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More "Fluent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uncle's cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... you men make of us," she replied. "How you fool us to the top of our bent; and of all men you clergymen are the most fluent of your honeyed, caressing words. Now look me in the face, Mr. Slope, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to have obtained, in abundance, the gift of that "civil courage" which makes an Irishman at ease and unconstrained in all places and under all circumstances; and he who has kissed the Blarney stone is assumed to be endowed with a fluent and persuasive tongue, altho it may be associated with insincerity; the term "Blarney" being generally used to characterize words that are meant neither to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... some reason, that on the longer tramp to the south his presence with me would introduce a danger which would be absent if I were alone. For his English was not fluent, and he spoke it with an accent that would betray him at once. He even suggested our parting, if we ever did succeed in getting out—he to take his chance eastward, while I went south, lest he should prove a drag on me. But this I would not hear ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... and I will sustain it in the best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... tracts of fluent heat began, And grew to seeming-random forms, The seeming prey of cyclic storms, Till at ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... but she was not fluent to-day. She sat up and repeated, "I have not forgotten old times either, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... middle age, noticeable so far chiefly for his huge grey mustachios and for his silence. He has been willing but laconic,—taciturn, in fact. But I have felt sure he has a "glib" side. Can I find it? The stillest of men are fluent on their loved topics; there is some key to unlock every one's reserve. Can I hit upon the key to his? Which of possible interests in common will bring ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with the same weapons. It ain't much trouble to travel with the high-flyers after you find out their gait. I got along fine. I was feeling cool and agreeable, and pretty soon I was talking away fluent as you please, all about the ranch and the West, and telling 'em how the Indians eat grasshopper stew and snakes, and you never saw ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... chastisements she recounts in the nightly half-hour which she spends with me when I am endeavouring to compose myself for sleep. Francesca is fluent at all times, but once seated on the foot of ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... all a demonstrative girl naturally; not ready with her tears, not liberal with her caresses, not fluent in her talk, Eunice was affected by my proposal in a manner wonderful to see. She suddenly developed into an excitable person—I declare she kissed me. "Oh," she burst out, "how clever you are! The very thing to write about; I'll ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... refrained from insulting Vitellius. For it was generally believed that as in strategy he took the advice of Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, so too in political matters he employed the talents of Galerius Trachalus.[200] Some people even thought they could recognize Trachalus' style of oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men vied with each other ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... stationed are not so, but even the little children come to the convent and are assembled. And in matters of the soul—the chief thing—they go to confession; and in truth I would rather confess a hundred Indians in the Filipinas, of those thus rendered fluent, than one Spaniard. The Indian women confess remarkably well, and with many tears, and take communion with devotion. They give account of themselves, respect the father, and recognize his courtesy. Who has not experienced this? The Spaniards understand it all, but when an effort is made to settle ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXIII, 1629-30 • Various
... us to consult five minutes among ourselves. He withdrew; and the fluent agent remarked the sum was a trifle: but, trifling as it was, he had no doubt but feelings of delicacy and honor would dictate that it ought to be jointly paid, by the three ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... really grateful, for she felt herself at a great disadvantage among these fluent and interesting folk, who talked like the characters in novels. Their jests, their comment, meant little to her; but their gestures, their graceful attitudes, their courtesies to each other, meant ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Jones," his masterpiece, appeared in 1749, and three years later "Amelia"; journalism and his duties as a justice of the peace occupied him till 1754, when ill-health forced him abroad to Lisbon, where he died and was buried. Fielding is a master of a fluent, virile, and attractive style; his stories move with an easy and natural vigour, and are brimful of humour and kindly satire, while his characters in their lifelike humanness, with all their foibles and frailties, are a marked contrast to the buckram and conventional ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... booking-office where she might obtain her ticket to Italy—and home—when a wail in a thin foreign voice fell upon her ear, and she turned round to face a dark and agitated-looking young woman, neatly dressed, who was bewailing herself in the fluent Italian of the ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... older poetry of the desert had been constantly imitated up to this time, although it was not natural to town life. Abu-l-'Atahiya was one of the first to drop the old qasida (elegy) form. He was very fluent and used many metres. He is also regarded as one of the earliest philosophic poets of the Arabs. Much of his Poetry is concerned with the observation of common life and morality, and at times is pessimistic. Naturally, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Burman language, let this occupy your most precious time and your most anxious solicitude. Do not be content with acquiring this language superficially, but make it your own, root and branch. To become fluent in it, you must attentivly listen, with prying curiosity, into the forms of speech, the construction and accent of the natives. Here all the imitative powers are wanted; yet these powers and this attention, without ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... because it is full of soft placid selfishness is one of the most difficult to paint;" but in sketching Tito's career, "the same wonderful power is maintained throughout, of stamping on our imagination with the full force of a master hand a character which seems naturally too fluent for the artist's purpose. There is not a more masterly piece of painting in English romance than this figure ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... Baron to me in his fluent French, as our little party sauntered out into the open fields to shoot, "I do not get along very well with my farmer. I must tell you this in case he gives us trouble to-day. He has the right, owing to a stupid lease my aged aunt was unwise enough to sign with him some years ago, to exclude us ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... daughters, that the most handsome, industrious, and accomplished man the world has ever seen, his own nephew, in fact, thinks of marriage, and that his conditions are this and that; he tells his nephew that the most beautiful and amiable creature in Germany, a brilliant musician, a fluent linguist, a devoted daughter, and a person of simple housewifely tastes, lives next door to him, the uncle. Except for the housewifely tastes, it sounds, and in fact is, rather like a courtship in the Arabian Nights so far. The ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... his reputation through Europe, for an extraordinary proficiency in the languages of India. Later scholars speak lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... M'Gregor questioned the drover. The man was monosyllabic to a degree, as the real bushmen generally are. It is only the rowdy and the town-bushy that are fluent of speech. ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... in a usually fairly fluent prattler with the sex was her whole mental attitude. I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... everyone hurried to occupy his seat. In the wings there was no one save the author and three or four of his friends. The opening scenes were received as usual with indifference; the following ones with a little more cordiality; the versification was fluent and polished, and, as you know, the public appreciates sugar-coated phrases. At last the moment arrived for Clotilde's entrance, and a faint murmur of curiosity and expectation ran through the audience. ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... ditch? What is the earthly good to be got out of a nod of the head? Strange that men will be contented with such pleasures, or if not contented, at least that they will be so eager in seeking them. Not one word did Harry, he so fluent of conversation ordinarily, change with his charmer on that day. Mutely he beheld her return to her carriage, and drive away among rather ironical salutes from the young men in the Park. One said that the Indian widow was ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... across the Macquarie has long been a desideratum. This river, although in common seasons fordable, and in dry seasons scarcely fluent, is liable, after heavy falls of rain in the mountains, to rise suddenly to a great height, and cut off the communication between the public buildings on the one side, and the peopled suburbs and great road from Sydney on the other. The country beyond the Macquarie ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... criticised by the American public for their elocutionary defects. They have no speakers to compare with Wendell Phillips, George William Curtis, or Anna Dickinson, although John Bright is without peer among his countrymen, as is Mrs. Besant among the women. The women, as a general rule, are more fluent ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... from its associations with Burns (which Mr. T.F. Henderson in a dainty little book has recently recounted anew), but also from the fact that the natives keep alive the literary traditions of the place in quite a worthy way. The local baker has written a fluent volume of Essays dealing with village incidents and worthies, which proves, as Mr. Barrie says, that life in every stage, if truthfully portrayed, is intensely interesting, and that every window-blind is the curtain for some tragedy ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... Although Dr. Macleod never aspired to rank as a theological writer, he has in his way been a prolific and successful author. His works may be said to have merits peculiarly their own. His graceful, easy, fluent style; his admirable capacity for illustration; his graphic delineations of scenery and character; and, above all, his unfailing use of simple, terse, homely Saxon, have combined to place him in the front rank of living writers. Among his more notable publications we ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Governor of Panama to leave no stone unturned to find and surrender the seventeen Englishmen, on account of whom all this fuss and pother was being made, lest worse come of it. The Don was not a particularly fluent correspondent, but he grew almost eloquent when he strove to impress upon his fellow-governor the inexorable determination displayed by the young English captain, and he wound up by quoting two or three Spanish proverbs to the effect that of two evils it was always best to choose ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... awkwardly that he had done nothing. Where was the easy, gay and debonaire assurance of this fluent young man? He was finding nothing to say to Rue Carew, or saying what he said as crudely and uncouthly ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... of age he met Annie Besant. This was in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-four, and a friendship grew up between them that was of great benefit to both. Mrs. Besant was a woman of much power, a clear, logical thinker, and a fluent and eloquent public speaker. Her influence upon Bradlaugh was marked. After meeting her, much of the storm and stress seemed to leave his nature, and he acquired a poise and peace ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... twelve o'clock with an unnatural flush upon your cheek and a strange color in your eye that you got at the club. You merely acknowledge that you feel queer. You say that champagne never intoxicates; that it only exhilarates, makes the conversation fluent, shakes up the humor, and has no bad effect except a headache next day. Be not deceived. Champagne may not, like whiskey, throw a man under the table; but if, through anything you drink, you gain an unnatural fluency of speech and glow of feeling, ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... extorting money from the passengers, which he regularly spent every night in the wine-shops of Badajoz. To those who gave him money he returned blessings, and to those who refused, curses; being equally skilled and fluent in the use ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... into Venetia's grasp; and stood, irresolute and ashamed, her fluent tongue stricken dumb, her intent to wound, and sting, and outrage with every vile, coarse jest she knew, rendered impossible to execute. The purity and the dignity of her opponent's presence had their irresistible influence, an influence too strong for even her debonair and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... subject, forgot his theme, and sat down in confusion. With all his incisive thought and fine command of language, Addison could not think on his feet. And as if aware of his limitations, in one of the "Spectator" essays he said, with more or less truth, "The fluent orator, ready to speak on any topic, is never profound, and when once his thought is cold it will seldom repay ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... now, in a moment's pause, only to find, too late, that all warmth and naturalness had left her with the effort. Fluent dream-practice is only too apt to make one uncomfortably crude and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... of correspondence which fully demands a volume alone to provide for the various phases incident to Love, Courtship and Marriage. Few persons, however otherwise fluent with the pen, are able to express in words the promptings of the first dawn of love, and even the ice once broken how to follow up a correspondence with the dearest one in the whole world and how to smooth the way with those who need to be consulted in the matter. ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... inner circle, and in many respects associated with it, was the Rev. Francis Hodgson, a ripe scholar, good translator, a sound critic, a fluent writer of graceful verse, and a large-hearted divine, whoso correspondence, recently edited with a connecting narrative by his son, has thrown light on disputed passages of Lord Byron's life. The views entertained by the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... certainly not by dint of wrestling with Greek prose, the mastery of language. His light verse is wonderfully handled, quaint, fluent, right. Modest as he was, he was ambitious, as we said, but not ambitious of any gain; merely eager, in his own way, to excel. His ideal is plainly stated ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... of them are fugitive and aim at coloring a word, a phrase, or at best a temporary situation. There is little flow of natural, fervent melody. What the composer accomplished with tune, characteristic but fluent, eloquent yet sustained, in "Cavalleria rusticana," he tries to achieve in "Iris" with violent, disjointed, shifting of keys and splashes of instrumental color. In this he is seldom successful, for he is not a master of orchestral writing—that ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... than the possession of any commanding one, that created his influence. He certainly was not a wit yet he was always gay, and always said things that made other people merry. His conversation was sparkling, interesting, and fluent, yet it was observed he never gave an opinion on any subject and never told an anecdote. Indeed, he would sometimes remark, when a man fell into his anecdotage, it was a sign for him to retire from the world. And yet Pinto rarely opened ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... have found inaccuracies in Froude's transcripts from the Simancas manuscripts without knowing a word of Spanish. But he was seldom so frank as that. It was not often that he forgot his two objects of holding up Froude as the fluent, facile ignoramus, and himself as the profound, ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Blake, whom the Doctor engaged as housekeeper, was the youngest daughter of an honest shoemaker, who formerly flourished at Belfield Green, where he was noted for industry, a fondness for reading, a tenacious memory, a ready wit, and a fluent tongue. In politics he was a radical, and in religion a schismatic. The little knot of Presbyterian Federalist magnates, who used to assemble at the tavern to discuss affairs of church and state over mugs of flip and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... each science lifts its modern type, Hist'ry her Pot, Divinity her Pipe, While proud philosophy repines to shew, Dishonest sight! his breeches rent below; Imbrown'd with native bronze, lo! Henley stands, Tuning his voice and balancing his hands. How fluent nonsense trickles from his tongue! How sweet the periods, neither said nor sung! Still break the benches, Henley! with thy strain, While SHERLOCK, HARE, and GIBSON, preach in vain. Oh great restorer of the good old stage, Preacher at once, and zany of thy age, ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... what you would call an eloquent or fluent speaker: his Somersetshire brogue was at times difficult of comprehension. He certainly was not fluent when he said to Mrs. Oldtimes: "Why thic—there—damn un Mrs. Oldtimes if he beant gwine and never zeed zich a ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... sympathetically, more fluently, and with finer effect on a beautiful "grand" than on a jangly upright instrument: the one is a better vehicle of expression than the other. So also we can secure more fluent expression with a fountain pen than with one that continually interrupts the free flow of ideas by demanding to be dipped in the inkpot. We have two typewriters of the same manufacture, but one is an early model and the other a modern machine: there is a vast difference in the ease of expressing ...
— Spirit and Music • H. Ernest Hunt
... I had the ambition—it was one of several ambitions—to become a courier. The Morning Post advertisements of couriers who professed to be fluent in a number of languages and were at the disposal of invalid aristocrats desiring to take extensive (and expensive) trips abroad, aroused the most romantic visions in my mind. A courier's was the life for me. I saw myself whirling ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... forward after that which is to follow. There is no ebb and flow in his metre more than on the shores of the Adriatic, but wave follows wave with equable gainings and recessions, the one sliding back in fluent music to be mingled with and carried forward by the next. In all this there is soothingness indeed, but no slumberous monotony; for Spenser was no mere metrist, but a great composer. By the variety of his pauses—now at the close of the ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... amazement fell upon all. For myself, the wild incongruity of this foreign tongue from lips which I had heard utter such fluent and flute-like English ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... cocoa-nut groves, park-like flat, lovely ravines running upward, and down which tiny rills of water came cascading; past three huge black buttresses of lava, the ends that had cooled in the water of as many streams of fluent stone; and above all, grey, strange, dotted with masses of rock, seamed, scored, and wrinkled, rose from out of the dense forest, which rail up its flanks, the great truncated cone, above whose summit floated a faint grey cloud of smoke or ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... was no affair of his. He heard that Mayor Brenchfield had been invited—and had accepted the invitation—to attach himself to the Royce Pederstone party in order to give the candidate the support of his fluent tongue and widespread influence. ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... very glad to see the noble Athenian in his own city. His fame for eloquence and prudence is already in Tyre and Babylon," spoke the stranger, never taking his steel-blue eyes from the orator's face. The accent was Oriental, but the Greek was fluent. The prince—for prince he was, whatever his nation—pressed his hand closer. Almost involuntarily Democrates's hand responded. They clasped tightly; then, as if Lycon feared a word too much, the unknown released his hold, bowed ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... a most remarkable treatise, and ran through London at once. For the style, though slovenly, was fluent and popular, and Edwards, having plenty of time on his hands, and having a taste for personalities, had made minute inquiries into the antecedents of the Five Independents in Holland and in England, and had interwoven the results of these inquiries with his arguments ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... such things in a certain order of mind. His phrases about "dire calamity" and so on mean nothing; the whole tenor of his writing proves that he represents, and consciously, one of the forces which go to bring war about; his part in the business is a fluent irresponsibility, which casts scorn on all who reluct at the "inevitable." Persistent prophecy is a familiar way ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... time after his election, he began to take part in the debates. He was not a fluent speaker; indeed he was hesitating, and sometimes his sentences were much involved; but, as he never spoke except upon topics with which he was perfectly familiar, he was listened to with the respect and attention which are always, in the House of ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... demagogue beat the pulpit-drum In the Age of the Antonines! The sting was not dreamed to be taken from death, No Paradise pledged or sought, But they reasoned of fate at the flowing feast, Nor stifled the fluent thought, We sham, we shuffle while faith declines— They were frank in the Age of ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... He was no brawling ruffian, no ordinary rake. Remembering what Scotland was in those days, Bothwell might well seem in reality a princely figure. He knew Italian; he was at home in French; he could write fluent Latin. He was a collector of books and a reader of them also. He was perhaps the only Scottish noble of his time who had a book-plate of his own. Here is something more than a mere reveler. Here is a man of varied accomplishments and ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... jealous of Baboo's fluent talk. Rather a sportive negro, it appears. Says he goes to theatre nearly every night. Has a regular and rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... Johann Matthysz (Matthyszoon), baker of Haarlem. He had little education, but some literary faculty, and had written plays. On the 13th of January 1534 he appeared in Muenster as an apostle of Matthysz. Good-looking and fluent, he fascinated women, and won the confidence of Bernard Knipperdollinck, a revolutionary cloth merchant, who gave him his daughter in marriage. The Muenster Anabaptists took up arms on the 9th of February 1534 (see ANABAPTISTS). On the death of Matthysz (1534), Buckholdt succeeded him as prophet, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... that he was very pleased with all he had seen and heard; that he wanted the troops to know that both he and the Queen always kept them in their thoughts, and that he meant to see all of them again, with his own eye, as soon as the war was over. The General gave it out very well, (he is fluent in Hindustani,) and it made a great impression on ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... of grim smiles. Suddenly I recognized the trick of that Arab cheapjack. It may be seen at work in Poplar, my native parish to which the ships come, when a curious and innocent Chinaman joins the group about the fluent ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... a void of darkness beneath him,— night made visible by street lamps; and he found himself suddenly and acutely sensible of the wonder and mystery of the City: the City whose secret life ran fluent upon the hot, hard pavements below, whose voice throbbed, sibilant, vague, strident, inarticulate, upon the night air; the City of which he was a part equally with the girl in grey, whom he had never before seen, and in all likelihood ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... natural talent, and those naturally possessed of fluency must of course find it hard to restrain the tide of words that is perpetually flowing up to the lips; but if they desire to converse agreeably, the effort must be made, and self-denial must be attained. The benefit derived by an over-fluent talker from self-restraint will be quite commensurate with the effort, no less than with the added pleasure of the listener, for he will gain in the power of accurate thought every time that he resists the inclination to utter ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... See fault in him who bravely dares defend The cause forlorn, the wretch without a friend Nay, though the rightful side is wisdom's choice, Wrong has its rights and claims a champion's voice; Let the strong arm be lifted for the weak, For the dumb lips the fluent pleader speak;— When with warm "rebel" blood our street was dyed Who took, unawed, the hated hirelings' side? No greener civic wreath can Adams claim, No brighter ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... morning when Red awoke, arrows of gold were shooting through the holes in the old barn, and outside, the bird life, the twittering and chirping, the fluent whistle and the warble, the cackle and the pompous ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... your fluent witt interpret Why she procastinatts your promisd match? By this light, her daughter would be married tomorrow If her mother and I ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... profession was then little more than a vow of celibacy and his devotion took no ascetic turn. His nature in fact was sunny, versatile, artistic; full of strong affections, and capable of inspiring others with affections as strong. Quick-witted, of tenacious memory, a ready and fluent speaker, gay and genial in address, an artist, a musician, he was at the same time an indefatigable worker alike at books or handicraft. As his sphere began to widen we see him followed by a train of pupils, busy with literature, writing, harping, painting, designing. One morning a lady summons ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... pocket, and accordingly after dinner we gathered round him in a circle, and he held forth. It would be no easy matter to describe a discourse which lasted a couple of hours, or indeed to say very precisely what it was about. It was a rambling, desultory reference to his travels and adventures in fluent and sometimes eloquent language, and not without an occasional dash of humour and drollery. He illustrated the truth of the Scriptures by examples drawn from his personal observation and the habits, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Soliciting the kind offices of both Sherwen and Raimonda, he had presented himself, under their escort, stiff and perspiring in his full official regalia, before Mr. Brewster; then before his daughter, whose solemnity, presently breaking down before his painfully rehearsed English, dissolved in fluent French, setting him at ease and making him her slave. Poor penitent Von Plaanden even apologized to Carroll, fortunately not having heard of the American's threat, and made a most ...
— The Unspeakable Perk • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... her lip and, although she had never felt more fluent in her life, said nothing. Her husband lit his pipe, and after a rapid glance in her direction took up an old newspaper ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... great power,—fluent and elegant in diction, bright and sparkling in thought, keen ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... his retreat to study Holy Scriptures, and to such good effect that, the next time he preached, he charmed his hearers by his eloquence. Soon after this the Archbishop of La Plata held a provincial council, with the object of reforming the morals of the Indians in his diocese. Cardenas, being a fluent speaker, was chosen for the post of Apostolic Missionary. From this time dates the beginning ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham
... be unpopular, especially in the East, where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure. Aggrieved parties ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... like his science, is first-hand. In the woods, one day, talk ran on the Trinity as being nowhere asserted as a doctrine in the Bible, and some one suggested that the attempt to pack these great and fluent mysteries into one word must always be more or less unsatisfactory. "Ye-es," droned Phelps: "I never could see much speckerlation in that expression the Trinity. Why, they'd a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... me," began Dete again, in her usual fluent manner, "I myself had lost count of her exact age; she is certainly a little younger, but not much; I cannot say precisely, but I think she ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... ages which had faith to recognize their worthiest man and to accept his guidance which had achieved great things in the world, not those which prated of democracy and progress. To make his countrymen, in this age of fluent political talk, see the true moral quality of the men of the seventeenth century—this it was which occupied seven years of Carlyle's life and filled his thoughts. It was indeed a labour of Hercules. Much of the material was lost beyond ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... two solid quarto volumes, published at Paris in 1756—"avec approbation et privilege du Roy," as the title page says—in which he related all that he could learn about previous voyages to the south, and pointed out, with generous amplitude, in limpid, fluent French, the desirableness of pursuing further discoveries there. Incidentally he coined a useful word: to Monsieur le President Charles de Brosses we owe the name "Australasia."* (* De Brosses, Histoire des Navigations aux ...
— Terre Napoleon - A history of French explorations and projects in Australia • Ernest Scott
... own style at the outset by careful and systematic writing. Spurgeon, often when a youth, read some of his sermons, although afterwards he never premeditated a single sentence for the pulpit. Dr. Richard S. Storrs was a most fluent extemporaneous speaker, but for twenty years he carefully wrote all his discourses. My own habit, after a time, was to write a portion of the sermon and turn away from my notes to interject thoughts that ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... once more, for "St. Raphael," who spoke fluent Finnish, at once secured the only cart to take our things over the ferry to the railway station about ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... disposition was naturally cheerful and mild, his temper even, and not easily provoked. Although somewhat inclined to taciturnity, yet when drawn out to converse upon any subject he was acquainted with, he was naturally fluent, and in his language pure and correct. He was a universal favorite with the youth of both sexes in his native town, and, during the intervals between his voyages, was always in demand when a Thanksgiving ball was contemplated, or a sleigh-ride, or a "frolic," ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... was a picturesque woman, and a fluent talker, and she held a tolerably high station among the Parvenus. Her English was fair enough, as a general thing—though, being of New York origin, she had the fashion peculiar to many natives of that city of pronouncing saw and law as if they ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... movements with gentle interest, maintaining a silence meanwhile only surpassed in completeness by Dot's. Hannah rattled on, but there was a hollowness in the rattle that made Catherine's hostess heart falter. She was never fluent, herself. Her gentle art consisted in making her guests entertain ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... rather than from convenience, a wife puts kindred before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive list than ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... strips of tape are softly unwound and fall in slack twisted piles. One of those machines is printing off a long letter from Berlin, another is registering news from Vienna, and by a third news from Paris comes as easily and rapidly as from Shoreditch; subdued men take the tapes, expand and make fluent the curt, halting phrases of the foreign correspondents, and pass the messages swiftly away to the printers. From America, Australia, India, China, the items of news pour in, and are scrutinised by severe sub-editors; ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... of James Howell, Esq. are well known as fluent examples of the best style of writing of his day, and as repositories of many curious facts and intelligent remarks. The following letter appears to be addressed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... of Lord Normanby. His writings evince great knowledge of the world, the work-o'-day world, as well as the beau monde; yet there is no bitterness in his satire, which is always just and happily pointed. His style, too, is easy, fluent, and polished, without being disfigured by ...
— The Idler in France • Marguerite Gardiner
... not a fool. In the discussion of graver matters—politics, law, and history—that arose in the smoking-room, he was not to be put down by more fluent tongues; demolished sophistry by solid reasoning, impregnable assertions, and an array of facts that might be prolix, but was always formidable—in short, sustained fully the character ascribed to him by his brother-in-law, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... from Rupert Vivian." Kitty read the inscription; her lip curled, but she still kept silence. Hugo thought that her eye rested with some complacency upon the silver beads; but she did not express a tithe of the pleasure and surprise which flowed so readily from Mrs. Heron's fluent tongue. ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... keep life fixed and constant, and all about her she found life fluent and changing. Or perhaps life was constant, and the fluency was in her. Or perhaps the difficulty was all in this man, about whom she had never been able to take any position that he did not shortly ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... this of the whole race of the Greeks: I grant them literary genius, I grant them skill in various accomplishments, I do not deny them elegance in conversation, acuteness of intellect, fluent oratory; to any other high qualities they may claim I make no objection: but the sacred obligation that lies upon a witness to speak the truth is what that nation has ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... READER,—Whether this book is to be of use to you or not, depends wholly on your reason for wishing to learn to draw. If you desire only to possess a graceful accomplishment, to be able to converse in a fluent manner about drawing, or to amuse yourself listlessly in listless hours, I cannot help you: but if you wish to learn drawing that you may be able to set down clearly, and usefully, records of such things ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... fluent is ever thy speech at the moment war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, and the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... to make the best of it, youth is easily attracted and filled with the present show, and easily forgets that which, from distance in time or space, has no show to show. Spending his evenings in the midst of merry faces, and ready tongues fluent with the tones of jollity, if not always of wit, which glided sometimes into no too earnest discussion of the difficult subjects occupying their student hours; surrounded by the vapours of whisky-toddy, and the smoke of cutty pipes, till far into the short hours; then hurrying home, and lapsing ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... tall, bronzed, commanding, taciturn—but fluent when he did speak—or Kent, or Sumner, or little Jerry Carter himself. And once, a soldier stepped into the circle of firelight, his heels clicking sharply together; and Crittenden thought an uneasy ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... dreamed of such delicate motion, Fluent, and graceful, and ambient, Soft as the breeze flitting over the flowers, But swift as the summer lightning. I sat up again, but my strength was all spent, And no time left to recover it, And though she rose at our gate like a bird, ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... irresponsible as his eloquence was dazzling. In his twenty years of public life he had but one purpose—to please and to be praised; and to gain those ends he sacrificed consistency and discretion with a light heart. The beauty of his person and the fluent splendor of his speech went far towards the attainment of an ambition which was always frustrated by a fatal levity. In the fine phrase of Burke, he was a candidate for contradictory honors, and his great aim was to make ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... changes always improvements. Poe constantly rehandled his scanty show of verse, and usually bettered it. The Raven was the first of the few poems which he nearly brought to completion before printing. It may be that those who care for poetry lost little by his death. Fluent in prose, he never wrote verse for the sake of making a poem. When a refrain of image haunted him, the lyric that resulted was the inspiration, as he himself said, of a passion, not of a purpose. This was at intervals so rare as almost to justify the Fairfield theory that ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... Went to hear Mr. Spurgeon. House three-quarters full-say three thousand people. First hour, lacking one minute, taken up with two prayers, two ugly hymns, and Scripture-reading. Sermon three-quarters of an hour long. A fluent talker, good, sonorous voice. Topic treated in the unpleasant, old fashion: Man a mighty bad child, God working at him in forty ways and having a world of trouble ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... she had vainly sought came voluntarily, and in fluent speech she told him how her heart had so long consumed itself with yearning for him, and that she had now left everything behind to obey his summons; and he thanked her with eager warmth by raising the hand which clasped his to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sentences than in other kinds of writing. Twenty words make a good average sentence length. It is necessary to remember that one's stories are read not only by the literati, but by the uneducated as well. One must make one's style, therefore, so fluent, so easy, that a man with a speaking vocabulary of five hundred words can read and enjoy ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... answered you a while ago, O Great One, as it was with Ingona, so was it and is it with me. I have no gift of fluent speech, but I pray you to recall what he said, and to believe that I agree with every word, and would ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... Wherever we find a well-mannered, soft-spoken, fussy old soul, with a taste for fine clothes and fine dinners, fond of court festivities, and heart and soul devoted to royalties, we promote him. If he speak French tolerably, we make him a Minister; if he be fluent, an ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... a member of Parliament, who was lamenting that he had failed to win the ear of the House. He was puzzled by the failure. He was a fluent speaker; he knew his subject with great thoroughness, and his character was irreproachable; and yet when he rose the House went out. He was like a dinner-bell. He couldn't understand it. Yet everybody else understood it quite well. It was because he was ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... waiting on table, and ringing the recitation bell. In spite of these menial services, he was popular in his class and had a number of aristocratic friends,—among them Philip Van Rensselaer. He was one of the best scholars in his class,—first in mathematics, and so fluent in Greek that to the end of his life he ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... lady (married to an Italian count) plied him with numerous questions in fluent French, spoken with an atrocious accent. Finally, she wished to hear the Abbe's views upon Melchisedech! In the midst of other questions and answers, the kindly little man managed to turn round to her with a cheery "Ah, Madame la Comtesse! pour le ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... his position to a nicety. His fluent adaptability was in its right place. Little Captain von Wegstetten would have no non-commissioned officer under him better calculated to satisfy his desires than Gustav Weise. If he had remained a social-democrat, thought Wolf to himself, he would simply have been a pliant tool in the hands ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... The negotiations with the bird-man had lasted a little longer than one would have expected. But then, of course, M. Feriaud was a foreigner, and Roland's French was not fluent. ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... warning that his life was in danger came to Sarpi from Caspar Schoppe, the publicist. Scioppius (so his contemporaries called him) was a man of doubtful character and unsteady principles, who, according as his interests varied, used a fluent pen and limpid Latin style for or against the Jesuit faction. History would hardly condescend to notice him but for the singular luck he had of coming at critical moments into contact with the three chief Italian thinkers of his time. We know already ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... deep beneath the personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their manners are still debating the same questions today. The main currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides, clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its "long withdrawing roar," and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by the last man as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... knees into his chair and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine times out of ten some corresponding mental warp? Bernard's fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true—it was not in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into "meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was he laying a trap?—Not misled: the Laura Selincourt of Hyde's recollection was not ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... his own people. He is tall, rather corpulent, and has more of the negro feature than common, but has large eyes. He is very dark, and his people swear by "Black Sechele". He has great intelligence, reads well, and is a fluent speaker. Great numbers of the tribes formerly living under the Boers have taken refuge under his sway, and he is now greater in power than he was ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... attention to her story of the shooting of the stag, Stephen's feat when a boy of fourteen; she did not of course know as much of the history of the Archdales as did the petted young beauty to whom he had been talking before dinner, and she in the midst of her fluent account wondered in her own mind where she had heard it all, and remembered that it had been one of Katie's stories when ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... delightful," he would remark to me, "to realize once more that the chief end of man is not, after all, to have fluent meditations upon wrecks of lost empires—to discover beauty in hideousness because somebody else pretends to do so—to mumble praises about frescoes which are frightful to look at, and break your neck besides—to have profound emotions in Jerusalem and experience ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... Be it known to this fluent generation that I R. L. S., in the forty-third of my age and the twentieth of my professional life, wrote twenty-four pages in twenty-one days, working from six to eleven, and again in the afternoon from two to four or so, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fail to be impressed by the aspect of the slight, pallid woman who seemed to gain height by reason of her slenderness, who moved toward her audience with such simple natural majesty, who wore and conducted her fluent classical draperies with such admirable and perfect grace. It was as though she had lived always so attired in tunic, peplum, and pallium—had known no other dress—not that she was of modern times playing at antiquity, she was ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... through the various grades of probation and preparation by which the Jesuit is trained for his arduous work, and was ordained priest in the year 1825. Being a ripe scholar, well versed in literature, ancient and modern, an able theologian, a fluent and impressive speaker, he soon took a foremost place amongst the leading ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... character of the road, and an extra allowance for expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. He thus describes his feelings: "It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-House, and, the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion of the mail soon laid me asleep. It is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the outside of ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... of sound there is But his motion's gentle hiss, Till one fluent arm and hand Suddenly circles, and the wand Taps a bough far overhead, "Crack," and then all noise is dead. For he halts, and for a space Stands erect with upward face, Taut and tense to the white Message ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... party of us were going out through the P. & O. communication trench and, finding the mud too deep, we climbed out and walked across the open, whereat an old Colonel of some Highland regiment gave us a "beautiful calling." His discourse was a masterpiece of fluent soldier talk and, as a Scot usually does when excited, he lapsed into the "twa-talk" of his native Hielans. I can remember his last words, which were to the effect that: "Ye daft Cany-deens think ye're awfu' brave but I tell ye the noo it's no bravery; it's sheer stupidity." ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... melancholy view of life may have been caused simply by his unfortunate constitution; for everybody sees in the disease of his own liver a disorder of the universe; but it was also intensified by the natural reaction of a powerful nature against the fluent optimism of the time, which expressed itself in Pope's aphorism, Whatever is, is right. The strongest men of the time revolted against that attempt to cure a deep-seated disease by a few fine speeches. The form taken by Johnson's revolt ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... known of the course of study pursued by Joseph at Moor's School. When he entered it his knowledge must have been very slender, and as a young man he began to learn things ordinarily taught to a mere child. It is likely that he now became much more fluent than formerly in his use of the English tongue. From the beginning his progress was very rapid, and Dr Wheelock does not stint the praise that he bestows upon him: 'Joseph is indeed an excellent youth,' was his comment; 'he has ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... as he would any other treasure trove for which he had no use, in hopes of reward for its return, said Blake. It was queer, of course, that the Indian in whose pouch it was found should have been so fluent a speaker of English, yet many a Sioux knew enough of our tongue to swear volubly and talk ten words of vengeance to come. There were several ways, as Blake reasoned, by which that letter might have got into the hands of the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... music on a tall tree beyond the garden hedge, and I am more grateful for the distance that divides us than for the song; for, just now, he does not sing so well as sometimes of an evening, when he is most fluent, and a listener, deceived by his sweetness and melody, writes to the papers to say that he has heard the nightingale. Just now his song is scrappy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do not fit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... about equal to that of a European child of ten years old. A few, a very few, go beyond this, but these are exceptions, just as Shakespeare was an exception to the ordinary intellect of an Englishman. They are fluent talkers, but their ideas are borrowed. They are absolutely without originality, absolutely without inventive power. Living among white men, their imitative faculties enable them to attain a considerable amount of civilization. ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... Anglo-Canadian was quite so stolid, serious and impressive with homely common sense as Sir Lomer Gouin, the Premier of Quebec. This man spoke slowly, massively, almost gutturally like a Saxon, in fluent but accented English. He was far less excitable than the Premier of Ontario ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... with some reason, that on the longer tramp to the south his presence with me would introduce a danger which would be absent if I were alone. For his English was not fluent, and he spoke it with an accent that would betray him at once. He even suggested our parting, if we ever did succeed in getting out—he to take his chance eastward, while I went south, lest he should prove a drag on me. But this I would not hear of, and the matter was ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... reputation for some little while, but had already begun to be forgotten, and in a private room up two pair of stairs, the three companions made a very elegant supper, and drank three or four bottles of champagne, talking the while upon indifferent subjects. The young man was fluent and gay, but he laughed louder than was natural in a person of polite breeding; his hands trembled violently, and his voice took sudden and surprising inflections, which seemed to be independent of his will. The dessert had been cleared ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... party required to make up for the thinness of their members by the strength of their eloquence. Practice makes perfect, and it is not to be wondered at therefore if a large proportion of The Twenty had become fluent. But more were wanted, and of our friend O'Mahony's fluency there could be no doubt. Therefore he was sent for, and on the very day of his arrival he proved to the patriotic spirits of Dublin that he was the man ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... let his dignity weigh upon him. He had been sent down alone. Hence there had been great scrambling to gather together on the Zone men enough who spoke Spanish—and with no striking success. Most noticeable of my fellow-enumerators, being in uniform, were three Marines from Bas Obispo, fluent with the working Spanish they had picked up from Mindanao to Puerto Rico, and flush-cheeked with the prospect of a full month on "pass," to say nothing of the $4.40 a day that would be added to their daily military income of $.60. Then there were four of darker hue,—Panamanians ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... following day she gave Roberts a check for the money, drawn by Zillah Chetwynde. Waving off his thanks, she dismissed him, and sent for the cook. That functionary quickly appeared. She was short of stature, large of bulk, red of face, fluent of speech, hasty of temper—au reste, she was a good cook and faithful servant. She bobbed to Hilda on entering, and, closing the door, stood with folded arms and belligerent aspect, like a porcupine armed for defense on the slightest appearance ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... holde one like bodie. Outward garments and cloakes may be borrowed, but never the sinews and strength of the bodie. Most of those that converse with me, speake like unto these Essayes; but I know not whether they think alike. The Athenians (as Plato averreth) have for their part great care to be fluent and eloquent in their speech; The Lacedemonians endevour to be short and compendious; and those of Creet labour more to bee plentifull in conceits than in language. And these are the best. Zeno ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... her brother's praise with fond and fluent tongue, she felt without being able to describe her feelings, that he had lost something of his original beauty. The breath of the world had passed over the mind and dimmed its purity. His was the joyous, ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... natural, were very much despised by the women of the tribe. The pieces of fine sentiment and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great "Ha'," the wild legends served every necessary purpose equally well. The "Ha'" in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and the frosts set in, was a genial place; and so attached was my cousin to its distinctive ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... lady is my maiden aunt, come over from the State of Maine to see your British institutions," Mr. Parmalee said, in fluent fiction, to the obsequious landlady. "She's writing a book, and she'll mention the Blue Bell favorably in it. Her name is Miss Hepzekiah Parmalee. Let her have your best bedroom and all the luxuries this hotel affords, and I ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... both read and spoke remarkably well, would say haive, and shaul (for shall), when she sung her hymns. But it was not so well in reading lectures at the Academy. Mr. West would talk of his art all day long, painting all the while. On other subjects he was not so fluent; and on political and religious matters he tried hard to maintain the reserve common with those about a court. He succeeded ill in both. There were always strong suspicions of his leaning to his native ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... ministers, and become preachers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, insomuch that the people where they dwell may even take up a proverb concerning them, saying, "Is he among the prophets?" his gifts may be so rare, his tongue may be so fluent, and his matter may be so fit, that he may speak with a tongue like an angel, and speak of the hidden mysteries, yea, of them all; mark that, and yet be nothing, and yet be none of the Lord's anointed ones, with the Spirit of grace savingly, but may ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... alert it was a sensitive medium. He dropped with crossed knees into his chair and glanced reflectively at Bernard Clowes, heu quantum mutatus. . . . When the body was wrecked, was there not nine times out of ten some corresponding mental warp? Bernard's fluent geniality struck him as too good to be true—it was not in Bernard's line: and why translate a close friendship into "meeting once or twice"? Was Bernard misled or mistaken, or was he laying a trap?—Not misled: the Laura Selincourt of Hyde's recollection ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... not a natural quality. Jefferson states that "in the circle of his friends, where he might be unreserved with safety, he took a free share in conversation," and Madison told Sparks that, though "Washington was not fluent nor ready in conversation, and was inclined to be taciturn in general society," yet "in the company of two or three intimate friends, he was talkative, and when a little excited was sometimes fluent and even eloquent" "The story ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... him from swimming the swollen Tiber; Claelia the hostage on her brazen steed; and many another, handed down inviolate from the days of the ancient kings. Here was the rostrum, beaked with the prows of ships, a fluent orator already haranguing the assembled people from its platform—there, the seat of the city Praetor, better known as the Puteal Libonis, with that officer in session on his curule chair, his six lictors leaning on their fasces at his back, as he ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... of these nations are reflected also in their methods of presentation. The style of the English philosopher is sober, comprehensible, diffuse, and slightly wearisome. The French use a fluent, elegant, lucid style which entertains and dazzles by its epigrammatic phrases, in which not infrequently the epigram rules the thought. The German expresses his solid, thoughtful positions in a form which is at once ponderous and not easily ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... eye its ancient aspect; but if it chance to him to land at the Battery on a clear and still Sabbath morning, and before the bells summon forth the worshippers, and to walk thence to Union Square in company with an octogenarian Knickerbocker of good memory, local pride, and fluent speech, he will obtain a mental photograph of the past that transmutes the familiar scene by a quaint and vivid aerial perspective. Then the "Middle Road" of the beginning of this century will reappear,—the traces of a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... better can prevail, Or from the fluent tongue produce the tale, Than when two friends, alone, in peaceful place Confer, and wines and cates the table grace; But most, the kind inviter's cheerful face? Thus might we sit, with social goblets crown'd, Till the whole circle of the year goes round: Not the whole circle of the year would ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... labourer, a talkative young chap who had sat with Hal at lunch-time, and had given his name as Apostolikas. He entered into fluent conversation with Hal, explaining how much interested he was in the check-weighman plan; he wanted to know just what they were going to do, what chance of success they thought they had, who had started the movement and who was in it. Hal's replies took ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... that although Europeans of most brilliant intellect may devote long years and infinite labour to the study of Chinese, lacking this native instinct, they can never attain to that ripened and fluent knowledge which is a heritage of the Mongol ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready
... she folded her arms. "Oui, assez de musique," repeated Panshin gaily, and at once he dropped into a chat, alert, light, and in French. "Precisely as in the best Parisian salon," thought Marya Dmitrievna, as she listened to their fluent and quick-witted sentences. Panshin had a sense of complete satisfaction; his eyes shone, and he smiled. At first he passed his hand across his face, contracted his brows, and sighed spasmodically whenever he chanced to encounter Marya Dmitrievna's eyes. But later on he forgot her altogether, ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... correspondence which fully demands a volume alone to provide for the various phases incident to Love, Courtship and Marriage. Few persons, however otherwise fluent with the pen, are able to express in words the promptings of the first dawn of love, and even the ice once broken how to follow up a correspondence with the dearest one in the whole world and how to smooth the way with those who need to be consulted in the matter. The numerous ...
— Down the Slope • James Otis
... happiness in private, life." He was tall, well-proportioned, graceful; his features were clean-cut and expressive of both intelligence and amiability; his manner was cordial and unaffected; his mind was vigorous and his industry unremitting. Furthermore, he was an able lawyer, a fluent orator, a persuasive debater, an adroit parliamentarian. Upon entering the Senate at the early age of thirty-two, he had won prompt recognition by a powerful speech in opposition to the tariff of 1824; and by 1828, when he was reelected, he was known as the South's ablest and boldest ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... up Menelaus was taller, when they sat down Odysseus was more stately. But when they spake, Menelaus' words were fluent, clear but few; Odysseus when he spoke, fixed his eyes on the ground, turning his sceptre neither backwards nor forward, standing still like a man devoid of wit; one would have deemed him a churl and a very fool; yet when ...
— Authors of Greece • T. W. Lumb
... Glasgow working woman whose son was at the front was treated to a fluent harangue on the misdeeds of that "auld blackguard," the Kaiser. She ventured to suggest that we should love our ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... talk. Tombs in his sing-song namby-pamby University voice was concerned to get information. He asked endless questions, chiefly of Gilkison, who was the only one who really understood his language. I thought I had never seen anyone quite so fluent and so futile, and yet there was a kind of feeble violence in him like a demented sheep. He was engaged in venting some private academic spite against society, and I thought that in a revolution he would be the class of lad I would personally conduct to the nearest ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... copy, ordinarily fluent enough, would not come. Ideas fluttered away just out of reach. The sequence of a chapter had been in his head. Like the dagger, it had gone. He could not account for that disappearance, nor did he try. It would turn up again. So, ultimately, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... fishing operations on the part of Goliath and his merry men for that day, at any rate. It was all so quiet, and so tame and so stupid, no wonder Mistah Jones felt savage. When Captain Slocum's fluent profanity flickered around him, including vehemently all he might be supposed to have any respect for, he did not even LOOK as if he would like to talk back; he only looked sick ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... from Corcelle, is to me my duty, and I will sustain it in the best way in my power.... Ah! that ancient France, how one feels her grandeur here, and what a part she is known to have had in Christianity! It is that chord which I should like to have heard vibrate in a fluent writer like you, and not eternally those paradoxes, those sophisms. But what matters it to you who date from yesterday and who boast of it," he added, almost sadly, "that in the most insignificant corners of this city centuries of history abound? Does your heart blush at the sight of the facade of ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... skirts of "Merry Islington," return to a temperate dinner and cheerful evening, and, before going to bed, write off what had arranged itself in his head from the studies of the morning. In this way he took a more general view of the subject, and wrote in a more free and fluent style than if he had been mousing at the time among authorities. The influence of this way of composing history is plainly seen in the entertaining, but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... yet once more, for "St. Raphael," who spoke fluent Finnish, at once secured the only cart to take our things over the ferry to the railway station ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... feeling that he is failing miserably. He, the fluent speaker at lectures, and on public platforms, is now bereft of the power to explain ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... terrible storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those in Dauber. Had Mr. Noyes written Drake without the songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the Songs, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is past," could have been written only by a poet. In Forty Singing Seamen there is displayed an imagination quite superior to anything in Drake; ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... details, little touches of local colour, revision of choice of words, heart-rending erasions. And here, my child," I concluded, bringing out the beautiful, clean, smooth typed copy—"here is the finished work itself, light, pleasant, fluent, humorous and, most important ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went white. Some of the women were ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... nature an orator and a lover of the drama. So far as I am aware, he never read a poem if he could help it, and yet he responded instantly to music, and was instinctively courtly in manner. His mind was clear, positive and definite, and his utterances fluent. Orderly, resolute and thorough in all that he did, he despised William McClintock's easy-going habits of husbandry, and found David's lack of "push," of business enterprise, deeply irritating. And yet he loved them both and respected my mother for ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the country attorney very often united the functions of solicitor and counsel. As a result of this double life, the attorney acquired the peculiar intellectual defects of the barrister, and retained the heavy responsibilities of the attorney. He grew talkative and fluent, and lost his lucidity of judgment, the first necessity for the conduct of affairs. If a man of more than ordinary ability tries to do the work of two men, he is apt to find that the two men are mediocrities. The Paris attorney never spends himself in forensic ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... gained our first glimpse during these early days. The Boers we found were in many respects startlingly near akin to us. They sprang originally from the same liberty-loving stock as ourselves. Hosts of them spoke correct and fluent English, while not a few of them were actually of English parentage. Moreover, the Hollanders and the English have so freely intermarried in South Africa that at one time it was fondly hoped the cradle rather than the rifle would finally settle ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... a good fluent talker; moreover, she studied her listener, and finding that my interest in her own interminable story was becoming exhausted she sought for other subjects, chiefly the strange events in the lives of men and women who had lived in the village ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... "To a pleasing, fluent, narrative style, Miss corner unites a nice discrimination, and never suffers matters which sully the mind to appear in ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous
... the conversation rose with the champagne; the sounds of fluent and broken French were mingled with those of Spanish and Portuguese. The ladies lay back in their chairs and laughed. The guests already knew each other well enough not to be reserved or constrained. Jokes and bons-mots passed over the ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland
... at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a process ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... people which his class are studying. He is aware that the pupil should experience something more than a kaleidoscopic view of isolated facts. He recognizes the folly of requiring four years of high school English for the purpose of cultivating clear, fluent, and accurate expression, only to relax the effort when the student comes into the history class. He knows that the precision, logic, and habit of definite thinking exacted by the pursuit of the scientific subjects should not be laid aside when the ...
— The Teaching of History • Ernest C. Hartwell
... teaching at Newburyport for a short time, she accepted a call to fill a vacancy in the academy at Elizabeth City, N. C., where she continued an earnest and appreciated teacher for a number of years. She became a fluent French scholar while at that institution, and her leisure hours were devoted to the fine arts. Her paintings and drawings were much admired for their correctness in outline, subdued coloring, ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... He was still a young man when he was preferred to all the prominent statesmen of his party as a Presidential candidate. He was remarkably attractive in personal appearance, prepossessing in manner, ready and even eloquent as a public speaker, fluent and graceful in conversation. He presented thus a rare combination of the qualities which attach ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... on some slight matter, I went to the merchant's shop where I saluted him and sat down by him. Presently up came the lady as usual, followed by a slave girl and wearing a dress more sumptuous than before; and she saluted me without noticing Badr al-Din and said in fluent graceful speech (never heard I voice softer or sweeter), "Send one with me to take the thousand and two hundred dirhams, the price of the piece." "Why this hurry?" asked I and she answered, "May we never lose thee!"[FN524] and handed me the money. Then I ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the music the soft air along, While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong Kept up among the guests discoursing low At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow; But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains, Louder they talk, and louder come the strains ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... of determination I kept on bearing up toward the top, but it was always quite labour in vain, through my want of skill, as the smaller stones being more fluent, I found myself still sinking down more and more with every step, till, mingled with the peculiar rattle of the gliding stones, came the roar of the river foaming and dashing amongst the rocks, and into which I expected ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... on for some time without a word on either side, until I ventured to remark that I coincided with him in the belief that Acadia was the romantic ground of early discovery in America; and that even the fluent pen of Hawthorne had failed to lend a charm to the harsh, repulsive, acrimonious features ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... Judge Paterson, [3] a fault in his mode of speaking while a youth, and seems never to have been fully corrected, as he did that of rapid utterance, attaining the true medium for public speaking in this respect. He spoke with great apparent ease, but could not be called fluent, although he never appeared at a loss for words, which were always so chaste and appropriate that they seemed to, have been as carefully selected before they fell from his lips as if they had been written down in a prepared speech and committed to memory. His manner was dignified and ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... more Gallantry in a Billet-doux that should be understood at the Bank, than in gross Money; But as to stubborn People, who are so surly as to accept of neither Note or Cash, having formerly dabbled in Chymistry, I can only say that one part of Matter asks one thing, and another another, to make it fluent; but there is nothing but may be dissolved by a proper Mean: Thus the Virtue which is too obdurate for Gold or Paper, shall melt away very kindly in a Liquid. The Island of Barbadoes (a shrewd People) manage all their Appeals to Great-Britain, by a skilful Distribution of Citron-Water ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... in this work which we could have wished somewhat different from what they are. Mr. Parton's fluent and forcible style sometimes degenerates into flippancy. We could cite many instances of felicitous expression, some, also, of bad taste, and some of hasty assertion. "Clubable" is hardly a good enough word ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... lead in ever widening circles, away from the topic under discussion when the events of his own life were discussed, but he is a fluent speaker and a student of psychology. Psychology as that philosophy relates to the mental and bodily tendencies of the African race has long since become one of the major subjects with which this unusual man struggles. "Why is the negro?" is ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves: Indiana Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... has never been in Europe a fluent script so beautiful and legible as that of our very best English writers of to-day. But their aesthetic mastery has come from loving study of the forms that conscious artistry had perfected, and through a constant practice ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... this fluent discourse, the meaning of which was not altogether clear to him. He frowned in bewilderment, as he again seated himself in the chair opposite his wife. He could think of nothing with which to rebuke her diatribe, save ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... delay, or difficulty about anything concerning the relations between himself and the factory, the deepest and keenest expression of discontent and disgust his versatile and acute imagination can suggest, or his fluent tongue give utterance to is, that this is 'Adanlut lea mafich,' that is, 'Like a court of justice.' Could there be a stronger ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... shoulders the model consented, and they went off to a cremerie. The Spaniard spoke broken French, fluent but difficult to follow, and Philip managed to get on well enough with him. He found out that he was a writer. He had come to Paris to write novels and kept himself meanwhile by all the expedients possible to a penniless man; he gave lessons, he did any translations he could get hold of, chiefly ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Billy promotin'. I 'spect he could take to writin' newspapers right away, if you could hold him down to it. He's jes' like his pa—the very spittin' image of him! Mr. Wiggs was so educated—the most fluent man ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... a short quarter of an hour with your excellency," said Count de Lacy, in very fluent German, but with the hard foreign accent of a Hungarian. "After a battle won, I know nothing pleasanter than to recall with a comrade the past danger, and to revel again in memory ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... their heads adorned with very tasteful ornaments of cowrie-shells, surmounted by plumes of ostrich-feathers, which drooped over the back of the neck. After the dance, the old chief addressed them in a long and vehement speech; he was followed by several other speakers, all of whom were remarkably fluent, and the resolution of the meeting was declared "that the nogaras were to be beaten, and men collected to accompany the Turks on a razzia in the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... clamorous, Filling my still breasts with a flush and a flame, Gathering the soft ripples below my breasts Into urgent, passionate waves, And my soft, slumbering belly Quivering awake with one impulse of desire, Gathers itself fiercely together; And my docile, fluent arms Knotting themselves with wild strength To clasp what they have never clasped. Then I tremble, and go trembling Under the wild, strange tyranny of my body, Till it has spent itself, And the relentless nodality of my eyes reasserts itself, ...
— Amores - Poems • D. H. Lawrence
... whereon he rose, or rather tried to, felt for his hat, which, of course, had gone, with the idea of taking it off, and instantly addressed her in his beautiful and fluent Arabic, saying how glad he was to have this unexpected honour, and ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... burning under the Prior's eyelids; but he was silent still. That was not his idea of Heaven; but then he was less weary of earth. He felt almost vexed that the only passage of Scripture which would come to him was one utterly unsuited to the occasion—"They rest not day nor night." Usually fluent and fervent, he ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... to see the noble Athenian in his own city. His fame for eloquence and prudence is already in Tyre and Babylon," spoke the stranger, never taking his steel-blue eyes from the orator's face. The accent was Oriental, but the Greek was fluent. The prince—for prince he was, whatever his nation—pressed his hand closer. Almost involuntarily Democrates's hand responded. They clasped tightly; then, as if Lycon feared a word too much, the unknown released his hold, bowed ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... gray, lighting up from time to time with a sympathetic glow; the countenance sensitive, spiritual, with 'mind and music breathing' from it; the general demeanor composed and gracious; her utterance fluent and finished, but somewhat measured; her voice clear and melodious, moving evenly, as it were in a monotone, though now and then rising, with a sort of quiet eagerness, into a higher note." The same writer speaks of the close-fitting ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... I continued: "He hasn't lost a bone since I have known him." This nettled him, and he began to badger me about an unsuccessful attempt which I made some time ago to get him to taste a green persimmon. Hobart has a good education, is fluent in conversation, and in discussion gets the better of me without difficulty. All I can do, therefore, is to watch my opportunity to give him an occasional thrust as best I can. Father Stanley is slow, destitute of either education or ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty
... spite of his foreign accent, was considered fluent, and his writing very good. To the questions put to him he answered in a way to obtain the approbation of the Doctor, and he was forthwith sent to take his place in the lower school. Ernst found that each class contained sixteen boys. The ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... beside her. His friends anticipated a distinguished Parliamentary career for John; he could make anything sound reasonable. Miss Bussey was fascinated by his suave and fluent narrative of what had befallen Mary and himself; she could not but admire his just remarks on the providential disclosure of the true state of the case before it was too late, and sympathized with the ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... to him: it gave him pain. He felt none of that exultation in creating characters which he had been told was part of the pleasures of an author. There were times, indeed, when he felt a mitigated joy in writing because his ideas were fluent and words fell easily off his pen, but even on those occasions, the labour of writing hurt him and exhausted him. The times of pleasurable writing were short interludes between the long stretches of painful writing, little oases that ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... celebrated historian, was there, with his lady. He is a young-looking man, of agreeable manners, and fluent in conversation. This I gather from Mr. S., with whom he conversed very freely on our historians, Prescott, Bancroft, and especially Dr. Sparks, his sharp controversy with whom he seems ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is to be unpopular, especially in the East, where comminatory swearing alone is practised, and you have to offend a man very grievously to get him to disgorge his treasure. In this country, except among ladies in comparatively humble circumstances, anything like this fluent, explicit, detailed, and sincere cursing, aimed, missile-fashion, at a personal enemy, is not found. It was quite common a few centuries ago; indeed, in the Middle Ages it was part of the recognised procedure. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... birth and of the highest rank in Scythia. Anacharsis, on the other hand, could not be expected to see a compatriot in Toxaris, who was dressed in the Greek fashion, without sword or belt, wore no beard, and from his fluent speech might have been an Athenian born; so completely had time transformed him. 'You are surely Anacharsis, the son of Daucetas?' he said, addressing him in the Scythian language. Anacharsis wept tears of joy; he not only heard his mother-tongue, but heard ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... was that the grief of each found fluent expression; and the fair corpse was addressed to, with all the tenderness that the sincerest love and warmest admiration could inspire; each according to their different degrees of relationship, as if none of them had before looked upon her. She was their very niece, both uncles said! ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... flowing periods; the right word in the right place; antithesis &c. 577. *purist. V. point an antithesis, round a period. Adj. elegant, polished, classical, Attic, correct, Ciceronian, artistic; chaste, pure, Saxon, academical[obs3]. graceful, easy, readable, fluent, flowing, tripping; unaffected, natural, unlabored[obs3]; mellifluous; euphonious, euphemism, euphemistic; numerose|, rhythmical. felicitous, happy, neat; well put, neatly put, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... position to a nicety. His fluent adaptability was in its right place. Little Captain von Wegstetten would have no non-commissioned officer under him better calculated to satisfy his desires than Gustav Weise. If he had remained a social-democrat, thought Wolf to himself, he would simply have been a pliant tool ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... gained, and a renewal of old issues and hostilities in the near future. Republican congressmen from the State, almost without exception, yielded to this view, voicing the sentiment that it was vain to temporise longer with compromises. With fluent invective, James B. McKean of Saratoga assailed the South in a speech that recalled the eloquence of John W. Taylor, his distinguished predecessor, who, in 1820, led the forces of freedom against the Missouri Compromise. "The slave-holders," ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... aspect; yet not a trace of abjectness; nothing that asked for pity. When Diana last caught sight of them, Marion had a contadino's child on her knee, in the corner of a third-class carriage, and Frobisher opposite—he spoke a fluent Italian—was laughing and jesting with the father. Marion, smiling, waved her hand, and the ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... bat, he was, after one or two repulses, actually adopted into the university eleven. He communicated this ray of glory by letter to his mother and sister with genuine delight, coldly and clumsily expressed; they replied with feigned and fluent rapture. Advancing steadily in that line of academic study towards which his genius lay, he won a hurdle race, and sent home a little silver hurdle; and soon after brought a pewter pot, with a Latin inscription recording the victory at "Fives" ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... tall, loosely made man swung into the room. The new-comer shot a swift glance at him and moved past to the bedside, addressing the concierge in fluent French that was marked by a pronounced American accent. He cut short her eager communication as he bent over the bed and made ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... Barsetshire. "It will probably be necessary for you to review the connection which still exists between, and which binds together, the Church and the State." Mr. Daubeny's words had of course been more fluent, but the gist of the expression was the same. He had been quite in earnest when addressing his friends in the country. And though there had been but an interval of a few weeks, the Conservative party in the two Houses heard the paragraph read without ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... Bowring! man of many tongues, (All over tongues, like rumor) This tributary verse belongs To paint his learned humor. All kinds of gab he knows, I wis, From Latin down to Scottish— As fluent as a parrot is, But far more Polly-glottish. No grammar too abstruse he meets, However dark and verby; He gossips Greek about the streets And often Russ—in urbe. Strange tongues—whate'er you do them call; In short, the man is able To tell you what o'clock in all The dialects of Babel. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... their mother generally sent their messages for them. Nancy and Kitty did not yet write nearly as well as they talked, but they contrived to express something of their own individuality in their communications, which were free and fluent, though childlike ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... and daughter bid him a rather stoical farewell, so far as tears and talk were concerned, though their pallid faces indicated the pain of separation was heartfelt. Mountain women have not a fluent line of chit-chat, nor are they ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... performance, Mr. Davidson, which I can not entirely commend. It is fluent, to be sure, but it lacks variety. A true artist would have interspersed those finer shades and gradations of meaning which go to express the numerous and clashing emotions which must necessarily agitate your venerable bosom. You surely mean more than ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... broken, being much troubled by a cobweb which some studious spider had woven across it, and having probably contracted a cold from long exposure to the chills and damps of the abbey. In a short time, however, it became more distinct, and I soon found it an exceedingly fluent, conversable little tome. Its language, to be sure, was rather quaint and obsolete, and its pronunciation what, in the present day, would be deemed barbarous; but I shall endeavor, as far as I am able, to render ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... in fluent American, began by alluding to the numerous links which bound together his country with that of his audience, and pointed out that nowhere was this affinity more pronounced than in their philosophies. Both showed a concrete cosmopolitanism indissolubly wedded ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 29, 1914 • Various
... realize it in life. Being an antithesis to the analytical novel, this novel treats of sex, not as a psychology but as a philosophy; nuances are avoided, the feminine figure becomes a symbol, drawn, not photographically but broadly, in fluent, even exaggerated Botticellian outlines. I might go even further and say that as a symbol of Russian revolution the figure of Elisaveta is perhaps meant to stand out with the statuesque boldness of the Victory of Samothrace. The feminine figure, nude or thinly ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... as organist of the cathedral at Milan, and having distinguished himself by certain operas successfully produced in Italy, he removed to London, where he led an easy and enjoyable life. He was an elegant and fluent writer for the pianoforte. The one son of Bach who is commonly regarded as having left a mark upon the later course of music was Carl Philip Emanuel (1714-1788), the third son, commonly known as the Berlin ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... put the writing materials before Mr. Bruff, and asked him if he had any objection—before we separated for the night—to draw out, and sign, a plain statement of what he had seen. He at once took the pen, and produced the statement with the fluent readiness of ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... constitutional law; third, of strong will, indomitable courage, and patient labor. Guided by the light of her own understanding, she seeks truth among the mixed materials of other minds, and having found it, maintains it against all obstacles; fourth and last, a writer fluent, cogent, and abounding with evidence of ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... Howell, Esq. are well known as fluent examples of the best style of writing of his day, and as repositories of many curious facts and intelligent remarks. The following letter appears to be addressed to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... good writing. An AEschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better poet if ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of this interrogation. And it is a question especially for you, because you have special advantages in the matter of putting it. We older people are all fixed and fossils, as you are very fond of telling us. The iron has cooled and gone into rigid shapes with us. It is all fluent with you. You may become pretty nearly what you like. I do not mean in regard to circumstances: other considerations come in to determine these; but circumstances are second, character is first; and I do say, in regard to character, you young folk have all but infinite possibilities before you; ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... the other officials look very small: indeed the first impression of him is that of a man of another race. While I am wondering whether the old Japanese heroes were cast in a similar mould, he signs to me to take a seat, and questions my guide in a mellow basso. There is a charm in the fluent depth of the voice pleasantly confirming the idea suggested by the face. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... was greasy, and I took out my handkerchief, but before I could use it to wipe my hands, a young squaw pushed her way up to me, and offered her long black hair as a napkin. She threw the oily length across my arm, and flattered me in fluent Ottawa. ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... his company of all things. Indeed, had Halfman been other than he was, Evander would have preferred any companionship that kept him from his melancholy thoughts. And already Halfman attracted him, or at least interested him. His fantastical manner, his fluent speech, his assurance, and that note of something foreign, odd, as characteristic, as conclusive, as the scorch of foreign suns upon his face, appealed to the curiosity in Evander which ever made men books for him. Halfman's manner grew more expansive at Evander's ready acceptance of his offer. ...
— The Lady of Loyalty House - A Novel • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... exclaimed Herr Schulz—and this time his English was faultless and fluent—"Shut that door behind you, Mr. Greve, and shoot the bolt—that's it just below the knob! Sit down, sit down, and while I mix you a drink, you shall tell me ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... we have already spoken. He is a colored gentleman, and in every respect the noblest man, white or black, whom we met in the West Indies. He is highly intelligent, and of fine moral feelings. His manners are free and unassuming, and his language in conversation fluent and well chosen. He is intimately acquainted with English and French authors, and has studied thoroughly the history and character of the people with whom the tie of color has connected him. He travelled two years in Hayti, and his letters, written in a flowing and luxuriant ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... most of all in Johannesburg. You are soon able to recognise his points and identify him at a distance. He is a little too neatly dressed and his watch-chain is a little too much of a certainty. His manner is excessively glib and fluent, yet he has a trick of furtively glancing round while he talks, as if fearful of being overheard. For the same reason he speaks in low tones. He must often be discussing indifferent topics, but he always looks as if he were hatching a swindle. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... confident. Interest in all his actions was discern'd; 1150 More learn'd than honest, more a wit than learn'd: Or forced by fear, or by his profit led, Or both conjoin'd, his native clime he fled: But brought the virtues of his heaven along; A fair behaviour, and a fluent tongue. And yet with all his arts he could not thrive; The most unlucky parasite alive. Loud praises to prepare his paths he sent, And then himself pursued his compliment; But by reverse of fortune chased away, 1160 His gifts no longer than their author stay: He shakes ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... that as in strategy he took the advice of Suetonius Paulinus and Marius Celsus, so too in political matters he employed the talents of Galerius Trachalus.[200] Some people even thought they could recognize Trachalus' style of oratory, fluent and sonorous, well adapted to tickle the ears of the crowd: and as he was a popular pleader his style was well known. The crowd's loud shouts of applause were in the best style of flattery, excessive and insincere. Men vied with each other in their enthusiasm and ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... to her with regard: with the result that Mr. Lien himself has, in fact, had to take a back seat (lit. withdrew 35 li). In looks, she is also so extremely beautiful, in speech so extremely quick and fluent, in ingenuity so deep and astute, that even a man could, in no way, come up to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... when talking in a company with fluent vivacity, and, as he flattered himself, to the admiration of all who were present; a German who sat next him, and perceived Johnson rolling himself, as if about to speak, suddenly stopped him, saying, 'Stay, stay,—Toctor Shonson is going to say something.' This was, no doubt, very ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... every respect the noblest man, white or black, whom we met in the West Indies. He is highly intelligent and of fine moral feelings. His manners are free and unassuming, and his language in conversation fluent and well chosen.... He is at the head of the special magistrates (of whom there are sixty (sic) in this island) and all the correspondence between them and the governor is carried on through him. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... granite walls from thirty-five hundred to four thousand feet high. It shows grandly from where it broke on our sight, sweeping boldly forward and downward in its majestic channel, swaying from side to side in graceful fluent lines around stern unflinching rocks. While I stood in the canoe making a sketch of it, several bergs came off with tremendous dashing and thunder, raising a cloud of ice-dust and spray to a height of a hundred feet ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... when she was let out, and expressed her entire approval of Johnny in fluent dog language, looking after him reproachfully when he ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... almost universal in his days. The older poetry of the desert had been constantly imitated up to this time, although it was not natural to town life. Abu-l-'Atahiya was one of the first to drop the old qasida (elegy) form. He was very fluent and used many metres. He is also regarded as one of the earliest philosophic poets of the Arabs. Much of his Poetry is concerned with the observation of common life and morality, and at times is pessimistic. Naturally, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and began to speak. At first his words came to him slowly; but as he warmed to his subject he became fluent and ...
— General John Regan - 1913 • George A. Birmingham
... these chastisements she recounts in the nightly half-hour which she spends with me when I am endeavouring to compose myself for sleep. Francesca is fluent at all times, but once seated on the foot of my bed she ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... entertaining as it was penetrating; his allusions and quotations, as far as they were English and within my reach, were apt and ingenious - and the wild and sudden flights of his fancy, bursting forth from his creative imagination in language fluent, forcible, and varied, had a charm for my ear and my attention wholly new and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... because he was stern and unrelenting when he felt that justice and his duty required him to be so, no more proves that he had a cold heart than does the fact that he was silent, dignified, and reserved. Cold-blooded men are not fierce in seeking to redress the wrongs of others, nor are the fluent of speech the only kind and generous members of the ...
— George Washington, Vol. II • Henry Cabot Lodge
... as the sunny air at noonday. Nor was his conversation altogether light and mirthful. There were at times bursts of high enthusiasm, at which he would himself laugh heartily a moment afterward—there were touches of passing romance and poetry blending in an under-current with his fluent mirth; and, above all, there was an evident strain of right feeling, of appreciation of all that was great and generous and good, predominant above romance and wit, perceptible in every ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... demonstrative girl naturally; not ready with her tears, not liberal with her caresses, not fluent in her talk, Eunice was affected by my proposal in a manner wonderful to see. She suddenly developed into an excitable person—I declare she kissed me. "Oh," she burst out, "how clever you are! The very thing to write about; ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... answer for the Author, His Modesty misguides him to think it).——No Applause therefore can be too high, for such Merit. And, let me abominate the contemptible Reserves of mean-spirited Men, who while they but hesitate their Esteem, with Restraint, can be fluent and uncheck'd in their Envy.——In an Age so deficient in Goodness, Every such Virtue, as That of this Author, is a salutary Angel, in Sodom. And One who cou'd stoop to conceal, a Delight he receives from the Worthy, wou'd be equally capable of submitting ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson
... results have shown to be the greatest revolution of history. So sensitive, physically, that he had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... merit and distinction through the various grades of probation and preparation by which the Jesuit is trained for his arduous work, and was ordained priest in the year 1825. Being a ripe scholar, well versed in literature, ancient and modern, an able theologian, a fluent and impressive speaker, he soon took a foremost place amongst the leading priests at ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men whose words come slowly and painfully when among their fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary assemblage for their audience; and so our short address went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious precedents on ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... suffered from an over-fluent tongue rather than a resolute will, was determined to make himself heard. He addressed the driver again. Italian in the mouth of Italians is a deep-voiced stream, with unexpected cataracts and boulders to preserve it from monotony. In Mr. Eager's mouth it resembled ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... of the night, she discovered Gabrielle fallen asleep with an open copy of Don Juan beside her pillow and a spent candle flaring within an inch of the lace bed-curtains. Gabrielle smiled when Biddy woke her with a stream of fluent abuse, for she had been dreaming that she herself was Haidee and her Aegean island lay somewhere in the Gulf ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... gloom lay my Beltane, stirring not and speaking no word, being faint and sick with his hurts. But Giles the archer, sitting beside him, vented by turns bitter curses upon Sir Pertolepe and humble prayers to his patron saint, so fluent and so fast that prayers and curses became strangely blent and mingled, on ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... industries, the prevention of juvenile street trading, the extension of the Borstal prison system, the furtherance of vague talkative religious movements the fostering of inter-racial ententes, all found in him a tireless exponent, a fluent and entertaining, though perhaps not very convincing, advocate. With the real motive power behind these various causes he was not very closely identified; to the spade-workers who carried on the actual labours of each particular movement he bore the relation ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... looking pretty and not too warlike in the gay uniform of a French Officer of Cavalry, played the hero's part with a very natural and fluent charm. I join in the general hope that this, the first play under his actor-management, will go well. It ought to, for though, in point of power to thrill, it did not quite confirm the promise of its sinister name and theme it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... fathers," the voice says, "in the last quarter of the last century, forfeited a golden opportunity. It was a time of reconstruction in the State, social life was taking on the form it was destined long to retain, a great war had come to an end and its results were being registered, all things were fluent. Moreover, there happened, just then, to be an almost unparalleled lull in the strife of religious parties; men were more disposed than usual to agree; the interest in liturgical research was at its greatest, ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... articles offered; they should fill orders as received, without substituting other articles; they should pack their shipments very carefully and with a view to local transportation conditions. The success of the Germans in building up their Dominican trade was due in large measure to the polish and fluent Spanish of their representatives, to their thorough study of local conditions, and to their favorable terms ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... distinctly feel that "KATHARINE TYNAN" could have made a first-rate novel of Denys the Dreamer (COLLINS) and have had plenty over for a good second if she had taken the trouble. But her fluent pen runs away with her down paths that lead nowhere in particular, instead of developing her main characters and situations to an intelligible and satisfactory point. Denys is of a gentle Irish family that has come down to very small farming. He dreams good, solid and rather ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... them was dressed as a nun. Quite by accident I saw her face. It was that of a beautiful girl. I observed she kept aloof from the others. I suspected a disguise, and, when opportunity afforded, spoke to her, offered my services. She replied to my poor efforts at Spanish in fluent English. She had fled in terror from her home, some place down in Sinaloa. Rebels are active there. Her father was captured and held for ransom. When the ransom was paid the rebels killed him. The leader of these ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... sprang from the people, his father being an obscure locksmith in Marseilles. Like Guizot, he first became distinguished as a writer for the "Constitutional," and afterward as its editor. He was a brilliant and fluent speaker, at home on all questions of the day, always equal to the occasion, yet without striking originality or profundity of views. Like most men who have been the architects of their own fortunes, he was vain and consequential. He was liberal in his views, a friend of order and law, with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... this time a dozen newspapers in the State. With all of them had Bartlett to do battle for the cause in which he had enlisted, and right valiantly did he do it. He was a fluent and most caustic writer, and was always ready, not only to write, but to fight for his party, and would with his blood sustain anything he might say or write. Like most party editors, he only saw the interest of his party in what he would write, and would write anything he ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... high renown are all comprised in thee; By them may Fortune never cease thy bounder slave to be! Munificence and knowledge sure, glory and piety, Fair fluent speech and ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... little weight, was gratefully accepted by the German clavichord players, and, reacting, became one of the determining agents of the piano music and style of playing of the Vienna school. Thus arose a fluent execution of a rich figuration and brilliant passage playing, with but little inclination to sonorousness of effect, lasting from the time of Mozart's immediate followers to that of Henri Herz; a period ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... sufficiently noticed by either poet or painter. Willows are now beautiful objects in the landscape; they are like rich masses of arborescent silver, especially if stirred by the breeze, their light and fluent forms contrasting finely with the still and sombre aspect of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... nothing to complain of. But he had not expected it to come to him riding high on the crest of a great, frothing wave of verbal denunciation. Mr Bickersdyke, through constantly speaking in public, had developed the habit of fluent denunciation to a remarkable extent. He had thundered at Mike as if Mike had been his Majesty's Government or the Encroaching Alien, or something of that sort. And that kind of thing is a little overwhelming at short range. Mike's ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... speak German and had no means of explaining to the prisoners that they were to take their turn to get rations and water at a dump nearby. It was a war correspondent, young Valentine Williams, afterward a very gallant officer in the Irish Guards who gave the orders in fluent and incisive German. He began with a hoarse shout of "Achtung!" and that old word of command had an electrical effect on many of the men. Even those who had seemed asleep staggered to their feet and stood at attention. The habit of discipline was part of their very ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... difficult to catch. It is curious how the different parts of the country betray themselves by their speech. There are Scotchmen whom it is not easy to follow, and there are very few of them who speak with anything like an English accent. Even the most fluent of the Welshmen speak with a certain hesitation, betraying their bilingual infancy and youth. The Irish have as many accents nearly as there are members. The Northumbrian burr, however, is a tongue apart. It has the pleasantness of every foreign ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... reputation through Europe, for an extraordinary proficiency in the languages of India. Later scholars speak lightly of this multifarious knowledge, and nothing can be more probable, than that attainment of many languages, with any approach to their fluent use, is beyond the power of man. But his diligence was exemplary, his memory retentive, and his understanding accomplished by classical knowledge; with those qualities, much might be done in any pursuit; and though modern orientalists protest against the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... artist at this period a Greek myth and a Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, devoid of any but voluptuous feeling; while both might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.[116] To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Poet is a rare genius. And most happily it is so; for elevated taste and high-toned morality are not, by any means, the common heritage of man. Anacreon and Burns were genuine Poets. They uttered, in fine style, many truths; and were not merely fluent in their respective languages, but affluent. But, perhaps, like some other men of mighty parts and grand proportions, better for mankind they had never been born. A Cowper and a Byron, in their whole career of song, will exert a very different influence, not only on ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Gibson, but said nothing about his long neglect of duty. Molly, who by this time knew the few strong expressions of his countenance well, was sure that something was the matter, and that he was very much disturbed. He hardly attended to Mrs. Gibson's fluent opening of conversation, for she had already determined to make a favourable impression on the father of the handsome young man who was heir to an estate, besides his own personal agreeableness; but he turned ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... speaking, the maiden had raised her head slightly above the water, and now was gazing at him with eyes the like of which he had never seen before. "I 'opes she understands Carnish," he added to himself, "for 'tis the only langwidge I'm fluent in." ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... while many descriptive passages are fine, the pictures of the terrible storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those in Dauber. Had Mr. Noyes written Drake without the songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the Songs, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is past," could have been written only by a poet. In Forty Singing Seamen there is displayed an imagination ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... "were words selected and arranged to strike almost all the common complexes in analyzing and diagnosing. You'd think any intelligent person could give a fluent answer to them, perhaps a misleading answer. But try it yourself, Walter. You'll find you can't. You may start all right, but not all the words will be reacted to in the same time or with the same smoothness and ease. Yet, like the expressions of a ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... openly hostile to the "great man," was the titular head of an Opposition numbering almost all the men of wit and genius in the kingdom. Lyttelton, Fielding's warmest friend, had become secretary to the Prince, and was recognised as a fluent leader of the Opposition in the House of Commons. Another friend, John Duke of Argyll, had joined the ranks of the Opposition in the Lords. On the whole the author of Pasquin, may well have hoped for a speedy fall of the "Colossos," with "its ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... a word, he listened to the fluent tide of her speech, a strange, mocking light in his eyes, whose portent she ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... probably under forty, without prejudice to the possibility of his being under twenty. A Londoner would recognize him at once as an extreme but hardy specimen of the abortion produced by nature in a city slum. His utterance, affectedly pumped and hearty, and naturally vulgar and nasal, is ready and fluent: nature, a Board School education, and some kerbstone practice having made him a bit of an orator. His dialect, apart from its base nasal delivery, is not unlike that of smart London society in its tendency to replace ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... refuse grumpily—and that would have made enough scandal. But Mr. Pryor bounded briskly to his feet, unctuously said, "Let us pray," and forthwith prayed. In a sonorous voice which penetrated to every corner of the crowded building Mr. Pryor poured forth a flood of fluent words, and was well on in his prayer before his dazed and horrified audience awakened to the fact that they were listening to a pacifist appeal of the rankest sort. Mr. Pryor had at least the courage of his convictions; or ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... quick at retort, and unyielding observers of the ancient customs. Then she selected a dozen sturdy champions, her relations and friends; and, lastly, the old hemp-beater of the parish, a fine and fluent talker, if ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... him, Chino," Rennie called. Herrera brought over a tin cup from the fire now blazing. As the Mexican took it awkwardly with his left hand, still watching Rennie glassily over the brim, the latter used fluent Spanish, only a word or two of which ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... Honorable Jean Antoine Panet, was no longer eligible for election, having been removed to the Legislative Council, and the chair of the Assembly fell upon Louis Joseph Papineau, a man of superior manners, of considerable independence of character, of fluent tongue and impassioned utterance, of extraordinary persuasive powers, and of commanding aspect. He was accepted by Sir Gorge Prevost, and business began. A vote of thanks was unanimously accorded to Mr. Panet for his steady, impartial, and faithful discharge of the speakership for twenty-two ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... Court. The company, of course, was mixed, but the white contingent had caught the local colour (coffee) and showed great aptitude in imitating the methods of the aborigines. Naturally there were conventions; the chiefs talked fluent English, while the Zulu supers employed their own vernacular, except in certain formal phrases, as when the "praisers" (my programme's name for a sort of universal claque) punctuated the speeches of their king with ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 7, 1914 • Various
... speak all that was in his mind freely and without fear of betrayal concerning the war that was soon to be waged between the rival factions of our oppressors and the means that were to be used to turn their strife to our own account, and this he did, speaking in fluent Spanish and in short, clear sentences, as a man of action and ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith
... speak with fluent energy of the Tsar's rescript, of Stead, of general disarmament arbitration in cases of international disputes, of the signs of the times, of the new humanity and the new gospel of life which would make it the business of the community ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... equal eminence; and his enthusiastic friends insisted that never, either in single conflict or when receiving the assault of the senatorial leaders of a whole party, had he been discomfited. His style was bold, vigorous, and aggressive; at times even defiant. He was ready, fluent, fertile in resources, familiar with national and party history, severe in denunciation, and he handled with skill nearly all the weapons of debate. His iron will and restless energy, together with great personal magnetism, made him the idol of his friends and party. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Miranda, ever fearless and most fluent. "Tired am I of always seeing the same dull, old scenes. I wish the rail-fences would tumble down, and the sprawling apple-trees,— And the brown farm-houses take unto themselves wings and fly away, Like the wild-geese in autumn, if only something might be new. There's ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... the following morning found us spinning along the Albert Embankment in a hansom to the pleasant tinkle of the horse's bell. Thorndyke appeared to be in high spirits, though the full enjoyment of the matutinal pipe precluded fluent conversation. As a precaution, he had put my notebook in his pocket before starting, and once or twice he took it out and looked over its pages; but he made no reference to the object of our quest, and the few remarks that he uttered would have indicated that ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... bought at the fair of St. Awdrey or St. Etheldreda, has run through the same course: it at one time conveyed no suggestion of mean finery or shabby splendour, as now it does. 'Voluble' was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what 'fluent' means now; 'dapper' was what in German 'tapfer' is; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; 'plausible' was worthy of applause; 'pert' is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... his copy, ordinarily fluent enough, would not come. Ideas fluttered away just out of reach. The sequence of a chapter had been in his head. Like the dagger, it had gone. He could not account for that disappearance, nor did he try. It would turn up again. So, ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus
... whose ducal father made his money by inventing a fluent pill, or who gained his great wealth through relieving humanity by means of a lung pad, a liver pad, a kidney pad or a foot ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... as boyhood, was already entrusted with the uncontrolled management of his property and might perhaps find it necessary to make formal speeches to the assembled community, not only was great value set all along on the fluent and polished use of the mother-tongue, but efforts were early made to acquire a command of it in the years of boyhood. The Greek language also was already generally diffused in Italy in the time of Hannibal. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... asked one of the listeners, as the speaker, a fluent, energetic young man, closed his recital of the atrocities he had witnessed. "Did they escape, or are they among the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... who acknowledged the honour in fluent Melanesian, was understood to say that he had only done his duty, that he was speechless with gratitude and that he would always regard Lord READING as a brother. A recherche vegetarian luncheon was then served, after which Lord ROTHERMERE presented ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... The effect on a house-master of humane conscience and good intent may be imagined. Again, a man who has sincerely devoted himself to gaining the esteem of his charges does not like to hear himself described, even at a distance, as "Popularity Prout" by a dark and scowling Celt with a fluent tongue. A rumor that stories—unusual stories—are told in the form-rooms, between the lights, by a boy who does not command his confidence, agitates such a man; and even elaborate and tender politeness—for the courtesy wise-grown men ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... loaf of bread. Here they sat for some time, listening to the conversation of the peasants who frequented the wine shop. Sometimes a question was asked of the wayfarers. Gerald replied, for his companion's Spanish although fluent was not good enough to pass as that of a native. He replied to the question as to where they had received their hurts that they were survivors of the Armada, and grumbled that it was hard indeed that men who had fought in the ...
— By England's Aid or The Freeing of the Netherlands (1585-1604) • G.A. Henty
... "Thou art mighty fluent with thy guesses," replied he, not at all relishing these unpleasant truths; "and what if I am doomed to pine after the good I can never attain? I will bear my miseries, if not without repining, at least without thy pity;" ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... bishop of Nueva Segovia is Don Fray Jose Hevia Campomanes, a religious of the Order of St. Dominic—who is most fluent in the Tagal language, and had been, for many years before, parish priest of Binondo, which parish he enriched with a fine cemetery. He took possession of his see June 19, 1890, but was made a prisoner at the outbreak of the revolution; ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... his brother at a disadvantage, and he grew fluent and caustic as he went on, almost changing places with Howard, who took the rake out of the boy's hands and followed, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... knowledge of war at the same time; and a knowledge of soldier-people and sailor-people and their ways and talk; also a knowledge of some foreign lands and their languages: for he was daily emptying fluent streams of these various knowledges, too, into his dramas. How did he acquire these ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... them, quite as gaudy to look upon and every whit as reckless in their horsemanship, rode Dade and Jack. If their hearts were not as light, their faces gave no sign; and their tongues flung back the good-humored jibes of their fellows in Spanish as fluent as any they heard. ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... gone with the Baroness in the other direction toward the ponds. This ready-witted lady, who liked to be in the secret about everything, soon observed, in a few conversational feelers which she threw out, that Edward was very fluent and free-spoken in praise of Ottilie. She contrived in the most natural way to lead him out by degrees so completely that at last she had not a doubt remaining that here was not merely an incipient fancy, but ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... years the Maori race has returned four members to the House. They usually speak through an interpreter. In spite of that, when discussing native questions they often show themselves fluent and even eloquent. Outside local and private bills, nearly all important legislation is conducted by Government. Private members often profess to put this down to the jealousy and tyranny of Ministers, but the truth is that Parliament, as a whole, ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... have,... and it is one which will be properly appreciated by any student of languages. They are, by common consent of all competent authorities, the genuine productions of native minds, cast in the idiomatic forms of the native tongue by those born to its use. No matter how fluent a foreigner becomes in a language not his own, he can never use it as does one who has been familiar with it from childhood. This general maxim is tenfold true when we apply it to a European learning an American language. The flow of thought, as exhibited in these ...
— The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees • James Mooney
... competency, and foisted their pictures most on people when they had forgotten how to paint. Pompiers, fumistes, makers of respectable pommade—as the painter's potations increased, his English became less fluent, and he was driven back constantly to the dialect of the Paris ateliers, which was more familiar to him than his mother tongue. Ah! how he hated these people and their thread-paper morality, and their sordid conception of art—a prettiness that ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... a white Mulatto, if you will allow me to make the bull; her eyebrows dark and her hair quite sable, dry and crisp like a negro's, though not quite so curling. She scarcely gave me time to make my compliments in French before she spoke in fluent English. I was not sorry she fought under British colors, for though she was never at a loss, I knew I could express and defend myself better than had she spoken in French. I hurried her as much as decency would permit from one subject to another, but I found politics were uppermost in her thoughts.... ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal and leaf—the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by rote—are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... the subject of terms. She was very cautious, quite on her guard; she did not absolutely bargain, but she warily sounded me to find out what my expectations might be; and when she could not get me to name a sum, she reasoned and reasoned with a fluent yet quiet circumlocution of speech, and at last nailed me down to five hundred francs per annum—not too much, but I agreed. Before the negotiation was completed, it began to grow a little dusk. I did not hasten it, for I liked well enough ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... by heart, and thought it probable that he could rewrite Sir Charles Grandison from memory. In his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private conversation—for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often for hours at a stretch—he was never at a loss to fortify and illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names, facts of all kinds, and passages quoted verbatim from his multifarious reading. The ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... a longer visit than usual; his cup of coffee, indeed, became a cup of tea; and his talk, while he staid, seemed to suffer less from the limitations of his Order than it usually did. He was fluent and direct; he allowed it to appear that he read more than his prayers, that his glance at the world had still a speculation in it; and when he went away, he left Alicia with flushed cheeks and brightened eyes, murmuring a vague inward corollary ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... obtained, in abundance, the gift of that "civil courage" which makes an Irishman at ease and unconstrained in all places and under all circumstances; and he who has kissed the Blarney stone is assumed to be endowed with a fluent and persuasive tongue, altho it may be associated with insincerity; the term "Blarney" being generally used to characterize words that are meant neither to be "honest ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... some time without a word on either side, until I ventured to remark that I coincided with him in the belief that Acadia was the romantic ground of early discovery in America; and that even the fluent pen of Hawthorne had failed to lend a charm to the harsh, repulsive, acrimonious features of ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... the fluent conversation and compliments, the gossip and jokes he had been saving up to tell her, died away on his lips. He saw she had been crying. He sat down further ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... was no question which feature of the entertainment was the attraction extraordinary: Verman—Verman, the savage tattooed wild boy, speaking only his native foreign languages—Verman was a triumph! Beaming, wreathed in smiles, melodious, incredibly fluent, he had but to open his lips and a dead hush fell upon the audience. Breathless, they leaned forward, hanging upon his every semi-syllable, and, when Penrod checked the flow, burst into thunders of applause, which Verman received with ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... extra allowance for expenses subscribed by the Bristol merchants. He thus describes his feelings: "It was past eight o'clock when I reached the Gloucester Coffee-House, and, the Bristol mail being on the point of going off, I mounted on the outside. The fine fluent motion of the mail soon laid me asleep. It is somewhat remarkable that the first easy or refreshing sleep which I had enjoyed for some months was on the outside of ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... ancient counts of Holland. This illustrious origin, which in his own eyes formed a high claim to distinction, had not procured him any of those employments or dignities which he considered his due. He was presumptuous and rash, and rather a fluent speaker than an eloquent orator. Louis of Nassau was thoroughly inspired by the justice of the cause he espoused; De Brederode espoused it for the glory of becoming its champion. The first only wished for action; the latter longed for distinction. ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... hesitation she started off in the flow of her discourse, which rolled smoothly and uninterruptedly on for nearly two hours. It was very apparent that it was not a cut and dried speech, for she was as fluent and as felicitous in her allusions to circumstances immediately around her as she was when she rose to a more exalted pitch of laudation of the "Union," or of execration of the old slavery system. Her voice was remarkable—as sweet as any woman's voice we ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... reminiscences of famous men and women. And the actual condition of the people, how they lived, and what they were thinking about, interested him deeply. He spoke to everybody he met, in the train, in the steamboat, or in hotels, in fluent if rather "bookish" German, in correct but somewhat halting French, or, if it was a Roman Catholic priest he had to deal with, in sonorous Latin. And, without anything approaching cant or officiousness, he always tried ...
— Principal Cairns • John Cairns
... final consonant evaded after the Polynesian habit) was sent by Bishop Dordillon to South America, and there educated by the fathers. His French is fluent, his talk sensible and spirited, and in his capacity of ganger-in-chief, he is of excellent service to the French. With the prestige of his name and family, and with the stick when needful, he keeps the natives ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sheikh Abdul Qadir vouchsafed no reply beyond a grunt. The chief glanced at Shah Sowar, and that excellent comedian, assuming the ashamed look of one disgraced by his master's rudeness, at once made a long-winded and complimentary reply in the most fluent and high-flown Persian. Then, before the effect should be lost, he ordered in tea, and commenced an animated conversation with the two strangers, all parties absolutely ignoring, out of politeness, Sheikh Abdul Qadir and his Evil Spirit. Thus anxiously skating over the thin ice, Shah Sowar ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... was a man who had seen many changes, And always changed as true as any needle; His polar star being one which rather ranges, And not the fix'd—he knew the way to wheedle: So vile he 'scaped the doom which oft avenges; And being fluent (save indeed when fee'd ill), He lied with such a fervour of intention— There was no doubt he ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... enables a young beginner to form his own style at the outset by careful and systematic writing. Spurgeon, often when a youth, read some of his sermons, although afterwards he never premeditated a single sentence for the pulpit. Dr. Richard S. Storrs was a most fluent extemporaneous speaker, but for twenty years he carefully wrote all his discourses. My own habit, after a time, was to write a portion of the sermon and turn away from my notes to interject thoughts that came in the heat of the moment and then turn to my manuscript. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... bronze, lo! Henley stands, Tuning his voice, and balancing his hands; How fluent nonsense trickles from his tongue, How sweet the periods neither said nor sung. Still break the benches, Henley, with thy strain, While Sherlock, Hare, and Gibson ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... "The style is fluent and unforced; the description of character well limned; and the pictures of scenery forcible and felicitous. There is a natural conveyance of incidents to the denouement; and the reader closes the volume ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... paled again, and he gazed at Robert in a sort of dazed fashion. The imagination of young Lennox was alive and leaping. He had found what seemed to him a happy solution of a knotty problem, and, as usual in such cases, his speech became fluent ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... publishers tell me that people want to know why, and how, and by which of us these poems were written,—curiosity, complimentary, no doubt, but which it is by no means easy for the surviving bard to satisfy. It is sixty years since most of these verses were written with the light heart and fluent pen of youth, and with no thought of their surviving beyond the natural life of ephemeral magazine pieces of humour. After a long and very crowded life, of which literature has occupied the smallest part, it is difficult for me to live back ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... life of adventure and romance in which his constant ideas of war and politics run through and across an almost imaginary tapestry. He seems to have intended to illustrate and to popularise his ideals and to attain by a story the many whom his discourses could not reach. In verse Machiavelli was fluent, pungent, and prosaic. The unfinished Golden Ass is merely made of paragraphs of the Discorsi twined into rhymes. And the others are little better. Countless pamphlets, essays, and descriptions may be searched without total waste by the very curious and the ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... The piece is for the fashionable salon or the concert hall. One catches at its close the overtones of bustling plaudits and the clapping of gloved palms. Ductility, an aristocratic ease, a delicate touch and fluent technique will carry off this study with good effect. Technically it is useful; one must speak of the usefulness of Chopin, even in these imprisoned, iridescent soap bubbles of his. On the fourth line and in ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... onward, by expression of ideas, making room for thoughts to follow, and the dull elf, whose mouth is a mill-dam, finds his fancies and thoughts accumulate on his brain, till that organ is dull and sodden as is his facial aspect. Why is it that some can only be fluent from the point of a pen, while others can only address their fellows effectively by word of mouth? Of course there are conversational monsters as well as other violations of nature's creative processes. And the more thought that talk holds in solution, the more grateful the offering. But I have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... theme, and sat down in confusion. With all his incisive thought and fine command of language, Addison could not think on his feet. And as if aware of his limitations, in one of the "Spectator" essays he said, with more or less truth, "The fluent orator, ready to speak on any topic, is never profound, and when once his thought is cold it will seldom repay examination—it was ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Emerson, Hawthorne and Longfellow. Lowell was a scholar with academic ties, a patriot above party, master of prose and verse highly developed and finished, and at times of a lofty strain owing to his moral enthusiasm; Whittier was a Quaker priest, vigorous in a great cause of humanity, with fluent power to express in poetry the life of the farm, the roadside and the legends that were like folklore in the memory of the settlement; Holmes was a town wit and master of occasional verse, with notes here and there of a higher strain in single rare ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... strong upon him. His face was sufficiently made up to baffle recognition; but there remained his voice. To dissemble this he had availed himself of the fact that Figaro was a Spaniard. He had known a Spaniard at Louis le Grand who spoke a fluent but most extraordinary French, with a grotesque excess of sibilant sounds. It was an accent that he had often imitated, as youths will imitate characteristics that excite their mirth. Opportunely he had bethought him of that Spanish student, and it was upon ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... friends, as Becky had the Sedleys; like Becky, she imprudently married a heavy, unscrupulous young officer; her expedients for living on nothing a year were exactly those of Mrs. Rawdon Crawley; her personal charms, her fluent tongue, her good nature, even, were those of that accomplished lady. Finally she has her Marquis of Steyne in the wealthy, luxurious Cardinal de Rohan; she robs him to a tune beyond the dreams of Becky, and, incidentally, she drags to the dust the royal head of the fairest and most unhappy of ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... replied my friend, "that your confidence in smooth features and fluent accents should have ended long ago. Till I gained from my present profession some knowledge of the world, a knowledge which was not gained in a moment, and has not cost a trifle, I was equally wise in my own ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... drew my portrait, and I drew his. My guardian was not quite pleased that I should know an actor, but Mead attracted me by the superior tone of his conversation. It was the first time in my life that I had met with an accomplished talker; I had known plenty of talkers who were only fluent, but Mead had always something interesting to say, and he invariably said it with easy finish and good taste. In a word, he was a master of spoken English, and did not fear to make use of his power, not having ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... Pliny the Younger was the adopted son of Pliny the Elder. He was a voluminous correspondent. We have nine books of his letters, relating to a large number of subjects, and presenting vivid pictures of the times in which he lived. Their diction is fluent and smooth. ...
— History of Rome from the Earliest times down to 476 AD • Robert F. Pennell
... himself a disciple of Pestalozzi, came into the school-grounds and read the meaning of the scene. Jasper saw the soul of things, and turned always from the outward expressions of life to the inward motive. He read the true character of the boy in buckskin breeches, human heart, and fluent tongue. He sat down on the log step of the school-house in silence, and Mr. Crawford presently came out with a quill pen behind his ear, ...
— In The Boyhood of Lincoln - A Tale of the Tunker Schoolmaster and the Times of Black Hawk • Hezekiah Butterworth
... minister; and a certain high chested carriage of the shoulders, a lofty pose of the head, and the Olympian majesty with which a mane, or rather a huge wisp, of hazel colored hair is thrown back from an imposing brow, suggest Jupiter rather than Apollo. He is prodigiously fluent of speech, restless, excitable (mark the snorting nostril and the restless blue eye, just the thirty-secondth of an inch too wide open), possibly a little mad. He is carefully dressed, not from the vanity that cannot resist ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... up irrevocably, why burn the "studious lamp" in search of further confirmation? Every set opinion I hear a student deliver I feel a certain lowering of my regard. He who studies, he who is yet employed in groping for his premises, should keep his mind fluent and sensitive, keen to mark flaws, and willing to surrender untenable positions. He should keep himself teachable, or cease the expensive farce of being taught. It is to further this docile spirit that we desire to press the claims of debating societies. It is as a means of melting down ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and you are far more deeply impressed than by the glib facility which does not pause, does not stumble, does not hesitate, because he does not stop to think. Many people, reading so much about Mr. Sexton's oratory, will be under the impression that he is a very rapid and fluent speaker. He is nothing of the kind. He speaks with a great slowness, grave deliberation, and there are often long and sometimes even trying pauses between his sentences. He could not conceal on this great occasion the anxiety and the seriousness of the situation; but the mind was ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... before husband, her affection remaining chiefly where it was before marriage. But if the moralist desires yet more solid virtues, he need only inquire of the first Sevillan he meets, who will give at shortest notice, in choice and fluent language, a far more impressive list than I ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... still at table. I take away her dish. Naught remains of the Locust but his skin, hardly altered in shape, but utterly drained and perforated in several places. The method, therefore, was changed during the night. To extract the non-fluent residue, the viscera and muscles, the stiff cuticle had to be tapped here, there and elsewhere, after which the tattered husk, placed bodily in the press of the mandibles, would have been chewed, re-chewed and finally reduced to a pill, which the sated Spider throws up. This would have been ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast, Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest; 'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruin'd turret wreathe, All green and wildly fresh without, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... and embarrassed fashion, very unlike the fluent ease with which he opened the case, the judge advocate announced that, owing to the impossibility of compelling the testimony of witnesses on whom he had relied, he was obliged to announce that the prosecution would here rest. The defense, of course, he said, vaguely, would wish to be ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... a man of the people and a very fluent public speaker, but his disposition was very different from Cato's. Although he had an enmity of long standing against the Scipios, he would not endure what was taking place but spoke in defence of Africanus, who was accused while absent, and ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... outrageous." For a time he and Congress worked together well enough, but sharp disagreement arose in 1864. He had propounded a particular plan for the reconstruction of Southern States. Senator Wade, the formidable Chairman of the Joint Committee on the War, and Henry Winter Davis, a keen, acrid, and fluent man who was powerful with the House, carried a Bill under which a State could only be reconstructed on their own plan, which differed from Lincoln's. The Bill came to Lincoln for signature in the last hours of the session, and, amidst frightened protests from friendly legislators ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... manner was easy and his tongue fluent. Beatrice had only to lean her head back and smile faintly from time to time. The General suddenly paused—so suddenly that Beatrice looked up and noticed the sudden pallor of his ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... thoroughly in earnest, a fluent speaker, both in public and private, well fortified with statistics and arguments. He personally travelled the whole country from Maine to fifteen miles up the Missouri River. The legislatures of Maine, ...
— The Story of the First Trans-Continental Railroad - Its Projectors, Construction and History • W. F. Bailey
... had drawn away from all their former friends, received him without the slightest suspicion. And he described with a light heart and fluent tongue his home with its high, pointed roof, the great open fireplace in the dining-room and the little leaded glass panes. He also painted the silent streets of his native town and the long rows ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... alongside, we were surprised to find Lieutenant Henry Wise, master of the Independence frigate, that we had left at Valparaiso. Wise had come off to pilot us to our anchorage. While giving orders to the man at the wheel, he, in his peculiar fluent style, told to us, gathered about him, that the Independence had sailed from Valparaiso a week after us and had been in Monterey a week; that the Californians had broken out into an insurrection; that the naval ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... music the soft air along, While fluent Greek a vowel'd undersong 200 Kept up among the guests, discoursing low At first, for scarcely was the wine at flow; But when the happy vintage touch'd their brains, Louder they talk, and louder come ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... hard by and by, dear," said Anne, who always felt the pain of her friends so keenly that she could not speak easy, fluent words of comforting. Besides, she remembered how well-meant speeches had hurt her in her own sorrow and ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... is moved, and {then}, in fact appears what eloquence can do; and the fluent man receives the arms of a brave one. He, who so often has alone withstood both Hector, and the sword, and flames, and Jove {himself}, cannot {now} withstand his wrath alone, and grief conquers the man that is invincible. ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... the most fluent manner, the foregoing affidavit, which existed only in his own brain, my brother Downright desired the court to take my ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... treatises which only caricature the subject, and of which it is rather an advantage to be ignorant. But who is so destitute of good sense as to deny, that a graceful and easy conversation in the private circle, a fluent and agreeable delivery in public speaking, a ready and natural utterance in reading, a pure and elegant style in composition, are accomplishments of a very high order? And yet of all these, the proper study of English grammar is the true foundation. This would ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... and surely the circumstances were not anodyne. Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black cloth of her dress—all these, with the silence of the forest, the heat of the southern day, the woodland fragrances of which the air was full, and the sense ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... don't want to bump up and down the sandy plain again, so a lively conversation goes on in Dutch about the road between one of my gentlemen and somebody who looks like a "stuck-vat" upon short legs. The dialogue is fluent and lively, beginning with "Ja, ja!" and ending with "All right!" but it leads to our hitting off the right track exactly, and coming out at a lovely little cottage-villa under the mountain, where we rest and lunch and then stroll ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... salt-pan afterwards. In c[oe]lum, jusseris, ibit,—or the other way either,—it is all one, so any thing is to be got by it. Yet, after all, thin, speculative Jonathan is more like the Englishman of two centuries ago than John Bull himself is. He has lost somewhat in solidity, has become fluent and adaptable, but more of the original groundwork of character remains. He feels more at home with Fulke Greville, Herbert of Cherbury, Quarles, George Herbert, and Browne, than with his modern English cousins. He is nearer than John, by at least a hundred years, to Naseby, Marston Moor, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... waiting an excuse to deliver you over to their insatiable maw, to be dealt with according to the rules of their society. Or, perhaps the lady who in the first flush of your acquaintance quite dazzles you with her fluent chat upon multitudinous topics, suddenly, upon finding you unguardedly expressing opinions not approved by the high priests of mediocrity, lets fall her mask, and shows herself to your astonished gaze a secret emissary, a determined servant of their most ancient and established order. "Thus ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... though it contained something relating to you which every one had been glad to hear, yet there was too much about politics, and poesy, and all things whatsoever, ending with that topic on which most men are fluent, and none very amusing—one's self. It might have been re-written—but to what purpose? My praise could add nothing to your well-earned and firmly-established fame; and with my most hearty admiration of your talents, and ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... industrious, and accomplished man the world has ever seen, his own nephew, in fact, thinks of marriage, and that his conditions are this and that; he tells his nephew that the most beautiful and amiable creature in Germany, a brilliant musician, a fluent linguist, a devoted daughter, and a person of simple housewifely tastes, lives next door to him, the uncle. Except for the housewifely tastes, it sounds, and in fact is, rather like a courtship in the Arabian Nights so far. The prince hears ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... As they with Trojans mix'd in social guise, When both were standing, o'er his comrade high With broad-set shoulders Menelaus stood; Seated, Ulysses was the nobler form: Then, in the great Assembly, when to all Their public speech and argument they fram'd, In fluent language Menelaus spoke, In words though few, yet clear; though young in years, No wordy babbler, wasteful of his speech: But when the skill'd Ulysses rose to speak, With down-cast visage would he stand, his eyes Bent on the ground; the staff he bore, nor back He wav'd, nor forward, but ...
— The Iliad • Homer
... there to say good-bye to Ida and put her into the carriage; but it proved a difficult good-bye to say, and for once the usually fluent old lawyer was bereft of the power of speech as he held Ida's small hand, and looked through tear-dimmed eyes at the white and sorrowful face. He had intended to say all sorts of kind and encouraging things, but he could ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... merely this—that she had been writing to an old friend, and her manner for the time, as well as her expression, was affected by her mental proximity to that friend;—so plastic—so fluent even—was her whole nature. Indeed Alec was not long in finding out that one of her witcheries was, that she was never the same. But on this the first occasion, the alteration in ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... outright, and stared at her with renewed interest. He admitted to himself that she was one of the most fascinating women he had ever met, and wondered what vicissitude could have brought such a woman, who used classical illustrations, fluent, cultivated speech, and who was strong grace exemplified, to such a position. She seemed master of her surroundings, and yet not of them, looking down with a hard and lofty scorn on the very men from whom she made her living. He began to believe what was commonly said of ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... the sergeant was a fluent, fertile, interesting, sonorous, prompt, audacious liar: and such was his success, that Dard and one or two more became mere human fiction pipes—of comparatively small diameter—irrigating a rural district with false ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... trailed behind and watched the others use the hardware supplies, and then I tackled the chuck with the same weapons. It ain't much trouble to travel with the high-flyers after you find out their gait. I got along fine. I was feeling cool and agreeable, and pretty soon I was talking away fluent as you please, all about the ranch and the West, and telling 'em how the Indians eat grasshopper stew and snakes, and you ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... still more mortified, when talking in a company with fluent vivacity, and, as he flattered himself, to the admiration of all who were present; a German who sat next him, and perceived Johnson rolling himself, as if about to speak, suddenly stopped him, saying, 'Stay, stay,—Toctor Shonson is going to say something.' This was, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... By Thee disposed into congenial soils, Stands each attractive plant, and sucks and swells The juicy tide—a twining mass of tubes. At thy command the vernal sun awakes The torpid sap, detruded to the root By wintry winds, that now in fluent dance, And lively fermentation, mounting, spreads All this innumerous-colour'd scene of things. As rising from the vegetable world My theme ascends, with equal wing ascend My panting Muse! And hark! ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... trial to him, as he was extremely diffident, and without writing out his lectures in advance he was scarcely able to speak at all. In this he presented a marked contrast to his brother William, who was a fluent and brilliant speaker. Hunter's lectures were at best simple readings of the facts as he had written them, the diffident teacher seldom raising his eyes from his manuscript and rarely stopping until his complete lecture had been read through. His lectures were, therefore, instructive ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... third time, reinforced by those political arrangements which deny every form of state honor or conspicuous promotion to the very highest description of excellence, whether of the bar, the pulpit, or the civic council. Not "the fluent Murray," or the accomplished Erskine, from the English bar—not Pericles or Demosthenes, from the fierce democracies of Greece—not Paul preaching at Athens—could snatch a wreath from public homage, nor a distinction from the state, nor found ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... almost naked, white giant with curiosity. He noted the strange contrast of primitive weapons and apparel, and the easy, fluent French which the man spoke. The former denoted the lowest, the latter the highest type of culture. He could not quite determine the social status of this strange creature; but he knew that he did not relish the easy assurance ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in Thoreau. The hard world of matter becomes suddenly all fluent and spiritual, and he sees himself in it—sees God. "This earth," he cries, "which is spread out like a map around me, is but the lining of my inmost soul exposed." "In me is the sucker that I see;" and, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... and every normal member of the community bore his part in the recital of the heroic deeds that ordinarily formed the subject of these primeval lays. Were it the praise of a god, of a feasting champion, or of a slain comrade, the natural utterance was narrative. Later on, the more fluent and inventive improvisers came to the front, and finally the professional bard appeared. Somewhere in the process, too, the burden may have shifted its part from under-song to alternating chorus, thus allowing the soloist opportunity ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... with sentences. Good thinking makes good sentences, but the sentence must be flexible if it is to ease the thought. We can learn its elasticity, we can practice the flow of clauses, until the wooden declaration which leaves half unexpressed gives place to a fluent and accurate transcript of the mind, form fitting substance as the vase the water within it. This technique has to do with paragraphs. The critic knows how few even among our professional writers master their paragraphs. It ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... young man must be taken down, and I am truly sorry that the task devolves upon me.' He then proceeded, in a very overbearing way, and with an assumption of great superiority, to attack Lincoln and his speech. He was fluent and ready with the rough sarcasm of the stump, and he went on to ridicule the person, dress and arguments of Lincoln with so much success that Lincoln's friends feared that he would ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... of a fervent Christian friend, Peter Bohler, "Had I a thousand tongues I would praise Christ Jesus with them all," struck an answering chord in Wesley's heart, and he embalmed the wish in his fluent verse. The third stanza (printed as second in some hymnals), has made language for pardoned souls for ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... women, that would groan to see a child Pull off an insect's leg, all read of war, The best amusement for our morning meal! The poor wretch, who has learnt his only prayers From curses, who knows scarcely words enough To ask a blessing from his Heavenly Father, Becomes a fluent phraseman, absolute And technical in victories and defeats, And all our dainty terms for fratricide; Terms which we trundle smoothly o'er our tongues Like mere abstractions, empty sounds to which We join no ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... stripped the gauntlet without purpose from one of her little brown hands. A solitaire sparkled on the third finger. Again she murmured, "I'll ask mother"; then turned and flashed up the steps, her slender limbs carrying with fluent ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine
... him in a circle, and he held forth. It would be no easy matter to describe a discourse which lasted a couple of hours, or indeed to say very precisely what it was about. It was a rambling, desultory reference to his travels and adventures in fluent and sometimes eloquent language, and not without an occasional dash of humour and drollery. He illustrated the truth of the Scriptures by examples drawn from his personal observation and the habits, expressions, and belief of the present inhabitants of Palestine, ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... painters and sculptors to their horrid fates in the hands of Garstin and Smith, replied with a vivacity rather Gallic than British, and finally, emerging almost with passion from his native language, burst into the only tongue which expresses anything properly, and assailed his enemy in fluent French. Thapoulos muttered comments in modern Greek. And the Turkish refugee from Smyrna quoted again and again the words of praise from Pierre Loti, which had made of him a moral wreck, a nuisance to all who came into contact with him, ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... Doctor Hilary approvingly, "and one I should advise you to adhere to. Your accent is all right, but your—your speech is a trifle fluent, if I ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... face a moment. "God keep you!" said she, with a surprising fervor in one not over-fluent at her prayers. "God reward you for showing this mercy to an old woman—who ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... eggs, and some bottles of beer. The effect was astonishing. Every man spoke his own tongue, and fluently. Mrs. Peterkin poured out coffee for the Spaniard, while he bowed to her. They all liked beer; they all liked olives. The Frenchman was fluent about "les moeurs Americaines." Elizabeth Eliza supposed he alluded to their not having set any table. The Turk smiled; the Russian was voluble. In the midst of the clang of the different languages, just as Mr. ...
— The Peterkin Papers • Lucretia P Hale
... sir, it would surely be most unusual for a man like you to go to war," he began, and for quite ten minutes he proceeded to set forth in fluent and excited speech a number of reasons why the idea of Barry's going to war was absurd and preposterous to him. It must be confessed that Barry was the only one of the men who appeared to give much heed to him. They seemed to be dazed by the stupendous ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... abandoned it, to crowd struggling upon the arched hump of the back. Here they tore and gorged and quarreled till, some fifteen minutes later, their last foothold sank beneath them. Then, with dripping beaks and talons, they all flapped back to their cliffs; and slowly the fluent sand smoothed itself to shining complacency over the tomb of the diplodocus, hiding and sealing away the stupendous skeleton for half ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
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