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More "Austere" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grave and austere physiognomy, half-Spanish and half-scholastic; and it is easy for the imagination to people its quiet streets with the English and Irish students who frequented its collegiate halls from the days of Guy Faux to the days of ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... this, he had a Goodness of Nature and Disposition in so great a Degree that he may be deservedly styled a Philanthrope. He was a very Silenus to the Boys, as, in this Place, I may term the Students of the Law, to make them merry whenever they had a Mind to it. He had nothing of rigid or austere in him. If any, near him at the Bar, grumbled at his Stench, he ever converted the Complaint into Content and Laughing with the Abundance of his Wit. As to his ordinary Dealing, he was as honest as the driven Snow was white; and why not, ...
— Characters from 17th Century Histories and Chronicles • Various
... up in front of her and began to dance, not our Western dance of free limbs, but an Oriental dance from the hips with posturings of hands and feet. They sang a harsh faltering song without any apparent relation to the accompaniment played by that austere dame. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Count of Riverola toward the young Francisco, owed its origin to the total discrepancy of character existing between the father and son. Francisco was as amiable, generous-hearted, frank and agreeable as his sire was austere, stern, reserved and tyrannical. The youth was also unlike his father in personal appearance, his hair being of a rich brown, his eyes of a soft blue, and the general expression of his countenance indicating the fairest and ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... gentleman turned sharply with half-blind eyes, and lips tight shut. 'I think,' he said, with a hind of austere humour, 'I think, do you know, I see no "but."' He paused as if to catch the echo and added, 'It's our only course.' He continued to polish round and round his glasses. ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... mother, and the superadded torment of his Aunt Margaret's presence. Fazio Cardano was a man of rigorous sobriety, and he seems moreover to have atoned for his early irregularities by the practice of that austere piety which Jerome notices more than once as a characteristic of his old age.[177] The discipline was hard, and the life unlovely, but the home was at least decent and orderly, and no opportunities or provocations to loose manners or ill doing ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... to grief. [aa] Among ladies, look, don't talk. [ab] Don't laugh loud, or riot with ribalds. [ac] Don't repeat what you hear. [ad] Words make or mar you. [ae] If you follow a worthier man, let your right shoulder follow his back, and [af] don't speak till he has done. [ag] Be austere (?) in speech; [ah] don't stop any man's tale. [ai] Christ gives us all wit to know this, [ak] and ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... this great matter, I am not insensible to the austere demands of the occasion; but the dependence of the crime against Kansas upon the slave power is so peculiar and important, that I trust to be pardoned while I impress it with an illustration, which to some may seem trivial. It is related in Northern mythology that the god of ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour, and as if hovering in the air; looking towards him with severe countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of austere anger. At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another Knight, Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, whose stature was less gigantic; casting vengeful looks at him. This he seeing with his eyes, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... followed her. In the austere lines of her riding-habit he could see more clearly than he had yet done what a superb young image of health ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... ceremony, came the thrilling Recessional, which received as instant applause from the world as if it had been spoken to an audience. In its scriptural phraseology, in its combination of haughty pride and deep contrition, in its "holy hope and high humility," it expressed with austere majesty the genius of the English race. The soul of a great poet entered immediately into the hearts of men, ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... been a peace man. I have memories of a tall, rather austere person, yet of great kindliness, but it was the pretty, playful stepmother that made the most vivid impression. And now tell me of the little ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... murmured something cryptic about her having "no doubt been too busy," and seemed to have nothing further to say. The face of the lounge stewardess wore a peculiar expression. A quiet, rather austere-looking woman, she always behaved like a mummy in the doctor's presence, standing behind him with folded hands and mute lips. But when he had gone she came ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... happy; nor does she ever willingly part with any pleasure but in hopes of ample compensation in some other period of their lives. The sole trouble which she demands is that of just calculation, and a steady preference of the greater happiness. And if any austere pretenders approach her, enemies to joy and pleasure, she either rejects them as hypocrites and deceivers, or if she admit them in her train, they are ranked, however, among the least favoured ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... professed Severity discourage the looser Part of Mankind from having any thing to do with their Writings. A man must have Virtue in him, before he will enter upon the reading of a Seneca or an Epictetus. The very Title of a Moral Treatise has something in it austere and shocking to the Careless ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... difference is also found in sculpture. Kalon and Hegesias worked in a severe style, like that of the Etruscans; Kalamis was less austere; ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Then he was a god, to the red man's dreaming; Then the chiefs brought treasures grotesque and fair,— Magical trinkets and pipes and guns, Beads and furs from their medicine-lair,— Stuck holy feathers in his hair, Hailed him with austere delight. The orchard god was ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... train stopped at noon, Naval occupation of the North proclaimed itself. A Master-at-Arms, austere of visage and stentorian voiced, fell upon the weary voyagers like a collie rallying a flock of sheep. A Lieutenant-Commander of the Reserve, in a tattered monkey-jacket, was superintending the unstowing of bags and hammocks by a party of ancient mariners in white working rig ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... the boy had bounded across the floor and wrung the outstretched hand, his face radiant with delight. By the fire Ruth cried softly and the Colonel gently patted her dark head, his eyes full of tenderness. Then taking refuge from the sharp pain of his emotion in austere command: ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... Colombia's economy suffers from weak domestic and foreign demand, austere government budgets, and serious internal armed conflict. Other economic problems facing the new president URIBE range from reforming the pension system to reducing high unemployment. Two of Colombia's leading exports, oil and coffee, face an uncertain future; new exploration is needed to offset ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... done for you, England, my England? What is there I would not do, England, my own? With your glorious eyes austere, As the Lord were walking near, Whispering terrible things and dear As the Song on your bugles blown, England— Round the world on ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... general character of the Roman government was hard and austere, it was particularly so in what regarded the revenue. This revenue was either fixed or occasional. The fixed consisted, first, of an annual tax on persons and lands, but in what proportion to the fortunes of the one or the value of the other I have not been able ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... and temper so austere, he seemed to the Jesuits the heaven-called head for the Canadian Church; and it was doubtless through their influence, acting upon the Queen Mother, Anne of Austria, and Cardinal Mazarin, that Laval was appointed titular Bishop of Petraea, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... road and then stood still to gaze at the facade of the Sytch Pottery. It was a long two-storey building, purest Georgian, of red brick with very elaborate stone facings which contrasted admirably with the austere simplicity of the walls. The porch was lofty, with a majestic flight of steps narrowing to the doors. The ironwork of the basement railings was ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... this, crowds continued to come and he was transferred from monastery to monastery, but always with the same result—the crowd sought him to be healed. He was known as simple, open, and obedient in his relations with men, and austere toward himself. He was patient and resigned, compassionate toward the poor and sick, and full of zeal for their conversion. The number of patients he is said to have cured is incredible, and it is even said that he resuscitated three dead persons. After his death ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... has come to pass that the descendants of one of the most mercantile and gregarious of races, whose artists have won some of their chiefest triumphs in depicting the joyous episodes of crowded social life, have, through calling and environment, become lovers of solitude, austere, self-dependent, disposed rather to repel than to ...
— Story of the War in South Africa - 1899-1900 • Alfred T. Mahan
... determine, among many other future events, foretold the destruction of the Church of Rome, whose corruptions he censured with the greatest severity, and the promulgation of a new and more perfect gospel in the age of the Holy Ghost, by a set of poor and austere ministers, whom God was to raise up and ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... rose the mountains, the foothills green and dimpled, the slopes with their massed shadows of pines and oaks climbing upward and gashed with deep purple canons, and above them the great white, solemn peaks, austere and stately guardians of the desert which stretched away and away, its illimitable distances lost at ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... duties of a sovereign. Except the presence of Omar at the siege of Jerusalem, their longest expeditions were the frequent pilgrimage from Medina to Mecca; and they calmly received the tidings of victory as they prayed or preached before the sepulchre of the prophet. The austere and frugal measure of their lives was the effect of virtue or habit, and the pride of their simplicity insulted the vain magnificence of the kings of the earth. When Abubeker assumed the office of caliph, he enjoined his daughter Ayesha to take a strict ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... received in state by the two Governors, who delivered up to him the authority which, under the pressure of necessity, they had assumed. He remained only a few days; but he had time to show enough of the incurable vices of his character to disgust a population distinguished by austere morals and ardent public spirit. There was, however, no outbreak. The city was in the highest good humour. Such quantities of provisions had been landed from the fleet, that there was in every house a plenty ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in his day. That austere concealment of her heart, which so impassioned him, chilled enthusiasm in all others of her acquaintance. So her letters were few, and now she was thankful enough. She herself wrote to nobody, and never spoke of her future unless she ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... not without much hesitation and delay that Alexander ventured to excommunicate his heterodox presbyter with his chief followers, like Pistus, Carpones, and the deacon Euzoius—all of whom we shall meet again. Arius was a dangerous enemy. His austere life and novel doctrines, his dignified character and championship of 'common sense in religion,' made him the idol of the ladies and the common people. He had plenty of telling arguments for them. ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... relation towards it, a relation which will depend on the general discipline of a man's mind and the bias of his whole character. As far as knowledge and conscious reason will go, we should follow resolutely their austere guidance. When they cease, as cease they must, we must use as best we can those fainter powers of apprehension and surmise and sensitiveness by which, after all, most high truth has been reached as well as most high art and poetry: ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... spiritual advice; that since the death of his wife and only son, he had never been seen with a smile upon his face. To tell you the truth, I was surprised to hear sermons so full of heavenly benevolence and love breathed from the lips of such an austere ...
— George Leatrim • Susanna Moodie
... her share of the estate somewhat modified her grief in this instance. She had but slightly known her father; he had been home but seldom, and for brief visits. He was an austere man, very fine-looking, but silent and undemonstrative. She should not miss him so much, still his death was such a shock—as she was fond of repeating to her friends; she should never recover from the effects ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... When the Imam rose from his lectures, they used to join me, and we repeated to each other the lessons we had heard. Now Omar was a native of Naishapur, while Hasan Ben Sabbah's father was one Ali, a man of austere life and practice, but heretical in his creed and doctrine. One day Hasan said to me and to Khayyam, "It is a universal belief that the pupils of the Imam Mowaffak will attain to fortune. Now, if we all do not ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... quaint bar-room to the more private chambers upstairs. The chief glory of the Cheshire Cheese, however, is to be seen downstairs on the left hand of the principal entrance. This is the genuinely old-fashioned eating-room, with its rude tables, its austere seats round the walls, its sawdust-sprinkled floor, and, above all, its sacred nook in the further right hand corner which is pointed out as the favourite seat of Dr. Johnson. Above this niche is a ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... that, Grimhild so fascinated him that he was induced to espouse Gudrun, and all pledged their faith to Sigurd, and confirmed it by oaths. Sigurd gave Gudrun to eat of Fafnir's heart, and she became afterwards far more austere than before. Their son was ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... sways to and fro, like a mighty wind upon the waters, the hearts of assembled thousands at an Exeter Hall oratorio. To take an instance more striking still, Beethoven, the sublime, the rugged, the austere, is also, as even Mons. Jullien could tell us, fast becoming a popular favourite. Now why is this? Simply because these master minds, under the divine teaching of genius, have known how to clothe their works in a beauty of form incorporate with their very essence—a beauty of form which has ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... giving it to Mr. Baddeley, or Mr. Parsons: when Bensley was occasionally absent from the theatre, John Kemble thought it no derogation to succeed to the part. Malvolio is not essentially ludicrous. He becomes comic but by accident. He is cold, austere, repelling; but dignified, consistent, and, for what appears, rather of an over-stretched morality. Maria describes him as a sort of Puritan; and he might have worn his gold chain with honour in one of our old round-head families, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... governed by her mind but were solely directed by external circumstances. At court, humble, resigned, patient, attentive: at balls, masquerades, gaming-tables, and routs, gay, sprightly, and flippant; at her country seat, reserved, austere, arrogant, ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... an old, wrinkled and austere rustic, who seemed always to succumb to the pressure of new customs with a ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... Within their austere walls no voices penetrate; A sacred silence only, as of death, obtains; Nothing finds entry here of loud or passionate; This quiet is the exceeding ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... who is a priest and courtier, says, 'Well, descendant of Raghu, do not thou, so noble in sentiments, and austere in character, entertain, like a common man, this useless thought. What man is a kinsman of any other? What relationship has any one with another? A man is born alone and dies alone. Hence he who is attached to any one as his father or his mother, is to be regarded as if he were insane, ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... careful with him. And then, dearest Sarianna, you yourself have not been well. The grippe seems to have been bitter against you. This is the time of year when it generally rages, and even Pen has had a small cough, which makes me austere about hours. In fact, the weather in the north has reverberated here, and we have paid for our mild winter by a considerable lingering of cold wind, from snow on the mountains, they say. As for me, it's much to my disadvantage in getting air and ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... Irish, cast of countenance. He was scrupulously neat in his personal appearance, faultless in bands and necktie, and fond of wearing a flower in his button-hole. His chilly manner, coupled with his somewhat austere religious principles, had no doubt much to do with the fact that he was never a popular man. His friends claimed for him a keen sense of humour, but it was not to be detected by those whose knowledge of him was professional rather than personal. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... most simple and aspiring; and certainly most perfect among evergreens, with their straight, faintly carmined shoots, their pliable strong leaves so subtly rippled at the edge, and their clean, dry fragrance; delicate, austere, alert, serene; such ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... grow your hair for the marriage knot," Yunsan warned me one day, with the ghost of a twinkle in his austere eyes, more nearly facetious and human than I had ever ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... that this was the same haughty young girl who had once so proudly shown him Gania's letter. He could not understand how that proud and austere beauty could show herself to be such an utter child—a child who probably did not even now understand ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... have the pull of me somehow; Oh! I've read "Handbooks." I've attended Meetings Where angry ratepayers raise fruitless row; But, bless you, these bold roarings turn to bleatings, When they the cruel inquisition face Of some austere Committee of Assessment. Until I found myself in that dread place I never knew what fogged and foiled distress meant. Between them and my Landlord I've no peace. I'm honest, but they treat me as "a wrong one." I'm a Shopkeeper, holding ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... whose chapter consecrated to the glory of the gourd as a symbol of fruitfulness, enlivened him; with the poem in which Ermold the Dark, celebrating the exploits of Louis the Debonair, a poem written in regular hexameters, in an austere, almost forbidding style and in a Latin of iron dipped in monastic waters with straws of sentiment, here and there, in the unpliant metal; with the De viribus herbarum, the poem of Macer Floridus, who particularly ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... and conduct can hardly be overstated. In other cases there was extravagance and harm. Uncompromisingly, and not very intelligently, did they speak Scripture, think Scripture, and act Scripture, like Hebrews born out of due season. Knox invested himself with the austere authority of the Hebrew prophet; Calvin was fain to hew Agag in pieces before the Lord. The Puritans of England became fanatical in their sombre conception of sin and in the rigour of their exaggerated Hebraism. Here was the ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... a hundred times more austere, more honest, more objective. It no longer has to justify its pains, its susceptibility to suffering, by interpreting these things in terms of sin—it simply says, as it simply thinks, "I suffer." To the barbarian, however, suffering in itself is scarcely understandable: what he needs, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... or other in this 'chiaro fondo di Sorga,' as Carlyle describes, that Jourdain, the hangman-hero of the Glaciere, stuck fast upon his pony when flying from his foes, and had his accursed life, by some diabolical providence, spared for future butcheries. On we go across the austere plain, between fields of madder, the red roots of the 'garance' lying in swathes along the furrows. In front rise ash-grey hills of barren rock, here and there crimsoned with the leaves of the dwarf sumach. A huge cliff stands up and seems to bar all passage. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... even in its young affections than ever heretofore the countless volumes of the heart, race after race, have given to my gaze: there is yet a deep-buried feeling that warns me of inevitable woe. Thou austere and remorseless Hierophant,—thou who hast sought to convert to our brotherhood every spirit that seemed to thee most high and bold,—even thou knowest, by horrible experience, how vain the hope to banish FEAR from the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wonder, as she was thus thrown into closer contact with her aunt, whether Aunt Phoebe's austere tastes came from her having such a narrow nature, or because she had never known anything different. She could not help noticing that there were woefully few friends who came to see her during her indisposition. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... beside me — you, upon whose golden head Many rains of many sorrows have from day to day been shed; Who, because your love was noble, faced with me the lot austere Ever pressing with its hardship on the man of letters here — Let me feel that you are near me, lay your hand within mine own; You are all I have to live for, now that we are left alone. Three there were, but one has vanished. Sins of mine have made ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... prevalent in such places; a word which suggests Milton or Carlyle will have the flavour of those men's minds about it. I therefore cannot resist the conclusion that, if the language of Greek poetry has, to those who know it intimately, this special quality of keen austere beauty, it is because the minds of the poets who used that language were habitually toned to a higher level both of intensity and of nobility than ours. It is a finer language because it expresses the minds of finer men. By 'finer men' I do ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... occupants walking like figures in some ancient ceremony, were moving slowly toward the far end of the room. One by one, as they filed past, they raised their calm, passionless faces to mine, immensely vital, proud, austere, and then, without further word or gesture, they opened the door I had lost and disappeared through it one by one into the darkness of the night beyond. And as they went it seemed that the mist swallowed ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... Pandanus there is a graceful species at elevations of 1000 to 4000 feet ("Borr," Lepcha).] The fourth striking feature is a wild plantain, which ascends to nearly the same elevation ("Lukhlo," Lepcha). This is replaced by another, and rather larger species, at lower elevations; both ripen austere and small fruits, which are full of seeds, and quite uneatable; that commonly grown in Sikkim is an introduced stock (nor have the wild species ever been cultivated); it is very large, but poor in flavour, and does not bear seeds. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... thou carve thy speech laboriously, And match and blend thy words with curious art? For Song, one saith, is but a human heart Speaking aloud, undisciplined and free. Nay, God be praised, Who fixed thy task for thee! Austere, ecstatic craftsman, set apart From all who traffic in Apollo's mart, On thy phrased ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... and his face was marked with an expression that it vexed her she could not put a name to, for if at her age she could not read human nature like a book she never would. It was not hunger, for it was serene, and it was not greed, for it was austere, and yet it certainly signified that he habitually made upon life some urgent demand that was not wholly intellectual and that had not been wholly satisfied. As she wondered a slight retraction of his chin and a drooping of his heavy eyelids warned her, by their likeness to the controlled ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... nerves, Faustina," replied her father in austere tones. "If the young man is dead, it is the will of Heaven. If he is alive we shall soon find it out. Meanwhile I must beg you to be calm—to ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... love me. What does it matter? I love you; that is the important thing to me. I thank you for that eternal possession. Let it be a dream, austere and pure. Passion has its own ascetic cell, where it can fast and scourge itself. I ask you for nothing, Blanche. I am yours wholly. Do what you ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter
... My mother died long ago, and her unmarried sisters took care of me. They lived very simply in a small secluded country house: two old-fashioned Evangelicals, gentle but austere, studying small economies, giving all they could away. In winter we embroidered for missionary bazaars; in summer we spent the days in a quiet, walled garden. It was all very peaceful, but I grew restless; and when I heard that my father's health was failing I felt that I ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... impersonate the worship of Venus Urania,—spiritual tenderness overcoming sensual desire. Thus faithful to the traditions of this great poet did the austere Michael Angelo do reverence to the virtues of Vittoria Colonna. Thus did the lofty Corneille present in his Pauline a divine model of the love which inspires great deeds and accompanies great virtues. Thus did Shakspeare, in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... so long a time to elapse without even a letter; and that, too, after so many promises and protestations. I cannot think what to do unless we send him the ring which was to be the token of recognition. But which of these austere hermits could we ask to be the bearer of it? Then, again, Father Kanwa has just returned from his pilgrimage; and how am I to inform him of [S']akoontala's marriage to King Dushyanta, and her expectation of becoming soon a mother? ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... manners as they existed at the end of the eighteenth century, George Crabbe, devotes a whole poem to the parish clerk in his nineteenth letter of The Borough. He tells of the fortunes of Jachin, the clerk, a grave and austere man, fully orthodox, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, and detecter and opposer of the wiles of Satan. Here is ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... convent—even a hermit's cell Would break the silence of this dell— It is not quiet—is not ease, But something deeper far than these. The separation that is here Is of the grave, and of austere And happy feelings of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... confer pleasure while almost incapable of either inflicting or receiving pain. To this day his exceptional fortune stands Raphael's memory in good stead, since for one man or woman who yearns after the austere righteousness and priceless tenderness of Michael Angelo, there are ten who yield with all their hearts to the gay, sweet gentleness and generosity of Raphael. No doubt it was also in his favour as a painter, that though a man of highly cultivated tastes, 'in close intimacy and correspondence ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... of the fraternity, but he seldom came to the farm. Meanwhile the enterprise was considered an unspeakable folly, or worse, by the conservative circle of Boston. In Boston, where a very large part of the 'leaders' of society in every way were Unitarians, Unitarian conservatism was peremptory and austere. The entire circle of which Mr. Ticknor was the centre or representative, the world of Everett and Prescott and their friends, regarded Transcendentalism and Brook Farm, its fruit, with good-humored wonder as with Prescott, ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... leave of her daughter, the queen dowager went, before leaving France, to see her own mother, who was a widow, and who was living at a considerable distance from Paris in seclusion, and in a state of austere and melancholy grief, on account of the loss of her husband. Instead of forgetting her sorrows, as she ought to have done, and returning calmly and peacefully to the duties and enjoyments of life, she had given herself up to inconsolable grief, and was doing all she could to perpetuate ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... for I know something of the soul of the East, but it would be too long a story to tell now. The West knows nothing of the true Oriental. It pictures him as lapped in colour and idleness and luxury and gorgeous dreams. But it is all wrong. The Kaf he yearns for is an austere thing. It is the austerity of the East that is its beauty and its terror ... It always wants the same things at the back of its head. The Turk and the Arab came out of big spaces, and they have the desire of them in their bones. They ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... mean either to say, as some do, that the French mind has very little of the religious element. The very sweetest and softest, as well as the most austere and rigid type of piety has been given by the French mind; witness Fenelon and John Calvin—Fenelon standing as the type of the mystic, and Calvin of the rationalistic style of religion. Fenelon, with his heart so sweet, so childlike, so simple and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was refined, for Mr. Bertie Tremaine combined the Sybarite with the Utilitarian sage, and it secretly delighted him to astonish or embarrass an austere brother republican by the splendour of his family plate or the polished appointments of his household. To-day the individual to be influenced was Endymion, and the host, acting up to his ideal of a first minister, addressed questions to his companions on the subjects which were peculiarly their ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... faith. Even to-day, it must be admitted, science calms neither our thirst for justice, our desire for safety, nor our everlasting idea of happiness after life in an eternity of enjoyment. To one and all it only brings the austere duty to live, to be a mere contributor in the universal toil; and how well one can understand that hearts should revolt and sigh for the Christian heaven, peopled with lovely angels, full of light and music and perfumes! Ah! to embrace one's ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... he had passed, indeed, into a different world as he followed Count Sabatini's austere looking butler across the white stone hall into the cool dining-room, where the little party which he had come to join was already at luncheon. Outside, an unexpected heat seemed to have baked the streets and drained the very life from the air. Here the blinds were closely drawn; ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... comrades knew and loved in him. Presently the Spanish captain, Don Fadrique Mendez, approached him; he was a youth like the other, and was equally skilled in martial exercises, but he was generally as austere and thoughtful as Heimbert was cheerful and gentle. "Pardon, Senor," began the solemn Spaniard, "if I disturb you in your meditations. But as I have had the honor of often seeing you as a courageous warrior and faithful brother in amrs ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... in time and circumstance, and not in essential nature. The Puritan maiden, with all her homely culture and rough surroundings, is really as poetic a personage as any of Spenser's exquisite individualizations of abstract feminine excellence; perhaps more so, as the most austere and exalted spiritualities of Christianity enter into the constitution of her nature, and her soul moves in a sphere of religious experience compared with which "fairy-land" is essentially low and earthy. She is an angel as well as a woman; yet the height of her meditations ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... asked a question," said Austere; "far be it from me to impugn any man who has held offices in the gift of the people for ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... this sort—he is very common in the United States, and almost as common among the middle classes of England, Germany and Scandinavia—does himself a serious disservice, and that he is uneasily conscious of it. Having got himself a wife to his austere taste, he finds that she is rather depressing—that his vanity is almost as painfully damaged by her emotional inertness as it would have been by a too provocative and hedonistic spirit. For the thing that chiefly ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... explicit than might be surmised from a study of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to the will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated and superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did know so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect for his character, but ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... about Battle Abbey. Southward, and the way of the setting sun, the Downs ran out in huge spurs, line behind line of them, into the shining splendour of the sea, to break off abruptly in the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. The hills were bare and bleak in their austere yet rounded strength, stripped of trees, clothed only in resplendent gorse, here a squat haystack dumped upon a ridge against the sky, there a great patch of plough let ...
— Boy Woodburn - A Story of the Sussex Downs • Alfred Ollivant
... at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me. Wordsworth is the only simple-minded man I ever loved, if that great austere mind, chill even as the Cumberland year, can be called simple. But Hugo is not perverse, nor even personal. Reading him was like being in church with a strident-voiced preacher shouting from out of a terribly sonorous pulpit. "Les Orientales." An East ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... reconciled to the Catholic church, and the conquest of Britain reflects less glory on the name of Caesar, than on that of Gregory the First. Instead of six legions, forty monks were embarked for that distant island, and the pontiff lamented the austere duties which forbade him to partake the perils of their spiritual warfare. In less than two years, he could announce to the archbishop of Alexandria, that they had baptized the king of Kent with ten thousand of his Anglo-Saxons, and that the Roman missionaries, like those of the primitive ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... Infessura, whom, by the way, he translates with an amazing freedom,(2) and he makes bold to add regarding Gianandrea Boccaccio that: "It must also be said that the ambassador of Ferrara, either because he did not see everything, or because he was less austere than Infessura, was not shocked by the comedies, etc." ("soit qu'il n'ait pas tout vu, soit qu'il ait ete moins austere ...
— The Life of Cesare Borgia • Raphael Sabatini
... nature of things by the process of reason and induction. It would be a denial of the dignity of human nature and the relative importance of the faculties with which we are endowed, were we to condemn at one time austere reason engaged in investigating causes and their natural connections, and at another that exercise of the imagination which prompts and excites discoveries by its ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... from Les Miserables, the most famous character of the book, Jean Valjean, an ex-convict, takes his first step toward final regeneration by meeting Bishop D. The Bishop, known also as Monseigneur Welcome, voluntarily lived a simple and austere life with his sister and old housekeeper, but had humored his one weakness by retaining his table silver ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... rejoice to know that the number of good cottagers every year grows larger. At his best though he may be stern in the assertion of his rights of property, there is no simpler, honester gentleman than he, and the moral earnestness with the want of which the more austere boarder has been apt to reproach him, grows very rapidly after he gets his lawn made and ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... oath I will not trust; but go with speed To some forlorn and naked hermitage, Remote from all the pleasures of the world; There stay until the twelve celestial signs Have brought about the annual reckoning. If this austere insociable life Change not your offer made in heat of blood, If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds, Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love, But that it bear this trial, and last love, ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... his good and faithful wife. But when it comes to dealing with human beings anything, anything may be expected. So even my astonishment did not last very long. How far she developed and illustrated that conscienceless and austere doctrine to the girl-friends, who were mere transient shadows to her husband, I could not tell. Any length I supposed. And he looked on, acquiesced, approved, just for that very reason—because these pretty girls were but shadows to him. O! Most virtuous Fyne! He cast his eyes down. He didn't ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... solemn and austere, and so ponderous, and egotistical, and calm—yes, you are hatefully calm and ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... sort of thing, And a monk with a book, and a monk with a bell, And "dear linen souls," In clean linen stoles, Swinging their censers, and making a smell.— And see where the Choir-master walks in the rear With front severe And brow austere, Now and then pinching a little boy's ear When he chants the responses too late or too soon, Or his Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La's not quite in tune. (Then you know They'd a "movable Do," Not a fix'd one as now—and of course never knew How to set up a musical Hullah-baloo.) It was, in sooth, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... to make the most of any given place, and we have much in our own power. Things looked at patiently from one side after another generally end by showing a side that is beautiful. A few months ago some words were said in the Portfolio as to an "austere regimen in scenery"; and such a discipline was then recommended as "healthful and strengthening to the taste." That is the text, so to speak, of the present essay. This discipline in scenery,[2] it must be understood, is something more than a mere walk before breakfast to whet the ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the very atmosphere of "The Playboy of the Western World," would be out of place in any telling of the greatest of old Irish legends; so it is that Synge has found for "Deirdre of the Sorrows," or rather for its great moments, an austere epic speech that seems native to the story. The passionate words are nobly adequate to the passionate resignation they have to tell, a resignation that has come of the unwilling belief of the lovers that so great a love as theirs ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... whose faith austere Pretends alone to point th' eternal road; Proud of his creed, pronounce with voice severe, All else excluded ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... this state it has an agreeable sweetness, and will not intoxicate. In the other two states it has undergone a fermentation, and received an infusion of certain herbs and roots, by which it loses its sweetness, and acquires a taste very austere and disagreeable. In one of these states it's called Tuac cras, and in the other Tuac cuning, but the specific difference I do not know; in both, however, it intoxicates very powerfully. A liquor called ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... which shaded the second floor windows. The doors in that house had a short-waisted effect with little panels above and long panels below. I had a chamber so clean and small that I called it in my mind the Monk's Cell, nearly filled with the high posted bed, the austere table and chairs. The whitewashed walls were bare of pictures, except a painted portrait of Stephen Williams, pastor of Longmeadow from 1718 to 1783. Daily his laughing eyes watched me as if he found my pretensions a great joke. He had a long nose, and a high forehead. His black hair crinkled, ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... to fatigue, to the insidious whispering of mere flesh. He was a man without temptation, with an untroubled allegiance to a duty that involved an endless, exacting labor; and for those reasons he was austere, withdrawn from the community of more fragile and sympathetic natures. At times his inflexible integrity oppressed John Woolfolk. Halvard, he thought, was a difficult ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... recognized among these three figures the well-known face and form of his friend Hawbury. With Hawbury was a lady whom the Baron remembered having seen once in the upper hall of a certain house in Rome, on a memorable occasion, when he stood on the stairs calling Min. The lady was very austere then, but she was very gracious now, and very wonderfully sweet in the expression of her face. And with them was a stranger in the garb ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... to her own austere and handsome home in Westhaven, now the property of her uncle and aunt, Mr. Richard Fenton and Miss Victoria Fenton. If Memory Frean and her uncle had not ceased to care for each other perhaps there would have been no little House ...
— The Girl Scouts in Beechwood Forest • Margaret Vandercook
... untracked, unstained snow swept in undulating breadth to the deep shadow of the great building, which rose against the sky as cold, as seamless, as if it were cut from solid ice. The yellow flare of lamps about its base only added to its austere majesty. It was at its best, and Ida and Bradley looked up at it in silence, hearing the jingle of bells, the soft voices of the negro drivers, the laughter of children coasting on the mall, and the muffled ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... broke down, her voice stuck in her throat, but her eyes ought to have been enough. They were big and shining eyes, and when she made them appealing they had been known to work wonders with father and mother and other grown-ups, even with the austere Professor Sutton. But this burly figure in the baggy blue uniform had a face more like a wooden Indian than a human grown-up—and an old, dyspeptic wooden Indian at that. Missy's eyes were to avail her nothing ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... found its exponent in John Wycliffe, the great forerunner of the Reformation, whose austere figure stands out above the crowd of notables in English history, with an outline not unlike that of another forerunner ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... he departed a Minerva, not stately nor austere, not marching in warlike majesty, but gay ...
— Cecilia Volume 1 • Frances Burney
... parsley;[729] and to the Romans, earthen jars of wine, and hogs' flesh, and figs and gourds, and bundles of wood, at the thrift of which gifts some laughed, but others treated the matter in a respectful way, seeing the austere and serious countenance of Cato imperceptibly assuming a pleasant expression. Finally, Favonius, mingling with, the crowd and sitting among the spectators, applauded Cato, and called out to him to give to those who were ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive, austere, strangely sad. Yesterday here, as on every evening, lights burned, the most rollicking of music rang out, blue tobacco smoke swirled, men and women careered in couples, shaking their hips and throwing their legs on high. And the entire street shone on the outside with the red lanterns ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... Republican. Four years ago, the fulfilment of the last of these alternatives appeared most probable. But the democratic movements of 1848 were sternly repressed in 1849. The absolute authority of a single ruler, and the austere stillness of martial law, are now paramount in the capitals of the continent, which lately owned no sovereignty save the will of the multitude; and where that which the democrat calls his sacred right of insurrection, ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... British Museum to respectable people on Sunday, has lately been the subject of some discussion. I think it would puzzle the most austere of the Sunday legislators to assign any valid reason for opposing so sensible a proposition. The Museum contains rich specimens from all the vast museums and repositories of Nature, and rare and curious fragments of the mighty works of ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... brought up in the austere quiet of a small New England town, where life was sad and manners grave, and when about eighteen served for a while in the portion of our army then acting in the North. The life of adventure dissatisfied me with my too quiet home, and when ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... her sobs were so violent and uncontrollable that Deerslayer was a little appalled, and he was abundantly repentant from the instant that he discovered how much greater was the effect produced by his words than he had anticipated. Even the austere and exacting are usually appeased by the signs of contrition, but the nature of Deerslayer did not require proofs of intense feelings so strong in order to bring him down to a level with the regrets felt by the girl herself. He arose, as if an adder had stung him, and the accents ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... learnt that you were about to give them a new Rule above the strength of man to endure, have engaged me to come here, in my capacity of vicar-general, to entreat you to modify it, because they will not receive it, if it is too austere." ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... patience with such doctrines, and scantly with such men," said John. "They would 'make the heart of the righteous sad, whom God hath not made sad.' They show our loving and merciful Father as an harsh, stern ruler, 'an austere man,' meting out to His servants no more joy nor comfort than He can help. For joy that is put on is not joy. If it arise not of itself, 'tis not worth having. Paul saith, 'As sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing;' ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... was an austere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father's ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... frequently acted inconsistently with the philosophic character; a thing as common with philosophers as with other men. Aristotle had nothing of the austerity of the philosopher, though his works are so austere: he was open, pleasant, and even charming in his conversation; fiery and volatile in his pleasures; magnificent in his dress. He is described as fierce, disdainful, and sarcastic. He joined to a taste for profound erudition, that of an elegant dissipation. His passion for ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the part of the listener, we should avoid thinking of the form as mechanical in any derogatory sense, but rather as a means to a definite artistic end. Certainly no greater mistake can be made than that of considering Bach, the supreme master of polyphonic writing, as too austere, too involved, for the delight and edification of every-day mortals. Bach means brook, and the name[41] is most appropriate; for Bach is a never ceasing stream of musical life, the fountain-head from which spring the leading tendencies ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... like old times when, at that hour, I found myself seated beside him in a hansom, my revolver in my pocket and the thrill of adventure in my heart. Holmes was cold and stern and silent. As the gleam of the street-lamps flashed upon his austere features I saw that his brows were drawn down in thought and his thin lips compressed. I knew not what wild beast we were about to hunt down in the dark jungle of criminal London, but I was well assured from the bearing of this master huntsman that the adventure was a ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was encompassed by the scenes and the sounds of familiar life; the din of a busy world still vexed and cheered me; the unveiled faces of women still shone in the light of day. Yet, whenever I chose to look southward, I saw the Ottoman’s fortress—austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube—historic Belgrade. I had come, as it were, to the end of this wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... suggested themselves since I had been in this house; and being determined not to allow myself to fall into a reverie which at this moment might be dangerous, I gave up consideration of all kinds, and yielded myself wholly to the pleasure of my ramble. And it was a pleasure! For however solemn and austere might be the interior of the Pollard mansion, without here on the lawn all was cheeriness, bloom, and verdure; the grim row of cedars encircling the house seeming to act as a barrier beyond which its gloom and ...
— The Mill Mystery • Anna Katharine Green
... its final revelation to the completion of this great idea-we could not possess it in its total effulgence, it is, however, certain that an immense advance was made, a prodigious usurpation across the realms of chaos, by the grand illuminations of the Hebrew discoveries. Too terrifically austere we must presume the Hebrew idea to have been: too undeniably it had not withdrawn the veil entirely which still rested upon the Divine countenance; so much is involved in the subsequent revelations of Christianity. But still the advance made in reading aright the divine ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... by the creation of woman's character, by introducing into mediaeval poetry, hitherto hard and austere, the nuances of love, that the Breton romances brought about this curious metamorphosis. It was like an electric spark; in a few years European taste was changed. Nearly all the types of womankind known to the Middle Ages, Guinevere, Iseult, Enid, are derived from Arthur's court. ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... me, but remarked to no one in particular that "an austere manner is a poor passport in this country," which implied that I was new to the East, and would learn better if I stayed long enough. I ignored the remark, somewhat pleased that I had rebuffed him, for I well knew ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... confined to the Celts. The Phrygians doted on a sombre and mysterious religion. In heathen times they loved the worship of Cybele, with its exciting ceremonial and cruel mutilations. And when they adopted Christianity, though their morality was generally austere, their credulity was intense. In the 2nd century many of them embraced the new revelations of Montanus, and in the 4th they largely affected the hard Puritanism of Novatian. In religious matters the Celts are very little {152} inclined ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... player and listened. I had heard Mademoiselle sing that wonderful song, "Adelaide," and she had sung it divinely. But I would have given a dozen "Adelaide's" for that simple air, rendered by no voice, but merely by sympathetic fingers on those austere keys. I listened, as I say, and into my heart crept something—I know not what—that gave me a feeling of fulness of heart, of a surcharge of strange ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... about this church and this convent, famous as having been the abode of Thomas Aquinas, was calculated to fire the enthusiasm of Bruno's soul; the leisure and quiet, far from inducing habits of indolence, or the sterile practices of asceticism, were stimulants to austere study, and to the fervour of mystical speculations. Here he passed nearly thirteen years of early manhood, until his intellect strengthened by study he began to long for independence of thought, and becoming, as he said himself, solicitous about the ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... on an austere look. It was an insult to the divine powers to assert that they had taken the part of a race horse. But he turned the point to his own ends. "It's quite wrong to abuse the noble animal; and that's one reason why I hold that ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... witness that I think her mere dust and ashes in comparison with you, and shall continue to think so, unless you drive me from you by too much severity. She is a daughter of earth; you are an angel of heaven; only be not too austere in your divinity, and remember that I am a poor, fallible mortal. Come now, Helen; won't you forgive me?' he said, gently taking my hand, and looking up with ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the exclusion of all the serious and religious aims which, in any other case, he would have been the first to acknowledge as the object he ought to pursue. For he had been brought up among the Quakers, and shared in their austere distrust of a self-seeking spirit; yet what else but self-seeking was his passionate prayer, 'Give me Sylvia, or else, I die?' No other vision had ever crossed his masculine fancy for a moment; his was a rare and constant love that deserved a better fate than it met with. At this time ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... products of the orchards and gardens surpassed description. Bread came from the laboratory, and not from the soil by the sweat of the brow. Toil was unknown; the toil that we know, menial, degrading and harassing. Science had been the magician that had done away all that. Science, so formidable and austere to our untutored minds, had been gracious to these fair beings and opened the door to nature's most occult secrets. The beauty of those women it is not in my power to describe. The Greeks, in their highest art, never rivalled it, for here was a beauty of mind that no art can represent. They ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... Grand Ducal stables. Two flunkies in the Grand Duke's livery took my luggage, escorted me to the carriage and I was driven up to the old castle. The landau took me to a side entrance and I was promptly shown into an austere and unpretentious chamber. Scarcely had I entered when a quiet, elderly, benevolent-looking gentleman dressed in a shooting jacket appeared in another doorway, evidently much perturbed. I at once recognized him as the old Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerein. He appraised me for ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... horrible! We are told that five thousand priests chanted night and day in the Great Temple, to the honour and in the service of the monstrous idols, who were anointed thrice a day with the most precious perfumes; and that of these priests the most austere were clothed in black, their long hair dyed with ink, and their bodies anointed with the ashes of burnt scorpions and spiders; their chiefs were ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... look solemn on occasion, but his dreams were satisfied at the sight of men like Drumsheugh and Hillocks in their Sabbath blacks. Nature lent an initial advantage in face, but it was an instinct in the blood that brought our manner to perfection, and nothing could be more awful than a group of those austere figures, each man gazing into vacancy without a trace of expression, and refusing to recognise his nearest neighbour by word or look. Drumtochty gave itself to a "beerial" with chastened satisfaction, partly because it lay near to the ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... money from the cook. In a little time, Shorsha, there was scarcely anything going on in the house but card-playing; the almoner played with me, and so did the sub-rector, and I won money from both; not too much, however, lest they should tell the rector, who had the character of a very austere man, and of being a bit of a saint; however, the thief of a porter, whose money I had won, informed the rector of what was going on, and one day the rector sent for me into his private apartment, and gave me so long and pious a lecture upon the heinous ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... character gives them the slightest pretence for supposing that his bold advocacy of liberal views is connected with any ulterior designs or any "fatted calf" of theory or office. While he is thus healthily free from the taint of the partisan, he is also independent of the austere insensibility of the judicial Pharisee, whose boast is that he decides questions relating to human nature without any admixture of human instinct and human feeling. Mr. Motley, throughout his History, writes from his heart as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... childish sports call forth Intellect, Activity, so the young creature's Imagination was stirred up, and a Historical tendency given him by the narrative habits of Father Andreas; who, with his battle-reminiscences, and gray austere yet hearty patriarchal aspect, could not but appear another Ulysses and 'much-enduring Man.' Eagerly I hung upon his tales, when listening neighbors enlivened the hearth; from these perils and these travels, wild and far almost as Hades itself, a ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... merchant looked into Officer Burke's face, and, as others had done, was inspired by its honesty and candor. He felt that here might be a friend in time of trouble. Most of the policemen he knew were austere and cynical. He leaned toward Burke and spoke in ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her curiously—at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything was scrupulously clean, but the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury struck poignantly on ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... beautiful studies of childhood—Rebecca's artistic, unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand put midst a circle of austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenomenal ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... favor and esteem he was highly indebted, he could not escape the suspicion of being accessory to a deed from whence he derived the principal advantage. He enjoyed, at least, before his elevation, an acknowledged character of virtue and abilities; [65] but his austere temper insensibly degenerated into moroseness and cruelty; and the imperfect writers of his life almost hesitate whether they shall not rank him in the number of Roman tyrants. [66] When Carus assumed the purple, he was about sixty years of age, and his two sons, Carinus ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... along one of the well-kept turnpikes that wind about the Warm Springs Valley. He recognized the austere and solemn beauty that hemmed him in from the far-off outer world; but at the same time he was contrasting it with the sea-coast of his native State, Massachusetts, and a certain creeping homesickness began to rise ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... perfect and whose dress never strikes the eye, but which seems to have developed on them as the natural foliage of their persons. He had a high appreciation of the enjoyments of life—vanity, ostentation, good eating, and even the austere joys of the family. At home with his wife he illustrated the tender assiduity of the young husband; abroad he was the personification of a youth just freed from parental discipline. While his wife was the happiest woman in Paris, he was rendering Miss Stille equally ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe
... austere nights of midnight oil, all the books I had read, all the wisdom I had gathered, went glimmering before the ape and tiger in me that crawled up from the abysm of my heredity, atavistic, competitive ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... and other similar strong expressions, for the purpose of exaggeration, are easily found; and, mild as Marcus Cato is in his disposition, yet in his speeches he is not only vehement, but sometimes even austere. What new thing, let me ask, have the matrons done in coming out into public in a body on an occasion which nearly concerns themselves? Have they never before appeared in public? I will turn over your own Antiquities,[1] and quote them against you. Hear, now how often ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius
... Wiltshire, on the 1st of May 1672. A fanciful mind might trace a correspondence between the particular months when celebrated men have been born and the peculiar complexion of their genius. Milton, the austere and awful, was born in the silent and gloomy month of December. Shakspeare, the most versatile of all writers, was born in April, that month of changeful skies, of sudden sunshine, and sudden showers. Burns and Byron, those stormy spirits, both appeared in the fierce January; and of the former, ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... as he listened to the boy; but he was an austere man, and would not utter a word to make the child think ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... Margaret Godolphin was one of the Queen's Maids of Honour at the Court of Charles II., and was distinguished for the delicate purity of her nature, as well as for her high intellectual attainments. Some of the extracts Evelyn gives from her Diary seem to show an austere, formal, almost ascetic spirit; but it was inevitable that a nature so refined as hers should have turned in horror from such ideals of life as were presented by men like Buckingham and Rochester, like Etheridge, Killigrew, and Sedley, like the King himself, to whom ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... service,) finally fixed himself at Amherstburgh. In the neighbourhood of this post he had acquired extensive possessions, and, almost from the first formation of the settlement, exchanged the duties of a military, for those of a scarcely less active magisterial, life. Austere in manner, severe in his administration of justice, Major Grantham might have been considered a harsh man, had not these qualities been tempered by his well known benevolence to the poor, and his staunch, yet, unostentatious, support of the deserving ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... through—a gorge where day-long a shadowy gloom hung among the fern-fringed rocks, and where the austere wildness of dripping cliffs and forbidding woods seemed a stage set ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... to-day was in a mood of 'sweet austere composure' quite becoming to her style of beauty; her naive nonchalance at times is rather stimulating. What a contrast between her and la belle Francaise!—all the difference that there is between a diamond and a flower. I find the little thing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... there then need that prescience should try, By ordeal pitiless, assured event, Disclosed beforehand to prophetic eye? Need was there, by austere experiment, To test the frailty and the fall foreknown Of man, beneath o'erwhelming burthen bent? In this was tutelar prevision shown? Hardly may he, in such belief confide, Who sees his fellow myriads left to groan In barren penance, without light or guide, ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... old age; Dishonour'd by his only child, And all his hospitality To the insulted daughter of his friend By more than woman's jealousy Brought thus to a disgraceful end— He rolled his eye with stern regard Upon the gentle minstrel bard, And said in tones abrupt, austere— "Why, Bracy! dost thou loiter here? I bade thee hence!" The bard obeyed; And turning from his own sweet maid, The aged knight, Sir Leoline, Led forth the ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... 1635, and the Jesuits had lost a staunch friend and never-failing protector. His successor, however, was Charles Huault de Montmagny, a knight of Malta, a man of devout character, thoroughly in sympathy with the missions. Under Montmagny's rule New France became as austere as Puritan ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... anything to do, never again anything to do. All her young life at the convent had been preoccupied with the future, busied with dreams. The constant excitement of hope filled her hours at that time, so that she was not aware of their flight. Then hardly had she left those austere walls, where her illusions had unfolded, than her expectations of love were at once realized. The longed-for lover, met, loved and married within a few weeks, as one marries on these sudden resolves, had carried her off ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... possessions—we pass, after distributing the necessary largesse to the sacristan, to a turnstile which admits, on payment of a lira, to the Chapel of the Princes and to Michelangelo's sacristy. Here is contrast, indeed: the sacristy, austere and classic, and the chapel a very exhibition building of floridity and coloured ornateness, dating from the seventeenth century and not finished yet. In paying the necessary fee to see these buildings one thinks again what the feelings of Giovanni ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... formerly thought desirable, in the relaxation of morals which prevailed in Venice, to institute the office of censor, three magistrates were elected bearing this title; but it seemed so harsh and austere in that dissipated city, that these reformers of manners were compelled to change their title; when they were no longer called censors, but I signori sopra il bon vivere della citta, all agreed on the propriety of the office under the softened term. Father ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... home on purpose to give up a whole evening to them. I have gone through all; your own manuscript, which I envy Mr. Gough, his specimen, and the four letters to you from the latter and Mr. Steevens. I am glad they were both satisfied with my reception. In truth, you know I am neither formal nor austere, nor have any grave aversion to our antiquities, though I do now and then divert myself with their solemnity about arrant trifles; yet perhaps we owe much to their thinking those trifles of importance, or the Lord knows how they would have patience to investigate them so indefatigably. ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... man's room, comfortable, austere, scholarly. The refuge of a busy man, to judge by the piles of books and papers which littered the large open writing-table. There were despatch boxes turned upside down, a sea of parchment and foolscap. In the midst of it all a man deep ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... carve thy speech laboriously, And match and blend thy words with curious art? For Song, one saith, is but a human heart Speaking aloud, undisciplined and free. Nay, God be praised, Who fixed thy task for thee! Austere, ecstatic craftsman, set apart From all who traffic in Apollo's mart, On thy phrased paten ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... economy has experienced positive growth over the past three years despite a serious armed conflict. The economy continues to improve in part because of austere government budgets, focused efforts to reduce public debt levels, an export-oriented growth strategy, an improved security situation in the country, and high commodity prices. Ongoing economic problems ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... of the expression of a refined nature. For the poor lady who pitifully lamented the calamity which had "reduced her to elegance" indicated no slight deprivation; proper clothing for the occasions of life being both to men and women one of those great decencies demanded by an austere and ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... In the second volume, Guido, servile and false, is followed by Caponsacchi, as noble alike in conception and execution as anything that Mr. Browning has ever achieved. In the third volume, the austere pathos of Pompilia's tale relieves the too oppressive jollity of Don Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini; while in the fourth, the deep wisdom, justice, and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile us to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in the confession of Guido, now ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Miles, we are led back to the days of the eleventh century. He is an accurate and picturesque chronicler of that iron, yet chivalrous age. If on the one hand, we see the sinister figure of Henry IV of Germany, on the other we find the austere but noble monk Hildebrand, who became Pope St. Gregory VII. We hear the clash of swords drawn in private brawl and vendetta, but see them put back into the scabbard at the sound of the church bells that announce the beginning ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... the British Museum to respectable people on Sunday, has lately been the subject of some discussion. I think it would puzzle the most austere of the Sunday legislators to assign any valid reason for opposing so sensible a proposition. The Museum contains rich specimens from all the vast museums and repositories of Nature, and rare and curious fragments of the mighty works of art, in bygone ...
— Sunday Under Three Heads • Charles Dickens
... apple-trees, now red with apples, with its old well half hidden in clumps of lavender. The little dwelling itself, with its low ceilings and long oak beams and dim colouring and quaint furniture, had a certain austere charm, a quiet dignity of its own. The sunny air came softly in through wide-open latticed windows, bringing with it the scent of mignonette. There had never been a breath of air in the house in Pembridge Square. Ole Scorpio, ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... estate, attended mass daily, and found his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and water-fowl. But these rumours are not particularly relevant, and it is certain that among people of his own class in the neighbourhood he passed for a stern and even austere man, observant of his religious obligations, and keeping strictly to himself. There was no talk of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that time the nobility were very free with their peasants. Some people said he had ...
— Kerfol - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Ridley Court. He entered on Sir William and Lady Belward without announcement. Sir William came to his feet, austere and pale. Lady Belward's fingers trembled on the lace she held. They looked many years older. Neither spoke his name, nor did they offer their hands. Gaston did not wince, he had expected it. He owed these old people something. They lived according to their lights, they had acted righteously ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... taste for study returned, and, not content with reading, he attempted original composition. The subject he selected was a curious one for a youth in his sixteenth year. It was an attempt to settle the chronology of the age of Sesostris, and shows how soon the austere side of history had attracted his attention. "In my childish balance," he says, "I presumed to weigh the systems of Scaliger and Petavius, of Marsham and of Newton; and my sleep has been disturbed by the difficulty ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... over the garden and the sea, was an experience new and bewildering. The dwelling abounded in lobbies and corridors, in queer corners where the gloom lurked, and in doors that gave glimpses of sombre bedsteads and high-backed austere chairs, of china painted with the most wonderful designs (loot of the old Indian palaces), of swords and sabretaches hung on walls, and tables polished to such degree that they reflected ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... therefore, had it been solemn and austere in the degree suitable to an unsimulated panic, would have taken a different direction. Gossip may be addressed to anybody. He that will listen is sought for; and not he that can co-operate. But earnest business, soaring into ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... reluctance. Lucien wore a white cravat with embroidered ends; his sister had seen that M. du Hautoy and M. de Chandour wore such things, and hastened to make similar ones for her brother. Here, no one appeared to wear white cravats of a morning except a few grave seniors, elderly capitalists, and austere public functionaries, until, in the street on the other side of the railings, Lucien noticed a grocer's boy walking along the Rue de Rivoli with a basket on his head; him the man of Angouleme detected in ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... scarcely thirty years of age, handsome, tall, austere, or rather melancholy, in all his ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... which have agitated the Christian world were then rife. England had plunged into the new order of things with headlong vehemence. The character of its inhabitants, which had always been sedate and reflective, became argumentative and austere. General information had been increased by intellectual debate, and the mind had received a deeper cultivation. Whilst religion was the topic of discussion, the morals of the people were reformed. All these national features are more ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... even her beauty, for the improvement of her sisters. I asked her to represent before us the actions of the famous women and wise virgins of the Scriptures. She acted Esther, Deborah, Judith, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, and Mary, the mother of Jesus. I know, venerable father, that thy austere mind is alarmed at the idea of these performances. But thou thyself wouldest have been touched if thou hadst seen her in these pious scenes, shedding real tears, and raising to heaven arms graceful as palm leaves. I have ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... also found in sculpture. Kalon and Hegesias worked in a severe style, like that of the Etruscans; Kalamis was less austere; Myron ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... beheld a veritable fortress of ancient times. At a first glance we were as much interested in the little gray town of Langeais, which is charmingly situated on the right bank of the Loire, as in the chateau itself, whose facade is gloomy and austere, a true mediaeval fortress, "with moat, drawbridge, and portcullis still in working order," as Walter expresses it. As we stood on the stone steps at the entrance between the great frowning towers waiting ...
— In Chteau Land • Anne Hollingsworth Wharton
... however, an exception in history which may perhaps serve to prove the rule. The Puritans who colonized New England were frontier men, and were, I think, in general scrupulously honest. They had their faults. They were stern, austere men, tyrannical at the backbone when power came in their way, as are all pioneers, hard upon vices for which they who made the laws had themselves no minds; but ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... case of my own infants, and very young children, differed from that of grown-up persons. This was shown by their not disliking rhubarb mixed with a little sugar and milk, which is to us abominably nauseous; and in their strong taste for the sourest and most austere fruits, such as unripe gooseberries ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of the country, will be the objects of preferment. And then I run no risk in foretelling that whatever order, quiet, and morality you have in the country will be lost. A Popish clergy who are not restrained by the most austere subordination will become a nuisance, a real public grievance of the heaviest kind, in any country that entertains them; and instead of the great benefit which Ireland does and has long derived from them, if they are educated ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... sir," she began calling to him soundlessly, and broke off abruptly and stood there at the window for a time, motionless and thoughtful. She was a tall girl, of a broad-shouldered, athletic type, a college girl by the sign of the austere cut of her gown, but a western girl by the sign of the flying ends of the scarf about her throat, the unafraid looseness of her bright hair. Her face, lit by her amber eyes and crowned by those loose masses of hair, had a rare, dusky-gold beauty. Despite her ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... Street as one of the authentic shrines of our history (Lord, how trimly dight it would be if it were in New England!), Camden has made a certain amend in putting Walt into the gay mosaic that adorns the portico of the new public library in Cooper Park. There, absurdly represented in an austere black cassock, he stands in the following frieze of great figures: Dante, Whitman, Moliere, Gutenberg, Tyndale, Washington, Penn, Columbus, Moses, Raphael, Michael Angelo, Shakespeare, Longfellow and Palestrina. I believe that there was some rumpus ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Chateaubriand nor Mme. Recamier disliked, would have been less easily secured; but the tone of the reunions was vastly different, and at the celebrated receptions of the Abbaye aux Bois (where Mme. Recamier spent her last quarter of a century) the somewhat austere deportment of the siecle de Louis XIV. was in vogue. All the amusements were in their nature grave. Mlle. Rachel recited a scene from "Polyeucte" for the author of "Les Martyrs," and for archbishops and cardinals; the Duc de Noailles read a chapter from his history of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... His sorrow had softened his intolerant and emphatic temper. His experience of the cruel indifference of the elegant made him more conscious of the worth of these honest folk, graceless and devilish tiresome, who had yet an austere conception of life, and because they lived joylessly, seemed to him to live without weakness. Having decided that they were excellent, and that he ought to like them, like the German that he was, he tried to persuade himself that he did in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... was little cordiality, for they differed alike in disposition and manner of thought. Ptylus was narrow and bigoted in his religion, precise in every observance of ceremonial; austere and haughty in manner, professing to despise all learning beyond that relating to religion, but secretly devoured with jealousy at the esteem in which Ameres was held by the court, and his reputation as one of the first ...
— The Cat of Bubastes - A Tale of Ancient Egypt • G. A. Henty
... members of this Senate wished—that Mr. Root might hear from the mouth of the man of experience, authority, and austere demeanor who is to preside over us, the most eloquent and highest of these ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... severely simple knot on her neck, she might have been a wandering goddess, who had descended, with immortal calm, to direct the affairs of the household. Her white shirtwaist, with its starched severity, suited her austere beauty and her ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... do not disturb or interrupt you, sir," he said, beaming in the doorway like a benevolent high priest. He had doffed his professional manner of austere disapproval, as was his custom ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... This was a question I asked myself. You may imagine the extent of the circles of torment that my mind had searched before coming to so simple and so terrible a question. Notwithstanding his efforts, my patron did not succeed in stifling the movements of his heart. Under his austere manner, under the reserve of the magistrate, a passion rebelled, though coerced with such force that no one but I who lived with him ever guessed the secret. His motto seemed to be, 'I suffer, and am silent.' The escort of respect ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... conjecture as to whether Madame de Tours, the social swell of the town, would or would not offer up her prayer to Deity, accompanied by Friponne, her black poodle. If Friponne issued forth from the narrow door, in company with her austere mistress, the shining black silk gown, we knew, would not decorate the angular frame of this aristocratic provincial; a sober beige was best fitted to resist the dashes made by Friponne's sharply-trimmed ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... knows I'm selfish enough, but I can at least understand and appreciate generous and kindly sympathy, and could be won by it. But this cool and inflexible elaboration of character, where only the end is considered, and all our timid shrinking and human weakness are ignored,—this austere asceticism which despises the present world and life,—is to me unnatural and monstrous. I confess I never read the Bible very much, and have not listened when it was read. I have half forgotten the story of Lazarus. You left off where Lazarus ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... gifted comtesse goes to the convent to visit her gently austere sister-in-law, and meets there the Princess Henrietta of England, than a child of eleven years. The attraction is mutual and ripens into a deep and lasting friendship. When this graceful and light-hearted girl becomes ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... distance, and men are trained in obedience and scrupulousness and self-denial. They produce no beautiful works of art, and have hardly any stories to delight in; but they are reverent and conscientious; private feeling is sacrificed with an austere satisfaction to the public interest, and they accordingly build up a great power. Living in an atmosphere of magic, where unseen dangers lurk on every side, and there is virtue in words and forms correctly ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... Lady Cecil, was one of the daughters of Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reforming party, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remarkable woman, highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies of her party, and as would become her father's daughter and the austere and laborious family to which she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the Greek and Latin tongues;" she was passionately religious, according to the uncompromising religion which the exiles had brought back with them from Geneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... distinctions among Christians. Priests aspire to be better than laymen; monks better than priests; virgins than wives. The diligent, in praying and fasting, would be better than the laborer; and they who lead austere lives, more righteous than they of ordinary life. This is the work of the devil, and productive of every form of evil. Opposed to it is Christ's doctrine in our text. Under such conditions as mentioned, faith and love ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther
... remain in good condition, were inhabited by Becket. In the treasury is the black strip of a stole he used to wear, sewed on to another stole. Also relics of St. Edmund, and curious deeds connected with him and others, who had retired to this, then an austere Cistercian monastery. The walls of the cloister are hung with engravings representing scenes in the life of ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... professed by the first emigrants, and bequeathed by them to their descendants, simple in its form of worship, austere and almost harsh in its principles, and hostile to external symbols and to ceremonial pomp, is naturally unfavorable to the fine arts, and only yields a reluctant sufferance to the pleasures of literature. The Americans are a very old and a very enlightened people, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... understood her power. Hers was a soul of swift and subtle sympathy. A word, a mere inflection, was sufficient to set in motion the most complicate and obscure conceptions in her brain, permitting her to comprehend with equal clarity the Egyptian queen of pleasure and the austere devotee to whom joy is a snare. From time to time she uttered little exclamations of pleasure, and at the end of each act motioned him to proceed, as if eager to ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... those locked rooms on the ground-floor where the window-blinds are drawn down close, have been spared the general devastation. Mrs Pipchin has remained austere and stony during the proceedings, in her own room; or has occasionally looked in at the sale to see what the goods are fetching, and to bid for one particular easy chair. Mrs Pipchin has been the highest bidder for the easy chair, and sits ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... was one of benediction. He stood straight up in his austere pure-mindedness, tall, slender, pale, sharp of voice, keen of glance, stern in judgment, aggressive in debate, and fixedly untender everywhere, except—but always except—in the sick chamber. His inner heart was all of flesh; but his demands ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... change; and he broke down completely as the poor right hand (which Isaac would use) opened and closed in a vain effort to clasp his. But Isaac was intolerant of sympathy, and at once rebuked all reference to his illness. Above the wreck of his austere face, his eyes, blood-shot as they were and hooded under their slack lids, defied you to notice any change ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... of heathenism, are revering and following the name of our Savior Jesus Christ: therefore our beloved son, the master-general of the Order of Preachers [21] [Dominicans], has determined to send thither professed members under the care of their own vicar, with rules for austere life and a reformed standard of conduct—as is becoming to a religious and praiseworthy institute, and according to which their province of New Spain was established—who there may found a new province ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... and leave strangers to survey their magnificent galleries where the finest pictures of the age of Leo X. are collected together. The great Roman lords of the present day, are as unacquainted with the pompous luxury of their ancestors, as these ancestors themselves were with the austere virtues of the Roman republic. The country houses convey still more the idea of this solitude, of this indifference of the possessors in the midst of the most admirable abodes in the world. People may walk in these immense gardens without suspecting that they have a master. The grass grows in the ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... the morning, he rode up to Marumbah Station with little Mary held in front of him. Mrs Westonley, pale-faced, austere, and much agitated, ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... Although everybody was aware of this blot in his scutcheon, he was mortally angry if ever his origin was suspected; and made up for his fathers' errors by outrageous professions of religion, and the most austere practices of devotion. He visited church every morning, confessed once a week, and hated Jews and Protestants as much as an inquisitor could do. He never lost an opportunity of proving his sincerity, by persecuting one or the other whenever ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clarion-like in every syllable, and in response Lady Harriet was moved to offer a cold cheek in salutation to the bride. Stella bent instantly and kissed it with a quick graciousness that would have melted any one less austere, but in Lady Harriet's opinion the act was marred by its very impulsiveness. She did not like impulsive people. So, with chill repression, she accepted the only overture from Stella that she ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... if horrified by the austere reception of his cordial advances. 'Wha's gaumlin'? We mauna play, billies, till he's gane. An unco pernicketty auld carl, thon ane,' he remarked, sotto voce. 'But there's naething in the Company's by-laws again refraishments,' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... of penance," responded Ananda, "in virtue of which the austere devotee quells the winds, allays the waters, expostulates convincingly with tigers, carries the moon in his sleeve, and otherwise performs all acts and deeds appropriate to the ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... well off enough to keep a servant, and each had their work to attend to, the husband as an employee in a public office and his wife as cashier in a milliner's shop, and did not dream of any evil, and were further reassured by the charitable, unctuous and austere looks of the doctor, they allowed their daughter to go ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was totally unprepared for the wonderful, absolute silence that met her heroics. He stood and looked her full in the eyes with a calm radiance in his face that reminded her of the dawn-light she had seen that morning come over Providence Nob and his deep smile gave a young prophet look to his austere mouth. And as she gazed at him she drew timidly nearer, even around the corner of ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... and outright "vice," or any shades or degrees of either, the positiveness with which he assigns to eternal damnation all who depart in any degree from "virtue" as he defines it, is therefore to accept Mandeville as a genuine exponent of a rigorism too austere and too grim not only for the ordinary run of orthodox Anglicans or Catholics of his time but even for St. Augustine (at times), for the Calvinists, and ...
— A Letter to Dion • Bernard Mandeville
... saith the Minister of Agriculture. And they, between them, make me no more ado than whip me thirteen and six out of my pinched pocket to pay thee out of danger. How many masters would do this for their servant? Nay, I'll be sworn I have paid the fines inflicted by austere Magistrates, when thou, Crab, hast surreptitiously slipped thy muzzle, otherwise thou hadst been executed; I have "tipped" angry constables when thou hast stolen out not "under control," otherwise thou hadst suffered for't: thou thinkest not of this now! Nay, I remember the trick ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... where he sat at his wine, and get his private ear, and tell him that a man was having speech with his daughter on the threshold of her apartments. Messer Simone knew well enough how great an effect such a piece of news would have upon the austere nature of his host, and I make no doubt that his red face grinned in the moonlight as he dispatched his fellow upon his errand. When Maleotti had gone, Messer Simone slowly ascended the staircase that conducted to the loggia, and concealed himself very ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and on the day of our visit two bullocks were tethered in the outer chamber, the materials of the stone-mason were lying here and there among the carved pillars, and a painfully modern stone wall is rising in face of the austere threshold of the inner sanctuary. The lintel of the shrine is surmounted with inferior coloured pictures of Hindu deities, and two printed and tolerably faithful portraits of the great Maratha chieftain. "Thence," in the words of the poet, "we turned and slowly ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... flower-stands filled up the corners, with their roses and other blooms. This study, which Balzac himself has left us a description of in his novel The Girl with the Golden Eyes, was soon abandoned as a workroom for another more simple and austere, up under the roof. The latter, however, he likewise began, being tormented by the desire of change, to adorn almost ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... you speak? Whom have you got there dressed up as a Hungarian?" said the commander with an austere gibe. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... preserves a certain grave and austere physiognomy, half-Spanish and half-scholastic; and it is easy for the imagination to people its quiet streets with the English and Irish students who frequented its collegiate halls from the days of Guy Faux ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... grown to man's stature. He was now full six feet in height, black-haired and dark of eye, and with a grave manner which the exciting experiences he had passed through had intensified. Many people found the young officer too cold and austere for their liking, but the haughty demeanour which characterised him in reality covered a warm and sympathetic nature, of which those who were admitted into his intimacy were fully aware. By this time he had made several notable friends, including Major George ...
— John Nicholson - The Lion of the Punjaub • R. E. Cholmeley
... of an austere, rigid, metallic and sepulchral magnificence, giving the impression of a Greek temple with columns, architraves, flagstones and ornaments of black marble, gold and ebony. The hall is trapezium-shaped. Basalt steps, ...
— The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a great race, not unworthy of their fame,—those ancient Romans; and Alpine flowers of moral beauty bloomed amid the Alpine snow and ice of their austere pride." ...
— A Handbook for Latin Clubs • Various
... opened the window and looked out, and could not think what change had come upon that austere field of mountains that it should thus sing and shine under the lofty heaven. I had seen her—Olalla! And the stone crags answered, Olalla! and the dumb, unfathomable azure answered, Olalla! The pale saint of my dreams had vanished for ever; and in her place ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... profound sincereness with which Wordsworth feels his subject, and also from the profoundly sincere and natural character of his subject itself. He can and will treat such a subject with nothing but the most plain, first-hand, almost austere naturalness. His expression may often be called bald, as, for instance, in the poem of Resolution and Independence; but it is bald as the bare mountain tops are bald, with a baldness which ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... hand on Olive; the spell of the past was already losing power; the sense that it had all been a dream grew stronger every minute. In a few hours she would re-enter the little house close under the shadow of that old Wren church, which reminded her somehow of childhood, and her austere father with his chiselled face. The meeting with her husband! How go through that! And to-night! But she did not care to contemplate to-night. And all those to-morrows wherein there was nothing she had to do of which it was reasonable to complain, yet nothing ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his friends. His passion, his bitter, vengeful cry against the ignorant masses of the world was something Bertha had read about, but never felt; but she quivered now with the half-disclosed fury of the disappointed austere soul. ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... mind, Greek or Roman, marriage was intended for the end of building up the family, and the family was consecrated to the State. The fulfilment of so exalted a function involved a certain austere dignity which excluded wayward inclination or passionate emotion. These might indeed occur between a man and a woman outside marriage, but putting aside the very limited phenomena of Athenian hetairism, they were too shameful to be idealized. Some trace of this classic attitude ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... with most graceful wood- engravings, was published at Venice in 1492. Notwithstanding the freedom with which in divers passages Boccaccio reflected on the morals of the clergy, the Roman Curia spared the book, which the austere Savonarola condemned to the flames. The tradition that the Decameron was among the pile of "vanities" burned by Savonarola in the Piazza della Signoria on the last day of the Carnival of 1497, little more ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... looked at her. She was standing up, coming towards him; a faint tinge of pink colour had stained her cheek—her bosom was heaving—her eyes were challenging his with a light which needed no borrowed brilliancy. Go with her! The man's birthright, his passion, which through the long days of his austere life had lain dormant and undreamt of swept up from his heart. He held out his arms, and she came across the room to him with a sweet effort of self-yielding which yet waited for while ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... we cannot do it justice without lingering a little over her portraiture. She is described as tall, fair, and of a Saxon type of beauty. Her manners would seem to have been de haute ecole, and her culture was on a large and noble scale. Austere in her morals, her faith was the deistic philosophy of the ante-revolutionary period; but, like other people of noble mind, instead of making doubt a pretext for license, she brought up virtue to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... Johanna might well yield to the tenderness of a human passion without forfeiting our sympathy, or incurring a stain upon her moral character; and yet this aberration of heart—this dereliction from the austere purity required by her sacred mission—might, in a theological point of view, be supposed to have forfeited her claim to the miraculous interposition of Heaven in her behalf. So that, in the closing scenes, though Johanna might have no claim on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... night when Mary came home rather later than usual, her father (who, though fond of her, was an austere man) questioned her gruffly as to the cause of her delay, when she replied:—"Oh! papa, I am to sing 'As Pants the Hart' to-morrow, and Mr. Grandison insisted on my trying it with the organ after practice. It ...
— The Mysteries of Montreal - Being Recollections of a Female Physician • Charlotte Fuhrer
... completion of life, or even as the last opportunity given to men to meet a tremendous reality and not be found wanting, he might have written a sweetly breathed prayer for eternal rest, like the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem aeternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the fifth ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... deputation to move him from his vengeful purpose, the deputies,—the foremost citizens of Rome and the relations and former friends of Coriolanus,—having "declared their business in a very modest and humble manner," he is described by Plutarch as stern and austere, answering them with "much bitterness and high resentment of the injuries done him." What was the temper as well as the power of Coriolanus, we learn distinctly enough from these few words of Plutarch. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... other boys brought up with the best surroundings in a Massachusetts village, where the college atmosphere prevailed. He had his boyish pleasures and his trials, his share of that queer mixture of nineteenth century worldliness and almost austere Puritanism, which is yet characteristic of many ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... know the town of Bagdad is divided into quarters, in each of which there is a mosque with an imaum to perform service at certain hours, at the head of the quarter which assembles there. The imaum of the division I live in is a surly curmudgeon, of an austere countenance, and the greatest hypocrite in the world. Four old men of this neighbourhood, who are people of the same stamp, meet regularly every day at this imaum's house. There they vent their slander, calumny, and malice against me and the whole quarter, to the disturbance ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.
... by him in the past, feigning himself overcome with the utmost humility and waxing devouter than any man alive, he went and turned Minor Friar and styled himself Fra Alberta da Imola; in which habit he proceeded to lead, to all appearance, a very austere life, greatly commending abstinence and mortification and never eating flesh nor drinking wine, whenas he had not thereof that which was to his liking. In short, scarce was any ware of him when from ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... adopting the former mode of locomotion; nor does he recover a sense of his true position until he finds himself seated at one end of a square table, the other three sides whereof are occupied by the same number of gentlemen of grave and austere bearing, with all the candles in the room apparently endeavouring to imitate that species of eccentric dance which he has only seen the gas-lamps attempt occasionally as he has returned home from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... simple-hearted man, as brave men often are, and a singularly spotless life spent chiefly in war and austere devotion had left him more than ignorant of the ways of the world. He had few friends, chiefly old comrades of his own age who did not live in the palace, and he detested gossip. Had he known what the woman was with whom he was speaking, ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... His communion with the people was brief, and marked by a tone of severe contemptuous misanthropy. He seldom stirred abroad except during morning, or in the evening twilight, when he might be seen gliding amidst the coming darkness, like a dissatisfied spirit. His life was an austere one, and his devotional practices were said to be of the most remorseful character. Such a man, in fact, was calculated to hold a powerful sway over the prejudices and superstitions of the people. This was true. His power was considered almost unlimited, and his life one that would not ...
— Phil Purcel, The Pig-Driver; The Geography Of An Irish Oath; The Lianhan Shee • William Carleton
... of Christianity have been good or bad, according as they ministered to character. So strong was this ethical trait in Kant that it dwarfed all else. He was not himself a man of great breadth or richness of feeling. He was not a man of imagination. His religion was austere, not to say arid. Hegel was before all things an intellectualist. Speculation was the breath of life to him. He had metaphysical genius. He tended to transform in this direction everything which he touched. Religion is thought. He criticised the rationalist movement from the height ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... stern, austere man, usually very silent and reserved. I only remembered seeing him excited once or twice. My mother had died in my infancy—(I was but fifteen months at the time) and my father's sister became his housekeeper. I had but one ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... dressed as a busy business man or a clever young student might have been. They are none the less pretty for that, and far more beautiful. But the fashions have floated away to absurdity. Every now and then through the austere bustle of London in war time drifts a last practitioner of the "eternal feminine"—with the air of a foreign visitor, with the air of devotion to some peculiar cult. She has very high-heeled boots; she shows a leg, she has a short skirt with a peculiar hang, due no ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... effect of her austere education," said Burr. "It is not possible for you to conceive how young people are trained in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... [FN264] The austere Caliph Omar whose scourge was more feared than the sword was the - author of the celebrated saying "Consult them ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
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