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More "Lightness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some who make a profession of their philosophy—pass unfair censures upon the gifts of heaven. They complain because we do not equal elephants in bulk of body, harts in swiftness, birds in lightness, bulls in vigour. But what has been denied to mankind could not have been given. Wherefore, whosoever thou art that undervaluest human fortune, bethink thee what blessings our Father has bestowed upon ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the bridle, and the animal slowly and steadily commenced the descent, fixing his fore legs upon the steps, and drawing his hinder limbs carefully after him. Here it was that the lightness and steadiness of Turpin's mare was completely shown. No Alpine mule could have borne its rider with more apparent ease and safety. Turpin encouraged her by hand and word; but she needed it not. The sexton ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... did," laughed Billy, with the lightness of a long-lost child who has found a friend. "Why, I ...
— Miss Billy • Eleanor H. Porter
... peevish. I looked at him with wonder. He leaped past me, with a forced agility, and sprang on upward. I followed with lightness born of thought, with which the true ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... his disclaimer, and yet under her momentary lightness he still perceived something of the strong current of bitter sadness which had so profoundly moved him at the inquest and which still remained unexplained; therefore he hesitated about referring ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... the same merry lightness with which it was received by the others; but after the train had pulled out and she was on her way home she remembered Helen's words and looks with something almost amounting to a shock. Any mention of Stewart, any ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... unappreciated. This practice first gave to the metal gold an arbitrary value which it did not possess before. For the peculiar life-giving attributes of the shells modelled in the yellow metal came to be transferred to the gold itself. No doubt the lightness and especially the beauty of such gold models appealed to the early Egyptians, and were in large measure responsible for the hold gold acquired over mankind. But this was an outcome of the empirical knowledge gained ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... had been old friends meeting after a separation. "You wait upon me yourself?" he asked. "I am served like the gods!" She had waited upon a great many people, but none of them had ever told her that. The observation added a certain lightness to the step with which she went to a little table where there were some curious red glasses—glasses covered with little gold sprigs, which Charlotte used to dust every morning with her own hands. Gertrude thought the glasses very handsome, and it was a pleasure to her to know that ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... explode while I stood there, in my nightshirt, looking on. It is true that the box weighed very little. Probably, as I have said, the whole affair would not have turned the scale at a couple of ounces. But then its very lightness might have been part of the ingenious inventor's little game. There are explosives with which one can work a very satisfactory amount of damage with considerably less ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... into plow metal made an appeal to him. Being a metal-worker and knowing much of the history of the metals, he knew of the "Toledo blade"—that secret and marvelous invention with its tremendous strength, keen cutting edge and lightness. To make a moldboard as finely tempered in its way as a "Toledo blade" was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... head, almost invariably fastened with clusters of natural roses; some of these mantillas were marvels of costly work, and fell shadow-like over those soft summer dresses, giving them a graceful and cloud-like lightness. All Seville was on foot, no carriages are permitted in the street during the holy week. Poor and rich were, for the time, on a perfect level, and each came forth well dressed and radiant, to honor the most interesting spectacle known ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens
... Spanish, Sensuality Jasmine, Yellow, Grace Judas Tree, Betrayal Juniper, Succour Justicia, Perfection Kennedia, Mental Beauty Kingcups, Desire of Riches Laburnum, Pensive Beauty Lady's Slipper, Win Me Lagerstroemia, Eloquence Lantana, Rigour Larch, Audacity Larkspur, Lightness, Levity Larkspur, Double, Happiness Larkspur, Pink, Fickleness Larkspur, Purple, Haughtiness Laurel, Glory Laurel, Common, Perfidy Laurel, Ground, Perseverance Laurel, Mountain, Ambition Lavender, Distrust Leaves, Dead, Sadness Lemon, Zest Lemon Blossom, Fidelity ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... the epigrams of comedy reach their high-water mark; in contrast to them is another class in which the lightness is a little forced and the humour touches cynicism. In these the natural brutality of the Roman mind makes the Latin epigram heavier and keener-pointed; the greater number indeed of the Greek epigrams of this complexion are of the Roman period; ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? Ha! Not she; nor doth she tempt: but it is I 165 That, lying by the violet in the sun, Do as the carrion does, not as the flower, Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be That modesty may more betray our sense Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough, 170 Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary, And pitch our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie! What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo? Dost thou desire her foully for those things That make her good? O, let her brother live: 175 Thieves ...
— Measure for Measure - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... re-entering the Castle, was with its young Lord, who received him with his usual kindness and lightness of humour. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... nor any of the Surrenden circle made presence of gladness at the new dignity for, with all his gaiety of manner and lightness of wit, he took dark views of himself, none the lighter for their humor, and his obedience to the President's order was the gloomiest acquiescence he had ever smiled. Adams took dark views, too, not so much on Hay's account as on his own, for, while Hay had at least the honors of office, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... thy servant is,'" he quoted lightly. But beneath the lightness she divined a pain that she could not wholly fathom. Quite aware of her power, Miss Polly Brewster was now, for one of the few times in her life, stricken with contrition for her use ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... ideas of married life were a sort of good-fellowship and admiration, if the woman was pretty; good cooking and a desire to please among the commoner ones. At four and twenty he had not given the matter much consideration. Madame Giffard was full thirty, but she looked like a girl in her lightness and grace. And he owed the memory of M. Giffard something. This step would make amends and allay a troublesome sort of conscience ...
— A Little Girl in Old Quebec • Amanda Millie Douglas
... 2. Through lightness of heart and neglect of our shortcomings we feel not the sorrows of our soul, but often vainly laugh when we have good cause to weep. There is no true liberty nor real joy, save in the fear of God with a good conscience. Happy is he who can cast away every cause of distraction ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... Elkusch, five miles. We suffered much this day because of the snow, and that the lightness of our dress was ill suited to such severe weather. Schell, negligently, lost our purse, in which were nine florins. I had still, however, nineteen grosch in my ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck
... hand with his wonted graceful lightness of manner, he walked on with her, leaving the other two to ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... attack of sleepiness," Charley said with assumed lightness. "I feel all done up to-night. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... She looked charming with her great boa tied about her throat, and sprang into the dog-cart all lightness and joy. ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... her. The places where she came upon Aunt Hester were strange and lovely places where the air one breathed smelled like flowers and everything was lovely in a new way, and when one moved one felt so light that movement was delightful, and when one wakened one had not quite got over the lightness and for a few moments felt as if one would ...
— In the Closed Room • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... which is known as a steam horse in a watch case. Gradually the results of the pile of which Captains Krebs and Renard had kept the secret had been surpassed, and aeronauts had become able to avail themselves of motors whose lightness increased at the same time as ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... cracking jokes, he was exercising himself, or his countrymen, or at farthest his successors, in the use of the vernacular tongues with the same lightness and brightness. When he ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... a moderate oven from 15 to 20 minutes. Pin a white napkin round the tin, strew sifted sugar over the top of the souffle, and send it immediately to table. The proper appearance of this dish depends entirely on the expedition with which it is served, and some cooks, to preserve its lightness, hold a salamander over the souffle until it is placed on the table. If allowed to stand after it comes from the oven, it will be entirely spoiled, as it ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... with a peculiar richness in its platted coils, an unconsciously faultless poise of head, and, equally unconscious, a dreamy softness of sweeping lashes. As she laughed with the General her student noted further what seemed to him a rare silkiness in the tresses, a vapory lightness in the short strands that played over the outlines of temple and forehead, and the unstudied daintiness with which they gathered into the merest mist of a short curl ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... laws of gravitation. Elusive fascinations of thought were liberated with the shining crystalline aerial pulsation; some mysterious attraction dwelt down long vistas amongst the bare trees; their fine fibrous grace of branch and twig was accented by the snow, which lay upon them with exquisite lightness, despite the aggregated bulk, not the densely packed effect which the boughs would show to-morrow. The crags were crowned; their grim faces looked frowningly out like a warrior's from beneath a wreath. Nowhere could the brown ground be seen; already the pine boughs bent, the needles ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the authors. Zozaya, Morote and Dicenta have passed for many years now as terrible men, both destructive and great innovators. But how ridiculous! Zozaya, like Dicenta, has never done anything but manipulate the commonplace, failing to impart either lightness or novelty to it, as have Valera and Anatole France, succeeding only on the other hand in making it ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... moved upon this earth a shape of brightness, A power, that from its objects scarcely drew One impulse of her being—in her lightness Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew, Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue, To nourish some far desert: she did seem Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew, Like the bright shade of some immortal ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... was chill and grey. He felt bad. His first act, unconscious and automatic, was to feel for his sack. Its lightness startled him. Then, slowly, memories of the night thronged into his brain. Rough voices disturbed him. He opened his eyes and peered out from under the table. A couple of early risers, or, rather, men who had been out on trail ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... to be reflected in them in his brightness, and they went, hand in hand, along the bank, looking at the shoals of little fish swimming near the bank, and they went on brimming over with happiness, as if they were raised from the earth in their lightness of heart. ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... refinement, the subtlest and best, showed in all her ways. He studied her, as he would have studied a strange, showy and originally fragrant flower, or a bird of oddly attractive plumage. While she said little to him or to anyone else in his presence, he became aware of the willfulness and joyous lightness which played on her nature's changeable surface. He wondered at her influence over Father Beret, whom she controlled apparently without effort. But in due time he began to feel a deeper character, a broader intelligence, behind her ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... to the place where the frigate lay, was only three miles, yet, in consequence of the lightness of the wind, they did not get within hail of her until eleven o'clock. When they had approached within two hundred yards, they were hailed and ordered to anchor, or they would be fired into. Lieutenant Decatur ordered a Maltese pilot, who was on board the ketch, to answer that they ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... tribunes in a beautiful taste: but of all delight, is what they call the abbot's cloister. It is the very thing that you would build, when you had extracted all the quintessence of trefoils, arches, and lightness. In the church is a star-window of eight points, that is ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... to the mantel-piece dominated by Cytherea. Here, he addressed himself silently to the doll, you're responsible for this. Get me out of it. I'll put it all in your hands, that hand you have raised and hold half open and empty. But his, he added, in an embittered lightness, was an affair of matrimony; it was a moral knot; and it had nothing to do with Cytherea, with the shape, the sea, the island, of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... any of the mistrusting," said Bartley, with humorous lightness. "But isn't sacred rather a strong word to use in regard ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... blue, yellow, red, white, and their combinations, as also the visual forms of appearance (sa@msthana) of long, short, round, square, high, low, straight, and crooked. The sense of touch (kayendriya) has for its object the four elements and the qualities of smoothness, roughness, lightness, heaviness, cold, hunger and thirst. These qualities represent the feelings generated in sentient beings by the objects of touch, hunger, thirst, etc., and are also counted under it, as they are the organic effects produced by a touch which excites the physical frame at a time when the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... though the people applauded and encored her"—there was a gleam of disdain in the golden eyes—"but she was very pretty ... she danced with wonderful grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow dipping and darting over the shallows of the river-shore—like a branch of red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and swung by a spring breeze.... I admired her, and yet I was sorry for her.... To have to pose and bound and whirl before all ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... was sorry because Aunt Anne was dead, and he was more and more conscious of the unbecoming lightness and freedom where he found himself at the death of Aunt Anne. He had not dared acknowledge it to himself. He couldn't, for shame. But whereas, in the past years, when he ventured to formulate his own life a little and see what it had done ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... much upon her, spite of the lightness of the breeze (a circumstance in our favor: the chase being a ship, and we but a boat), at my comrade's instigation, we added oars to sails, readily guiding our way by the former, though the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... for dishes, cups, trays, trenchers, &c. as the joyner for tables, inlayings, and for the delicateness of the grain, when the knurs and nodosities are rarely diapred, which does much advance its price: Our turners will work it so thin, that it is almost transparent: Also for the lightness (under the name Aier) imploy'd often by those who make musical instruments: Also that especially, which grows in Friuli, Carniola, and Saltzburglandt: There is a larger sort, ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... either by the sons of Bassano or by others. Bassano's style varied considerably during his lifetime. He naturally was at first a copier of his father, but his productions in this style are not of great value. He was then strongly attracted by the lightness and beautiful colouring of Titian, and finally adopted the style which is recognized as his own. Although he painted few great pictures, and preferred humble subjects, yet his altar-piece of the Nativity at Bassano is estimated highly by the best judges, and in Lanzi's opinion is the finest work ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... toil has, however, its peculiar temptations. When overwrought, and in my depressed moods, I learned to regard the ardent spirits of the dram-shop as high luxuries: they gave lightness and energy to both body and mind, and substituted for a state of dulness and gloom, one of exhilaration and enjoyment. Usquebaugh was simply happiness doled out by the glass, and sold by the gill. The drinking usages of the profession in which I laboured were at this time many: when ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... (1787) we find an advertisement put out by Thomas Folgham, of Cheapside, stating that he has "a great assortment of his much-approved pocket and portable umbrellas, which for lightness, elegance, and strength, far exceed anything of the kind ever imported or manufactured in this kingdom. All kinds of common umbrellas prepared in a particular way, ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... advanced; and of course the enemy's ships came up with the wind, forming a bow and quarter line. The ships were therefore obliged to edge away, to keep in the wake of their leaders; and this manoeuvre, from the lightness of the wind, the unmanageable state of the ships in a heavy swell, and, we may add, the inexperience of the enemy, not being performed with facility and celerity, undesignedly threw the combined fleets ...
— Fighting Instructions, 1530-1816 - Publications Of The Navy Records Society Vol. XXIX. • Julian S. Corbett
... distance is reached. Such progressive vibrations are known as waves, and, since they act as stimuli to the organs of hearing, they are called sound waves. Sound waves always originate in vibrating bodies.(116) They are transmitted chiefly by the air, which, because of its lightness, elasticity, and abundance, readily takes up the vibrations and spreads them in ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.
... drier in the kiln, seated close to a great heap of hops and inhaling the odour, I was in a condition of agreeable excitement all the evening. My mind was full of fancy, imagination, flowing with ideas; a sense of lightness and joyousness lifted me up. I wanted music, and felt full of laughter. Like the half-fabled haschish, the golden bloom of the hops had entered the nervous system; intoxication without wine, without injurious after-effect, dream intoxication; they were wine for ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... true one. But, because it is fit you should have Reasons, in Support of a Judgment that can neither deserve nor expect an implicit Reception, I will run over the Anonymous Letter I herewith return you; and note with what Lightness even Men of good-natur'd Intention fall into Mistakes, by Neglect in too hasty Perusals, which their Benevolence wou'd take Pleasure in blushing at, when they discover their Weakness, in ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... startled to find how invariably the scales tipped; how lightly an historical Mont, born of a miracle, crowned by the noblest buildings, a pious Mecca for saints and kings innumerable, shot up like feathers in lightness when overweighted by the modern realities of a perfectly appointed inn, the cooking and eating of an omelet of omelets, and the all-conquering ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... 45 deg. is indeed what we should have expected a priori since we found that objective heaviness is balanced by a movement out from the center on the mechanical principle. If movement out and objective heaviness are in general alike in effect, then movement in and objective lightness should be alike in effect, as we have found to be the case from the preceding experiments. The inward-pointed line does not actually move in, it is true, but it strongly suggests the completion of the movement. It enters into the 'mechanical' equation—it appears ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... mind, and for a considerable period his productions showed evident traces of that painter's influence. Some of his latest pieces approach rather to the manner of his great contemporary Guido, and are painted with more lightness and clearness. Guercino was esteemed very highly in his lifetime, not only by the nobles and princes of Italy, but by his brother artists, who placed him in the first rank of painters. He was remarkable for the extreme rapidity of his execution; he completed no ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... smile as she gave Stillman a nod of recognition. "Fancy any girl forgetting so much gorgeousness!" she exclaimed with an attempt at lightness, but Claire caught the covert rancor in her voice, and as her aunt made a movement of escape she put out a ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... professional work made itself felt in an extreme zest and lightness of spirit. It was a very happy and delightful time. I was living among friends who were all very hard at work, and the very contrast of my freedom with their servitude was enlivening. I was able, too, to think over ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you good-natured dears," she said with an attempt at lightness. Then, hearing the thin rustle of a dress, she turned sharply and cast an unfriendly glance at a mild young woman with a very pointed nose, on which a pair of eyeglasses sat astride, who came meekly forward, looking self-conscious, and smiling with one side of her mouth. The man with the ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... the memory of Doctor Hale,—with the passage on this latest floating palace of the ocean, the Kaiser Wilhelm II.,—and he realizes how far science has penetrated into the more subtle forces, where lightness and speed take the place of clumsy device and slow motion. To go up to the hurricane deck of the wonderful Kaiser Wilhelm and look down through the openings on the six mighty engines, with their intense throb of vibration ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... with terror. Instead of summoning a physician, to ascertain the nature of her symptoms, he called a negro and his cart from Bush Hill. In vain the neighbours interceded for this unhappy victim. In vain she implored his clemency, and asserted the lightness of her indisposition. She besought him to allow her to send to her mother, who resided a few miles in the country, who would hasten to her succour, and relieve him and his family from the danger and trouble ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... took their leave. Only the friends of Gonzague remained in the room, and they stood apart, eying their master dubiously, uncertain whether he would wish them to go or to stay. Chavernay took it upon himself, with his usual lightness of heart, to play their spokesman. He advanced ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... discovered that it was actually a new formation of fresh-water ice on the lower side of the old ice, due to the layer of fresh water of about 9 feet 9 inches (3 metres) in depth, formed by the melting of the snow on the ice. Owing to its lightness this warm fresh water floated on the salt sea-water, which was at a temperature of about -1.5 deg. C. on its surface. Thus by contact with the colder sea-water the fresh water became cooler, and so a thick crust of ice was formed on the fresh water, where it came in contact with the salt water lying ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... forthwith. He was a bland, round little man, rather too fat for one's conceptions of what a policeman ought to be, yet with that lightness of foot that so many stout ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew
... reinforcements. They crossed the harbour, paused for a while beside the Adler—it is supposed for ammunition—and drew near the Matautu shore. The Mataafa men lay close among the shore-side bushes, expecting their arrival; when a silly lad, in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot in the air. My native friend, Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her house and gave the culprit a good shaking: an episode in the midst of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... well, then," said Mrs. Munger, with the utmost lightness and indifference, "we'll drop the idea of the invited supper ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Unfortunately the relative weight of the two lots of seeds was ascertained in only a few instances in which their germination was observed; but with Ipomoea and I believe with some of the other species, the relative lightness of the self-fertilised seeds apparently determined their early germination, probably owing to the smaller mass being favourable to the more rapid completion of the chemical and morphological changes necessary for germination. On the other hand, Mr. Galton gave me ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... to be a mountain," said he, with ponderous lightness, "and have angels in blue climb up you instead ...
— Options • O. Henry
... lightness of the offence divested the commencement of the trial of much of that importance and apparent dignity which attach themselves to most celebrated criminal cases. The prisoner was not bidden to look upon the juror, nor the juror to look upon the ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... her answer: "No," she said stoutly. "Though, of course," she added with an attempt at lightness, "I'd prefer to cross on ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... chances were against him, even with his disguise, but he was bound to enter the Indian camp, and he was prepared to incur all risks and to endure all penalties. He even felt a certain lightness of heart as he hurried on his way, and at length saw through the forest the flare of light from ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Suma seemed to flow over the ground, looking neither to right nor left, the massive paws falling with the lightness of leaves dropping from the trees. A frightened agouti scampered across her path and stopped, frozen with fear, and a green ribbon-like snake drooping in festoons from a low-growing branch hastily drew up its coils as the big ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... have done so, even if he had wanted to?)—he persisted in the futile and unequal fight with his publisher, provoked by his own vanity. He wasted his time, his strength, his money, and his only weapons, since in the lightness of his heart he was rash enough to deprive himself of the publicity which his music ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... himself, but the eyes of an expert would have discovered the secret of her speed at once. You had but to look for a moment at the rake of her stern, her long, narrow keel, her tall masts, to see the cut of her sails, the wonderful lightness of her rigging, and the ease and perfect seamanship with which her crew trimmed her sails to the wind. Everything about her gave the impression of the security of power in this delicately curved inanimate creature, swift and intelligent as a greyhound or some bird of prey. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... the girl, it roused in him a hunger to draw from the well of her perfect health, from the unused vigor of her being, something for himself. The touch of her hands warmed him. In the fulness of her life, in the strong eloquence of face and form, he forgot she was not beautiful. The lightness passed from his words, and his ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... serviceable, but not to be compared with the Indian canoes, which were made of the bark of trees, wrought with great skill into a beautiful shape. The birch canoe was an admirable structure, combining elements and principles which modern naval architecture may well study to imitate. In lightness, rapidity, freedom and ease of motion, it has not been, and cannot be, surpassed. Its draft, even when bearing a considerable burden, was so slight, that it would glide over the shallowest bars. It was strong, durable, and easily kept in repair. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... song, and light, and flowers! Gust on gust, the harsh winds blow— Come, bind up those ringlet showers! Roses for that dreaming brow! Come, once more that ancient lightness, Glancing feet, and eager eyes! Let your broad lamps flash the brightness ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... breathless and there was a forced lightness in her tone which did not escape him. He bent a ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... of bows. In war two were used—the cross-bow and the long-bow. The cross-bow was meant at first for the defence of towns, like Genoa or the towns of Castile. So strength was more important than lightness, and the archer had time to take aim. It was a bow on a cross piece of wood, along which the string was drawn back peg after peg by mechanism. The bow was then held to the breast, and the arrow let off. It was clumsy, heavy, ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... acquire the ponderous movements and weight of manner of smaller wits and duller brains. In the girl, quiescence was the natural outcome of womanly reserve; in the Boy, it would have been mere affectation. His lightness and brightness were his great charm at present, a charm, however, which was much enhanced by moments of thoughtfulness, which gave glimpses of another nature beneath, with more substantial qualities. The Tenor had soon perceived that he was not all ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... in frosty weather) made them look forward with pleasant anticipation to the comforts which awaited them at their hospitable entertainer's. It was the sort of afternoon that might induce a couple of elderly gentlemen, in a lonely field, to take off their greatcoats and play at leap-frog in pure lightness of heart and gaiety; and we firmly believe that had Mr. Tupman at that moment proffered 'a back,' Mr. Pickwick would have accepted his offer with the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... pitcher from the bench by the wall she went out, and, sheltered by the ridge of rocks behind which the cottage stood, made her way to the spring which dripped from a crack in the cliffs. While she waited for the pitcher to fill, she sang, in sheer lightness of heart, the old ballad which not only floated on the air of Abersethin and its neighbourhood, but which she had heard her mother sing in the ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... mallets, and rubbed together into fibers. After this being dried in the sun, you may spin it, just like hemp, or any similar substance. The fiber thus produced makes very strong and durable ropes, extremely well adapted, from their lightness and durability, for the running rigging of a ship; while the same causes, united with its great strength and buoyancy, render it very suitable for large cables ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... nart, to which they are harnessed is about ten feet in length and two in width, made of seasoned birch timber, and combines to a surprising degree the two most desirable qualities of strength and lightness. It is simply a skeleton framework, fastened together with lashings of dried sealskin, and mounted on broad, curved runners. No iron whatever is used in its construction, and it does not weigh more than twenty pounds; yet it will sustain a load of four or five ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... among the stately trunks of the solemn pines, made his way to the river. On its bank were drawn up many canoes, over which Chitta glanced hastily, but with a practised eye. In a moment he selected one that promised to combine lightness with speed, noiselessly launched it, and stepped into it. Grasping a paddle, he headed the stolen craft down the river, and was quickly buried in the mist that rose ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... was still attractive to him. He wondered why she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little, ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... mistaken. Almost immediately, however, there came from the direction of the hall a dull chunky sound as though something soft had been kicked, followed by a low gurgle and the noise of staggering feet. Unless he was dancing a pas seul out of sheer lightness of heart, the nocturnal visitor ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... his glass; and they all laughed at her subsequent gasping. Jasper Penny was astoundingly happy; his being radiated a warmth and contentment more potent than that of the St. Croix rum. It was accompanied by an extraordinary lightness of spirit, a feeling of the desirability of life. The memory of his greying hair had left him; not, it was true, to be replaced by the surging emotions of youth, but by a ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... most buoyant creature that runs. His soft wrapping of fur conceals the muscular play and effort that is so obvious in the hound that pursues him, and he comes bounding along precisely as if blown by a gentle wind. His massive tail is carried as if it floated upon the air by its own lightness. ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... you think for a moment I'd let you take that ride alone?" She smiled faintly with a brave attempt at lightness. "You'd be falling off and breaking another rib. Please don't make difficulties. I'm going with you, and that's an end ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... with an attempt at lightness. "He won't listen to reason—nor to bribery and corruption—" this last was said openly and with a smile that robbed the ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... leaping at him like a wild animal; I feel the tightening of the big neck muscles as my fingers closed on his throat; I feel a soft breath of night air as we neared the open window; then in my hands a sudden lightness, and in my ears a ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... at this juncture that the young woman was not particularly distressed. Instead, her rather pretty face was full of eagerness and there was a certain lightness in her manner that puzzled him for the moment. Her companion was the older of the two and quite as prepossessing. Both were neatly dressed and both looked as though they were or had been bread-winners. If they had a secret, it was now quite evident to this shrewd, ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the garden and he was glad enough to escape so, a little shaken, but without a scratch. The group composed of Feodor and his friends were strangely protected by the lightness of the datcha's construction. The iron staircase, which, so to speak, almost hung to the two floors, being barely attached at top and bottom, raised under them and then threw them off as it broke into a thousand pieces, but ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... live in herds, five, ten, and sometimes twenty together. They are merry, wise creatures, graceful and agile in their movements, and spring from cliff to cliff and across chasms with extraordinary lightness and sureness of foot. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 23, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... rooms were finished, according to their several purposes. Cleanliness and order prevailed throughout. Above all, the large panes of plate-glass contributed towards a perfect lightness, which had been wanting in the old house for many causes, but chiefly on account of the panes, which were for the most part round. My father was cheerful on account of the success of his undertaking; and if his good humor had not been often interrupted because the diligence and exactness ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... device used to insure the girl's continued agility and lightness of foot. As long as the hidden stick remains unbroken the girl ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... What of the girl he had seen at her father's camp, the heart's desire of the rugged old Scotchman? In the lightness of her step, in the lift of her head, in speech and gesture and expression of face, she was of the white race, an inheritor of its civilization and of its traditions. Only her dusky color and a certain wild shyness seemed ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... stairs his lightness counted. His bare feet made no sound. He could hear behind him the great mass of Humbert, hurling itself down. Haeckel ran as he had never run before. The last flight now, with the concierge well behind, ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... world is a heavy heart. Next to that, the most burdensome to the walker is a heart not in perfect sympathy and accord with the body,—a reluctant or unwilling heart. The horse and rider must not only both be willing to go the same way, but the rider must lead the way and infuse his own lightness and eagerness into the steed. Herein is no doubt our trouble, and one reason of the decay of the noble art in this country. We are unwilling walkers. We are not innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen from that state of grace ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... hours before had voluntarily confessed her love for one man, and was on the eve of compulsorily giving herself up to another one. Had it been any one else but Natasha, Arnold could have felt only disgust; but his love made it impossible for him to believe her guilty of such unworthy lightness as her words bespoke, even on the plain evidence before him, so he simply choked back his anger as best he might, and followed towards the house, speechless with astonishment at the marvellous change that had come ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... all the taxi windows and was struck with the architectural beauties of the streets. With the exception of Munich I have never seen a modern town comparable to New York. The colour of the stone and lightness of the air would put vitality into a corpse; and in spite of a haunting recollection that the lady in the gallery had had enough of me, I returned to the Ambassador happy ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... work in India, and employed the spare time that missionary work left him in bringing his invention to a workable state. The invention is described as a 'box which with the aid of clockwork rises in the air, and goes with such lightness and strong rapidity that it succeeds in flying a journey of seven leagues in an hour. It is made in the fashion of a bird; the wings from end to end are 25 feet in extent. The body is composed of cork, artistically joined together and well fastened ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... as characteristic of the Gaulish race." At all events, the language of the Gauls disappeared in Central France to make way for the language or the Capital—the modern French, founded on the Latin. The Gaulish race, nevertheless, preserved their characteristics—quickness, lightness, mobility, and elasticity—qualities which enabled them quickly to conceive new ideas, and at the same time to quickly abandon them. The Franks had given the country the name it now bears—that of France. ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... walked with a peculiar, rolling motion of the body. He certainly was stout. There were no angles about him anywhere, nothing but rotundity. Withal, and despite the curious, rotary gait, there was a suggestion of quickness and of well-balanced lightness about all his movements. His hands and feet I thought quite remarkably small. There was a short section of the bole of a large tree, with a flattened base, lying on the ground near the stairway. The gentleman subsided ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... to be asked, o' course," said Mr. Kybird, with an attempt at dignity, rendered necessary by a certain lightness in his friend's manner. "The old woman don't like the Nugent lot, but ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... that of Epicurus, magnificam vocem, an heroical speech, "A fool still begins to live," and accounts it a filthy lightness in men, every day to lay new foundations of their life, but who doth otherwise? One travels, another builds; one for this, another for that business, and old folks are as far out as the rest; O dementem senectutem, Tully exclaims. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... expensive business. The balloons were made of the finest, lightest Japanese silk, carefully prepared and still more vigorously tested. They were made by the most famous of the world's balloon-makers, Lachambre, and required the spending of money unstintedly. The motors cost according to their lightness rather than their weight, and all the materials, cordage, metal-work, etc., were expensive for the same reason. The cost of the hydrogen gas was very great also, at twenty cents per cubic meter (thirty-five cubic feet); and as at each ascension all ...
— Stories of Inventors - The Adventures Of Inventors And Engineers • Russell Doubleday
... his wonted graceful lightness of manner he walked on with her, leaving the other ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... The lightness of the new peer's tone revolted Maltravers, and he turned impatiently away. But Lord Vargrave, resolving not to suffer the conversation to glide back to sorrowful subjects, which he always hated, turned round to Ernest, and said, "Well, my dear Ernest, I see by the papers ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... shown, from the moment we got to sea, that he was to have no boy's play, but that the ship was to carry all she could, and that he was going to make up by "cracking on'' to her what she wanted in lightness. In this way we frequently made three degrees of latitude, besides something in longitude, in the course of twenty-four hours. Our days we spent in the usual ship's work. The rigging which had become slack from being long in port was to be set up; breast backstays got up; studding-sail ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... silence, refrain from brushing a fly off the nose, or suppress a cough or sneeze. The same exhibition of collective action is seen in the care with which the children move to avoid making a noise during their work. The lightness with which they run on tiptoe, the grace with which they shut a cupboard, or lay an object on the table, these are qualities that must be acquired by all, if the environment is to become tranquil and free from disturbance. ...
— Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook • Maria Montessori
... saddle with the lightness of a man of half his years, and his eyes rested on the pack-saddle on ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... aborigines are the birch-builders. They detect by the river-side the tree barked with material for canoes. They strip it, and fashion an artistic vessel, which civilization cannot better. Launched in the fairy lightness of this, and speeding over foamy waters between forest-solitudes, one discovers, as if he were the first to know it, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... looking at Gunson as if he thought him mad. "Leave fo' Indian man come find? No. Quong set him." And going quickly and delicately over the stones with a step that was almost cat-like in its lightness, he had reached my bundle almost before Gunson could protest. Swinging it up on his head as he turned, he began to come back as quickly as he went, but now he began to ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... glad. Sometimes they think of the ashes and cinders and wonder whether the pleasure will last. Then the lightness goes out of their feet and the smiles from their rosy lips. The thing is to enjoy it while you are here. You are a very delightful Cinderella; I must ask godmother to keep a watch over you. I ...
— A Modern Cinderella • Amanda M. Douglas
... long story, become very tiresome because of its want of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester to stuff it with endless tags. But for a short tale in deft hands it can apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack of sting. The fabliau-writer or reciter was not required—one imagines that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it—to spin a long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty rapidly; and, as La Fontaine ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... receiver, since as transmitters and receivers they are practically the same as those in ordinary use for other purposes. The watch-case receiver is nearly always employed for operators' purposes on account of its lightness and compactness. It is used in connection with a head band so as to be held continually at the operator's ear, allowing both of her hands to ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller
... leaned over the world, a dark care, an immovable fate, bearing down with the weight of his presence all aspiration, all budding delights of children and young persons: all must crouch before him, and uphold his glory with the sacrificial death of every impulse, every admiration, every lightness of heart, every bubble of laughter. Or—which to a mind like Robert's was as bad—if he did not punish for these things, it was because they came not within the sphere of his condescension, were not worth his notice: of sympathy ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... with a mixture of kaolin and Mellville gravel clay, and the gear is packed in the carburizing material. Bohnite, a commercial carburizing compound is used exclusively at this plant. This does excellent work and is economical. Broadly speaking, the economy of a carburizing compound depends on its lightness. The space not occupied by work must be filled with compound; therefore) other things being equal, a compound weighing 25 lb. would be worth more than twice as much as one weighing 60 lb. per cubic foot. It has been claimed that certain compounds can be used over and over again, ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... to sing like the birds, from "lightness of heart, and very joy of living." After a few moments' silence, a bird-song was whistled by the "mates in the tree," eliciting strong words of praise, as well as surprise, ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... carpeted with powdered pearls and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world and all the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the north, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithiof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, where ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Chaucer preserves his own distinct personality. If he quizzes in the rime of Sir Thopaz the wearisome idleness of the French romance he retains all that was worth retaining of the French temper, its rapidity and agility of movement, its lightness and brilliancy of touch, its airy mockery, its gaiety and good humour, its critical coolness and self-control. The French wit quickens in him more than in any English writer the sturdy sense and shrewdness of our national disposition, corrects its extravagance, and relieves its somewhat ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... monkey, till at last he reached the branch which bore the nest, where he stooped puzzled, for Mrs and Mr Passer must have had an eye to safety when they constructed their nest; for unless Master Harry had possessed the activity and lightness of body of the old cock jackdaw he was so lately talking about, there was no chance of his getting any of the ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... the envy of the British, who imitated their models without success and tried to utilize them for cruisers when captured, but destroyed their sailing qualities by altering their rig and strengthening their hulls at the expense of lightness and symmetry. ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... its height. The central aisle is one hundred and thirty-two feet in altitude,—only surpassed by that of Beauvais, which is fourteen feet higher. It was then that the cathedral of Rouen was built, with its elegant lightness,—a marvel to modern travellers. Soon after, the cathedral of Cologne appears, more grand than either,—but left unfinished,—with its central aisle forty-four feet in width, rising one hundred and forty feet into the air, with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume V • John Lord
... impressed by my son's work and the beauty that he brought on to the stage of the Imperial, wrote to me that the symbolism of the first act according to Ibsen should be Dawn, youth rising with the morning sun, reconciliation, rich gifts, brightness, lightness, pleasant feelings, peace. On to this sunlit scene stalks Hiordis, a figure of gloom, revenge, of feud eternal, of relentless hatred and uncompromising unforgetfulness of wrong. At the Imperial, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... cruelly thoughtless," I said, in a voice that trembled slightly. Then, catching up the paper, I continued, with attempted lightness, "We have found this journal, that we mutually read, a fruitful theme. What do you think of ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... not inspired by any deeper motive than the common run of contemporaneous drawing-room verses, those of Charles of Orleans are executed with inimitable lightness and delicacy of touch. They deal with floating and colourless sentiments, and the writer is never greatly moved, but he seems always genuine. He makes no attempt to set off thin conceptions with a multiplicity of phrases. His ballades are generally ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she thought, after a little over an hour that the first expected movement made itself felt—a long trembling shudder through the wood beneath her hands, followed by a strange sensation of lightness, as if the whole table rose a little from the floor. Then, almost before the movement subsided, a torrent of little taps poured itself out, as delicate and as swift and, it seemed, as perfectly calculated, as the rapping of some minute electric hammer. This was new to her, yet ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... countenance that spoke the lightness of her heart, hastily took her leave, saying she did not dare be out longer, lest her mother should discover her excursion. Cecilia insisted, however, upon her going in a chair, which she ordered her servant to attend, and ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... the halfway point; the acceleration rate decreased, and the gravity indicator dropped, little by little. Everybody was enjoying the new sense of lightness, romping and skylarking like newly landed tourists on Luna. It was fun, as long as they landed on their feet at each jump, and the food and liquids stayed on plates and in glasses and cups. Yves Jacquemont began posting ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... whether the occupants of this house were at home or not. The place had evidently been in the hands of painters and cleaners since he saw it last: the stone-work was scrupulously white, the wood-work was painted a delicate green. The visitor lifted his well-defined eyebrows at the lightness of the color, as he turned to the door and rang the bell. It was easy to see that he was an observant man, upon whose eyes very few things ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... herself a little over this when Hope returned with a long thin band of white Indian cotton, steeped in water, and, taking her hand gently, began to bind her wrist with great lightness and delicacy. And as he bound it he said, "There, the ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... early hour of the day when it was announced that the meeting would be held, groups of colored people of all ages and both sexes began to assemble. They were all talking earnestly as they came, for some matter of unusual interest seemed to have usurped for the moment their accustomed lightness and jollity of demeanor. Nimbus, as the most prosperous and substantial colored man of the region, had always maintained a decided leadership among them, all the more from the fact that he had sought thereby to obtain no advantage for ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... Maggie, rather indifferently. Indeed, it seemed as if her lightness of heart had suddenly failed her. "Well, perhaps he is deeply involved in schemes for the resurrection of the Polish kingdom, or something of ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... St. Louis now bids fair to rival ere long the "Queen of the West;" Mr. Irving describes her as a small trading place, where trappers, half-breeds, gay, frivolous Canadian boatmen, &c., &c., congregated and revelled, with that lightness and buoyancy of spirit inherited from their French forefathers; the indolent Creole of St. Louis caring for little more than the enjoyment of the present hour; a motley population, half-civilized, half-barbarous, thrown, on his canvas, into one general, confused ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... no selfish happiness he felt. He thought of his mother and sisters at home,—of all those to whom he was indebted; and in the lightness of his spirit, after its heavy burden had been taken away, he lifted up his heart in thanksgiving to the Giver of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... topics—if they come in the way—are made use of for the purpose of insinuating or enforcing some useful truth. Point and epigram are the last things thought of; and therefore it is that Pope's translations, admirable as in themselves they are, fail to give an idea of the lightness of touch, the shifting lights and shades, the carelessness alternating with force, the artless natural manner, which distinguish these charming essays. "The terseness of Horace's language in his Satires," it has been ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... friends," said the President, with a good-humoured seriousness, "let me tell you that the position of either of you is no joke. It is too serious for any lightness and for any passion. I do not want to hear a word about your grievances. I see quite enough. I see a lady driven from home, deprived of her children, and tormenting herself with thoughts of revenge because she has no other object. I see ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... a wondrous rustling everywhere! The steady shadows shook and thinned and died, The shining grass flashed brightness back for brightness, And sleep was gone, and there was heavenly lightness. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... their rows of impatient and outstretched muzzles; and the first glimmers of light creeping over the layers of stones that supported the embankment of the park, lit up the figure of the old woman, running in the dew, with the lightness of a girl, despite her seventy years—verifying exactly each morning all the wealth of the domain, anxious to make sure that the night had not taken away the statues and the vases, uprooted the hundred-year-old quincunx, dried up the springs which filtered into ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... I found a lady travelling—from Sasellano, I understood; and I had the privilege of aiding her to cross the ford." Dieppe spoke with a calculated lightness. ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... yellowish-white of the walls; on one side a martyrdom of St. Catharine, on the other a Crucifixion. Their pale blues and lilacs, their sharp pure greens and thin crimsons, made subtle harmony with the general lightness and cleanness of the abandoned chapel. A poor little altar with a few tawdry furnishings at the further end, a confessional box falling to pieces with age, and a few chairs—these were all that ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the comforts and blessed air of home. This ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... more human than humane," laughed Kemp. He was glad to see that she had roused herself from her sad musings; but a certain set purpose he had formed robbed him now of his former lightness of manner. ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... have rambled away again. I intended to have remarked to you the effect produced by a grove of towering beech, the airy lightness of their foliage admitting a degree of sunshine, which, giving a transparency to the leaves, exhibited an appearance of freshness and elegance that I had never before remarked. I thought of descriptions of Italian scenery. But these evanescent graces seemed the effect of enchantment; ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... S.R. II. p. 100, 'The lightness and inaccuracy with which the "Great African" proceeds is all the better illustrated by the fact, that not only does he accuse Marcion falsely, but he actually defines the motives for which he expunged the passage which never existed etc.... he actually repeats the ...
— Essays on "Supernatural Religion" • Joseph B. Lightfoot
... from the throbbing sunshine into the green-black shadows of a tree, and seated himself with a boyish lightness in piquant contrast with his gray-haired dignity—a lightness that meant athletic years. Eleanor bent down the branch of a great bush that faced him and sat on it as if a bird had poised there. She smiled as their eyes met, and began to hum an air softly. The startled ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... I thought it was love for his brother, and the shame, that had changed Philip—and that endeared him to me. All the lightness and carelessness of manner departed. A great, strong, tenderness took their place. But you know, it was so that he came into your life. He had a wide sympathy and charity, for all—oh! how it drew people to him. ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... once, and with frowning brow regained her coolness, standing upright upon one foot, like Cupid in the painting by Gerard; like him, also, she seemed about to fly away, there was so much airy lightness in her ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... prominent eyebrows. His hair was the richest tone of chestnut; his moustache and beard—the latter peaking slightly forward—inclined to redness. Excellent health manifested itself in the warm purity of his skin, in his cheerful aspect, and the lightness of his bearing. The lower half of his forehead was wrinkled, and when he did not fix his look on anything in particular, his eyelids drooped, giving him for the moment an air of languor. On sitting down, ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... magnificence. They entered into architecture with the enthusiasm of their teachers, but, in their passion for novelty, lost sight of the simplicity which is the great fascination of a Doric Temple. "And they deemed that lightness and grace were to be attained not so much by proportion between the vertical and the horizontal, as by the comparative slenderness of the former. Hence we see a poverty in Roman architecture in the midst of profuse ornament. The great error was a ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... it. But in spite of his long life of dissipation and adventure (he had campaigned with the Swiss Guards at thirteen, and, though he was much past forty, looked like a man of scarce thirty), there was still such an unrivalled grace in all he said and did, such an heroic lightness and gallantry in all he dared—and he dared everything—that he seemed to be eternally young and incomparably charming. It was with a new-born and deep disgust that Calvert noted the attentions of this man, whose ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... with a lightness that Dinah found peculiarly exhilarating. He was evidently determined that she should not be dull. Her spirits rose. She suddenly felt like a child who has ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... make me blush!" She drew her sari across her face, hiding, under a veil of lightness, her joy ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... Annaple's lightness and dexterity rendered her the best of the lady tennis-players, and the less practised Ursula found herself defeated in the match, in spite of a partner whose play was superior to Mark's, and with whom she shyly walked ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... land, and fixt Where pure ethereal joins with foggy air. Defin'd each element, and from the mass Chaoetic, rang'd select, in concord firm He bound, and all agreed. On high upsprung The fiery ether to the utmost heaven: The atmospheric air, in lightness next, Upfloated:—dense the solid earth dragg'd down The heavier mass; and girt on every side By waves circumfluent, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid
... had never before realized the suffering this war was causing individuals until she saw the faces of those women with their sons and brothers and lovers; until she saw the faces of the brave boys, for the moment all the rollicking lightness gone, and only the pain of parting and the mists of the unknown future in ...
— The Search • Grace Livingston Hill
... daughter of the stars in such array that it blinded one to look at her. She has never come near me since, and I have changed my opinion of her: a beguiling minx, with little taste or judgment, and more than her share of feminine lightness and caprice; an unconscionable flirt, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... unexpected directions. Henderson sits with his big proportions quietly rested against the weight-boxes, pulling with monotonous vigor at the fifty-pound weights,—"the Stationary Engine" the boys call him. For a contrast, Draper is floating up and down between the parallel bars with such an airy lightness, that you think he must have hung up his body in the dressing-room, and is exercising only in his arms and clothes. Parsons is swinging in the rings, rising to the ceiling before and behind; up and down he goes, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... somewhat plain types exemplify the style which was in vogue at the same time in the Low Countries. It is good Gothic, to be sure,—at least, good as to its planning,—but without that ornateness or lightness known to-day as characteristic of the distinctive French type, which so ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... office—at least he thought it must be midafternoon until he consulted his watch and discovered that, to all intents and purposes, he had completely lost two hours. An amazing loss, truly. There was no lack of youthful vigor in Calvin Gray's movements at any time, but now there was an unusual lightness to his tread and his lips puckered into a joyous whistle. It had been a great day, a day of the widest extremes, a day of adventure and romance. And that is what every ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... wood, the cotton wood, and the yellow white wood, are used in this part of Canada for all building purposes, wherein pine is employed elsewhere, and the last named makes the best flooring. I should think, from its lightness and beauty, that it might be used with great advantage ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... Greeks used it to suggest the gifts of the gods coming down from heaven. 'Blessings on this house.' I suppose the wreath in the hand used here was meant to suggest the crowning of the work. It explains why the figure is called "Victory." By the way, it has an architectural value in giving lightness and grace ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... his heart. "He acts where you debate. You're often afraid to take a serious step. Cyril never hesitates. You draw back and falter; Cyril goes straight ahead. But all the more reason, accordingly, that Cyril should admit the lightness of whatever you do, for if you do anything—anything in the nature of a definite step, I mean—why, far more readily, then, would Cyril, in like case, have ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... solemnity to the sound, and crowning a climax. A favourite instrument with Wagner is the harp, and he uses it freely in Tristan. The effect is, as it were, to place the orchestra upon springs, adding lightness and elasticity to the tone, as may be noticed in the accompaniment to the duet at the end of ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... thing to avoid is stiffness or discomfort of any kind in the pose. At the same time one must have a gracious air, and while feeling perfectly solidly poised on the feet, must make the impression of a certain lightness and freedom from ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... in the carburizing material. Bohnite, a commercial carburizing compound is used exclusively at this plant. This does excellent work and is economical. Broadly speaking, the economy of a carburizing compound depends on its lightness. The space not occupied by work must be filled with compound; therefore) other things being equal, a compound weighing 25 lb. would be worth more than twice as much as one weighing 60 lb. per cubic foot. It has ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... Gilbert, with scornful lightness, as though his playing had never suffered from cold hands, "it's quite warm to-night!" Which ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... reverence, Denzil suddenly began to think how curiously alike they were, these two! Strong man and fair woman, both had many physical points in common,—the same dark, level brows,—the same half wild, half tender eyes,—the same sinuous grace of form,—the same peculiar lightness of movement,—and yet both were different, while resembling each other. It was not what is called a "family likeness" which existed between them; it was the cast of countenance or "type" that exists between races or tribes, and had young Murray not ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... hands," said Rosmore. "Truly, Sir John has made a mistake, his desire perhaps marring his judgment; but, as truly, I am your humble worshipper. No! please hear me out. In London I did not thrust myself upon you because I had wit enough to understand that professions with even a suspicion of lightness in them were distasteful to you; now, after what has occurred, I am at a disadvantage, and I have no intention of putting my happiness to the test at such an inopportune time. For the present look upon me as a friend who hopes presently to win a greater regard, and who is, meanwhile, ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner
... combat, it is vital that not one unnecessary pound be put on any man's back. Lightness of foot is the key to speed of movement and the increase of firepower. In judging of these things, every officer's thought should be on the optimistic side. It is better to take the chance that men will manage to get by on a little less than to overload them, ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense
... forgot the fact of his new clothes, except that he was conscious of walking with a lightness and elasticity strange to him, and in half an hour rang at the visitors' bell ...
— Facing Death - The Hero of the Vaughan Pit. A Tale of the Coal Mines • G. A. Henty
... more modern stories it is impossible not to be impressed by their lightness and swiftness, their flashes of beauty and emotion, their quick rippling talk; but it is hard, at times, not to feel them to be vitiated by their quite unconscious tendency to represent a point of ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... for the Prince, so he girded on his sword, and set out, singing as he went for pure lightness of heart. ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... easy to fill with air a half-inflated bladder. It is already so buoyant with its own lightness, that it yields itself with ease to receive the generous air. The imagination of the woman flew higher than ever it had flown when the proposition came home to her in all its bearings. Of course it had been in her mind that her daughter should marry well;—but there had been natural fears. ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... to come at six. She gave herself one more day; for what she could not have said. A lightness of head seemed to swim over her, and a loss of breath, when she tried to see more clearly the goal, or what might still capture and ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... worship, or the private use of the ecclesiastical ministers. The memory of past calamities inspired Justinian with a wise resolution, that no wood, except for the doors, should be admitted into the new edifice; and the choice of the materials was applied to the strength, the lightness, or the splendor of the respective parts. The solid piles which contained the cupola were composed of huge blocks of freestone, hewn into squares and triangles, fortified by circles of iron, and firmly cemented ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... finish of phrase. You have a picture of it in such a play as Moliere's Misanthropist, where we see a section of the polished life of the time—men and women making and receiving compliments, discoursing on affairs with easy lightness, flitting backwards and forwards with a thousand petty hurries, and among them one singular figure, hoarse, rough, sombre, moving with a chilling reality in the midst of frolicking shadows. But the shadows were all in all to one another. Not a point of conduct, not a subtlety of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Although Tiberius approached them, they would engage in no open battle with him but kept moving from one place to another, devastating a great deal of ground. Owing to their knowledge of the country and the lightness of their equipment they could easily go wherever they pleased. When winter set in, they did much greater damage by invading Macedonia again. Rhoemetalces and his brother Rhascuporis got the better of this force ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... office he found Caleb alone, his face buried in his hands. Seating himself he plunged into his tale, ending it with an apology to Caleb for the lightness of the sentence ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... struck up a lively tune, and the queen, with marvelous lightness of step and ogling glances, ambled up to a tall, raw-boned Methodist preacher, who had come with me, and invited him to dance with her. The poor parson seemed sadly embarrassed, as her manner was very pressing, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... or galley, being, essentially, an oar vessel, had to fulfil certain simple conditions. She had to be light, or men might not row her. She had to be long, or she might not carry enough oarsmen to propel her with sufficient swiftness. Her lightness, and lack of draught, made it impossible for her to carry much provision; while the number of her oars made it necessary for her to carry a large crew of rowers, in addition to her soldiers and sail trimmers. It was therefore ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... rows, for letting off the water. The Indian plow used in cultivating is exceedingly simple: it is composed of four pieces of wood which the most unhandy ploughman can put together, with the mould board and share, which are of cast iron. The lightness and simplicity of this plough render it easy to be used in every kind of cultivation, where the plantations are divided into rows, such as those of tobacco, maize and sugar cane. It is used with great advantage, ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... you look pretty enough to kiss," exclaimed Mr. Dinsmore, assuming a lightness of manner which he was far from feeling. "Have you had ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example of a rule which is ...
— Progress and History • Various
... deck house, 33 by 56 feet; the walls of the deck house are bowed out to form bay windows. When you first enter the Library the effect is as though you were looking at shimmering marble, this is owing to the lightness of the panels which are sycamore stained in light gray. The mantelpiece is of white statuary marble. The great swing doors which admit you, have bevelled glass panels set in bronze casings. The chairs have mahogany frames ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... said, with a lightness which seemed natural enough, "whether to-night I might not have to dine alone whilst you poor people sat and played havoc with the shreds of my reputation. Groves, the cabinet Johannesburg and the '84 Heidsieck—though I am afraid," he added, ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... drill will best develop the scope and efficiency of the gun as a naval arm, and will render most effective the peculiar advantages of its lightness and mobility in ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... walked on she felt an unselfish joy, a greater lightness of heart. Surely the spring would bring back some of her lost happiness to France. There would be another great drive, another tragic contest of strength, but the British ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... a peculiar lightness of hand to give grace to these colloquial numbers, and the author of Ionica is more at home in the dryad-haunted forest with Comatas. In combining classic sentiment with purely English landscape ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... had a great charm, and a certain whimsical and fantastic humour, which made him do funny little undignified things, like a child. But every single dictum of Melbourne's has got something original and graceful about it—always full of good sense, never pompous, always with a delicious lightness of touch. The only person who took the trouble to put down Melbourne's sayings, just as they came out, was Queen Victoria—but then she was in love with him without knowing it: and in the end he got stuck into the heaviest and most ponderous of biographies, and is lost to the world. Stale politics—there's ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... smooth. Let rise until three times the original size. Knead slightly, put into a well greased pan. Let rise until double its bulk and bake 25 or 30 minutes in moderate oven. It will be well to consult some experienced person as to lightness of sponge ...
— A Little Book for A Little Cook • L. P. Hubbard
... your work and—and if you'd let me, I'd count all these things up. If they are too heavy, you know by how much they are too heavy, and you must have a list of things made out to your scale of lightness, and— ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling
... be admitted that if the style of these passages is less elaborate than that of the Decline and Fall, the deficiency, if it is one, is compensated by greater ease and lightness of touch. ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison
... his reward, for Ethne understood that he had laid aside his suspicions, and she was able to set off his indefatigable cheerfulness against her own misery. And her misery was great. If for one day she had recaptured the lightness of heart which had been hers before the three white feathers came to Ramelton, she had now recaptured something of the grief which followed upon their coming. A difference there was, of course. Her pride was restored, and she had a faint hope born of Durrance's words ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... furtively followed his wife as she moved about near him, sometimes passing close to his chair in search of something she had mislaid. There was colour in her cheeks; her eyes, though preoccupied, were bright; there was a lightness and buoyancy in her step which she set to a little dancing air she was humming under ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... habit of dreaming and dawdling over his work. Such stories may be perfectly simple and even rather pointless and yet do good work; the whole object is to keep the child's fly-away imagination turned upon the work at hand, thus lending wings to his thought, and lightness to his fingers. Moreover, the mother who talks with her child while working is training in him the habit of bright unconscious conversation, thus giving him a most useful accomplishment. Making a game or a play out of the work is, of course, conducive to the ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... she by the laddered pine Steal to the stars on high, Her fairy whiteness, Hidden in brightness, Her hiding-place would so out-shine The constellated sky, She could not 'scape the eye Of my pursuing, Nor her fawn-foot lightness ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne
... no more to me, Homer in the dust-heap lies: I have found my Odyssey In the lightness of her glee, In the laughter of ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... tone of European literature proves. Foreigners, no doubt, do habitual injustice to the morality of French households; but it is impossible that fiction can utterly misrepresent the community which produces and reads it. When one thinks of the utter lightness of tone with which breaches, both of truth and chastity, are treated even in the better class of French novels and plays, it seems absurd to deny the correctness of the picture. Besides, it is not merely a question ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... should as yet be called, "No. 290," was barque-rigged, her standing gear being formed throughout of wire rope; thus combining strength with lightness to the utmost possible extent. Her ordinary suit of sails consisted of the usual square sails in the foremast, fore topmast staysail and jib, large fore and main topsails, maintop sail, topgallant sail ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... buildings on the park. The architecture adopted for all four structures was Romanesque in style; granite was used for wall work, and darker stone for ornamentation. The plans accepted exhibited less massiveness than the original Romanesque, and showed a tendency towards the lightness and delicacy of finish which modern ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... Rupert broke in, a hint of soberness beneath the lightness of his tone as he looked about the almost bare room and then at the strained pallor of Val's thin face. "The Ralestones have been luckless too long. And now suppose we take possession of this commodious mansion. I suggest that we get settled as soon as possible. I don't like the looks of the western ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... that Mr. Robson baptised the girl, taking Miranda for godmother. Mabilla they called her by her sponsor's desire, "Mabilla By-the-Wood," and as such she was published and married. You may be disposed to blame him for lightness of conscience, but I take leave to tell you that he had had the cure of souls in Dryhope for five-and-thirty years. He claimed on that score to know his people. The more he knew of them, the less he was able to question ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... the remaining rooms were finished, according to their several purposes. Cleanliness and order prevailed throughout. Above all, the large panes of plate-glass contributed towards a perfect lightness, which had been wanting in the old house for many causes, but chiefly on account of the panes, which were for the most part round. My father was cheerful on account of the success of his undertaking; and if his good humor had not been often interrupted because the diligence and exactness ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... swing did not reach the bole-bark. It reached nothing but air. He felt a sudden lightness as the stone fled from shaft, and he was left holding a stick ...
— The Beginning • Henry Hasse
... their convalescent State, complained of such a Giddiness, and Lightness of the Head, that they could neither walk nor stand; others, of a Dimness of the Eyes. These Symptoms, for the most part, went off as the Patients gathered Strength: The Use of the Bark, with now and then a Glass of Wine, hastened the Cure; and in two or three Cases ...
— An Account of the Diseases which were most frequent in the British military hospitals in Germany • Donald Monro
... her for its own lightness. It had not been so light for many a day. It seemed as if God was letting her know that He was there. She spread her cloak on a sunny spot of the floor, made Juliet lie down upon it, put a bundle of shavings under her head, covered her with her own cloak, ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... of Earth! Where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness Till they fail, as I am failing, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... village inn. The actual measurements are given in order that these proportions may be followed. It is a well-known fact, that chairs, or seats of any kind, can not be successfully designed on paper with any hope of meeting the essential requirements of comfort, lightness, and stability. Making seats is a practical art, and the development of the design is a matter of many years of successive improvements. A good model should therefore be selected and copied, with such slight changes as ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... said Mrs Chick, with assumed lightness, 'here's Mr Dombey come to see you. Won't you speak to him? They want to lay your little boy—the baby, Fanny, you know; you have hardly seen him yet, I think—in bed; but they can't till you rouse yourself ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... necessarily interfere with the lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as Americans are commonly ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... wandered at noon except for some bare-footed peasant or some monk with the rope around his waist, it was complete solitude; and on moonlit nights they sat by the waterfalls in an atmosphere that had the lightness of mountain air without its keenness. On one occasion they climbed by dry torrent courses five miles into the mountains, baby and all, on horseback and donkeyback—"such a congregation of mountains; looking alive in the stormy light we saw them by." It was certainly a blessed transformation ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... added with a wave of the hand, "You see to what it has advanced me!" for whereas the rest of Spendilove's literary men toiled in two gangs, one on either side of a long high-pitched desk, and wrote slashing leaders for the provincial press, Mr. Joshua exercised his lightness of touch upon 'picturesque middles' in a sort of loose-box partitioned off from the main office by screens of opaque glass. This den—he spoke of it as his 'scriptorium'—had a window looking out upon an elevated ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in a grey surtout. Behind him rode the duke of Vicenza (Caulincourt), who, since the death of marshal Duroc, has succeeded to his office. When they had come up to the house, the master of the horse sprung from his steed with a lightness and agility which I should not have expected in such a raw-boned, stiff-looking gentleman, and immediately held that of ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... day, I threw down my book an hour sooner than usual, and sallied out with a lightness of foot and exhilaration of spirit, to which I had long been a stranger. I had just sprung over a stile that led into one of those green shady lanes, which make us feel the old poets who loved, and lived for, Nature, were right in calling our island "the merry England"—when ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is written for children has the lightness of touch and play of fancy which are characteristic of George MacDonald's fairy tales. Mr. Arthur Hughes's illustrations are all that ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... square of pink cardboard from his waistcoat pocket and she read it, with a sudden lightness underlying her voice: ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... forcing a lightness she did not feel, for as usual she was the first to sense the tense quality in the atmosphere, "for we have certainly had practice enough. We used to sing for the soldier boys at the Hostess House almost ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... from pitching into a fellow twice his size. He could tell all about the great base-ball and foot-ball games of New York City, knew the pitchers by name and yet did not boast uncomfortably. He could swim like a duck and dive fearlessly. He could outrun them all, by his lightness of foot, and was an expert in gliding away from any hand that sought to hold him back. They admired him ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... took possession of the king at the sight and at the perusal of Fouquet's letter to La Valliere by degrees subsided into a feeling of pain and extreme weariness. Youth, invigorated by health and lightness of spirits, and requiring that what it loses should be immediately restored—youth knows not those endless, sleepless nights which enable us to realize the fable of the vulture unceasingly feeding on Prometheus. In instances where the man of middle life, in his acquired strength of will and purpose, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... against their French invaders. In these, as though to show that under the ashes of his old democratic enthusiasm still lived its wonted fires, and that the inspiration of a popular cause was only needed to reanimate them, we find, with less of the youthful lightness of touch and agility of movement, a very near approach to the vigour of his early journalistic days. Whatever may be thought of the historic value of the parallel which he institutes between the struggle ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... the yarn from the wool of their own sheep, and it is then woven by a weaver in Kilronan for fourpence a yard—the men seem to wear an indefinite number of waistcoats and woollen drawers one over the other. They are usually surprised at the lightness of my own dress, and one old man I spoke to for a minute on the pier, when I came ashore, asked me if I was not cold with 'my ...
— The Aran Islands • John M. Synge
... before the ginger ale, for so arises a fatter and lustier bubblement of foam. The reason whereof they leave no testament. While this portion of the meal was under discussion their minds moved free, unpinioned, with airy lightness, over all manner of topics. It seemed no effort at all to talk. Ripe, mellow with long experience of men and matters, their comments were notable for wisdom and sagacity. The waiter, overhearing shreds of their discourse, made a private notation to the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... naturally into his place as the lieutenant seemed now to wake up to his work, and glanced at the sails, which were all set, and giving his orders sharply and well, a pull was taken at a sheet here and a pull there, the helm altered, and in spite of the lightness of the breeze the Kestrel began to work along with an increase of speed of quite ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... Royle affirms that the Manila hemp (abaca fiber) excels the Russian in firmness, lightness, and strength in tension, as well as in cheapness, and has only the one disadvantage that ropes made from it become stiff in wet weather. The reason, however, is found in the manner in which it is spun, and may be ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... elegant and numerous; I have no less than eight different specimens, gathered from our immediate neighbourhood, some of which are extremely elegant, especially one that I call the "fairy fern," from its lightness. One elastic stem, of a purplish-red colour, supports several light branches, which are subdivided and furnished with innumerable leaflets; each leaflet has a footstalk, that attaches it to the branch, of so slight and hair-like a substance ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... evening gown the most fascinating emotions and secrets—love and hate and jealousy, cold and monstrous habits and desires, ruin impending or stealthily advancing, fortune giddying to a gorgeous climax, disease and shame and fear—yet only signs of love and laughter and lightness of heart visible. And she wondered whether at any other table there was gathered so curious an assemblage of pasts and presents and futures as at the one over which Freddie Palmer was presiding somberly. . . . Then her thoughts ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... had gone to the Sunday-school with the children, and had laid them up in her memory more carefully than she had done with those other words and phrases; and she had studied them deeply, for her good and ours. One may see by this that she had a wise and thoughtful head, for all there was so much lightness and vanity ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... about the Works. But her only answer to his meaningless questions was silence. Blair was conscious that he was breathing quickly, and that made him angry. "Why am I such an ass?" he asked himself; then said, with studied lightness, that he was afraid he would have to absent himself from business for still a little longer, as he was going abroad. Fortunately—here the old sarcastic politeness broke into his really serious purpose to be respectful; fortunately he was so unimportant that his absence didn't ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... taken for a younger brother of Mr. John Hamerton. They were both tall and spare, the elder man especially; both were straight and of somewhat proud bearing; their eyes were blue, with a straightforward and fearless expression. The lightness of the beard and hair, together with the development of the forehead, completed the resemblance, though the whole aspect of Mr. John Hamerton was that of a country gentleman, whilst hard intellectual work had left its stamp on the younger man's ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... he answered, with an attempt at lightness. Then rising he added: "Perhaps I am a little tired. Will you ring the bell for Keen? I think I will go to bed. I am sorry, dearest, but I don't feel like talking to-night. The fresh air has gone to my head, I think; but I shall be all right after ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... de Selinville, earnestly, though with an affectation of lightness, 'a little wickedness is fair when there is a great deal at stake. For my part, I would not hesitate long, to find out how soon the King will relent towards my ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... know not what you swear. Look, as I blow this feather from my face, And as the air blows it to me again, Obeying with my wind when I do blow, And yielding to another when it blows, Commanded always by the greater gust, Such is the lightness of you common men." (Ib., Act ...
— Tolstoy on Shakespeare - A Critical Essay on Shakespeare • Leo Tolstoy
... touch or smell, surely becomes more vivid and more clear in our consciousness. This does not at all mean that it becomes more intense. A faint light to which we turn our attention does not become the strong light of an incandescent lamp. No, it remains the faint, just perceptible streak of lightness, but it has grown more impressive, more distinct, more clear in its details, more vivid. It has taken a stronger hold of us or, as we may say by a metaphor, it has come into the center of ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... trouble. They can be finely ground in a nut-mill and used for several purposes, mixed in the proportion of about two ounces to the pound of wheatmeal they produce a rich flavoured bread. They can also he used in sweet cakes and in rich puddings to increase their food value, lightness and taste. Pine kernels being very oily, can be used with flour in the ...
— The Chemistry of Food and Nutrition • A. W. Duncan
... Notwithstanding the lightness and satire with which our Hero appeared to treat the subject, poor Distich was not to be stayed ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Marshall woke with a lightness at his heart that had been long absent. For a moment, conscious only that he was happy, he lay between sleep and waking, frowning up at his canopy of mosquito net, trying to realize what change had come to him. Then he remembered. ...
— My Buried Treasure • Richard Harding Davis
... to Mary Louise in this hour of trial. The chair-girl, beneath her gayety of demeanor and lightness of speech, was deeply religious. Her absolute faith sounded so cheering that death was robbed of much of its horror and her bereaved friend found solace. Mary Louise was able to talk freely of "Mamma Bee" to Irene, while ...
— Mary Louise • Edith van Dyne (one of L. Frank Baum's pen names)
... terror. Instead of summoning a physician, to ascertain the nature of her symptoms, he called a negro and his cart from Bush Hill. In vain the neighbours interceded for this unhappy victim. In vain she implored his clemency, and asserted the lightness of her indisposition. She besought him to allow her to send to her mother, who resided a few miles in the country, who would hasten to her succour, and relieve him and his family from the danger and trouble ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... accomplished, and when she arrived at the palace with the equerry, she was received with royal honours, as became the bride of the prince. The guards looked at each other with astonished eyes, as the wizened creature, bowed with age, passed between their lines; but they were more amazed still at the lightness of her step as she skipped up the steps to the great door before which the king was standing, with the prince at his side. If they both felt a shock at the appearance of the aged lady they did not show it, and the king, with a grave bow, ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... to an end. And then, too, this mighty command of spaces and masses is only half his power. He spreads further than any one else, but he also touches the detail of the scene, the single episode, the fine shade of character, with exquisite lightness and precision. Nobody surpasses, in some ways nobody approaches, the easy authority with which he handles the matter immediately before him at the moment, a roomful of people, the brilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... should then proceed to weigh the other bags against that which had been counted. While all were watching him as he poured out and counted the money with much noise and many loud exclamations from both merchants as to the lightness of some of the coins, neither the Caliph, Giafer, Mesrur, nor either of the slaves, perceived that behind them, barefoot and noiseless as camels, a number of huge and powerful black ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... declared he can hardly repress a boyish excitement. "War is a huge entrainement," he writes in June, 1893; "there is no other temptation to be compared to it, not one. We were all wet, we had been five hours in the saddle, mostly riding hard; and we came home like schoolboys, with such a lightness of spirits, and I am sure such a brightness of eye, as you could have ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Billy!" "Lay it down, lad!" came in a rugged chorus, and Wriggs danced on with wonderful skill and lightness, putting in all the regular pulling and hauling business right to the very end, which was achieved with the most intense solemnity of manner, amid ...
— Fire Island - Being the Adventures of Uncertain Naturalists in an Unknown Track • G. Manville Fenn
... of Romeo, he sought to win her love; to turn her from the lightness and frivolity of coquetting, to the more womanly aspirations of home and marriage, and to penetrate the veil of mystery and doubt in which she seemed enfolded, and into which she plunged herself the more closely if followed. But ...
— The Secrets Of The Great City • Edward Winslow Martin
... gathered flowers, either as a lesson to himself or a gift for others; they hardly spoke of careless beauty to him, they were emblems of lightness and thoughtlessness, and Heath had no time to stop and consider the lilies ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Belknap-Jackson been—pardon me—quite drunk, I feel that the outcome would have been happier for us all. So far as I have thought along these lines, it seems to me that if one is to be kicked at all, one must be kicked good-naturedly. I mean to say, with a certain camaraderie, a lightness, a gayety, a genuine good-will that for the moment expresses itself uncouthly—an element, I regret to say, that was conspicuously lacking from the brief ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... exquisite tracery, wherein flowers (chiefly lilies), leaves, and convoluted bands play a conspicuous part. Everywhere, on the cornices, tambours, and balconies, chaste wreaths and crowns of lilies add beauty and lightness to the fabric, and give to the whole the appearance ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... be added, in conclusion, that the oars of a lifeboat are short, and so made as to combine the greatest possible strength with lightness. They are fastened to the gunwale by short pieces of rope, and work in a moveable iron crutch on an iron thole-pin. Each boat is provided with a set of spare oars. Her equipment of compass, cables, grapnels, ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... spoke Dave, with a lightness that was deceptive, "I've really been in several worse scrapes than the ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... whole household when the door closed behind his broad back. Peace crippled perhaps for life, perhaps never to walk without crutches again! It was too dreadful to be true. Peace,—their gay little butterfly! Peace, whose feet seemed like wings! They never walked, but danced along with the lightness of a fairy, tripping, flitting, never still. ...
— Heart of Gold • Ruth Alberta Brown
... again in their little cottage, and Zephas' honest eyes—with no trace of evil knowledge or suspicion in their homely, neutral lightness—were looking into hers with his usual simple trustfulness, Mrs. Bunker trembled, whimpered, and—I grieve to say—basely funked her boasted confession. But here the Deity which protects feminine weakness intervened with the usual miracle. As he gazed at his ...
— Sally Dows and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of titles of minor works, which Aulus Gellius has preserved, the lightness and beauty of such compositions are charmingly expressed. Among these we find—a Basket of Flowers; an Embroidered Mantle; and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... had that morning, and he felt ready to tell her of his encounter with Drew. But fearing to raise her hopes unduly on so slender a basis he refrained, and stayed with her till the time was approaching for his visit to the house across the Park. Then he left her wondering at the feeling of lightness that came over him, and not attributing it to the fact that he had something to do—something which called his faculties into action to scheme and contrive the meeting without being baffled by those who dogged the steps of every one about ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... and when Adam Colfax received the word the boats were tied to the bank. Some tents were pitched in the opening, and with considerable difficulty the fires were lighted. A drizzling rain still fell, but the fires finally triumphed over it, and blazed and crackled merrily. Nevertheless, this lightness and merriment were not communicated to the men, who shivered in the wet, drew close to the flames, and had downcast faces. All the five were ashore and in the shadow of the woods they held a little conference of their ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler
... creation, wherein the marvels of the visible universe are reproduced with immeasurable grandeur, lightness, swiftness, and extension; wherein sensation is infinite, and whither certain privileged natures, possessed of divine powers, are able to penetrate, and you will have some notion of the ecstatic joys of which Cataneo and ...
— Massimilla Doni • Honore de Balzac
... tempest you admire proves its paternity," he said, with a manifest effort at lightness. "It emanates from the vast magazines of frost, snow, and wintry wind that lie far to the north-east even of my home, and THAT is in a region you would think drear and inhospitable after the more clement airs of of ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... necessity of bringing a novel somewhere to an end. And then, too, this mighty command of spaces and masses is only half his power. He spreads further than any one else, but he also touches the detail of the scene, the single episode, the fine shade of character, with exquisite lightness and precision. Nobody surpasses, in some ways nobody approaches, the easy authority with which he handles the matter immediately before him at the moment, a roomful of people, the brilliance of youth, spring sunshine in a forest, a boy on a horse; whatever his shifting panorama brings into ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... "has ennobled man, but not made him happier. The Christian is not so happy as the old Greek. The old Greek mythology is full of images of joy, of lightness, and vivacity; nymphs and fauns, dryads and hamadryads, and all sportive creations. The arts that grow up out of Christianity ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... leaf of pencilled paper on the table. The next minute his rapid footsteps crunched on the gravel path. Even after he was gone and she was left quite alone in her old condition, the dead, nerveless sense of despair did not return. An unreasonable lightness of spirit buoyed her—a feeling that after a desolate winter a new season was coming, that her little world was growing larger, lighting indefinably ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... She had never heard him laugh with such lightness, with such a note of soul-gladness, before. "Hope.... I shall eat and drink hope—until you—come to me. For you will come to me. I know it.... It couldn't be any other way." He laughed again, gayly. And then from out the blackness of the surrounding shrubbery there plunged ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... opened all the taxi windows and was struck with the architectural beauties of the streets. With the exception of Munich I have never seen a modern town comparable to New York. The colour of the stone and lightness of the air would put vitality into a corpse; and in spite of a haunting recollection that the lady in the gallery had had enough of me, I returned to ...
— My Impresssions of America • Margot Asquith
... still attractive to him. He wondered why she had no shades of feeling to correspond to her natural grace and lightness of movement, to the gentle, almost wistful attitudes of body in which he sometimes surprised her. When he came in from work and found her sitting on the porch, leaning against a pillar, her hands clasped about her knees, her head drooping a little, he could ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... plane of attainment. The physique of a healthy day-laborer is a thing of inferior mould to the physique of a healthy artist. Muscular power needs also nervous power to bring out its finest quality. Lightness and grace are not incompatible with vigor, but are its crowning illustration. Apollo is above Hercules; Hebe and Diana are winged, not weighty. The physiologist must never forget that Nature is aiming at a keener and subtiler temperament in ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... the visitors felt much more at ease. The slightly reduced gravitation gave them a sense of lightness and freedom which more than balanced the junglelike oppressiveness of the air. They found themselves guarding against a certain exuberance; perhaps it was the extra ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... considering here. Observation of this sequence with the bodily eyes alone will show nothing but a reduction of the specific gravity of the material concerned. He who is at pains to observe also with the eye of the spirit, however, is aware of a positive increase of lightness going hand in hand with a decrease of heaviness. Regarded thus, the three ponderable conditions form what Goethe would have called a 'spiritual ladder'. As 'rungs' of such a ladder they clearly point to a fourth rung - that ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... able to see his legs move. The comte, still paler than Raoul, followed his son, painfully traversing briers and bushes, stones and ditches, Raoul not appearing to touch the earth, no obstacle seeming to impede the lightness of his march. The comte, whom the inequalities of the path fatigued, soon stopped, exhausted. Raoul still continued to beckon him to follow him. The tender father, to whom love restored strength, made a last effort, and climbed the mountain after the young man, who attracted him by gesture ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Gentlemen conserned in the Hudson's Bay Trade, relating to the Comers of Bever skins, and the just cause of dissattisfaction which both of us had, to make us retire into France. I have no cause to believe that I in the least deserve to bee taxed with lightness or inconstancy for the Imployments wherein I since ingaged, although they were against the Interests of the said Company, for it is suffitiently known that my Brother nor myself omitted nothing that lay in our power, ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson
... supra) describes the tree (Cedrela toona—Roxb.) called calanta in Tagal, and lanipga in Visayan. The tree is fragrant and has wood of a reddish color. It was used for making the hulls of vessels, because of its strength and lightness. The same author describes also the asana (Pterocarpus indicus—Willd.) or as it is called in the Visayas, naga or narra—as an aromatic tree, of which there are two varieties, male and female. The wood of the male tree is pinkish, while that of the female tree is inclined ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... good pressing, well finished ends and corners, lightness of touch which holds the work without apparently touching it, thus giving to the finished garment a fresh look—all these ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... dedicated to the boy Froben and went on growing with each new edition: a rich and motley collection of dialogues, each a masterpiece of literary form, well-knit, spontaneous, convincing, unsurpassed in lightness, vivacity and fluent Latin; each one a finished one-act play. From that year on, the stream of editions and translations flowed almost uninterruptedly for ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... own heart, and one whom he looked upon as solid. For Mr. Wade belonged to a solid generation that liked the andante of life to be played in good heavy chords, and looked with suspicious eyes upon brilliancy of execution or lightness of touch. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... All lightness of spirit and body having departed from me at the touch of officialdom, I looked at the scribe without animation and asked in my ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... take their proper place; The next of kin contiguously embrace, And foes are sundered by a larger space. The force of fire ascended first on high, And took its dwelling in the vaulted sky; Then air succeeds, in lightness next to fire, Whose atoms from inactive earth retire; Earth sinks beneath and draws a numerous throng Of ponderous, thick, unwieldy seeds along. About her coasts unruly waters roar, And, rising on a ridge, insult the shore. Thus when the god—whatever god was he— Had formed ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... college that has ever been written." —N. Y. Press. "To any woman who has enjoyed the pleasures of a college life this book cannot fail to bring back many sweet recollections; and to those who have not been to college the wit, lightness, and charm of Patty are sure to be no less ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... had already been heard at Pleyel's rooms, and had there obtained a brilliant success. On this occasion it was not so well received, a fact which, no doubt, must be attributed to the instrumentation, which is lacking in lightness, and to the small volume of tone which M. Chopin draws from the piano. However, it appears to us that the music of this artist will gain in the public opinion when it becomes better known. [FOOTNOTE: From ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... between the two windows, was the last word in the matter of comfort. The colour scheme, of a light greyish-blue, was almost too bright for a man's room; it would have better suited a boudoir. It suggested that the owner of the room enjoyed an uncommon lightness and cheerfulness of temperament. On the walls, with wide gaps between them so that they did not clash, hung three or four excellent pictures. Two ballet-girls by Degas, a group of shepherdesses and shepherds, in pink and blue and white beribboned silk, by Fragonard, a portrait of a woman ...
— Arsene Lupin • Edgar Jepson
... but not at all obsequiously, with the air of good humor due to a combination of wealth and embonpoint. Fat and rich, in perfect health, and carrying his sixty years with the lightness of forty, Molina—Molina the "Tumbler" as he was nicknamed—spent his afternoons on the Bourse and his evenings in the greenroom of ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... lumbering survival stood pertly an Empire treadle-machine for printing envelopes and similar trifles. It was new, and full of natty little devices. It worked with the lightness of something unsubstantial. A child could actuate it, and it would print delicately a thousand envelopes an hour. This machine, with the latest purchase, which was away at the other end of the room near the large double-pointed case-rack, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... size the card was not extraordinary, but it was composed of metal. What metal? That question had immediately arisen in Mr. Boon's mind when the card came into his hand, and now it exercised the wits of all the others. Plainly it was not tin, brass, copper, bronze, silver, aluminum—although its lightness might have suggested ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... relative weight of the two lots of seeds was ascertained in only a few instances in which their germination was observed; but with Ipomoea and I believe with some of the other species, the relative lightness of the self-fertilised seeds apparently determined their early germination, probably owing to the smaller mass being favourable to the more rapid completion of the chemical and morphological changes ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... the little islet the air was full of the talk of the rippling water. The crested wavelets ran up the beach audaciously, joyously, with the lightness of young life, and died quickly, unresistingly, and graciously, in the wide curves of transparent foam on the yellow sand. Above, the white clouds sailed rapidly southwards as if intent upon overtaking something. ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... part of his life to the church of San Apollinaris at Rome. He died in 1674. He did much for musical art, perfecting recitative and advancing the development of the sacred cantata. His accompaniments are generally distinguished for "lightness and variety."] ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... too fanciful. In the Flower-Songs, indeed, he sometimes becomes trivial in his comparison of each English poet to a special flower; but his poetry is usually sincere with an undercurrent of pathos, as in 'The Ruined Chapel,' 'The Winter Pear,' and the 'Song.' For lightness of touch and aerial grace, 'The Bubble' will bear comparison with any verse of its own genre. 'Robin Redbreast' has many delightful lines; and in 'The Fairies' one is taken into the realm of Celtic folklore, which is Allingham's inheritance, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... range was as broad as these lines indicate. The most of his poems show the lightness of touch and artistic form revealed in the following lines ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... said, as this spirit regained its empire over him, and he paused before the "starred tubes" of his beloved science,—"and why this chill, this shiver, in the midst of hope? Can the mere breath of the seasons, the weight or lightness of the atmosphere, the outward gloom or smile of the brute mass called Nature, affect us thus? Out on this empty science, this vain knowledge, this little lore, if we are so fooled by the vile clay and the common air from our one great empire, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... across to the subject of their remarks. The girl sat in the front of the box, slim and elegant, her hands clasped loosely in her lap. She was watching the brilliant scene with a certain air of detachment, as if thinking of other things. Her usual lightness and gay banter seemed for the moment to have deserted her, leaving a soft brooding wistfulness that ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... the coolest man on the ship, never losing either presence of mind or a certain lightness of spirits, totally unlike the apparently ungovernable fury that possessed him when crossed by any one under his authority. His slight figure and gloved white hands seemed endowed with muscles ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... recent tillage. The whole of the plain, which ascended gently from the rivulet towards the forest, was subdivided in inclosures, by numberless fences, constructed in the rude but substantial manner of the country. Rails, in which lightness and economy of wood had been but little consulted, lying in zigzag lines, like the approaches which the besieger makes in his cautious advance to the hostile fortress, were piled on each other, ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... heroism decided the victory. The Swiss rushed into the gap made by Winkelried, and, having now come to close quarters with their enemies, their bodily strength and the lightness of their equipment gave them a great advantage over the heavily armed Austrians, who were already fainting under the heat of a July sun. The very closeness of the array of the Austrian men-at-arms rendered them incapable either of advancing or falling back, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the French Revolution, probably did to death an affection which owed what languid life it retained chiefly to propinquity and custom. Both Saumarez and Codrington, who served under him, speak passingly of the lightness with which his family ties sat upon Nelson in the years following his short stay at home in 1797. The house was empty, swept, and garnished, when the simple-minded, if lion-hearted, seaman came under the spell of one whose fascinations had overpowered the resistance of a cool-headed ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... know?" His eye was now cold enough to give her, in her chill, a flurried sense that she might displease him least by a graceful lightness. "The Duchess and Lord Petherton are like you ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... given in order that these proportions may be followed. It is a well-known fact, that chairs, or seats of any kind, can not be successfully designed on paper with any hope of meeting the essential requirements of comfort, lightness, and stability. Making seats is a practical art, and the development of the design is a matter of many years of successive improvements. A good model should therefore be selected and copied, with such slight changes as are necessary where ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... her father and I busied ourselves with gathering up our baskets and fastening the anchor—I remember, I say, what a figure she made. There is a certain purity in this Cragthorpe air which I have never seen approached,—a lightness, a brilliancy, a crudity, which allows perfect liberty of self-assertion to each individual object in the landscape. The prospect is ever more or less like a picture which lacks its final process, its reduction to unity. Miss Blunt's figure, as she stood there on the beach, was almost ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 100, February, 1866 • Various
... have me say?" persists Beauclerk still lightly, with wonderful lightness, in fact, considering the weight of that playful tap upon his bent knuckles. "That we shall not be sorry? Would you have me lie, then? Fie, fie, Miss Maliphant! The truth, the truth, and nothing but the truth! At all risks and hazards!" here he almost imperceptibly sends flying ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... while seemed to pass over me, and now I could nowhere see anything. I had passed beyond the fixed stars and plunged into the huge blackness that waits beyond. All this time I had experienced little, save a sense of lightness and cold discomfort. Now however the atrocious darkness seemed to creep into my soul, and I became filled with fear and despair. What was going to become of me? Where was I going? Even as the thoughts were formed, there grew against the impalpable ...
— The House on the Borderland • William Hope Hodgson
... the fire old Nuflo, lately so miserable, now happy in his delusions, was more than usually gay and loquacious. He was like a child who by timely submission has escaped a threatened severe punishment. But his lightness of heart was exceeded by mine; and, with the exception of one other yet to come, that evening now shines in memory as the happiest my life has known. For Rima's sweet secret was known to me; and her very ignorance of the meaning of the feeling ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... papers. "It is at least equal in vigour and elegance to that of most compositions in the ancient Scottish language," says Buchanan's biographer, but few modern readers will agree in this verdict. Buchanan's hand had not the lightness necessary for such a performance. The guilt of Mary and the death of Murray furnished him with more emphatic motives than the iniquities of Maitland, and he was evidently stronger in assault and invective than in the lighter methods ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... anything but an anxious and inquiring mind. While I clung with new and persistent hope to the thread which had been put in my hand, I was too conscious of the maze through which we must yet pass, before the light could be reached, to feel that lightness of spirit which in itself might have lessened the hours, and made bearable those days of forced inaction. To beguile the way a little, I made a complete analysis of the facts as they appeared to me in the light of this latest bit of evidence. The result was not strikingly encouraging, ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... His voice was thick, as it always was at that hour of the night; but he spoke with affected lightness and smiled. "You and the old man been having a palaver, haven't you? Did he say anything ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... foreign travel, on a scale and plan quite outside the beaten track of the conventional "grand tour" as our fathers knew it. From the Continent Richard Milnes brought back a gaiety of spirit, a frankness of bearing, a lightness of touch which were quite un-English, and "a taste for French novels, French cookery, and French wines" with which Miss Crawley would have sympathized. In 1837 he entered Parliament as a "Liberal Conservative" for the Borough of Pontefract, over which ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... a device used to insure the girl's continued agility and lightness of foot. As long as the hidden stick remains unbroken the girl will remain ...
— Washo Religion • James F. Downs
... he ever showed in anything. He had been carried from the ship and from the train, but when we drew up to Stormfield, where Mrs. Paine, with Katie Leary and others of the household, was waiting to greet him, he stepped from the carriage alone with something of his old lightness, and with all his old courtliness, and offered each one his hand. Then, in the canvas chair which we had brought, Claude and I carried him up-stairs to his room and delivered him to the physicians, and to the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... title due to the appearance of this melody in his opera of "Rosamunde." At least three of these variations display great finesse in treating the pianoforte. The first needs to be done with the utmost delicacy and lightness, the melody suggested rather than brought out. The third has a new rhythm and a melodic secondary figure in the left-hand part, which, taken with the treatment of the variation in the right-hand part, gives ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... that Kennedy had reason to congratulate himself on donning gymnasium shoes. They gave him that extra touch of lightness which enabled him to dodge blows which he was too weak to parry. Everything was vague and unreal to him. He seemed to be looking on at a fight ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... braidings, put it on, and over it a dark-brown overcoat; took from the servant's hands a hat which the latter presented him, and which harmonized with his elegant costume, made the man screw his spurs to his boots, and sprang upon his horse with the lightness and skill of an ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... Earth! Where'er thou movest Its dim shapes are clad with brightness, And the souls of whom thou lovest Walk upon the winds with lightness Till they fail, as I am failing, Dizzy, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and so it must. And I will add, it is a shame, it is a reproach, it is a stumbling block to the blind; for though men be as blind as Mr. Badman himself, yet they can see the foolish lightness that must needs be the bottom of all these apish and wanton extravagancies. But many have their excuses ready; to wit, their parents, their husbands, and their breeding calls for it, and the like; yea, the examples of good people prompt them to it; but all these will be but ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... draws the patient to itself, or repels it from itself. Now in drawing it to itself, it does three things in the patient. Because, in the first place, it gives the patient an inclination or aptitude to tend to the mover: thus a light body, which is above, bestows lightness on the body generated, so that it has an inclination or aptitude to be above. Secondly, if the generated body be outside its proper place, the mover gives it movement towards that place. Thirdly, it makes it to rest, when it shall have come ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas
... singing, and all the brooks bright under their little bridges, I knew that I must soon step aside and put down, if I could, some faint impression of the feeling of this time and place. I cannot hope to convey any adequate sense of it all—of the feeling of lightness, strength, clearness, I have as I sit here under this maple tree—but I am going to write as long as ever I am happy at it, and when I am no longer happy at it, why, here at my very hand lies the pleasant country road, stretching away toward newer ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... avoid is stiffness or discomfort of any kind in the pose. At the same time one must have a gracious air, and while feeling perfectly solidly poised on the feet, must make the impression of a certain lightness and freedom from ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... Therese was unweariedly anxious to soothe the mysterious wanderings of his mind with her softest tenderness. But his thoughts were, indeed, far from her, ever hovering over the changed image of his so lately adored Edith—ever agonizing over the lightness of a conduct so unlike her former virgin delicacy, so unlike the clinging vows she breathed to him in their hour of boding separation!—ever execrating the perfidy of his brother, which had brought on him this distracting load ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... "youth, so full of joy and lightness—so careless and gay-hearted! Here is a man—or a child—who in twenty-four hours may be lying cold in death yonder, and he smiles and even laughs. Hoffland," he added, "let us cease our discussions in relation to the origin of this ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... suddenly, throwing back her hair from either side of her face. At this instant the colonel and Monsieur d'Albon could distinctly see her features; she, herself, perceiving the two friends, sprang to the iron railing with the lightness and rapidity ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... observation, the accuracy of which lent them some picturesqueness; but in this letter he yielded to the intoxication of the air, he enjoyed flying as if it were his right. He experienced that sensation of lightness and freedom which accompanies the separation from earth, the pleasure of cleaving the wind, of controlling his machine, of seeing, breathing, thinking differently from the way he saw and thought and breathed on the land, of being born, ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... her blouse, ignored it for a few moments, returned to it from other thoughts with a sense of infinite delight, and read it again. Susan could not quite analyze its charm, but in her whole being she was conscious of a warmth, a lightness, and a certain sweet and heady happiness throughout the entire day and the ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Grisell, Grisell, I was about to lay my very heart at your feet when the Duke's trumpet called me away, ere I guessed, fool that I was, that mine was the hand that left the scar that now I love, but which once I treated with a brute's or a boy's lightness. Oh! pardon me! Still less did I know that it was my own forsaken wife who saved my life, who tended my sickness, nay, as I verily believed, toiled for me and my bread through these long seven years, all in secret. Yea, and won my entire ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... must only do so at his leisure, for the author "introduces All his Sections (and too often interweaves the serious Body of his meanings), with long Runs of bantering Levity, which his [Fielding's] Good sense may suffer by Effect of." "It is true (they continue), he seems to wear this Lightness, as a grave Head sometime wears a Feather: which tho' He and Fashion may consider as an ornament, Reflection will condemn, as a Disguise, and covering." Then follows a brief excursus, intended for their correspondent's ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson
... house," he said. Then, as though to forestall further parley, he turned and spoke with gracious lightness to one of his own rank and occupation who, at the request of my companion, was ascertaining whether letters ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... on the steps of the pagoda with a programme in his hand. Mose bounced into view, handed his tackle to Shanghai, Curry's hostler, and started for the jockeys' room, singing to himself out of sheer lightness of heart. He knew what he would do with that twenty-two-dollar ticket. There was a crap game every night at ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... again a happy priest of the sun. He felt as if all the dirt of misery were soaked out of him, as he might soak clean a soiled garment in the sea, and bleach it white on the sunny shore. So white and sweet and tissue-clean he felt—full of lightness and grace. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... and hiding the water which roared three hundred feet below. I think that my month in prison must have sharpened my appetite for wild and natural beauty, for I skipped as I went, and whistled in sheer lightness of heart. "O Corsicans!" I exclaimed, "O favoured race of mortals, who spend your pastoral days in scenes so romantic, far from the noise of cities, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... trembling steed—leading to the Mecca of his imagination, the palace Sans Souci itself. The building is only one story high, not large, reminding one somewhat of the Trianon at Versailles, though lacking the Trianon's finished lightness and elegance, yet with its semicircular colonnade distinctly French, and impressive by its elevated situation. The chief, the enduring, the magical impression, however, begins to form as our foreigner commences his pilgrimage through ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... cause may have affected the jaw also. Cessation of the process by which natural selection[3] favoured strong thick bones during ages of brutal violence might bring about a change in this direction. Lightness of structure, facilitating agility and being economical of material, would also be favoured by natural selection so far as strength was ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... tangible poetry could nowhere else be found. Over a hundred light and graceful columns of marble surround this one court, supporting arches of perfect loveliness, and a Moorish arcade of aerial lightness and beauty. The rich stucco and the arabesque decorations of the inner walls and ceilings, finished in gold and blue, the original colors still there after centuries of exposure, together form perhaps the gem of the Alhambra. Yet one hesitates to pronounce any one ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... that has lightness of mind. Serious people bore one so after a while." By "serious people" she meant one serious person whom she had admired particularly for his seriousness. But she was in another mood now, another atmosphere—the atmosphere ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips
... I opened my door to a knock, and Follet's bloodshot eyes raked me eagerly. He came in with a rush, as if my hit-or-miss bungalow were sanctuary. I fancied he wanted a drink, but I did not offer him one. He sat down heavily—for all his lightness—like a man out of breath. I saw a pistol-butt sticking out of his pocket and narrowed my eyes upon him. Follet seldom looked me up in my own house, though we met frequently enough in all sorts of other places. It was full five minutes ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Moslem peasantry would not touch them, and the Christian rayahs are afraid to do so. There are, of course, no figures of men, or even of animals, but the charmingly correct arches and doorways, and the delicate tracery above them intermingled with Arabic characters, give a lightness to the portals which is hardly to be found anywhere east of the Alhambra or the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... the kind proposed, with matter adapted to their circumstances, to their capacities, and their various turns of fancy; matter accessible to them by its conciseness and perspicuity, attractive by its variety and lightness, and useful by its easy adaptation to the familiar intercourse of life, and its fitness to enter into the conversation of rational society. Men whose time and labour are chiefly engrossed by the common occupations of life, have little leisure to read, none for what is called study. In ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... she said, with a lightness of tone that rang false to my ears. "And then—naturally, I should like to be sure that it is safely overboard, so it will not ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... leave. Only the friends of Gonzague remained in the room, and they stood apart, eying their master dubiously, uncertain whether he would wish them to go or to stay. Chavernay took it upon himself, with his usual lightness of heart, to play their spokesman. He advanced ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... great celebration in honor of King Lion, the Monkey was asked to dance for the company. His dancing was very clever indeed, and the animals were all highly pleased with his grace and lightness. ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... to me that I should do well to set some of the men to work upon the line which the arrow was to carry; for I had determined that this should be made also from the white hemp yarns, and, for the sake of lightness, I conceived that one thickness of yarn would be sufficient; but so that it might compass enough of strength, I bid them split the yarns and lay the two halves up together, and in this manner they made me a very light ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... gay companions the book had little effect except to make them laugh at him and draw comparisons between the lightness of his words and actions, and the seriousness of the ideas set forth in his Christian Hero. He found himself slighted instead of encouraged, and "from being thought no undelightful companion, was soon reckoned a disagreeable fellow."* So he took to writing plays, for ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... as in life generally," observed Panshin, holding his head to right and to left, "lightness and boldness—are the ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... rate. He might have added with a wave of the hand, "You see to what it has advanced me!" for whereas the rest of Spendilove's literary men toiled in two gangs, one on either side of a long high-pitched desk, and wrote slashing leaders for the provincial press, Mr. Joshua exercised his lightness of touch upon 'picturesque middles' in a sort of loose-box partitioned off from the main office by screens of opaque glass. This den—he spoke of it as his 'scriptorium'—had a window looking out upon an elevated railway, ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and I thought I saw in his eyes a look of savage pain. "I envy you," said he with an effort at his wonted lightness and cynicism. But that look touched my heart; I talked no more of my own happiness. To do so, I felt would be like bringing laughter into ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... heaped waist-high all about, could produce in the greediest man, hungry for earthly pleasures, a delight, a rapture, equal to mine. For this joy was of another and higher order and very rare, and was a sense of lightness and freedom from all trammels as if the body had become air, essence, energy, or soul, and of union with all visible nature, one with sea and land and ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... very strong, he wakened to a certain lightness of spirit. The morning sun had always called him to a new day, and the sun was shining. But he grew depressed as he prepared for the office. He told himself savagely, as he put on his shabby clothing, ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... am I," said Smith, with a fair imitation of his usual lightness. "Going away for good. I hope you will come through this all right. I'll never see you again. Shake hands, will you? You couldn't know it, of course, but—it—is possible that I owe ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... bows. In war two were used—the cross-bow and the long-bow. The cross-bow was meant at first for the defence of towns, like Genoa or the towns of Castile. So strength was more important than lightness, and the archer had time to take aim. It was a bow on a cross piece of wood, along which the string was drawn back peg after peg by mechanism. The bow was then held to the breast, and the arrow let off. It was clumsy, heavy, ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... passed in wild forest rambles. She looked frail as the rays of moonbeam which slid down the old white-bearded hemlocks, but her limbs were agile and supple as steel; and while the party went crashing on before, she followed with such lightness that the slight sound of her movements was entirely lost in the heavy crackling plunges of the party. Her little heart was beating fast and hard; but could any one have seen her face, as it now and then came into a spot ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... "No man can carry it about, much less get it into his head;" and so would it be said of a solid globe. If it were made of hollow wood, it would warp and split at the junction of its parts. A globe is made of paper and plaster. It is a beautiful combination of solidity and lightness. It is perfectly balanced upon its axis. It retains its form under every variety of temperature. Time affects it less than most other works of art. It is as durable as ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... his vagueness, his lightness, his coolly pleasant smile, looking at Mrs. Grey and not at his mother as he answered: "Thanks so much, but I'm monastic, too, you know. I don't go to dinners. I'll ride over some afternoon and ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... an atmosphere so similar to that of Earth that they could breathe with complete freedom, but there seemed to be a lightness and a vigor in their limbs that indicated that the air was supercharged with oxygen or ozone. The presence of this in large amounts was indicated by the intense blueness of the sky, across which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... formation of its foot, which, though it must have attracted attention, I have never seen mentioned by naturalists. It is equivalent to an arrangement that distinguishes the foot of the reindeer from that of the stag and the antelope. In them, the hoofs, being constructed for lightness and flight, are compact and vertical; but, in the reindeer, the joints of the tarsal bones admit of lateral expansion, and the broad hoofs curve upwards in front, while the two secondary ones behind (which are but slightly developed in the fallow deer and others of the same family) ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... water and sending it up as steam. But it was found that it would take an incredible amount of coal. They thought of separating it into oxygen and hydrogen, and then its own lightness would carry it up very quickly. But they had no power that would resolve even quarts into their ultimate elements, where tons ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... level, and preventing jerks at the junction of the rails, he took out a patent for an improved rail and chair, and recommended the employment of heavier rails, and the substitution of wrought for cast-iron. In connection with these improvements he added considerably to the lightness and strength of the locomotive, simplified the construction of the working parts, and substituted steel springs for the small cylinder, on which the boiler had at ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... which the Franks were killed to a man. The Basques, after having plundered the baggage-train, profited by the night, which had come on, to disperse rapidly. They owed all their success in this engagement to the lightness of their equipment and to the nature of the spot where the action took place; the Franks, on the contrary, being heavily armed and in an unfavorable position, struggled against too many disadvantages. Eginhard, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... rosy-flickering stains, Or lambent green, or gold, or crimson, warmed The pulsing crystal of the spirit's veins With ever-changing brightness. And through the Arctic night there went a voice, As if the ancient Earth cried out, "Rejoice! My heart is full of lightness!" ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... amid the scattered contents of the chest she had been rummaging, she forgot, in the charm of "The Family Tryst," that the dough of her batch of bread was fast approaching that stage of lightness that needed her attention, and that her oven was by no means in a proper state to receive it when that point should be reached. Page after page she turned with a vague feeling that each should be the last, till even this half-consciousness of wrong-doing was lost in ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... figure, all lightness and brightness, danced along the road, the white cotton dress rising and falling, the white-stockinged legs much in evidence, the arms outstretched as if in flight, straw hat falling off yellow hair, and a little wisp ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... pass away ere life hath lost its brightness? Bind me no longer, sisters, with the spell Of love and your kind words. List ye to me: Here I am blessed, but I would more be free— I would go forth in all my spirit's lightness. Let ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... laughing merrily for very lightness of heart, till they were close beside the poor widow's low cottage window. Suddenly Nelly stopped, and the laugh was hushed upon her bright lips. "Did you hear it, Phil?" she said softly. "Hear what, Nell?" ...
— Small Means and Great Ends • Edited by Mrs. M. H. Adams
... to have on everything fresh; to have got her feet into rosetted slippers instead of heavy balmoral boots; to feel the lightness and grace of her own movement as she went downstairs and along the halls in floating folds of delicate barege, after wearing the close, uncomfortable traveling-dress, with the sense of dust and fatigue that clung about it; to have a little flutter of bright ribbon in her ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... he said, with a lightness which seemed natural enough, "whether to-night I might not have to dine alone whilst you poor people sat and played havoc with the shreds of my reputation. Groves, the cabinet Johannesburg and the '84 Heidsieck—though I am afraid," he added, looking down at his companion, "that not all the ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with hydrogen. [The Lecturer here blew bubbles with hydrogen, which rose to the roof of the theatre.] It shews you how light this gas must be in order to carry with it not merely the ordinary soap-bubble, but the larger portion of a drop hanging to the bottom of it. I can shew its lightness in a better way than this; larger bubbles than these may be so lifted up; indeed, in former times balloons used to be filled with this gas. Mr. Anderson will fasten this tube on to our generator, and we shall have a stream of hydrogen here with which ...
— The Chemical History Of A Candle • Michael Faraday
... allusions to trivial passages in the history of their childhood, which none of the important scenes in which he had since been engaged had effaced from his mind; and at other times a playful carelessness, that showed the lightness, the expanding freedom of heart, which can be felt only in the perfect confidence and intimacy of domestic affection. In his manner towards his cousins, the Lady Pembrokes, who, since he had last seen them, had grown up from children into fine young women, there were nice differences; with all ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... have I not followed your slightest sign and have left what was either of joy or sorrow in our world to dwell with you in yours till you have dismissed me ever unwilling to depart—But now the weight of grief that oppresses me takes from me that lightness which is necessary to follow your quick & winged motions alas in the midst of my course one thought would make me droop to the ground while you would outspeed me to your Kingdom of Glory & ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... of the Norman cavalry. Their plan had been defeated by the precipitation of Damian, who, beholding as he thought the plumes and mantle of the Lady Eveline in the rear of the party, charged them without considering either the odds of numbers, or the lightness of his own armour, which, consisting only of a headpiece and a buff surcoat, offered but imperfect resistance to the Welsh knives and glaives. He was accordingly wounded severely at the onset, and ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... freedom. Let us think it out. Let the struggle go on, and let us not, with pallid faces and strident voices, cry out in fear; for the only tribunal that can righteously adjudicate the lightness of human thought is the tribunal, as Schiller has it, of history, which unquestionably is on earth the tribunal of the infinite God. He rules in the world of mind as well as in the globe of matter, and eighteen ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 22, September, 1891 • Various
... Bridgeport, or to pass around by Decatur and abandon altogether his attempt to make us let go our hold of Atlanta by attacking our communications. It was clear to me that he had no intention to meet us in open battle, and the lightness and celerity of his army convinced me that I could not possibly catch him on a stern-chase. We therefore quietly followed him down the Chattooga Valley to the neighborhood of Gadsden, but halted the main armies near the Coosa River, at the mouth of the Chattooga, ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... in the prophet's form to fight (For prophet none or augur we have seen; This was not Calchas; as he went I mark'd 90 His steps and knew him; Gods are known with ease) I feel my spirit in my bosom fired Afresh for battle; lightness in my limbs, In hands and feet a glow unfelt before. To whom the son of Telamon replied. 95 I also with invigorated hands More firmly grasp my spear; my courage mounts, A buoyant animation in my feet Bears me along, and I am all on fire To cope with Priam's furious son, alone. ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... thrown down on each side of them. I found upon examining these Weights, they shewed the Value of every thing that is in Esteem among Men. I made an Essay of them, by putting the Weight of Wisdom in one Scale, and that of Riches in another, upon which the latter, to shew its comparative Lightness, immediately flew up ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... speak to folks that don't speak to me," said Dickie, lifting the wafer as though its extreme lightness was faintly repulsive ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... dreamless sleep with a feeling that some curious change had taken place in him. He was abominably stiff, and to move his limbs was pain, but down in the centre of his being there was a novel sensation of lightness. He could have ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... long time since Marshal Saxe said there was but one kind of saddle fit for cavalry, which was the hussar saddle: this combined all advantages, lightness, solidity, and economy. It is astonishing that the system of actual war had not led to the employment of the kind of saddle in use among the Tartars, the Cossacks, the Hungarians, and, indeed, among all horsemen ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... both young,' remonstrated Brian, with that careless lightness which seemed natural to him, as a man who could hardly take the gravest problems of life seriously; 'there is no reason why we should not shake down into a very ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... begging, to lavish on his evil courses: he who could not pay us—not in red gold, but with his heart's blood—the woe he wrought. They had guileful, stony hearts, the Boswells, before they ever took to foreign lightness and wickedness: and evil to him who trafficked with them ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... Bun House, in Jew's Row, was pulled down in 1839. Sir R. Philips, writing in 1817, said, "Those buns have afforded a competency, and even wealth, to four generations of the same family; and it is singular that their delicate flavour, lightness, and richness have ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... means strength. On the contrary, it may actually be a cause of weakness if employed in the wrong place and in the wrong way. The heavier the machine, the more serious the damage done in the event of a bad landing. One of the best and easiest ways of ensuring lightness is to let the model be of very simple construction. Such a model is easier to build and more efficient when constructed than one of more complicated design. Weigh every part of your model as you construct it, and do not be content until ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... assumption of the Regency, Henry of Navarre contrived to fly, in spite of the plans laid to entrap him by the Queen-mother, to his own country; his wife Margaret accompanied him to his solitude; and paid the penalty of her lightness of conduct at the court of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... note of interrogation hung in the air at the end, might have been constructed by Augier,—just as the scene in the second act between Hedda and Brack recalls the manner of the younger Dumas, even in its lightness and its wit. Yet we may doubt whether any of the modern French playwrights could have lent the same curt significance to this commonplace interview between a married demi-vierge and an homme-a-femmes;—of their own accord these French terms ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... forward with his expression of humorous enjoyment of some latent joke and did something with the reins—Rose never could clearly understand what, though it seemed to her that he simply lifted them with ostentatious lightness; but the mare suddenly seemed to LENGTHEN herself and lose her height, and the stalks of wheat on either side of the dusty track began to melt into each other, and then slipped like a flash into one long, continuous, ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... into the region of the pump and doormat, we turn to a modest little volume by Mr. Bowling of St. John's College, Cambridge, entitled Sagittulae. And they are indeed delicate little arrows, for they are winged with the lightness of the lyric and barbed daintily with satire. AEsthesis and Athletes is a sweet idyll, and nothing can be more pathetic than the Tragedy of the XIX. Century, which tells of a luckless examiner condemned in his public capacity to pluck for her Little-go the girl ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... engagement at the French opera her salary was eighty thousand francs a-year. Taglioni and Elssler personify the two styles into which the present school of dancing is divided, the ballonne and the tacquete. The former is lightness combined with grace, when the dancer seems to float upon air. The tacquete is vivacity and rapidity; little quick steps on ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... 5, is the "Black Key" etude, so called because all the notes of the right hand are on black keys. This is a brilliant study with a very charming ending. Opus 25, No. 9, is the so called "Butterfly Wings" etude, a designation which expresses its general characteristic of lightness and grace, but fails to make allowance for the accent of passion in the rising and descending passage that occurs about the middle and which should be brought out when it is correctly interpreted—which usually it is not. The greatest of all the etudes is the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... on the brow of Bushwyck Carr. He did feel a trifle queer. A curious lightness—a perfectly inexplicable buoyancy seemed to possess him. He was beginning to feel strangely youthful; the sound of his own heart suddenly became apparent. To his alarm it was beating playfully, skittishly. No—it was not even ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... her way, her head high, an invincible lightness in the spring of every footstep, a splash of scarlet berries making a star among her dark hair, and humming the ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... old mossed steps, in that strange dazed state in which one notices frivolous things: I remember, for instance, feeling the lightness of my new clothes: for the weather was quite mild, and the day before I had changed to Summer things, having on now only a common undyed woollen shirt, the sleeves rolled up, and cord trousers, with a belt, and a cloth cap over my long hair, and an old pair of yellow shoes, without laces, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... strikes the note again and again, most poignantly in The Buried Life, of the poet's sensitive apprehension that all human intercourse is mockery, and that the gifted soul really dwells in isolation. Sordello is a monumental record of a genius without friends. Francis Thompson, with surface lightness, tells us, in A Renegade Poet ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... balance, and then sitting down where three branches crossed and made a seat. The apples were hard and sour, she remembered, regular winter apples. She rocked to and fro, singing with the birds and watching the white boats go sailing across the sky. She laughed in her lightness of heart, though there was no malice in it. She did not even give the household ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... and bushes a dozen yards from him; the leaves and flowers were heavy laden with the grey wet; and it felt clammy and cold on his face, and he tasted its salt on his lips. It seemed thickest and darkest when he looked down and lightest when he looked up, and the lightness led him to climb up among the dripping, slippery rocks; and slipping and stumbling he went on and on, the light increasing as he went, until at last to his delight he got above the mist. There was an immense crag there which stood boldly up on the hillside, ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... willow-wand, Young leaves! and, in your lightness, Teach us that spirits which despond May wear their own ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
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