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Wildness   /wˈaɪldnəs/   Listen
Wildness

noun
1.
A feeling of extreme emotional intensity.  Synonym: abandon.
2.
The property of being wild or turbulent.  Synonyms: ferocity, fierceness, furiousness, fury, vehemence, violence.
3.
An unruly disposition to do as one pleases.  "The element of wildness in his behavior was a protest against repressive convention"
4.
An intractably barbarous or uncultivated state of nature.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Wildness" Quotes from Famous Books



... wildness of life in such a jungle of cannibalism? No wonder the savage instinct is so deeply ...
— Tyranny of God • Joseph Lewis

... girls stood waiting with scarce a word passing among them, waiting at the quay-side for the fathers, brothers, or sweethearts, that for months had been facing the perils of the northern seas. There a dark-eyed, loose-limbed Breton peasant, the wildness of whose look bewrayed the gentleness of his nature, was arguing with a white-haired patriarch about the probable value of this year's haul: while quaint-looking children in little tight-fitting bonnets and clattering sabots clung patiently to their mother's skirts, their mothers, ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall

... forgets within half an hour, and never thinks of again. Whatever was valuable in the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh was the ripe fruit of study and of meditation. It was the same with his conversation. In his most familiar talk there was no wildness, no inconsistency, no amusing nonsense, no exaggeration for the sake of momentary effect. His mind was a vast magazine, admirably arranged. Everything was there; and everything was in its place. His judgments on men, on sects, on books, had been often and carefully ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of "The Lyrical Ballads." Well I knew Lady Carbery's constitutional inaptitude for poetry; and not for the world would I have sought sympathy from her or from anybody else upon that part of the L. B. which belonged to Wordsworth. But I fancied that the wildness of this tale, and the triple majesties of Solitude, of Mist, and of the Ancient Unknown Sea, might have won her into relenting; and, in fact, she listened with gravity and deep attention. But, on reviewing afterwards in conversation such passages as she happened to remember, ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... and villages to ashes; which opened a grave for many thousand combatants, and for half a century smothered the glimmering sparks of civilization in Germany, and threw back the improving manners of the country into their pristine barbarity and wildness. Yet out of this fearful war Europe came forth free and independent. In it she first learned to recognize herself as a community of nations; and this intercommunion of states, which originated in the thirty years' war, may alone be sufficient to reconcile the philosopher to its horrors. ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.

... impression. Young as she was, with the terribly clear perception of the male character which all women possess in different degrees, she recognised that Silas was dangerous to that logical and equitable state of existence we call happiness, not on account of his wildness or his eccentricities, but because of some want inherent in his nature, something that spoke vaguely in his words and his actions, in his handsome face and in his ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... fierce a fiend is passion! With what wildness, What tyranny, untam'd it reigns in woman! Unhappy sex! whose easy, yielding, temper Gives way to ev'ry appetite alike: And love in their weak bosoms is a rage As terrible as hate, and as destructive. But ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe

... punishment in a room, she would steadfastly refuse to admit that she had done wrong, and, maternal patience exhausted, the mutinous little culprit had commonly to be released impenitent and unconfessed. Indeed her wildness acquired for her the name of "Little Mustang;" as, later on, her fondness for poring over books beyond her childish years that of "Little Newspaper." At school, the confession must be made, she was refractory and idle. The prosaic ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... once enchanting spot. A stone had literally rolled against the mouth of the fountain, and the crystal diamonds no longer sparkled in the basin below. An awkward pump, put up near the cabin, explained this appearance of neglect and wildness. The soft grassy slope where I used to recline and watch the fountain's silvery play, was overgrown with tall, rank, rustling weeds, among which I could distinguish the deadly bloom and sickening odor of the nightshade. There was a rock covered with the brightest, ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz

... with her conversation, but, finding that I neither heard, answered, nor ate, our meal was soon brought to a close. It is long past midnight. I have thought till I am sick and giddy with thinking. I cannot sleep, and have been writing here to control the wildness of my imaginings. I have been twice to Eleanor's chamber. The door is half ground-glass, and I can see her black shadow as she walks to and fro across the room. She has been walking so ever ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... a man of the people, a new man, who spoke no known language, who was very uncouth and insulting, who proclaimed himself a "barbaric yawp," and who corresponded to the English imagination with the unpleasant and rampant wildness of everything in America,—with Mormonism and car factories, steamboat explosions, strikes, repudiation, and whiskey; whose form violated every one of their minor canons as America violated every one ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... take up some claims and go to ranching for ourselves, when we got discharged from the Flying U. We didn't mean any harm—everybody's taking up claims. We've bought some cattle and we're going to try and get ahead, like other folks. We—I wanted to cut out all this wildness—" ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower

... foolishly with flagrant questions, learned little of his companion save what that companion was willing, or maybe determined, that he should learn. Master Halfman made no concealment of it that he had been wild at Cambridge, and he hinted, indeed, broadly enough, that he had had a companion in his wildness who had since grown to be a godly man that carried the name of Cromwell. He admitted frankly that his pranks cast him forth from Cambridge, and that he had been a stage-player for a time in London, in proof whereof he declaimed to the amazed Master Vallance many flowing periods from Beaumont, ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... champered away a little at the top,—the water surged in and out with a thunderous, muffled sough and moan, like a Titan under the earth, pinned down eternally in pain. It was awfully impressive,—so impressive that I reflected neither upon it nor on myself. With this immitigable, adamantine wildness about me, and that abysmal, booming stifle of plaint, to which all the air trembled, sounding from below, I became another being, and the very universe was no longer itself; past and future were not, and I was a dumb atomy creeping over the bare peaks of existence, while out of the blind ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various

... upwards for 7000 feet. For miles and miles, above and around, great billowy masses, tossed and twisted into an infinity of fantastic shapes, arrest and weary the eye, lava in all its forms, from a compact phonolite, to the lightest pumice stone, the mere froth of the volcano, exceeding in wildness and confusion the most extravagant nightmare ever inflicted on man. Recollect the vastness of this mountain. The whole south of this large island, down to, and below the water's edge, is composed of its slopes. Its height is nearly three miles, its base ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... to Joan. She had crossed the plains in a wagon-train, that more than once had known the long-drawn yell of hostile Indians. She had prospected and hunted in the mountains with her uncle, weeks at a time. But never before this night had the wildness, the loneliness, been ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... 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

... about that the Slum Cat found herself transferred from the show to a Fifth Avenue mansion. She evinced a most unaccountable wildness at first. Her objection to petting, however, was explained on the ground of her aristocratic dislike of familiarity. Her retreat from the Lap-dog onto the centre of the dinner-table was understood to express a deep-rooted though mistaken idea of avoiding a defiling touch. Her assaults on a ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton

... do, massa? Oh, missis! oh! lily missis! me too glad to see you!" accompanied with certain interjectional shrieks, whoops, whistles, and grunts, that could only be written down in negro language, made me aware of our vicinity to our journey's end. The strangeness of the whole scene, its wildness (for now beyond the broad river and the low swamp lands the savage-looking woods arose to meet the horizon), the rapid retrospect which my mind hurried through of the few past years of my life; the singular ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... at this hint, yet was not surprised by it; Mr Gosport had acquainted her he had been formerly confined; and his flightiness, wildness, florid language, and extraordinary way of life, bad long led her to suspect his ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... word for nature," he said, "for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, to regard man as an inhabitant, a part and parcel of nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement; if so, I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization. The ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... and so often traversed France to visit her daughter in Provence, Madame de Sevigne had the happiness to die in her house at Grignan. She was sixty-nine, and she had been ill for some time; she was subject to rheumatism; her son's wildness had for a long while retarded the arrangement of her affairs; at last he had turned over a new leaf, he was married, he was a devotee. Madame de Grignan had likewise found a wife for her son, whom the king had made a colonel at a very early age; and a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... delicacy of his fancy and the beauty of his diction. His Ode on the Passions is universally esteemed for its sudden and effective changes from the bewilderment of Fear, the violence of Anger, and the wildness of Despair to the rapt visions of Hope, the gentle dejection of Pity, and the sprightliness of Mirth and Cheerfulness. His Ode on the Death of Thomson is an exquisite bit of pathos, as is also the Dirge on Cymbeline. Everybody knows and admires ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... 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, "Lift ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins

... is so very slightly marked on the bent that we only follow it with difficulty. It is steep in places, for in a short distance it climbs up to nearly 2,000 feet. The tawny hollows in the fell-sides, and the utter wildness spread all around, are more impressive when we are right away from anything that can even be called ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home

... look of wildness that made Kettles attractive to Pennie and Nancy, used to the trim propriety of well-cared-for village children, who curtsied when you spoke to them, and always said "Miss." There was a freedom in the glance of Kettles' eye and a perfect carelessness of good ...
— Penelope and the Others - Story of Five Country Children • Amy Walton

... dirty blankets wrapped round their loins to protect them against the inclemency of the season, and fastened by broad leathern belts, into which were thrust axes and knives of an enormous length, gave them an air of wildness ...
— Four American Indians - King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh, Osceola • Edson L. Whitney

... elapsed ere Lady Aphrodite woke to all the wildness of a deluded woman. The idol on whom she had lavished all the incense of her innocent affections became every day less like a true divinity. At length even the ingenuity of a passion could no longer disguise the hideous and ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli

... Drink,"[45]—how some unthrift youths, carousing deeply, chanced to turn their talk on ships and storms at sea; whereupon one giddy member of the company suddenly conceived that the room was a pinnace, that the sounds of revelry were the bawlings of sailors, and that his unsteady footing was due to the wildness of the tempest; the illusion spread among his companions, and a scene of whimsical confusion followed. In The Captives, ii. 2, we have a ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... the terrier tribe, there is no quainter little fellow than he of the Island of Skye,—known to his friends and admirers as the "Skye dog." This little animal, which, in length of spine, shortness of legs, wildness of hair, and litheness of movement, resembles one of those long, hirsute caterpillars oft-times to be observed by the happy rambler in the country, as it promenades across his path, possesses many distinctive traits, which separate him, in a manner, from Dog in general, assimilating ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... 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 cascades from ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition. Envy is *[Greek: kakistos kai dikaiotatos theos], as I once saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobaeus: it ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... over the brink of the causeways into the water below. Some had climbed on the terraces, others feebly supported themselves against the walls of the buildings. Their squalid and tattered garments gave a wildness to their appearance which still further heightened the ferocity of their expression, as they glared on their enemy with eyes in which hate was mingled with despair. When the Spaniards had approached within bow-shot, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various

... and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship, and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on peace; ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... our talks on 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

... sick man's chamber. Stretched upon a mattress, with both hands tightly bound to the bedstead, the friendless stranger was indeed a pitiful sight. His dark, dishevelled hair prematurely gray, his long, unshaven beard, and the wildness of the eyes which glanced upon them as they opened the door and entered, caused the faint hope which had so suddenly risen in Clotelle's heart, to sink, and she felt that this man could claim no kindred with her. Certainly, he bore no resemblance to the man whom she had called her father, and who ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown

... tyrant and heap up infamy for ourselves; on the other hand, if we hesitate to take the stern action demanded, we fail in strength of soul, and let slip the dogs of war to every extreme of weakness and wildness, to create depravity and horror that will ultimately destroy us. A true soldier of freedom will not hesitate to strike vigorously and strike home, knowing that on his resolution will depend the restoration and defence of liberty. But he ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... recreation, is, when continued many hours in succession, unless one be engaged in scientific researches, very monotonous and wearisome. Even the productions of a forest are not so various as those of a tract in which all the different conditions of wildness and culture are intermingled. A view of an unbroken wilderness from an elevation is equally monotonous. Wood must be blended with other forms of landscape, with pasture and tillage, with roads, houses, and farms, to convey to the mind the most agreeable sensations. The monotony of unbroken ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various

... When Josephine Murray was brought there as a bride she thought it to be very sombre and ill-omened; but she loved the lakes and mountains, and dreamed of some vague mysterious joy of life which was to come to her from the wildness ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope

... in the freshness of his being, such, So gifted virtually, that in him All better habits wond'rously had thriv'd. The more of kindly strength is in the soil, So much doth evil seed and lack of culture Mar it the more, and make it run to wildness. These looks sometime upheld him; for I show'd My youthful eyes, and led him by their light In upright walking. Soon as I had reach'd The threshold of my second age, and chang'd My mortal for immortal, then he left ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... nearer glades round our village had been my playground ever since I could remember, and before I knew that fear therein might be. That was not so long a time, however, save that the years of a child are long years; for at this time, when I first learned the full wildness of the woods of the great Andredsweald and knew what loneliness was, I was only ten years old. Since I could run alone my old nurse had tried to fray me from wandering out of sight of those who tended me, with tales of wolf and bear and ...
— A Prince of Cornwall - A Story of Glastonbury and the West in the Days of Ina of Wessex • Charles W. Whistler

... to be conquered and annually recuperated in turn. Cymria capta ferum ... might have been the motto of her municipal arms. Exactly how Mr. ONIONS exhibits the romantic spectacle of her development, with the strange knowledge she picked up, as from virgin wildness she became first select and then popular, I cannot hope to explain. Suffice it to say that the process is epitomised in sketches of the various people who helped in the moulding of her—the drunken Kerr brothers, who built a house in a single night; Howell Gruffydd, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various

... brushwood—the 'maquis' of Corsica, which yields shelter to its traditional outlaws and bandits. Yet upon these hillsides there are hardly any signs of life; the whole country seems abandoned to primeval wildness and the majesty of desolation. Nothing can possibly be more unlike the smiling Riviera, every square mile of which is cultivated like a garden, and every valley and bay dotted over with white villages. After steaming for a few hours along ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... sincere about the old peasant, despite his wildness, that Prescott went with him without objection. Both moving softly, they stepped into another field, the guide going forward as one who knew every inch of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock

... audience; the females were mostly of the lower classes, but the men were of all ranks, come hither to forget awhile the protracted scenes of wretchedness, which awaited them at their miserable homes. The curtain drew up, and the stage presented the scene of the witches' cave. The wildness and supernatural machinery of Macbeth, was a pledge that it could contain little directly connected with our present circumstances. Great pains had been taken in the scenery to give the semblance of reality to the impossible. The extreme ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... attempt was to 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

... how Providence has taken care to keep up this cheerfulness in the mind of man, by having formed it after such a manner, as to make it capable of conceiving delight from several objects which seem to have very little use in them; as from the wildness of rocks and deserts, and the like grotesque parts of nature. Those who are versed in philosophy may still carry this consideration higher by observing, that, if matter had appeared to us endowed only with ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... scuttled off to cover, and often with the whir of drumming wings a grouse rose noisily and lumbered away with spread tail into the painted foliage. But all the beauty of it was a beauty of wildness and of nature's victory over man. For such beauty Ham felt no answer of pulse ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck

... rhododendrons, an amber-colored stream descends in waterfalls to the sea. The slopes opposite to the house are thickly fledged with larches up to a certain height, when they suddenly give place to the wildness of the Mourne Mountains. The house externally is of more or less modern aspect, but within, when I knew it, it was full of fine family portraits, books, and old collections of china, together with certain other objects which appealed to the sense of history rather ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... Launcelot was startled with the appearance of a woman, whose looks and equipage indicated the most piteous distress. She seemed to be turned of the middle age, was of a lofty carriage, tall, thin, weather-beaten, and wretchedly attired; her eyes were inflamed with weeping, and her looks displayed that wildness and peculiarity which denote distraction. Advancing to Sir Launcelot, she fell upon her knees, and, clasping her hands together, uttered the following rhapsody in the ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett

... between the city and the hills, waves of blue and purple shade, forerunners of the night, stole over the Campagna towards the higher ground. But the hills themselves were still shining, still clad in rose and amethyst, caught in gentler repetition from the wildness of the west. Pale rose even the olive gardens; rose the rich brown fallows, the emerging farms; while drawn across the Campagna from north to south, as though some mighty brush had just laid it there for sheer lust of color, sheer joy in the mating it with ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... for their mimick actors always played and exhibited grotesque dances in the comedies. The jealousy of rivalship afterwards broke them off from the comick actors, and made them a company by themselves. But to secure their reception, they borrowed from comedy all its drollery, wildness, grossness, and licentiousness. This amusement they added to their dances, and they produced what are now called farces, or burlettas. These farces had not the regularity or delicacy of comedies; they were only a succession of single scenes, contrived to raise ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... from distrusting his fitness for another whaling voyage, on account of such dark symptoms, the calculating people of that prudent isle were inclined to .. harbor the conceit, that for those very reasons he was all the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales. Gnawed within and scorched without, with the infixed, unrelenting fangs of some incurable idea; such an one, could he be found, would seem the very man to dart his iron and lift his lance against the most appalling of ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... and uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... plentiful in the valley there. That she did not grow up a country hoyden is to be explained by the strictness of her governess and the influence of her uncle. But perhaps living in so wild a place gave her some disposition to wildness, even in spite of her religious upbringing. Her old nurse said: "Miss Silvia was always a little wild at heart," though if this was true it was never seen by ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett

... by wrapping them in cloths. I made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, when from the wildness of nuts and meats men first reached the mildness and refinement of this diet, and travelling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which, it is supposed, taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter, till ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... further advanced in civilization, especially the Germans. Milutinovitch has even a tinge of their philosophy. There is no want of talent; but there is no nationality in them. Nothing of that wonderful amalgamation of the East and the West; of mountaineer wildness and Christian principles; of barbarism and civilization; nothing of that interesting blending of Asia and Europe, which we feel entitled to expect from the poetry of Servians, who stand on the border between Muhammedanism and Christendom. Nothing which these educated writers have hitherto ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson

... be inhabited. Here and there a lone cot, a mere speck, met the eye amidst a landscape composed of nothing but barren wastes and thick forests, nearly impervious to the light. We had penetrated about half a mile through one of the latter, my attention occupied with the romantic wildness of the scene, when we were alarmed by the howling of a wolf. My guide crossed himself, and began cracking his whip with the noise and singular dexterity peculiar to the French postillions; and as we entered a part of the forest, impenetrable ...
— A Visit to the Monastery of La Trappe in 1817 • W.D. Fellowes

... that the Federation's laws would have any meaning for minds like these? Telzey snapped the library shut with fingers that had begun to tremble, and placed it on the ground. Then she stiffened. In the sensations washing about her, a special excitement rose suddenly, a surge of almost gleeful wildness that choked away her breath. Awareness followed of a pair of malignant crimson eyes fastened on her, moving steadily closer. A kind of nightmare paralysis seized Telzey—they'd turned her over to that red-eyed horror! She ...
— Novice • James H. Schmitz

... pleasure springs; For Styles are dignify'd, as well as Things. Tho' Sense subsists, distinct from phrase or sound, Yet Gravity conveys a surer wound. The chymic secret which your pains wou'd find, Breaks out, unsought for, in Cervantes' mind; And Quixot's wildness, like that King's of old, Turns all he touches, into Pomp and Gold. Yet in this Pomp discretion must be had; Tho' grave, not stiff; tho' whimsical, not mad: In Works like these if Fustian might appear, Mock-Epics, Blackmore, would ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte

... their hands a cup of gold or silver, in token of the privilege claimed by the City for the lord mayor to officiate as chief butler at the king's coronation. On the return of Edward I. from the Holy Land the citizens, in the wildness of their loyalty, threw, it is said, handfuls of gold and silver out of window to the crowd. It was on the return of the same king from his Scotch victories that the earliest known City pageant took place. Each guild had its show. The Fishmongers ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... England, or the part of himself which he had known had been the lesser part, and he had taken it for the greater. For he had set out on his journey with his hopes mainly fixed on Constantinople. Its road of wildness and tumult, its barbaric glitter, its crude mixture of races, even its passions and crimes—a legend in history, a solid fact of to-day—had allured his mind. The art of Greece had beckoned to him; its ancient shrines had had their strong summons for his brain; ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... a peasant who was driving a car of oxen, frequently descended to feed in the prairie and were shot for the sake of their skins, for the flesh being strong and disagreeable is held at no account. But notwithstanding the wildness of these regions, the handiworks of man were visible. The sides of the gorge though precipitous were yellow with little fields of barley, and we saw a hamlet and church down in the prairie below, whilst merry songs ascended to our ears from where the mowers were toiling ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow

... within my range seems to possess attractions for all comers. Here one may study almost the entire ornithology of the State. It is a rocky piece of ground, long ago cleared, but now fast relapsing into the wildness and freedom of nature, and marked by those half-cultivated, half-wild features which birds and boys love. It is bounded on two sides by the village and highway, crossed at various points by carriage-roads, and threaded in all directions by paths and byways, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... as usual, at the dawn of day. The customary interval between his departure and return was spent by Susan in a tumult of hopes and fears. As noon approached, her suspense arose to a pitch of wildness and agony. She could scarcely be restrained from running along the road, many miles, towards the city; that she might, by meeting Belding half-way, the sooner ascertain the fate of her lover. She stationed herself at a window ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... those qualities in which Cooper excelled. The scene of the one was laid on Lake Ontario and its shores; the other, on the little lake near which he had made his home; and the whole atmosphere of both is redolent of the beauty and the wildness ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury

... 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 ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... pinched and wasted, and clad in thin, worn garments, and shoes that seemed ready to drop from the naked, frost-bitten feet. The unkempt iron-gray hair and beard gave the face, at first glance, a look of wildness, but, observing more closely, one saw that the features, though heavy, were not uncomely, and wore a look of extreme suffering, which even death had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... loose, eyes bulging in exultation of revenge, he had struck those matches with his hairy hands and let them flare in the straw, till the little red flames ran and licked, rustled and licked, and there was nothing to do but watch them lick and burn. Nor of that sudden wildness of dumb fear that rushed into the heart of the crouching creature, changing the madness of his face to palsy. Nor of the recoil from the burning stack; those moments empty with terror. Nor of how terror, through habit of inarticulate, emotionless ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the hen, and tussled and fought with it, and each other, while the mother, keeping a sharp eye for enemies, looked on with fond delight. The expression on her face was remarkable. It was first a grinning of delight, but her usual look of wildness and cunning was there, nor were cruelty and nervousness lacking, but over all was the unmistakable look of the mother's pride ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... 'the wildness, force, and energy of that tongue, it is impossible to imitate in the ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... woman in Joan had not been hurt by her experiences, because it was only the wildness of youth that had carried her to the verge of making mistakes and then sent her reeling back, she reacted quickly. She was no longer the reckless, heedless Joan—the change made Martin frown. He put full ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... remained silent before the picture, communing with it as with his own heart and abandoning himself to the spell of evil influence that the painter had cast upon the features. Gradually his eyes kindled, while as Elinor watched the increasing wildness of his face her own assumed a look of terror; and when, at last, he turned upon her, the resemblance of both to their ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turn my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with, a gloomy kind of envy; for while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid,—comparatively so. Excuse this selfish digression. Your "Monody" [3] is so superlatively excellent that I can only wish it perfect, which ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... devotion to Lady Castlewood, who had much befriended him, immediately destroyed the proofs which were given him of his honorable parentage, and ever afterwards kept his claim a secret. After the duel, while Esmond was in prison, Lady Castlewood visited him, and in the wildness of her grief for her murdered husband, reproached her loyal kinsman for not having saved her lord's life, or avenged his death. In the estrangement which these reproaches occasioned, Esmond sought his fortune abroad in war; but subsequently, desiring to learn ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

... Solomon, as James was called, renewed the severity which Elizabeth found it wise to remit. Hitherto, the Puritans had been chiefly Presbyterians; but now the Independents arose, who carried their views still further, even to wildness and radicalism. They were stricter Calvinists, and inclined to republican views of civil government. Consequently, they were still more odious than were the Presbyterians to an arbitrary government. They were now persecuted for their doctrines of faith, as well as for their forms ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... 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 that ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... 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 ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot

... had brought on a second severe attack of rheumatism, which had bent her nearly double. Anxiety for Margaret, too, had wasted her to a skeleton, and her thin, sharp face, now of a corpse-like pallor, contrasted strangely with her eyes, from which the wildness all was gone. Touched with pity, Maggie drew a chair to her side, and thus replied: "I do forgive you, Hagar, for I know that what you did was done in love; but by telling me what you have you've ruined ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... to the place, and then its mysterious beauty and wildness began to have full effect on their minds, inducing them to remain for a long time, silent, as they sat side by side on a piece of ...
— The Lighthouse • R.M. Ballantyne

... I am come to bid thee farewell for a while, and this is the manner of it." And therewith he told her all as it was, and said withal: "Now I can do nought save to bid thee gather thy valiance to thee and not to wound my heart with the wildness of thy grief. And look thou, my dear; e'en now thou wert saying thy yearning that mine arms were round about thy body: now we are no longer altogether children, and I will tell thee that it is many a day since I have longed for this; ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris

... towards him with her usual sweet smile of welcome; but the smile vanished at once, as her eyes met his changed and working countenance; cold drops stood upon the rigid and marble brow, the lips writhed as if in bodily torture, the muscles of the face had fallen, and there was a wildness which appalled her in the fixed and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IX • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... something for his lord, to entertain him till the happy hour. The rustic pleas'd me with the concern he had for my Philander; oh my charming brother, you have an art to tame even savages, a tongue that would charm and engage wildness itself, to softness and gentleness, and give the rough unthinking, love; 'tis a tedious time to-night, how shall ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... company, I noted how deep the thing had bitten into our souls. Ringan's eyes still danced with that unholy blue light. Grey was very pale, and his jaw was set grimly. Bertrand had ceased from sobbing, and his face had the far-away wildness of the fanatic, such a look as his forbears may have worn at the news of St. Bartholomew. The big man Donaldson looked puzzled and sombre. Only Shalah stood impassive and aloof, with no trace of feeling on the ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... had the presence of mind to show any proper spirit I should have flung it away, though any adequate gesture of the kind would have gravely affected my equilibrium upon the wall. As it was, in the wildness of the moment, I put it in my waistcoat pocket, and, picking my way back by wall and ladder, landed in the respectable streets once more. Not before, however, I had seen with my own eyes the two awful and lamentable facts— that the burglar was climbing up a slanting roof towards ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... whether you would come to Cornwall, to stay with us. The coast is lovely, and in its wildness one can forget one's self, and that, I think, is what one most wants to do! I know what a help you would be to me, if you could come, and I will tell you all my troubles when we have been together some days. One gets to know people by the sea very quickly, I think, don't you? Although I ...
— The Professional Aunt • Mary C.E. Wemyss

... drew a deep sigh—evidently a sigh of relief—and said nothing; but his eyes lost something of their wildness, his countenance cleared visibly, and its drawn look relaxed a little. We all went to our cabin, and the boys cooked him the best dinner the camp could furnish the materials for, and while they were about it Hillyer and I outfitted him from hat to shoe-leather ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... step upon the stair. Fanny knew it was Dr. Lacey, for he soon returned with Julia, and as they passed her door she heard the merry laugh of Florence, who was bridesmaid. In an instant they were in the parlor, throughout which a general gloom seemed to reign. Perhaps it was owing to the wildness of the storm, which each moment increased in fury. The bridal party took their places and Uncle Joshua shut his eyes, while the ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes

... and obdurate, but Tennyson works them into the course of the fatal love of Lancelot and Guinevere, and into the spiritual texture of the Idylls. Balin has been expelled from Court for the wildness that gives him his name, Balin le Sauvage. He had buffeted a squire in hall. He and Balan await all challengers beside a well. Arthur encounters and dismounts them. Balin devotes himself to self-conquest. Then comes tidings that Pellam, of old leagued with Lot against Arthur, has taken to religion, ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang

... Intoxicated with the wildness of his hopes, he rushed out of the garden. He summoned a gondolier, threw himself into the boat, and hastened to the dwelling of Cinthia, where the inhabitants already were folded in ...
— The Bravo of Venice - A Romance • M. G. Lewis

... interesting. A detail of facts, in which your Royal Highness, in behalf of your country, has been so honourably engaged, may not prove unwelcome in aid of recollection; and a detail of facts, built on the experimental horrors of popular power, and which, proceeding from the wildness of theory to the madness of practice, has swept away every vestige of civil polity, and would soon leave neither law nor religion in the world, cannot, either in point of instruction or warning, be unreasonably laid before my fellow-citizens ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz

... more by thy margin, dark Carron, Shall Wallace in solitude, wander, When tranquil the moon shines afar on Thy heart-stirring wildness and grandeur. For lost are to me Thy beauties for ever, Since fallen in thee Lie the faithful and free, To waken, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... at the willow-trees slowly flitting by, at the stupid crows and daws gazing with dull suspicion askance at the passing equipage, at the long strips of turf between the cultivated sections, overgrown with artemisia, wormwood, and wild tansy; he gazed ... and that fresh, fertile nakedness and wildness of the steppe, that verdure, those long hillocks, the ravines with stubby oak bushes, the grey hamlets, the flexible birch-trees,—this whole Russian picture, which he had not seen for a long time, wafted into his soul sweet and, at the same time, painful sensations, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff

... the horn which announced his approach. He had a swarthy and sunburnt visage, with a thin beard, and piercing dark eyes, a well formed mouth and nose, and other features which might have been pronounced handsome, but for the black elf locks which hung around his face, and the air of wildness and emaciation, which rather seemed to indicate a savage than ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott

... of an Irish medicus, by a Somersetshire lady in whose veins ran the rover blood of the Frobishers, which may account for a certain wildness that had early manifested itself in his disposition. This wildness had profoundly alarmed his father, who for an Irishman was of a singularly peace-loving nature. He had early resolved that the boy should ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... dreary and savage character in the country immediately about these Falls, which is much more in harmony with the wildness of such a scene than the cultivated lands ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... sketched the scenery of this part of Ireland with a free, bold hand. It is not so grand or so wild as the scenery of Western Donegal, but it has both a wildness and a grandeur of its own. Sir Henry Burke's seat of Marble Hill, as seen in the distance from the road, stands superbly, high up on a lofty range of wooded hills, from which it commands the country for miles. And no town I have ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... entered, a woman and a slim toreador were dancing. The music was of an exciting nature, and the character of the performance and the performer immediately took the artists captive. The dance was an eccentric mixture of drollness, innocence, and wildness. When watching the toreador, Frederick felt as if he were in an arena at Seville; when watching the girl, as if he were near the Gulf of Corinth, or on one of the islands of the Cyclades. He promptly decided ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... attention is directed specifically to them, we have no longer what, by a curious limitation of the word, is called the love of nature. Not very long ago it was usual for painters of landscapes to introduce figures, buildings, or ruins to add some human association to the beauty of the place. Or, if wildness and desolation were to be pictured, at least one weary wayfarer must be seen sitting upon a broken column. He might wear a toga and then be Marius among the ruins of Carthage. The landscape without figures would have seemed meaningless; the spectator would have sat in suspense awaiting something, ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana

... went quickly; her heart fluttered with a sudden wildness. "Grandmother," she pleaded, hesitatingly, "oh, Aunt Matilda—just for this once, couldn't I have grey alpaca instead of brown? I hate ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... things, 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

... dead grass, and filling the hollows flush with snow. At times, to keep from being blown over, it was necessary to lean against the gusts. Aladdin was conscious of not making very rapid progress, but there was something exhilarating in the wildness, the bitter cold, and the roar of the wind; it had an effect as of sea thundering upon beach, great views from mountain-tops, black wild nights, the coming of thunder and freshness after intense heat, or any of the thousand and one vaster demonstrations of nature. ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris

... things he had thought left behind forever—sensations and longings which to the normal eye of middle age are but dried forms hung in the museum of memory. They started up at the whip of the still-living youth, the lost wildness at the heart of every man. Like the reviving flame of half-spent fires, longing for discovery leaped and flickered in Hilary—to find out once again what things were like before he went down the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... holes here and there; there were ludicrous and painful exposures of growing limbs everywhere; and the Party in Power and the Party out of Power could do nothing but mend and patch, and revamp and cleanse and scour, and occasionally, in the wildness of despair, suggest even the cutting off the rebellious limbs that persisted in growing beyond the swaddling ...
— The Story of a Mine • Bret Harte

... and was soon in tears. Moreover, when she thought of what Ethelberta would have replied had that keen sister known the wildness of her true reason in wishing to go, she shuddered with misery. To wish to get near a man only because he had been kind to her, and had admired her pretty face, and had given her flowers, to nourish a passion all ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy

... Angel, "Father Hegesippus tore away his robe, which I was holding in my supplicating hands. In a sort of wildness I still grasped it tighter; he pushed me fiercely from him, and I fell with my face towards the ground. He quitted me, closing violently after him the door of the sacristy, in which this scene had passed. I was left alone in the darkness. Either from the violence of my fall, or the excess of my ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... in none of the specimens have we a mere photograph of the outside of what took place. We have great pictures by genius of the—to the prosaic eye—invisible realities, as well as of the outward form of the actions. We behold and are made to feel the solemnity, the wildness, the pathos, the earnestness, the agony, the pity, the moral squalor, the grotesque fun, the delicate and minute beauty, the natural loveliness and loneliness, the quiet desperate bravery, or whatever else any of these wonderful ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... background. His strangeness, his romance, his power to leave her side and take part in the affairs of men, the possibility that they should together hire a boat and cross the river, the speed and wildness of this enterprise filled her mind and inspired her with such rapture, half of love and half of adventure, that William and Cassandra were startled from their talk, and Cassandra exclaimed, "She looks as if she were offering up a sacrifice! Very beautiful," she added ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... Portugal, besides overshadowing their artificial supporters, the vines are seen attaching themselves to, or hanging down in luxuriant festoons from forest-trees, such as the oak, chestnut, and cork, in all the wildness of nature, and not unfrequently insinuating themselves among the branches of myrtle-trees, which attain a considerable size in the hedge-rows, and contrasting their large, purple bunches with the snow-white blossom. The union is truly poetical, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various

... beauty of the prairie, and longing for it. "I suppose it's a matter of habit," she thought to herself. "There is certainly something that kindles your imagination in such a sight. It would be dreary if it weren't cultivated, but it must be wonderful to see a whole country reclaimed from wildness and made productive. 'Beauty for ashes' O!" and with a little shiver of pleasure, she repeated the lines that had so charmed her a few minutes before. "'The spirit of heaviness.' What a strange thing to include in the same message with the vengeance of the Lord! It makes blues ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett

... gaol, drew a short respite from the cordial; and he listened to my words with something of self-collectedness—albeit slight tremblings might still be seen to run along his nerves at intervals; and his features collapsed, ever and anon, into that momentary vacuity of wildness which the touch of despair never fails to give. I endeavoured to improve the occasion. I exhorted him, for his soul's sake, and the relief of that which needed it too much, to make a full and unreserved confession, not only to God, who needed it not, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various

... away from home on the Island of Maui, where he had gone to bargain with the Sun, a storm arose. The angry waters roared about the mouth of Hina's cave. They hissed and tossed in ugly blackness down the narrow river gorge; but Hina heard naught of the wildness without. Being used to the noisy cataract, her slumbers were not disturbed by the heightened tumult of ...
— Legends of Wailuku • Charlotte Hapai

... dusky son, In nature's wildness, proudly free, From where Missouri's waters run, Far north, to Hudson's ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young

... drowned all the others. They led him staggering away among them, and brought him to their vile resort. Even his companions wondered at his reckless demeanour, and expostulated with him on his extravagant wildness. He laughed them to scorn and called for more drink. After a while they rose to depart, leaving him where he was, ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed

... quarry above ground; Two Cupids squirt before; a lake behind Improves the keenness of the northern wind. His gardens next your admiration call, On every side you look, behold the wall! No pleasing intricacies intervene, No artful wildness to perplex the scene; Grove nods at grove, each alley has a brother, And half the platform just reflects the other. The suffering eye inverted Nature sees, Trees cut to statues, statues thick as trees With here ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope

... judge His people, and repent Himself for His servants." For so did the Lybian lion that was brought up under discipline, and taught to endure blows, and eat the meat of order and regular provision, and to suffer gentle usages and the familiarities of societies; but once He brake out into His own wildness, and killed two Roman boys; but those that forage in the Lybian mountains tread down and devour all that they meet or master; and when they have fasted two days, lay up an anger great as is their appetite, and bring ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser

... of you, the adorable wildness of you, you untamed thing! There were never any shades in you; kiss or kill was your motto, Alice. I felt from the first moment I saw you that you would love me ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie

... Montmorency are not immediately surrounded by any rugged scenery, calculated to strengthen and perpetuate the peculiar emotion which is excited by the first glimpse of the cascade, but the dreary wildness in the foliage of the encircling forest, the total absence of every vestige of human improvement, and the tumultuous waves and commotion and effulgence that incessantly occupy the mind and rivet the senses of the beholder in the survey of the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... faint; for apart from the wildness of the words thus abruptly and unexpectedly addressed to him, the hand of the Prince which lay upon his own, as if to keep him still, seemed to be pouring fire and madness into him. He tried to withdraw it, but the other ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various

... amongst great volcanic rocks, a toilsome ascent; and passes by the village of Ajusco, a miserable robber's nest. Yet the view, as we looked back from this barren tract, while the sun was breaking over the summits of the mountains, was very grand in its mixture of fertility and wildness, in its vast extent of plains and villages with their groves and gardens, and in its fine view of Mexico itself, white and glittering in the distance. The mountain of Ajusco, clothed with dark forests of pine, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca

... the lord of this world, as they irrigate his arid acres. Yet another turn and the wrathful river is carrying on its breast the tens of thousands of winter-cut logs dancing like straws on its frothy surface on their way to the busy mills; and the turbulent streams, their wildness tamed and harnessed, serve the needs of man ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan

... was put to a variety of trials. In vain she offered herself to the strangers of the village in which she was accidentally cast as a servant; her child, her dejected looks, her broken sentences, a wildness in her eye, a kind of bold despair which at times overspread her features, her imperfect story who and what she was, prejudiced all those to whom she applied; and, after thus travelling to several small towns and hamlets, the only employer she could obtain was a farmer; and the ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald

... "amusement park," and suburbs and crowded paths; and across the river is New York, in a solid mass of apartment-houses; but between Palisades and river, at the foot of the cliffs, is an unfrequented path which still keeps some of the wildness it had when it was a war-path of the Indians. It climbs ridges, twists among rocks, dips into damp hollows, widens out into tiny bowling-greens for Hendrik Hudson's fairy men. By night it is ghostly, and beside it the river whispers ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... conference meeting at Fischhof's house, was undoubtedly Dr. Becher, a passionate and exceedingly cultivated man. He was the only one present who seriously followed the reading of my plan, although, of course, he by no means agreed with everything. I observed in him a certain wildness and vehemence, the impression of which returned to me very vividly some months later, when I heard of his being shot as a rebel who had participated in the October Insurrection at Vienna. For the present, then, I had ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... 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 rational frenzy. ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... there was a prelude, bright and childlike; her hands, that had just now twisted and twined the aromatic greenery, exhaled the pungency of crushed herbage, and recalled her old girlish ramblings through the wildness of the Paradou. Then there came a flutelike song, a song of short musky notes, rising from the violets that lay upon the table near the head of the bed; and this flutelike strain, trilling melodiously to ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... it is largely broken into felspar, quartz, and mica, with schorl, chlorite, and hornblende. No great elevation is attained—nothing above 160 feet; the grandeur of the coasts, which certainly does not equal that of North Cornwall, consists in their rugged wildness and the fantastic weathering of their crags. Contorted formations, logans and rock-basins, reveal the decomposition of softer measures that has been proceeding for ages. The isles lie about 27 miles west of Land's End, but the journey from Penzance to St. Mary's is about 40 miles, and the small ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... forever," Aunt Fanny remarked. "That garage is charging him five dollars an hour for the automobile he's in, and surely even Joseph will decide there's a limit to wildness ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... about him for a refuge where he might flee from all society, and most of all from the spot where her presence seemed yet to linger. He discovered wild and solitary Culm Rock, and purchased the old stone house. Here, he thought, with the everlasting sound of the sea in his ears, with all the wildness and barrenness about him, and apart from the rest of mankind, he would bury himself, and forget all the bright and happy days which had passed. He left his friends without giving them any clew to his whereabouts, and with faithful old Hagar, who persisted in following him, took up ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord

... said, "we have nothing like this, but in the north, at least, we have odd bits of rugged grandeur where the wildness of the hills about one is emphasized by the green fertility of the valleys. There is a typical place where we spent a few months last year that I should like you to see. If you come back with us, as you half promised, we will ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... her hands she threw herself on her knees before the portrait, and gave way to all the bitterness and all the wildness of her grief. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... private taste of a stranger, his slight and superficial knowledge should humbly acquiesce in the judgment of a learned nation; yet I may hope or presume, that the Italians do not compare the tedious uniformity of sonnets and elegies with the sublime compositions of their epic muse, the original wildness of Dante, the regular beauties of Tasso, and the boundless variety of the incomparable Ariosto. The merits of the lover I am still less qualified to appreciate: nor am I deeply interested in a metaphysical passion ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... eye, nevertheless, they were still rich with beauty. They were picturesque in that sweetly impressive way where wildness, in a long lapse of years, has crept over scenes that have been once adorned with the careful art and toil of man; and when man could do no more for them, time and nature came, and wrought hand in hand to bring ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... was flung open. The young man who had followed Joan and Alec into the Louvre that morning rushed in. His pink and white face was crimson now, and his manner that of unmeasured, almost uncontrollable excitement. He gazed at them with a wildness that bordered on frenzy, yet it was clear that their own marked agitation was only what he ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... Mendocino to Mariposa, from Tahoe to the Farallones, lake, crag, or chasm, forest, mountain, valley, or island, river, bay, or jutting headland, every one bears the stamp of its own peculiar beauty, a singular blending of richness, wildness and warmth. Coastwise everywhere sea and mountains meet, and the surf of the cold Japanese current breaks in turbulent beauty against tall "rincones" and jagged reefs of rock. Slumbering amid the ...
— California and the Californians • David Starr Jordan

... officer made his appearance, they met of their own accord in free bands, with the view of pillaging the more peaceful districts and even of capturing and occupying towns, quite after the manner of the Campanians. The wildness and insecurity of the inland districts are attested by the fact that banishment into the interior westward of Cartagena was regarded by the Romans as a severe punishment, and that in periods of any excitement the Roman commandants of Further ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... lording it in power of thought and performance; he is a muffled imbecility, that can do nothing but hug and hide its existence, lest some careless breath of hers should blow it out; his pin-head taper must be kept under a bushel, or cease to be even the covert pettiness it is. The wildness of the North is not scenic and pictorial merely, but goes to the very heart of things, immeasurable, immitigable, infinite; deaf and blind to all but itself and its own, it prevails, it is, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... gesture of warning upon Marguerite's arm; it came none too sooe, for the next moment her wild, mad joy would have betrayed her. He was safe and well, was coming back here presently, she would see him in a few moments perhaps. . . . Oh! the wildness of her joy seemed almost more ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... solitary tract. The sea shuts it in on the 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



Words linked to "Wildness" :   intractability, willfulness, passion, fractiousness, intensity, tameness, passionateness, untamed, intractableness, wilfulness, intensiveness, savageness, wild, unruliness, savagery



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