"Softness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in noiselessly at his door, but the softness with which he turned the key this time was to keep from disturbing his servants, not to ...
— Santa Claus's Partner • Thomas Nelson Page
... been ministering to the ungainly externals of Jack Tier. She now wore a cap, thus concealing the short, gray bristles of hair, and lending to her countenance a little of that softness which is a requisite of female character. Some attention had also been paid to the rest of her attire; and Jack was, altogether, less repulsive in her exterior than when, unaided, she had attempted to resume the proper ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... your country, do they fall in love at nineteen?" said Juan Pachuca, suddenly. There was a softness in his voice that under other conditions—say, in a ballroom—Polly would probably have described as melting. In her present environment it ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... serves some one. Her fingers are covered with rings and she wears yellow hoops in her ears. I am repulsed as well as attracted. She is like a bold, upright stroke of life, and then I see her crafty eyes and notice how, in spite of her size, when she moves it is with the softness and flexibility of ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... the cause of his future misfortunes. When Cleopa'tra had thus secured her power, she set out on her return to Egypt. Antony, quitting every other object, presently hastened after her, and there gave himself up to all that case and softness to which his vicious heart was prone, and which that luxurious people were able ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... head toward the American. He had not known such softness of voice in Mendez's former captain of Lancers. But he saw that Driscoll had drawn his pistol, which accorded so grimly with the mildness of his tone that the scout ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... a dreamy gray-green ruggedness of shelving rock with mossy crevices and ferny nooks. The sunlight filtering through the young leaves fell about them in a shadow-flecked softness. There was a crooning song of some bird on its nest, the murmur of waters rippling down the stony shallows, and a beautiful girl in a dainty pink dress with her fingers just touching ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... made her look still more slender, with her long tapering limbs, her strong, slender body, with its round throat, round neck, round and supple arms; and her adorable neck and throat, of a milky whiteness, had the exquisite softness and smoothness of white satin. For a long time, at the ungraceful age between twelve and eighteen, she had looked awkwardly tall, climbing trees like a boy. Then, from the ungainly hoyden had been evolved this charming, ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... purchaser. Though Amy's picture was more highly finished than her father's, no one guessed that the Lear and Cordelia, and the Prospero and Miranda were not done by the same hand. Amy had caught her father's bold style, but added to it a delicate softness which he, from impatience, not want of ability, usually omitted. The calls upon her time were now incessant; for Beaufort grew more indolent than ever when he found that she cheerfully took so large a portion of his labour off his hands. He would frequently sketch an outline, and then leave it ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... laugh, but our wisdom does. I am naturally no enemy to a court life; I have therein passed a good part of my own, and am of a humor cheerfully to frequent great company, provided it be by intervals and at my own time: but this softness of judgment whereof I speak, ties me perforce to solitude. Even at home, amidst a numerous family, and in a house sufficiently frequented, I see people enough, but rarely such with whom I delight to converse; and I there reserve both for myself and others an unusual liberty: there is ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... death. How he wasted and wasted away in those few long-lingering days, till there seemed but little left of him but his frame and tattooing. But as all else in him thinned, and his cheek-bones grew sharper, his eyes, nevertheless, seemed growing fuller and fuller; they became of a strange softness of lustre; and mildly but deeply looked out at you there from his sickness, a wondrous testimony to that immortal health in him which could not die, or be weakened. And like circles on the water, which, as they grow fainter, expand; so his ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... yet still the old. She wore white lace. Her black hair was parted and rippled over the ears into a low coil. There was even more the look of an August peach to her than he remembered: dusky pink with decided yellow in the curve of her chin, as he had once laughingly asserted. But the softness and uplifted expression of the misty blue eyes were the same, and added to all was the repose of manner which comes only from the consciousness of power or of sorrows ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane
... an unusual softness. Crocker felt it and wondered as she gave him her hand and had him sit for a prudent moment outside. All the hot way up the valley he had had a sense of a crisis. It was odd to be summoned whither he had ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... our last parting still dwelt on my memory; nor could I form any notion of his character, or my probable reception. They were both more agreeable than I could expect. The domestic discipline of our ancestors has been relaxed by the philosophy and softness of the age; and if my father remembered that he had trembled before a stern parent, it was only to adopt with his own son an opposite mode of behaviour. He received me as a man and a friend; all constraint was banished at our first interview, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... that I am fond of joking, Alexai Dmitritch?" Madame Sipiagina asked with that same caressing softness in her voice ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... spring he saw Maria appear on the brow of the hill, and with a quick, joyous bound his heart leaped up to meet her. As she came toward him her white dress swept the tall grass from her feet, and her shadow flew like a winged creature straight before her. There was a vivid softness in her face—a look at once bright and wistful—which moved him with a new ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... him and was out of the barn door, but suddenly she turned and came running back. The sudden softness in his voice had stirred the woman in her to weakness. She went close to her father, and threw up her arms around his great neck, and clung to him, and sobbed as if she would sob her soul away, and pleaded with him as ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... that didst appear so fair To fond imagination Dost rival in the light of day Her delicate creation: Meek loveliness is round thee spread, A softness still and holy: The grace of forest ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes commended to our interest, not only as one of a family which seems to hold genius by the tenure of gavelkind, but as having a special claim by inheritance to a love and understanding of Dante. She writes English with a purity that has in it something of feminine softness with no lack of vigor or precision. Her lithe mind winds itself with surprising grace through the metaphysical and other intricacies of her subject. She brings to her work the refined enthusiasm of a cultivated woman and ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... article of exchange, is now systematically mined near Los Cerrillos, New Mexico. Its color is blue, and its hardness is fully equal to that of the Persian, or slightly greater, owing to impurities, but it lacks the softness of color belonging to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 810, July 11, 1891 • Various
... life may be better than yours after all. You are still tempted. Well, will you pamper me as he pampers his woman? Will you kill tigers and bears until I have a heap of their skins to lounge on? Shall I paint my face and let my arms waste into pretty softness, and eat partridges and doves, and the flesh of kids whose milk you will ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... worked out with the same perfection as the features of the figures; in the middle distance the brown trees were most delicately defined against the sky; the blue mountains in the extreme distance were exquisitely thrown into aerial gradations, and the sky and clouds were perfect in transparency and softness. But still there is no real advance in knowledge of natural objects. The leaves and flowers are, indeed, admirably painted, and thrown into various intricate groupings, such as Giotto could not have attempted, ...
— Lectures on Architecture and Painting - Delivered at Edinburgh in November 1853 • John Ruskin
... little while Bentley walked on beside her in silence. When he spoke there was the softness of ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... but was no judge of her own manner. Her manner was incurably gentle; and she was not aware how much it concealed the sternness of her purpose. Her diffidence, gratitude, and softness made every expression of indifference seem almost an effort of self-denial; seem, at least, to be giving nearly as much pain to herself as to him. Mr. Crawford was no longer the Mr. Crawford who, as ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... voice is a pure baritone and the vocal organs of Mr. Black must be of exquisite formation as he has resources in singing which command the study of the expert who has to hear all exponents and reject most of them. For softness and power, whisper and swell of tone, Mr. Black possesses ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... timidly. The door unclosed; she saw no one, and went through. There were low lights burning. There were heavy scents that were strange to her. There was a fantastic gloom from old armor, and old weapons, and old pictures in the dull rich chambers. The sound of her wooden shoes was lost in the softness and ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... beauty in distress turn rocks into cotton and tigers into ewes. Lay on to that hide of thine, thou great untamed brute, rouse up thy lusty vigour that only urges thee to eat and eat, and set free the softness of my flesh, the gentleness of my nature, and the fairness of my face. And if thou wilt not relent or come to reason for me, do so for the sake of that poor knight thou hast beside thee; thy master I mean, whose soul I can this moment see, how he has it stuck in his throat not ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... out of it,' she coaxed, with a softness in her voice which any man but unpractised Swithin would have felt to be exquisite. 'I feel that I have been so foolish as to put in your hands an instrument to effect my own annihilation. Not a word have you spoken for the ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... about one and a half times slower than the ordinary pyro soda developer, approaching to the latter pretty nearly, and gives to the negatives an agreeable color and softness, with clear shadows. If the negatives are to be thinner, more water, say 30 to 40 c. c., is taken. If denser, then the soda is increased, and the water in the developer is reduced. An alum bath before ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various
... contemplation he and velour formed For softness she and sweet attractive grace; He for God only, she ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... had changed the expression they had contained during the recent interview. They were soft now, with a softness that was half compassionate, half contemptuous. It is the compensation which life gives to those whom it has handled roughly in order that they shall be able to regard with a certain contempt the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... so as not to be used, it shrinks, and becomes a useless string; if a muscle be condemned to inaction, it shrinks in size, and diminishes in power; and thus it is also with the bones. Inactivity produces softness, debility, and unfitness for the functions they are designed to perform. This is one of the causes of the curvature of the spine, that common and pernicious defect in the females of America. From inactivity, the bones of the spine become ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... rivers roll exulting, and their banks Send up hosannas to the firmament. Fields, where the bondman's toil No more shall trench the soil, Seem now to bask in a serener day; The meadow-birds sing sweeter, and the airs Of heaven with more caressing softness play, Welcoming man to liberty like theirs. A glory clothes the land from sea to sea, For the great land and all its coasts ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... always reluctant, and had in it more of sadness than sweetness, yet it gave his features a singular softness and beauty, just as a ray of sunlight falling on a dark picture will brighten the tints into a momentary ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the story goes, plunged her son in the waters of Styx to make him invulnerable. The truth of this allegory is apparent. The cruel mothers I speak of do otherwise; they plunge their children into softness, and they are preparing suffering for them, they open the way to every kind of ill, which their children will not fail to experience ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... feeling the thickness and softness, exclaiming over the embroidery, said finally: "It is a splendid thing. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... melancholy. Avdotya Romanovna was remarkably good looking; she was tall, strikingly well-proportioned, strong and self-reliant—the latter quality was apparent in every gesture, though it did not in the least detract from the grace and softness of her movements. In face she resembled her brother, but she might be described as really beautiful. Her hair was dark brown, a little lighter than her brother's; there was a proud light in her almost black eyes and yet at times a look of extraordinary kindness. She was pale, but it was a healthy ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... Entranc'd she sits; from youth to age, Reviewing Life's eventful page; And noting, ere they fade away, The little lines of yesterday. FLORIO had gain'd a rude and rocky seat, When lo, the Genius of this still retreat! Fair was her form—but who can hope to trace The pensive softness of her angel-face? Can VIRGIL'S verse, can RAPHAEL'S touch impart Those finer features of the feeling heart, Those tend'rer tints that shun the careless eye, And in the world's contagious climate die? She left the cave, nor mark'd the stranger there; Her pastoral beauty, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... those natives who in all the great Italian cities haunt English-speaking societies; they try to drink tea without grimacing, and sing for the ladies of our race, who innocently pet them, finding them so very like other women in their lady-like sweetness and softness; it is said they boast among their own countrymen of their triumphs. The cavaliere unbuckled his sword, and laying it across a chair sat down at the piano. He played not one but many barcaroles, and seemed loath to leave ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... Lola Montez was announced to appear on the programme at Her Majesty's. A thousand ardent spectators were in feverish anxiety to see her. Donna Lola enchanted everyone. There was throughout a graceful flowing of the arms—not an angle discernible—an indescribable softness in her attitude and suppleness in her limbs which, developed in a thousand positions (without infringing on the Opera laws), were the most intoxicating and womanly that can be imagined. We never remember seeing the habitues—both young and old—taken by more agreeable surprise than ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... length in a voice whose musical softness was as that of a mother's appeal. "Bon jour, Blanche. You do not know me. ...
— The Bastonnais - Tale of the American Invasion of Canada in 1775-76 • John Lesperance
... seat of civil war, and to inhabit such a lurking-place as this, was a thing hardly to be imagined. Yet his heart bounded as he sometimes could distinctly hear the trip of a light female step glide to or from the door of the hut, or the suppressed sounds of a female voice, of softness and delicacy, hold dialogue with the hoarse inward croak of old Janet, for so he understood his antiquated attendant ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of his early days suggested to him the idea of making the young panther answer to this name, now that he began to admire with less terror her swiftness, suppleness, and softness. Toward the end of the day he had familiarized himself with his perilous position; he now almost liked the painfulness of it. At last his companion had got into the habit of looking up at him whenever he cried in a ...
— A Passion in the Desert • Honore de Balzac
... shall give any instance of, is the Softness and Delicacy of his Turns; of which many might be produced; but we think these few may be sufficient for our purpose. Eheu me miseram! Cur non aut isthaec mihi aetas & forma est, aut tibi haec sententia. Nam si ego digna hac contumelia sum ...
— Prefaces to Terence's Comedies and Plautus's Comedies (1694) • Lawrence Echard
... given! e meritamente; perocche ottimamente, siccome si vedra procedendo, segui al nome l'effetto: "and deservedly! for greatly, as we shall see, the effect followed the name!" At nine years of age, on a May-day, whose joyous festival Boccaccio beautifully describes, when the softness of the heavens, re-adorning the earth with its mingled flowers, waved the green boughs, and made all things smile, Dante mixed with the boys and girls in the house of the good citizen who on that day gave the feast, beheld little Brice, as she was familiarly called, but ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... convinces you!" says Florian. And about them, who were young in the world's recaptured youth, spring triumphed with an ageless rural pageant, and birds cried to their mates. He noted the red brevity of her lips and their probable softness. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... soap-makers' disposal. Those fats and oils which yield firm soaps, will, of course, allow a greater proportion of rosin to be incorporated with them than materials producing soaps of less body. Rosin imparts softness to a soap, ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... elements would combine to make something either darker or fairer than had been before. Meanwhile, in the uncrystallized solution the curious analyst might detect traits bright or sinister, ordinarily invisible. Here were softness, impetuosity, romantic imagination, and tender fire, enough to set up half a dozen poets. Again, there was a fund of malignity, coldness, and subtlety adequate to the making an Iago. Here, too, were the clear ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... is distinguished for the elegance and richness of its ornamentation: the softness of the Kersanton stone, when fresh taken from the quarry fits it specially for the deeply cut, lace-like works of the artists of the flamboyant school, and the church is remarkable for the skill with which the productions of the vegetable kingdom are represented both within and without. It ...
— Brittany & Its Byways • Fanny Bury Palliser
... retreat. Dowager lady Chia noticed that there was no one but themselves in her apartments. "I hear," she remarked, "that you had come to play the part of a go-between for your lord and master! You can very well observe the three obediences and four virtues, but this softness of yours is a work of supererogation! You people have also got now a whole lot of grandchildren and sons. Do you still live in fear and trembling lest he should put his monkey up? Rumour has it that you yet let that disposition of your ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... in fact, in the course of that agreeable morning, Clarissa had for a moment forgotten that she was talking to Mr. Austin the painter, and not to her brother Austin Lovel. More than once an unconscious warmth or softness in her tone had made Miss Granger look up from her embroidery-frame with ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... quality so often occurring in the French. Nevertheless, Italian has its difficulties, particularly in the way of distinctly enunciating the double consonants and proper division of the liaisons, or combining of final vowels with initial vowels, and the correct amount of softness to be ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... been from time immemorial that wherever there is contest as between artistic and moral beauty, unless the moral side prevail, all is lost. Let any sculptor hew us out the most ravishing combination of tender curves and spheric softness that ever stood for woman; yet if the lip have a certain fulness that hints of the flesh, if the brow be insincere, if in the minutest particular the physical beauty suggest a moral ugliness, that sculptor — unless he be portraying a moral ugliness ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... the story, And a softness the teller's eye; And the children no further question, And ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... stormed the keen-edged blade: the whiteness of his brow resembled the moon shining bright, and the blackness of his locks was as the murky night; and his waist was more slender than the gossamer[FN231] and his back parts than two sand heaps bulkier, making a Babel of the heart with their softness; but his waist complained of the weight of his hips and loins; and his charms ravished all mankind, even as one of the poets ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Basil Ransom replied, with a smile, and the curious feminine softness with which Southern gentlemen enunciate ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... letter with a sensation of pain at her heart. She felt so far away from them nowadays; she felt almost a certain reluctance to dovetail this life of softness and perfume and amusement in upon the old life. But she would go. She would ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... morning star, The evening star how tender,— The light of both is in her eyes, Their softness and their splendor. But for the lash that shades their light They were too dazzling for the sight, And when she shuts them, all is night— The daughter ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... night bird was very rare in the interior, and only one specimen was procured. Its plumage is characterised by that softness so peculiar to the genus to which it belongs, and in consequence of which its flight is so silent and stealthy that, like the foot-fall of the cat, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... typical lovers—habitually neglect the affairs of state to lead a life of voluptuous indulgence. Hindoo sculpture emphasizes the same trait: "Even in the conception of male figures," says Luebke (109), "there is a touch of this womanly softness;" there is "a lack of an energetic life, of a firm contexture of bone and muscle." It is not of such enervated stuff that true lovers ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... possibility of dawn which comes in the eastern quarter of heaven. The electric lights seemed dull and yet glaring; and every shadow was of a hard intensity. There was nothing of morning freshness; nothing of the softness of night. All was hard and cold and inexpressibly dreary. The face of the senseless man on the sofa seemed of a ghastly yellow; and the Nurse's face had taken a suggestion of green from the shade of the lamp near her. Only Miss Trelawny's face looked white; and ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... with wondering gratitude, the personal attentions of Mrs. Frost, who bound up the injured foot with a softness of touch which brought ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Upper Egypt, towards Arabia, there grows a shrub which some call Gossypion and others Xylon. It is small, and bears a fruit resembling the filbert, within which is a downy wool that is spun into thread. There is nothing to be preferred to these stuffs for whiteness or softness. Beautiful garments are made from them for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... sin and death, and the suffering of Christ himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed soul as for an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow? Neither are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is inconceivable, being only as it were a softness and silence in the pulse of an infinite felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen, for the angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but feel an uncomprehended pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard hearts ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... were to be married now in a week or two, and such a sign of love might have been allowed to him, even in the presence of the bride's mother. He did succeed in getting hold of her fingers, but found in them none of the softness of a response. "Don't," said Lady Alexandrina, withdrawing her hand; and the tone of her voice as she spoke the word was not sweet to his ears. He remembered at the moment a certain scene which took place one evening at the little bridge at Allington, and Lily's voice, and Lily's words, ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... us with a kind of wonder and a kind of mockery in her dark eyes. And when she spoke to us her voice was marvellously soft with a rich softness that made me, being then of a very sensual disposition, think instantly of old wine and ripe fruit, and darkened alcoves, and the wayward complaining of lutes. Indeed, wherever Monna Vittoria went she seemed to carry with her an atmosphere of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... longer this time, and Pierre's cold, handsome face took on a kind of softness before he said, "Remember the sorrow of thine ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... said good night to each other her hand nestled in his; he felt its warm softness, and pressed it more firmly than he had ever done before. How thin Rosa's little ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... Fable, Manners, Thought, and Expression ought to be full of the most innocent simplicity imaginable: for as Innocence in Life, so purity and simplicity in discourse was the Glory of that Age: So as gravity to Epicks, Sweetness to Lyricks, Humor to Comedy, softness to Elegies and smartness to Epigrams, so simplicity to Pastorals is proper; and one upon Theocritus says, that the Idea of his Bucolicks is in every part pure, and in all {38} that belongs to simplicity very happy: Such is this of Virgil, unwholsome to ...
— De Carmine Pastorali (1684) • Rene Rapin
... green, being fed only by the thin sunshine that sifts through the dense canopy, supported far aloft by the majestic columns that clustered about us. Under foot the russet moss was of astonishing depth and softness. One walks with care upon it, for the foot breaks through the thick matting that has in many cases spread from log to log, hiding treacherous traps beneath. The ferns luxuriate in this sylvan paradise; and many a beautiful shrub, new to us, bore flowers that blushed unseen until we made ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... flame of maximum power to be made very quickly. The tube having been introduced with constant rotation, it will soon soften sufficiently to be worked. The beginner will find it best to decide the convenient degree of softness by trial. ...
— On Laboratory Arts • Richard Threlfall
... editor of the "Our Own Men" section of Ourselves Monthly, "is that of a typical American captain of finance, hard, yet with a certain softness, broad but with a certain length, ductile but ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock
... traffic, the freighting also is handled by the blacks on large flat trucks with short guiding poles. These men are quite naked save for a small loin cloth; are beautifully shaped; and glisten all over with perspiration shining in the sun. So fine is the texture of their skins, the softness of their colour—so rippling the play of muscles—that this shining perspiration is like a beautiful polish. They rush from behind, slowly and steadily, and patiently and unwaveringly, the most tremendous loads of the heaviest stuffs. When ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... sharp, with hair slicked back from the forehead and narrow, slanting sharp eyes. He caught a glimpse of neck and shoulders above a brazen filmy waist, and in the splash of light and shadow there was no softness of contour, but ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... Happily he was on his own! He flattered himself that he remained so on occasions that were even more insidiously relaxing—when, in the evening, she strolled away with him to parts of the grounds of the Conversation-house, where the music sank to sweeter softness and the murmur of the tree-tops of the Black Forest, stirred by the warm night-air, became almost audible; or when, in the long afternoons, they wandered in the woods apart from the others—from Mrs. Vivian and ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... swift, smooth train, and perhaps saw the sunrise as I rushed out of the little tunnel that pierced Clayton Crest, and so to work like a man. Now that we had got all the homes and schools and all the softness of life away from our coal and iron ore and clay, now that a thousand obstructive "rights" and timidities had been swept aside, we could let ourselves go, we merged this enterprise with that, cut across this or that anciently obstructive piece of private land, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... these calamitous losses, the state was re-established in all its former strength and prosperity; because the soberness of our ancestry had not yet become infected with the luxury and softness of a more effeminate way of life, and had not learnt to indulge in splendid banquets, or the criminal acquisition of riches. But both the highest classes and the lowest living in harmony, and imbued with one ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... guardians, a Scotch noble—a Presbyterian and a Whig. This uncle was a widower with some children, but they were girls, and, though Lothair was attached to them, too young to be his companions. Their father was a keen, hard man, honorable and just but with no softness of heart or manner. He guarded with precise knowledge and with unceasing vigilance over Lothair's vast inheritance, which was in many counties and in more than one kingdom; but he educated him in a Highland home, and when he had reached ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... age was as a meadow-gale of June, which mingles the fragrance of all the flowers of the field, and adds a quickening and harmonizing spirit of its own, which endows the sense with a power of sustaining its extreme delight. The bucolic and erotic delicacy in written poetry is correlative with that softness in statuary, music, and the kindred arts, and even in manners and institutions, which distinguished the epoch to which I now refer. Nor is it the poetical faculty itself, or any misapplication of it, to which this want of harmony is to be imputed. ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... met. What if she screamed and aroused the house? What, indeed? "Madame," I said again, speaking hurriedly, and striving to reassure her by the softness of my voice, "we implore your help! Unless you assist ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... blue-wrought damask, hung in massy folds from ceiling to floor, before the deep bay-windows. Rosewood sofas and fauteuils, in costly coverings of the same soft color, rested on the brilliantly interwoven flowers of the Persian carpet, whose velvety softness echoed not the slightest tread. A fairy chandelier hung suspended from the lofty, corniced ceiling. Rare statuary decorated the mantel. Large mirrors and pictures in broad gilt frames adorned the walls. Marble stands, covered with deep-fringed cloths of gold, on which ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... from the seed of the New-town pippin, imported from North America. When this tree began to bear, its fruit, though without any external beauty, proved remarkably good, and had a peculiar quality, namely, a melting softness in eating, so that it might be said almost to dissolve in the mouth. The late Mr. Lee, of Hammersmith, often had grafts of this tree, and he sold the plant so raised first with the name of Ord's apple, and subsequently with the name of ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... feeling than is quite reasonable, my mind is ever impressed with admiration for persons of high birth, and I could, with the most perfect honesty, expatiate on Lord Errol's good qualities; but he stands in no need of my praise. His agreeable manners and softness of address prevented that constraint which the idea of his being Lord High Constable of Scotland[317] might otherwise have occasioned. He talked very easily and sensibly with his learned guest. I observed that Dr. Johnson, though he shewed that respect ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... reading; and must have dozed over the book. Suddenly, I awoke and sat upright, with a start. For a moment, I looked 'round, with a puzzled sense of something unusual. There was a misty look about the room, giving a curious softness to each table and chair ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... after we left the coast of the Okhotsk Sea was very slow, on account both of the shortness of the days, and the depth and softness of the freshly fallen snow. Frequently, for ten or fifteen miles at a stretch, we were compelled to break a road on snow-shoes for our heavily loaded sledges, and even then our tired dogs could hardly struggle through the soft powdery drifts. The weather, too, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... of this species ('J. A. S. B.' vol. xxxii. 1863, p. 343): "We have several specimens of what I take to be this rat from Darjeeling. They are especially distinguished by the fineness and softness of the fur. One specimen only, of eight from Darjeeling, which I refer to this species, has the lower parts ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... spoke—the teeth glancing back, with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid, yet most exultingly radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin—and here, too, I found the gentleness of breadth, the softness and the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality, of the Greek—the contour which the god Apollo revealed but in a dream, to Cleomenes, the son of the Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... still meekly folded about her waist, had mastered the feelings of anger so unbecoming to a person whose sins had been absolved only about three hours before, and asked me with an insinuating softness whether she wasn't an honest girl enough to look after any old lady belonging to a world which after all was sinful. She reminded me that she had kept house ever since she was "so high" for her uncle the priest: ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... his visitors he knew nothing; least of all of Cho[u]bei. Kondo[u] Rokuro[u]bei appeared. With him was an old lady. O'Naka bowed to the ground before the proposed son-in-law. She was in a flutter over the beautiful man destined for O'Iwa. The admirable courtesy of his manners, the tender softness of voice, robbed her of what little judgment she had. Her only fear was that the candidate for honours and the Tamiya ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Serving the fiery spirit more to flame, Who woos bright honour, he shall ever win A true nobility, a deathless fame: Not they who love to lean, unjustly vain, Upon the ancestral trunk's departed claim; Nor they reclining on the gilded beds Where Moscow's zebeline downy softness spreads." [216] ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... in an expression of regret in the prettiest blue eyes in the world, which might have satisfied any one that an offence occasioned by her own sweet face was not unpardonable. The sweetness, the ingenuousness, the spirit mingled with softness, exhibited in the countenance of this girl, are, I think, all characteristic of the English female countenance, when it has not been marble-ized by the over-wrought polish of high breeding. Similar countenances occur in America, though, I think, less frequently than here; and ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shoulders beside him. Nelson, through long following of the plough, had lost the erect carriage painfully acquired in the army. He was a handsome man, whose fresh-colored skin gave him a perpetual appearance of having just washed his face. The features were long and delicate. The brown eyes had a liquid softness like the eyes of a woman. In general the countenance was alertly intelligent; he looked younger than his years; but this afternoon the lines about his mouth and in his brows warranted every gray hair ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... changed to a great softness. "You were quite right to come to me," he answered, in that low, musical voice of his, his keen gaze having altered into one no less direct, but marvellously gentle. "Of course I will go and see your mother, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... durst with fingering bold assay To touch the softness of her tender skin, She looked as coy, as if she list not play, And made as things of worth were hard to win; Yet tempered so her deignful looks alway, That outward scorn showed store of grace within: Thus ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... with his gentle and devoted partner. That softness and sweetness of air which had first touched the heart of Content was still to be seen, though it existed amid the traces of a constant and a corroding grief. The freshness of youth had departed, and in its place was visible the more lasting, and, in her case, the more affecting beauty ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... nerve, a richness of aspect in color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of the most virginal of their white sisters. One thinks of them as of old in soft draperies of beautiful cream-colored native cloth wound around their bodies, passed under one arm and knotted on the other shoulder, revealing the shapely neck and arm, and one breast, with garlands ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... dared to whisper it, and he tingled from head to heel. His heart fondled it: May! May! May! and, with inexpressible vague, sweet longing, May! once more. Then her hair! then her voice! then the rosy softness of her hand! then, with hideous revulsion, from her perfections to himself! The gulf of shame! His boots were an epic of despair, his necktie was a tragedy. Then back to her with all the graces of the heavens upon her! Then back to himself again, and the deep damnation of the button which ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... with which we stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing 'Way down upon the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... matters in which you could not look for sympathy to such as him without being false, nay, almost worse than false? Have you ever thought what it is to be the one loved object of a man's heart, and to have accepted that love?" She had been on the point of interrupting him, but the softness of these last words interrupted ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... productiveness, scent, density, capacity to absorb scents of all kinds, cohesion, habitableness (in respect of vegetables and animals), and that attribute of the mind which is called patience of the capacity to bear. The properties of water are coolness, taste, moisture, liquidity, softness, agreeableness, tongue, fluidity, capacity to be congealed, and power to melt many earthly products.[1105] The properties of fire are irresistible energy, inflammability, heat, capacity to soften, light, sorrow, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... was one who thought of himself last. It humiliated Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him from doing more than an equal share of the day's work. The man was mild, gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to be made of the fiber of steel. Cameron could not thwart him. Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for himself. Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning of rock that promised gold; he ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... (again, and with warmth,) "It cannot be that you are so cruel! Softness itself is painted in your eyes.-You could not, surely, have the barbarity so wantonly to trifle with ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... considerations. He finds the elements of beauty to be:— (1) smallness; (2) smoothness; (3) gradual variation of direction in gentle curves; (4) delicacy, or the appearance of fragility; (5) brightness, purity and softness of colour. The sublime is rather crudely resolved into astonishment, which he thinks always retains an element of terror. Thus "infinity has a tendency to fill the mind with a delightful horror.'' Burke seeks what ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... namely, that hung from the ceiling, which she always saw alight, though she never saw the flame, only the slight condensation toward the centre of the alabaster globe. And besides the operation of the light itself after its kind, the indefiniteness of the globe, and the softness of the light, giving her the feeling as if her eyes could go in and into its whiteness, were somehow also associated with the idea of space and room. She would sit for an hour together gazing up at the lamp, and her ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... her knee. "He told me that he would let it stand just as it was for three months until October first, but after that we would have to—to tell—Grandfather and move," a quiver came into Patricia's soft voice that had in it the patrician, slurring softness that can only come from the throat of a grand dame sprung from the race which has dominated blue-grass pastures. "Doctor Healy says it won't be long but—but now he'll—he'll die in his own home that ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... the eye from the face of external nature. There is in woods and waters a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and beauty of the summer clouds floating feathery overhead, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the drapery of this place and hour, as fore-looking to such pavilions ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... marries him, she has the first rank. If he marries a woman older than himself by twenty years, she marries a man younger in wit by twenty degrees. I do not think he will dilapidate her fortune—he seems quiet and gentle. I do not think that she will abuse his softness—of disposition, shall I say, or of heart? The disparity of ages concerns no one but themselves; so they have my consent to marry, if they can get each other's. Just as this is written, enter my Lord of St. Albans and Lady Charlotte, to beg I would recommend a book ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... whether, without the use of masks, it may not be possible to attain a higher degree of separate excellence in the mimetic art. This we would very willingly allow. Cicero, it is true, speaks of the expression, the softness, and delicacy of the acting of Roscius, in the same terms that a modern critic would apply to Garrick or Schrder. But I will not lay any stress on the acting of this celebrated player, the excellence of which has become proverbial, ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... with a tiny ripple in her black hair, black-eyed, with a heavy, kind face. She gave one the impression of infinite patience, but a curious determination was concealed in her softness. The family were small farmers on Egremont Plain, between Great Barrington and Sheffield, Massachusetts. The bits of land were too small to support the great families born on them and we were always poor. ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois |
