these huge, strange cries, differing from any other, echoing through the open air for many a mile, expressing youth, joy, wildness, irrepressible strength, and the ideas of advance and conquest, sounded along the swamps and uplands of the South, floating to the skies. ("There never were men that kept in better spirits in danger or defeat—what then ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... the combatants, and the fiery animation of the horses are depicted with a truth and effect that strikes the mind with horror. Notwithstanding the singularity and fierceness of his style, he captivates by the unbounded wildness of his fancy, and the ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... sheltered cwrt the daffodils under the hedge nodded and swayed in the wind; but the two women inside the cottage were too much engrossed in their conversation, and with their thoughts, to notice the wildness of the night. Often they sat in silence, broken by occasional ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... concealing the most devious and enchanting caves and several mines of gold and silver paper. Among these rocks a number of survivors from a Noah's Ark made a various, dangerous, albeit frequently invalid and crippled fauna, and I was wont to increase the uncultivated wildness of this region further by trees of privet-twigs from the garden hedge and box from the garden borders. By these territories went my Imperial Road carrying produce to and fro, bridging gaps in the oilcloth, ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... calculated to make the ears of his enemies to tingle. His nationality was clearly indicated by his personal appearance, his features being rough-hewn and unmistakably Celtic; while his red hair and beard, usually not very well cared for, gave him an aspect of uncouth wildness. Up to this time he had not taken any very conspicuous part in politics since his arrival in Canada; but henceforward the Executive had no more bitter or sleepless foe. He continued to report the proceedings in Parliament, and kept his eyes ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent |
