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More "Prodigal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its occasional wants, whence can it obtain immediate relief but from external means?" Indeed, the investment has not been for any long time the natural product of the revenue of Bengal. When, by the vast charge and by the ill return of an evil political and military traffic, and by a prodigal increase of establishments, and a profuse conduct in distributing agencies and contracts, they found themselves under difficulties, instead of being cured of their immoral and impolitic delusion, they plunged deeper into it, and were drawn from expedient to expedient ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... de Malrive's "day," and Madame de Treymes, who lived with her mother, had admitted Durham to the heart of the enemy's country by inviting him, after his prodigal disbursements at the charity bazaar, to come in to tea on a Thursday. Whether, in thus fulfilling Mr. Boykin's prediction, she had been aware of Durham's purpose, and had her own reasons for falling in with ...
— Madame de Treymes • Edith Wharton
... among you that are themselves as idle as drones, that subsist on other men's labour, on the labour of their tenants, whom, to raise their revenues, they pare to the quick. This, indeed, is the only instance of their frugality, for in all other things they are prodigal, even to the beggaring of themselves; but, besides this, they carry about with them a great number of idle fellows, who never learned any art by which they may gain their living; and these, as soon as either their lord dies, or they themselves fall sick, are turned out of doors; ...
— Utopia • Thomas More
... brighten his life, she, too, had been taken from him, and he was once more left alone. He had plenty of time now to think of all this, and he wondered if the One he had forsaken for so long was thus hounding him that He might bring him back to His feet. The story of the Prodigal Son came into his mind, and he knew that the Master's parable was being re-enacted in his own life there in the ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... the money is still here. I have little to say to you, for your own feelings convince me that it is needless. Do you think that you can read a little? Then read this." Anderson turned to the parable of the Prodigal Son, which I read to him. "And now," said he, turning ever the leaves, "here is ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... bars, you think his tongue must be more resonant and of finer metal. In uttering the tinkling, bead-like de, de, de, he is more facile and exquisite; in the longer notes he possesses greater compass and power, and is more prodigal of his finer tones. How delicately he syllables the minor parts, weaving, as it were, the finest of silver embroideries to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... ceased at once. Szilard hustled the rediscovered "prodigal son" off the boards and never let him stop for an instant till he had got him safe and sound into his own private room. There he embraced him again, held him at arms' length and had a good look at him. The lad seemed ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... truth, and seal it with their blood? There have been those who in time of persecution have fallen away—but for one apostate there have been a thousand martyrs. We have been, I may rather affirm, too prodigal of life—too lavish of our blood. There has been, in former ages, not only a willingness, a readiness to die for Christ, but an eagerness. Christians have not waited to be searched for and found by the ministers of Roman power; they have ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... steward," the Ancient Mariner resumed, "that I was born with a silver spoon that melted in my mouth and left me a proper prodigal son. Also, that I was born with a backbone of pride that would not melt. Not for a paltry railroad accident, but for things long before as well as after, my family let me die, and I . . . I let it live. That is the story. I let my family ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... she knew the Countess had come back. There was a silence again between them, but with a different shade of embarrassment from that of their united arrival; and it was still without speaking that, abruptly repeating one of the embraces of which he had already been so prodigal, he whisked her back to the lemon sofa just before the door of the room was thrown open. It was thus in renewed and intimate union with him that she was presented to a person whom she instantly recognised as the ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James
... that the postillion was slackening his speed, I increased the amount of the present I was going to make him, and once more we rushed along at a headlong pace. I felt perishing with the cold; while the postillions seeing me so lightly clad, and so prodigal of my money to speed them on their way, imagined that I was a prince carrying off the heiress of some noble family. We heard them talking to this effect while they changed horses, and the Corticelli was so much amused that she did nothing but laugh for the rest of the way. In five hours ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... 'nother sea-faring party,—Jonah. S'cure the shadow ere the substance fade. Drunk all the brandy, old boy. Bottle's a canteen; 'vantage of military port to houseless stranger. Brought the brandy on board under my coat; nobody noticed,—so glad get me back. Prodigal son's return,—fatted calf ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... went back into the house again the painted cloths upon the wall seemed dingier than ever compared with the clean, bright world outside. The sky-blue coat of the Prodigal Son was brown with the winter's smoke; the Red Sea towered above Pharaoh's ill-starred host like an inky mountain; and the homely maxims on the next breadth—"Do no Wrong," "Beware of Sloth," "Overcome Pride," and "Keep an Eye on the Pence"—could ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... order that Mademoiselle de Montalais, who had not a large patrimonial fortune, although an only daughter, should be suitably dowered, it was necessary that she should belong to some great princess, as prodigal as the dowager Madame was covetous. And in order that the wife should not be of one party whilst the husband belonged to the other, a situation which presents serious inconveniences, particularly with characters like those of the future consorts—Malicorne ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... commingling an affectation of almost ludicrous clemency, with honest and hearty brutality. There was consequently something very grotesque about the document. Philip, in the outset, was made to sustain towards his undutiful subjects the characters of the brooding hen and the prodigal's father; a range of impersonation hardly to be allowed him, even by the most abject flattery. "Ye are well aware," thus ran the address, "that the King has, over and over again, manifested his willingness to receive his children, in however forlorn a condition the prodigals might return. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... past her, as if in a dream that was blurred by pain, and the sight infused into her soul, that was already harassed by pain and anxiety, a feeling of bitter aversion, and the envious thought that the mere trappings of the horses of this extravagant prodigal would suffice to keep her and her family above misery ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... reign, and was doomed to lead a dreary life of thirty-six years in penitence and neglect in a Carmelite convent. Madame de Montespan retained her ascendency longer for she had talents as well as physical beauty; she was the most prodigal and imperious of all the women that ever triumphed over the weakness of man. She reigned when Louis was in all the pride of manhood and at the summit of his greatness and fame,—accompanying him in ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... Willoughby was the first out of her room, as was ever the case when there was anything to be done. On the present occasion, the "fatted calf" was to be killed, not in honour of the return of a prodigal son, however, but in behalf of one who was the pride of her eyes, and the joy of her heart. The breakfast that she ordered was just the sort of breakfast, that one must visit America to witness. France can set forth a very scientific ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... in its conception, its inception, and its results a middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris—a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for the bread we eat, the clothes we wear out, and the house-room we occupy, how can we be expected to think so ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... companions in solitude, ministers of joy in hours of sadness. And let the "songs of Zion" mould the young affections, and be associated with a mother's love, and the dear delights of home. Perhaps in a strange land, and in a dying hour, when far from counselor and friend, they may lead even the prodigal to think upon his ways, and be ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... to Miss Cynthia to laugh out in prodigal joyousness on the afternoon she drove home when Wilbur had been pronounced out of danger. How tranquil the hills looked, with warm October sunshine sleeping on their sides and faint blue hazes on their brows! ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... thicken and spread out; would draw together and rise in an irregular spiral column, curling, swaying, poising, as if uncertain what to do next; and at last, all at once making up its mind, (how like a younker or a prodigal!), would go sailing away, straggling away, amorphous, on a puff of wind, leaving the hillside clear again;—till, presently, the ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... how do I look?" she asked; and before she could be answered she flew at Mrs. Mortimer with a gentle roughness, clasping her arms around her waist until the matron gasped. "You look too good to be true—both of you—if you are such lazybones that you wouldn't go to the station to meet the prodigal daughter!" ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... man's) distorted relation to God. And how lovingly, as well as sternly, God speaks through him! That divine lament which heralds the searching indictment is not unworthy to be the very words of the Almighty Lover of all men, sorrowing over His prodigal and fugitive sons. Nor is its deep truth less than its tenderness. For is not man's sin blackest when seen against the bright background of God's fatherly love? True, the fatherhood that Isaiah knew referred to God's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... which, in added recognition of my services to science, had all bestowed upon me diplomas, degrees and fellowships without number. But their demand for cadavres was unequal to my supply: by even the most prodigal extravagances they could not consume the one-half of the products of my skill as a physician. As to the rest, I had owned and operated the most extensive and thoroughly appointed soapworks in all the country. The excellence of my "Toilet Homoline" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... Warsaw. This conquered citadel with more than 400,000 inhabitants, is situated on the Vistula. It was, next to Paris, the most brilliant city of Europe in the early part of last century. But under Russian influence it became a provincial town in spirit, if not in size. It once had the character of prodigal splendor; within late years it became a forlorn, neglected city, not the least effort being made by the Russian authorities to modernize its appearance and improvement. From a sanitary point of view it became ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... world. It was his character in stone and lime. He clung to it, as the dull, fierce mind, unable to live in thought, clings to a material source of pride. And John had disgraced it. Even if fortune took a turn for the better, Green Shutters would be laughed at the country over, as the home of a prodigal. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... as we ate, he told me many things, and among them of a life of wasted opportunities—of foolish riot, and prodigal extravagance, ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... before her. "I can do no homage to Queen Ysabeau; yet the prodigal hands of her who knows that I must die to-morrow and cunningly contrives, for old time's sake, to hearten me with a sight of Rosamund, I cannot but kiss." This much he did. "And I swear in all ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... "When you are tired of waiting for the return of the prodigal let me know and I will see if I cannot get you in somewhere. I ought to be able to help. And look here, my child, never you pay another penny for tuition on those lines; you could get all the learning you need at the County Council ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... and the pretty child's story of M. le Vent et Mme. la Pluie, which latter has been translated. He was the devoted, unselfish friend and mentor of Alfred, to whose juniority and genius he extended an indulgence of which he needed no share for himself: in fact, he was the elder brother of the Prodigal in everything but want of generosity. A more amiable portrait cannot be imagined than the one to be drawn of him from the history of his intercourse with his brother and from Alfred's own letters and verses to him. This, however, was not the person to give us such an account and analysis ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... let slip! Its hours have run, Its golden hours, with prodigal excess, All run to waste. A day of life the less; Of many wasted days, ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... and M. Sonet himself came to help Topinard to carry poor Schmucke into the marble-works hard by, where Mme. Sonet and Mme. Vitelot (Sonet's partner's wife) were eagerly prodigal of efforts to revive him. Topinard stayed. He had seen Fraisier in conversation with Sonet's agent, and Fraisier, in his opinion, had gallows-bird ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... whither,—perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies,—the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac,— the canoes inverted on the ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... not how many knots an hour you may glide along, the prayers once offered up for your welfare still keep up with you. I care not on what shore you land, those benedictions stand there to greet you. They will capture you yet for heaven. The prodigal after a while gets tired of the swine-herd and starts for home, and the father comes out to greet him, and the old homestead rings with clapping cymbals, and quick feet, and the clatter of a banquet. If the God of thy childhood ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Tennyson can have attained the prodigal fulness of thought and imagery which distinguishes this poem, and especially the last canto, without his style ever becoming overloaded, seldom even confused, is perhaps one of the greatest marvels of the whole production. The songs themselves, which have been inserted ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... from God," answered Albert, whose mode of thinking about God was fast changing for the better. "I think God goes out a long, long way to meet the first motions of a good purpose in a man's heart. The parable of the Prodigal Son only half-tells it. The parable breaks down with a truth too great for human analogies. I don't know but that He acts in the beginning of the purpose. I am getting to be a Calvinist—in fact, on some points, I out-Calvin ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... a man of the woods and fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself. If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... mother to come very often to Little Market Street and to become intimate with Robin. But when he saw her with Robin he was generally embarrassed, although she was obviously enchanted with that gentleman, for whose benefit she was amazingly prodigal of nods and becks and wreathed smiles. It was a pity, he thought, that his mother was at moments so apparently elaborate. He felt her elaboration the more when it was contrasted with the transparent simplicity of Rosamund. Even Robin, he fancied, was at moments rather astonished by ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... epoch of this story, there dwelt in one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure. His home might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense, princely. His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and had no other ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... They're most prodigal with sighs, Or they laugh; Or they cast adoring eyes As they quaff. They exert their every wile Her attention to beguile. Do they ever win a smile? ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... following—and we were wrong in opposing—his true vocation. The Church received her own again. Rome did not smile at him at first. A de Hausee, however, never yet tapped long at any gate. The family—which had been stirred to fury by his father's trespass—welcomed the son as a prodigal manque. His aunt, the Princess Varese, left him half of her large fortune. He lived himself in great seclusion and simplicity, and died, as you are aware, of over-work last year. The one friend he corresponded ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... day after they were scrubbed clean, and were formally re-admitted to the dining-room. There, Civilization, acting through the subtle medium of the Saucepan, recovered its hold on them; and the admiral's two prodigal sons, when they saw the covers removed, watered at the mouth as ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... thought a cheerful feast for Joe Louden. The fatted calf was upon the board, but it had not been provided for the prodigal, who, in this case, was the brother that stayed at home: the fete rewarded the good brother, who had been in strange lands, and the good one had found much honor in his wanderings, as he carelessly let it appear. Mrs. Louden brightened inexpressibly ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... that the German painters at the beginning of the sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... doom'd to daily cares By pugilistic pupils and by bears!) Fines, tutors, tasks, conventions, threat in vain, Before hounds, hunters, and Newmarket plain: Rough with his elders; with his equals rash; Civil to sharpers; prodigal of cash. Fool'd, pillaged, dunn'd, he wastes his terms away; And, unexpell'd perhaps, retires M.A.:— Master of Arts!—as Hells and Clubs[10] proclaim, Where scarce a black-leg ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... crowns he won, and gave away: It seemed as if his labours were repaid By the mere noise and movement of the fray: No conquests or acquirements had he made; His chief delight was, on some festive day To ride triumphant, prodigal, and proud, And shower his ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Prodigal as had been Father Feeny and his battalion, there was more grafting needed before the Avenue Girl could take her scarred body and soul out into the world again. The Probationer offered, but was ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a beau-ideal, an abstraction substantialized only by the scissors, a concentrated essence of frivolity, infinitely sensitive to his own indulgence, chill as the poles to the indulgence of all others; prodigal to his own appetites, never suffering a shilling to escape for the behoof of others; magnanimously mean, ridiculously wise, and contemptibly clever; selfishness is the secret, the spring, and the principle of, par ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... of men who knew him well. Were we seeking to set his good traits against his bad, we should style him, in one column, brave, steadfast, daring, ambitious of greatness, far-sighted in policy; and in the other, prodigal, boastful, haughty, unfair in argument, ruthless in war. This method of portraiture, however, is not very helpful. We can form a much better idea of Frontenac's nature by discussing his acts than by throwing adjectives ...
— The Fighting Governor - A Chronicle of Frontenac • Charles W. Colby
... "'Tis said that the prodigal of twenty makes? the miser of seventy. It is certain that even our southern sun does not warm the blood of threescore as suddenly as it heats that of one. But we will not darken thy daughter's views of the future ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... both sides: the assailants threw themselves, with desperate resolution, into the breach, from whence they were repeatedly driven back at the point of the sword, or hurled headlong into the ditch. But the sultan was prodigal of blood, and had vowed to humble the Nazarenes who dared to dispute his authority. The walls, accordingly, after having been several times lost and won, were at length finally occupied by the Tartars and Mamlouks, ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... few principal characters as possible in developing your plot. This does not mean that you may be prodigal in your use of extras; quite the contrary. But, since extras who are posing as cowboys, soldiers, guests at a ball, bystanders in a street scene, or saloon loungers, are easily distinguished from the principals, it is a matter of small ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... bread and treacle, and possessed various works of art. Maggie actually forgot that she had any special cause of sadness this morning, as she stood on a chair to look at a remarkable series of pictures representing the Prodigal Son in the costume of Sir Charles Grandison, except that, as might have been expected from his defective moral character, he had not, like that accomplished hero, the taste and strength of mind to dispense with a wig. But the indefinable ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... dry-goods dealer, travelling to collect bills. At many of the country shops he would get out, and show his unwelcome visage. In the tavern, prints from Scripture, varnished and on rollers,—such as the Judgment of Christ; also, a droll set of colored engravings of the story of the Prodigal Son, the figures being clad in modern costume,—or, at least, that of not more than half a century ago. The father, a grave, clerical person, with a white wig and black broadcloth suit; the son, with a cocked hat and laced clothes, drinking wine out of a glass, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... France has not enough ports of sufficient size to handle the tonnage that is necessary to support the Allied armies within her borders. America's greatest problem is tonnage. She has the men and the materials in prodigal quantities, but they are all three thousand miles away. Before the men can be brought over, she has to establish her means of transport and line of communications, so as to make certain that she can feed and clothe them when ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... alcoholic wine of the coast of the Levant began falling into the glasses like ink crowned with a circle of rubies. The old man poured it forth with a prodigal hand. "Drink away, boys; in your land you don't have anything like this...." At other times he would concoct his famous "refrescoes," smiling with the satisfaction of an artist at seeing the sensuous grin that ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... things, such pursuits seem far more noble objects of ambition than any upon which the vulgar herd of busy men lavish prodigal their restless exertions. To diffuse useful information, to further intellectual refinement, sure forerunner of moral improvement,—to hasten the coming of the bright day when the dawn of general knowledge shall chase away ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... for a while longer, then Mrs. Minturn gracefully took her leave and went home to tell Katherine that another prodigal was on his way to ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... honesteco. Problem problemo. Proboscis rostro. Proceed procedi. Proceedings (law) proceso—ado. Proceeding procedo. Procession procesio. Process procedo, rimedo. Proclaim proklami. Procrastinate prokrasti. Procure havigi. Procuration konfidatisto. Prodigal malsxpara. Prodigality malsxparemo. Prodigious mireginda. Prodigy miregindajxo. Produce produkti. Produce produktajxo. Product produktajxo. Production produkto. Productive fruktoporta. Proem antauxdramo, antauxdiro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... hit the first at the prodigal son, but Kilcullen was too crafty to allow it to tell. He merely bowed his head, and opened his eyes, to betoken his surprise at such ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... affection which now reigned in his bosom. He felt as a father toward Scotland. For every son and daughter of that harassed country, he was ready to lay down his life. Edwin he cherished in his heart as he would have done the dearest of his own offspring. It was as a parent to whom a beloved and prodigal son had returned, that he looked on Bruce. But Helen, of all Scotland's daughters, she was the most precious in his eyes; set love aside, and no object without the touch of that all-pervading passion ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly-interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly-carved chairs and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be overrated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new manor halls. Every ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... Inquirer might make discoveries you little dream of, dear cousin Jack. You speak of its being time to cease roving, of settling yourself at last, of never parting, and, prodigal as you are, of making Eve the future mistress of your fortune. Now to all this, recreant, confess, or I shall never again ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... more prodigal employer of spies than Napoleon. Did he or any other conqueror ever acknowledge a success due to the despised outcasts who brought him information? No. The brilliance of combinations, the stroke of genius of the swift march and the decisive blow in flank, ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... what Sallust so well remarks to happen frequently in the same person, to be covetous of what is another's, and profuse of what is his own. This sort of men is usually amiable to ordinary eyes; but, in the sight of reason, nothing is laudable but what is guided by reason. The covetous prodigal is of all others the worst man in society. If he would but take time to look into himself, he would find his soul all over gashed with broken vows and promises; and his retrospect on his actions would not consist of reflections upon those good resolutions after mature thought, ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... When the prodigal got to his feet, the door stood open and his wife was waiting to receive him. At sight of her, dressed as she had been when he left her, a sudden flame of guilt and shame burned through him; but it served only ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... way, he is inoculating successfully wid his own ripe and flourishing ignorance. No, sir; nor like Gusty Gibberish, or (as he has been most facetiously christened by his Reverence, Father O'Flaherty) Demosthenes M'Gosther, inasmuch as he is distinguished for an aisy and prodigal superfluity of mere words, unsustained by intelligibility or meaning, but who cannot claim in his own person a mile and a half of dacent reputation. However, quid multis Mr. Hyacinthus; 'tis no indoctrinated or ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices in Dr. Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, "If I should be driven from my own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... lesson of forgiveness, inculcated by the story of the Prodigal Son, is among the earliest and most familiar in the memories of a nation of Bible readers like our own. Every one of us, perhaps unconsciously, carries in mind a simple, straight-forward conception of this subject, formed in early childhood—a time when the imagination rarely ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... apparent to mortals, through which a fairy at least might catch a view of a brook that was close at hand, rippling in the stars, and checkered at intervals by the rich weeds floating on the surface, interspersed with the delicate arrowhead and the silver water-lily. Then the trees themselves, in their prodigal variety of hues,—the blue, the purple, the yellowing tint, the tender and silvery verdure, and the deep mass of shade frowning into black; the willow, the elm, the ash, the fir, and the lime, "and, best of all, Old England's haunted oak;" these hues were broken again into a thousand minor ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the most of them were young men who had once been in better circumstances, but who now were reduced to get their living by calling papers about the streets. A few fine characters might have been picked out amongst those prodigal sons, as they stood warming their backs, or grouped together ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... to those names which have had the sanction of antiquity. Antiquity always begets the opinion of right; and whatever disadvantageous sentiments we may entertain of mankind, they are always found to be prodigal both of blood and treasure in the maintenance of public justice. There is, indeed, no particular in which, at first sight, there may appear a greater contradiction in the frame of the human mind than the present. When men act in a faction, they are apt, without shame or remorse, to neglect all ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... would see him home again. This was Margaret's view of it. Mr. Bilkins's view of it was not so cheerful The prospect of Mr. O'Rourke's ultimate return was anything but enchanting. Mr. Bilkins was by no means disposed to kill the fatted calf. He would much rather have killed the Prodigal Son. However, there was always this chance: he might ...
— A Rivermouth Romance • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... the man, without action is unable to enjoy them long, but the high-souled man, who is even diligent, is able to find riches buried deep in the Earth and watched over by the fates. The good man who is prodigal (in religious charities and sacrifices) is sought by the gods for his good conduct, the celestial world being better than the world of men, but the house of the miser though abounding in wealth is looked upon by the gods as the house of dead. The man that does not exert himself is never contented ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Lucre choke thee so, that thou gavest thyself over unto Lust? And did prodigal expenses cause thee in Dissimulation to trust? Thou wast pure (Love), and art thou become a monster, Bolstering thyself upon the lasciviousness of Lucre? Love, answer for thyself: speak ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... this last edition, that the second and third impressions were quickly dispersed and anxiously sought after. Vogt is a greater favourite with me than with the generality of bibliographers. His plan, and the execution of it, are at once clear and concise; but he is too prodigal of the term "rare." Whilst these editions of Vogt's amusing work were coming forth, the following productions were, from time to time, making their appearance, and endeavouring perhaps to supplant its reputation. First of all ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... of marrying your prodigal son Anatole?" she asked. "They say old maids have a mania for matchmaking, and though I don't feel that weakness in myself as yet, I know a little person who is very unhappy with her father. She is a relation of yours, Princess ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... gazed into the fire. Tricked and ignominiously defeated! Ay, but that was a trifle now, scarcely worthy of consideration. The girl had hoodwinked him, had lied more skilfully than he, yet in the fact that she had lied he found a prodigal atonement. Whigs and Jacobites might have their uses in the cosmic scheme, he reflected, as house-flies have, but what really mattered was that at Halvergate yonder Marian awaited his coming. And in place of statecraft he fell to thinking ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... in the 'Ship of Fools' (some of which he drew, while others he designed and superintended), he illustrated 'Terence' (1496); the 'Quadragesimale, or Sermons on the Prodigal Son' (1495); 'Boetius' (1501), and 'Virgil' (1502), all of which are interesting to the artist and engraver. In the original edition of the 'Ship of Fools,' written in the Swabian dialect, every folly is accompanied with marginal notes giving the classical ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... wild young fellow, and, before he was twenty-five, had squandered and gambled away everything but his land and some thirty negroes. Then he turned square round, and, from being prodigal and careless, became mean and cruel. He has a hundred now, and more ready money than any planter in ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... twenty dollars. This gave me, in all, about five hundred dollars, which money lasted me between five and six weeks! How true is it, that "sailors make their money like horses, and spend it like asses!" I cannot say this prodigal waste of my means afforded me any substantial gratification. I have experienced more real pleasure from one day passed in a way of which my conscience could approve, than from all the loose and thoughtless follies, in which ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper
... possessions of the said monastery, and of certain other enormous crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by the pious devotion of illustrious princes of famous memory, heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our most serene Lord and King that now ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... in the ancient commonwealths chiefly on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state, ii. 120. character of civil freedom, ii. 229. our best securities for it obtained from princes who were either war-like or prodigal, vi. 35. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... ugly and unmeaning appurtenances which a simpler taste will soon, it is to be hoped, banish from our funerals, were customary long before the eighteenth century began. In George III.'s reign a prodigal expenditure on such occasions began to be thought less essential. Before that time the relatives of the deceased were generally anxious that the obsequies should be as pompous as their means would possibly allow. It was still much as it had been in the days ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... mount high—ye plunge in deeper waste; The tradesman duns—no warning voice ye hear; The plaintiff sues—to public shows ye haste; The bailiff threats—ye feel no idle fear. Who can arrest your prodigal career? Who can keep down the levity of youth? What sound can startle age's stubborn ear? Who can redeem from wretchedness and ruth Men true to falsehood's voice, false to ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... attractions of a sermon can hardly be indifferent to the charm of other kinds of discourse. I can easily imagine a company of grayling wishing to overhear a conversation between I. W. and his affectionate (but somewhat prodigal) son and servant, Charles Cotton; and surely every intelligent salmon in Scotland might have been glad to hear Christopher North and the Ettrick Shepherd bandy jests and swap stories. As for trout,—was there one in Massachusetts that would not have been curious to listen to the ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... tenderness on the part of Joseph and Madame Descoings; but she hastened to tell them of Philippe's sufferings in exile, and so lessened it. Madame Descoings, wishing to make a festival of the return of the prodigal, as she called him under her breath, had prepared one of her good dinners, to which old Claparon and the elder Desroches were invited. All the family friends were to come, and did come, in the evening. Joseph had invited Leon Giraud, d'Arthez, Michel Chrestien, ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... called this "The Land of Fire." This beautiful flower is one of California's natural wonders—"Copa-de-oro"—cup of gold. It is as famed in the East as in the West, and thousands come to California to see it in its prodigal beauty. Steps should quickly be taken to conserve this wild splendor, and restrictions should be put upon the vandals, who, not content with picking what they can use to beautify the home, tear them up by the roots just to see how large an armful they can gather, scattering their golden petals ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... said, pointing to Edouard, "is he also your son?" And she gave a sigh. "God has been prodigal to you, madame, and as He has given you all you can desire, will you not implore Him to send ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... upon his departure, and tried to take with him as many men as possible. They were enlisted, willingly or by force—those who were requested and those who were compelled, alike. The encomenderos and soldiers caused a prodigal expense in ships, supplies and parades—which, because of the great opportunity furnished for all that in Filipinas, exceeded the governor's power and wishes. The governor sent Don Luys, his son, with all the regulars to the island of Cebu, where all ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... contemporary critical opinions regarding this work, nothing more amusing than to see the at other times censorious Philistines unwrinkle their brows, relax generally the sternness of their features, and welcome, as it were, the return of the prodigal son. We wiser critics of to-day, who, of course, think very differently about this matter, can, nevertheless, enjoy and heartily applaud the prettiness and elegance of the simple first variation, the playful tripping ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... said Mrs Prothero submissively; for Owen, though a prodigal, was the eldest son, and generally had his ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... success, last Saturday, at Old Drury. The general recommendation to the authors will be, as a matter of course, i.e., of race-course, given in the historic words of DUCROW, "Cut the cackle and come to the 'osses." When this advice is acted upon, The Prodigal Daughter, a very fine young woman, but not particularly prodigal, will produce receipts beyond ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... in New York. Haven't seen 'em in ten years. They paid me to live abroad. I'm gambling on THEM; gambling on their takin' me back. I'm coming home as the Prodigal Son, tired of filling my belly with the husks that the swine do eat; reformed character, repentant and all that; want to follow the straight and narrow; and they'll kill the fatted calf." He laughed sardonically. "Like hell they will! They'd ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... the government is decently provided for; but no one is extravagantly paid. Every member of Congress, and of the Assemblies, is allowed a sufficiency for his expenses. Whereas in England, a most prodigal provision is made for the support of one part of the Government, and none for the other, the consequence of which is that the one is furnished with the means of corruption and the other is put into the condition of being corrupted. Less than a fourth part of such expense, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... for one day,' he said. 'I can't stand any more.' He thrust the letter into his breast-pocket. 'Another impossibility. No prodigal's return to end that story. Veal was never a favourite meat of mine. Lord! I could laugh to see what a mess I have made of things. I could cry if anybody else had made it, and had meant as well, and hoped ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... part of his reign. The king, it is pretended, possessed not frugality proportioned to the extreme narrowness of his revenue. Splendid equipages, however, he did not affect, nor costly furniture, nor a luxurious table, nor prodigal mistresses. His buildings too were not sumptuous; though the Banqueting House must not be forgotten, as a monument which does honor to his reign. Hunting was his chief amusement, the cheapest pleasure in which a king can indulge himself. His expenses ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... thy early years, How prodigal of time! Mis-spending all thy precious hours— Thy glorious, youthful prime! Alternate follies take the sway; Licentious passions burn; Which tenfold force gives Nature's law. That ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... no quarter of the globe has there ever been found one analogous to the Robinson of De Foe; the other, on the contrary, is to be met with every where, denying the dependence of an isolated individual; but this dependence, even in the midst of a prodigal nature, if it is not to the honor of man, is to the honor of ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... report, which was perfectly electrifying; showing as it did how Master Walter had been weaned, and had cut a double tooth, and done many other extraordinary things, quite worthy of his high descent. In short, we were made very happy and grateful; and felt as if the prodigal father and mother had got ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 3 (of 3), 1836-1870 • Charles Dickens
... compact majority systematically ministerial. An administration founded on that basis had come into power since Rabourdin had finished his elaborate plan. At this time the luxury of peace under the Bourbons had eclipsed the warlike luxury of the days when France shone like a vast encampment, prodigal and magnificent because it was victorious. After the Spanish campaign, the administration seemed to enter upon an era of tranquillity in which some good might be accomplished; and three months before the opening of our story a new reign had begun without any ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to complete the scheme—or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country—half-way over to Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another on ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... think of the poor old mater awaiting her prodigal son. Tho' I broke her heart with my folly, I was always the white-haired one. (That fatted calf that they're cooking ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... highly-coloured scripture pieces on the walls, in little black frames like common shaving-glasses, and saw how the Wise Men (with a strong family likeness among them) worshipped in a pink manger; and how the Prodigal Son came home in red rags to a purple father, and already feasted his imagination on a sea-green calf. Then he glanced through the window at the falling rain, coming down aslant upon the sign-post over against the house, and overflowing the horse-trough; and then he looked at the fire again, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... appears like childish petulance when we explore the steady and prodigal provision that has been made for his support and delight on this green ball which floats him through the heavens. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapour to the field; the ice on ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... tropics. I have a very strong desire to go and reduce the new language to writing, but I cannot perform impossibilities. I don't think it quite fair for the Churches to expect their messenger to live, as if he were the Prodigal Son, on the husks that the swine do eat, but I should be ashamed to say so to any ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... her temper in unending inward and outward conflicts, until neither dulness nor obstinacy nor ingratitude nor insolence could reach her serene self-possession. Not for herself alone. Poorly as her prodigal labors were repaid in proportion to the waste of life they cost, her value was too well established to leave her without what, under other circumstances, would have been a more than sufficient compensation. But there were others who looked to her in their need, and so the modest fountain ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... he was setting at defiance every principle of morality and decorum, the interest of the female mind all over Europe in the conversion of this brilliant prodigal son was unceasing, and reflects the greatest credit upon ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Government is the debt of the civil list, which amounts to thirty millions. Queer ideas about Louis Philippe were entertained. He may have been covetous, but he certainly was not miserly; he was the most prodigal, the most extravagant and least careful of men: he had debts, accounts and arrears everywhere. He owed 700,000 francs to a cabinet-maker; to his market gardener he owed 70,000 ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... Middle Ages and the Renaissance dark and ominous amid the splendours of her art and civilisation. This is the natural result; this shrunken and squalid old age of poverty and self-abandonment is the end of that strong, prodigal, and vicious youth. Who shall restore vigour to these dead bones? we cry. If Italy is to live again, she must quit her ruined palace towers to build fresh dwellings elsewhere. Filth, lust, rapacity, treason, godlessness, and violence have made ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... cross-examined, and at last extracted from Silla the confession that she had been with Nikolai. That she, Mrs. Holman's daughter, in spite of all prohibitions, sought the society of that misled prodigal, who had rewarded her with such ingratitude, was enough to bring her to her grave. And no one would persuade her either that Holman's hardly-earned week's wages could vanish like steam from a kettle. A half-starved ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... antlers of the buck, skins of wild animals, plumage of birds, and other trophies of the hunter's craft; the large fireplace surrounded with hardy woodsmen, and the tables furnished with venison, wild fowl, and fish, the common luxuries of the region, in that prodigal profusion to which our forefathers were accustomed, and which their descendants still regard as the essential condition of hearty and honest housekeeping. This mansion I fancy surrounded by a spacious picketed rampart, presenting its bristling points to the four quarters of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... its victims. You can't expect the fatted calf to share the enthusiasm of the angels over the prodigal's return. Another darling weakness of the Academy is that none of its luminaries must 'arrive' in a hurry. You can see them coming for years, like a Balkan trouble or a street improvement, and by the time they have painted a thousand or so square yards ...
— Reginald • Saki
... to take any message that Anthony might care to intrust with him, and deliver it to Adam Patch when his condition permitted. But by obvious innuendo he confirmed Anthony's melancholy inference that the prodigal grandson would be particularly unwelcome at the bedside. At one point in the conversation Anthony, with Gloria's positive instructions in mind, made a move as though to brush by the secretary, but Shuttleworth with a smile squared his brawny shoulders, and Anthony saw how futile ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... on them and care for them, as for my English children, and that I expect them to gather in many a sorrowing mother's prodigal, who has wandered ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... shortly after his father's arrest on a charge of horse and cattle-stealing, and Tom, the prodigal, turned up unexpectedly. He was different from his father and eldest brother. He had an open good-humoured face, and was very kind-hearted; but was subject to peculiar fits of insanity, during which he did wild and foolish things for the mere love of notoriety. He had two natures—one bright and ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... prodigal came to himself, when he found himself no longer able to endure the husks of the swine like his ancient exemplar, when he rose and returned to his father because of that distaste, he found no father watching and waiting for him at the end of the road! Upon that change the action ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... Touches had been to Florence on business. With the charming kindness of which she is prodigal, she had brought with her Leon de Lora to show him Italy, and had gone on as far as Rome that he might see the Campagna. She had come by Simplon, and was returning by the Cornice road to Marseilles. She had stopped at Genoa, again on the landscape painter's account. The Consul-General ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... it. A kind of Jack's beanstalk, and every morning starred with turquoise blue trumpet mouths of ravishing beauty, which were dead at noon. The poor thing was constrained to be a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is the prodigal's foster-mother. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... the age. The one motiv is loud at the beginning of the Reformation but almost dies away before the end of the century; the other, beginning at the same time, rises slowly into a crescendo culminating far beyond the boundaries of the age. The first theme was the Prodigal Son, treated by no less than twenty-seven German dramatists, not counting several in other languages. To the Protestant, the Younger Son represented faith, the Elder Son works. To all, the exile in the ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to another we were hurried, passing through jungles such as we of the North never dream exist. In that humid climate vegetation is prodigal beyond belief, gorgeous with spattered greens and yellows and crimsons bizarre enough to ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... compressed the latter part. It is not, however, usual, in primitive story-telling, to linger over scenes of pathos. Such lingering is, like the painted tears of late Italian masters, invariably a sign of decadence. It is one of the marks of romance, which recognises tragedy only when it is voluble, and prodigal of lamentation. The older version of the Tain is throughout singularly free from pathos of the feebler sort; the humorous side is always uppermost, and the tragic suggestions ...
— The Cattle-Raid of Cualnge (Tain Bo Cualnge) • Unknown
... Enough! she proved to be that thing accursed Of God and man—a wily vain coquette. I hate myself for having loved her. Yet So much my heart spent on her, it must give A love less ardent, and less prodigal, Albeit just as tender and as true - A milder, yet a faithful love to you. Just as some evil fortune might befall A man's great riches, causing him to live In some low cot, all unpretending, still As much his home—as much his loved retreat, As was the princely ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... now included Argensola. . . . "A very interesting fellow, that Argensola!" And as he thought this, he forgot completely that, without knowing him, he had been accustomed to refer to him as "shameless," just because he was sharing his son's prodigal life. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... order prevails, but then again new desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of passions gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul, which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods and illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle and permit ...
— The Republic • Plato
... superfluous capitals and of underscoring in this letter, alone would have arrested his attention, for even men of a less severe education than himself were liberal in these resources, and women were prodigal. The directness and precision were also remarkable, and he recalled that she was but nineteen. The flattery touched him, no doubt, for he was very human; and despite the brevity of his leisure, he read the note twice, and ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... to him any very estimable qualities. He seems to have been a violent and tyrannical prince; a perfidious, encroaching, and dangerous neighbour; an unkind and ungenerous relation. He was equally prodigal and rapacious in the management of his treasury; and if he possessed abilities, he lay so much under the government of impetuous passions, that he made little use of them in his administration; and he indulged, without reserve, that domineering policy, which suited his ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... which it had vanquished, but still feared. The king's proceedings with Charles II. had, therefore, necessarily to be kept secret; the ministers of the King of England were themselves divided; the Duke of Buckingham, as mad and as prodigal as his father, was favorable to France; the Earl of Arlington had married a Hollander, and persisted in the Triple Alliance. Louis XIV. employed in this negotiation his sister-in-law, Madame Henriette, who was much attached to her brother, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Her imagination glowed, too, calling up pictures of the half-remembered, half-fabulous oriental scene. The romance of English rule in India, the romance of India itself, its variety, its complexity, the multitude of its gods, the multitude of its peoples, hung before her as a mirage, prodigal in marvels, reaching back and linking up through the centuries with the hidden wisdom, the hidden terror of the Ancient ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... of Method and Economy. I never saw the rule, "A place for everything, and everything in its place," so well observed as here. The reckless and the prodigal are found here as every where else, but they are marked exceptions. Nine-tenths of those who have a competence know what income they have, and are careful not to spend more. A Duchess will say to a mere acquaintance, "I cannot afford" a proposed ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... long after dawn. Then she was aroused by her father calling up the negroes. Hastily starting up, she looked around her and, for a moment, strove to remember what had happened. Soon she remembered all, and burying her face in the pillows, she sobbed out: "Father, I thank Thee; the prodigal is ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... muddy source we owe the many falsehoods and absurdities we have been pestered with concerning Lisbon. Thence your extravagantly sublime figures: Lisbon is no more; can be seen no more, etc., ... with all the other prodigal effusions of bombast beyond that stretch of time or temper to enumerate. Ib. p. 22. See post, under March ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... 'pittore' (painter). He had a house in Rome, and a villa in the neighbourhood, and on his death left a considerable fortune to his heirs. There has not been wanting a rumour that his life of a principe was a dissipated and prodigal life; but this ugly rumour, even if it had more evidence to support it, is abundantly disproven by the nature of Raphael's work, and by the enormous amount of that work, granting him the utmost assistance ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... popularity gone; but the effect of these things was but to fill his heart with a world sympathy, with pity for all who sorrow. Again and again he treated the Christ at Emmaus, The Good Samaritan, and The Prodigal Son themes. "Some strange presentment of his own fate," says M. Michel, "seems to have haunted the artist, making him keenly susceptible to the story of The Good Samaritan. He too was destined to be stripped and ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... exploits and showy manners, he captivated the imaginations of his countrymen, he won their hearts no less by his soldier-like frankness, his trust in their fidelity,—too often abused,-and his liberal largesses; for Pizarro, though avaricious of the property of others, was, like the Roman conspirator, prodigal of his own. This was his portrait in happier days, when his heart had not been corrupted by success; for that some change was wrought on him by his prosperity is well attested. His head was made giddy ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... was no fatted calf killed for the return of the prodigal in Miss Vantine's school. At her reappearance an air of chastened endurance settled upon all the teachers from Miss Vantine down to the elocution teacher. But their fears were doomed to disappointment, because Isabelle was for ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... majesty paid a visit to that great city. On no occasion, even in the metropolis, was so vast a multitude of persons collected to see the queen; and, probably, on no occasion was she ever welcomed in a provincial city with so prodigal an expenditure and splendid a display of loyalty. Manchester and Salford were both traversed in their great principal thoroughfares by the royal procession, attended with military pomp, and many persons of very great eminence in the nation ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... view of the high purchasing power of money in Dante's age, the fact that he borrowed at least seven hundred and fifty seven and a half golden florins, a debt that was not paid until after his death, leads one to think that he must have been regarded by his contemporaries as prodigal in the use of money. His financial difficulties must have given him an uneasy conscience for he insists repeatedly on the wickedness of prodigality. In fact he makes the abuse of money on the part either of a miser or of a spendthrift a sin against the social order ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... sin—the nun agonising in the cloister; the settler struggling for his life in Transatlantic forests; the pauper shivering over the embers in his hovel and waiting for kind death; the man of business striving to keep his honour pure amid the temptations of commerce; the prodigal son starving in the far country and recollecting the words which he learnt long ago at his mother's knee; the peasant boy trudging afield in the chill dawn and remembering that the Lord is his Shepherd, therefore he will not want—all shapes of humanity ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... am very fond of Willoughby, but I saw the faults of the boy and see the man's. He has the pride of a king, and it's a pity if you offend it. He is prodigal in generosity, but he can't forgive. As to his own errors, you must be blind to them as a Saint. The secret of him is, that he is one of those excessively civilized creatures who aim at perfection: and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... plaster-of-paris kitten, once the idol of a child whose son now doubtless lay in a national burial-ground, looked down from the mantel-piece. There was the frail rocking-chair that was never intended to be sat in, and on the wall, in an acorn-studded frame, was a faded picture entitled "The Return of the Prodigal." ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... had sprung to their feet, astonished at this prodigal waste of a delicacy fit for kings. Chook stood for a moment, glowering with rage, and then ran at his enemy; ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... upon it. A kind of Jack's beanstalk, and every morning starred with turquoise blue trumpet mouths of ravishing beauty, which were dead at noon. The poor thing was constrained to be a hierodule, gave no seed. Nature is the prodigal's foster-mother. ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Diderot did much, and in many directions, single-handed, flinging out his thoughts with ardent haste, and often leaving what he had written to the mercies of chance; a prodigal sower of good and evil seed. Several of his most remarkable pieces came to light, as it were, by accident, and long after his death. His novel La Religieuse—influenced to some extent by Richardson, whom he superstitiously admired—is a repulsive exposure of conventual ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... of tremendous size. And Watts McHurdie was so touched by the way ten years under a roof had tamed the woman whom he had known of old as "Happy Hallie," that he wrote a poem for the Banner about the return of the "Prodigal Daughter," which may be found in Garrison County scrap-books of that period. As for Mr. Bemis, he went slinking about the outskirts of the crowd, showing his teeth considerably, and making it obvious ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... passages as were already the common property of mankind before the coming of Christ. The parables which every one praises are in reality very bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate of the character of God—an estimate far below the standard ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... her, as if in a dream that was blurred by pain, and the sight infused into her soul, that was already harassed by pain and anxiety, a feeling of bitter aversion, and the envious thought that the mere trappings of the horses of this extravagant prodigal would suffice to keep her and her family above misery for a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... return of the prodigal was not long in spreading; and by the time the Templeton boys came down for their afternoon bathe it ...
— Follow My leader - The Boys of Templeton • Talbot Baines Reed
... husks have lost their flavour, my son. So long as the prodigal finds the husks sweet, there is little hope of him. But let him once discover that they are dry husks, and not sweet fruits, and that his companions are swine, and not princes—then he is coming to himself, and there is hope of making a man of ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... not possessing these fortunate variations were wiped out. The process of Nature, certainly, in the development of biological life thus appears to be no economical convergence of means upon an end. Nature has been recklessly prodigal. Millions more seeds of life are produced than ever come to fruition. And only animals perfectly adapted to their environment survive, while an incomparably greater ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... herself not only to her own, but to her husband's relatives. Her home had always been the havre de grace, known and venerated by them all; a meeting place for reconciliation between persons whose self-control had escaped them; the shelter for prodigal and repentant sons who awaited the forgiveness of their justly wrathful sires; the comforting haven that seemed to assuage the pangs of departure and bereavement. But above all it was the one spot for properly celebrating family anniversaries, announcing ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... shop! Then he had in Allen a real friend; but now he had in Lewis only a profligate and unfeeling associate. Lewis cared for no one but himself; and he was as avaricious as he was extravagant; "greedy of what belonged to others, prodigal ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... in the popular tradition. Count Jean gave her his fairest mountain as a gage of his affection and villages and rich pasture lands to her brave son, his namesake, who had fought by his side at the Bicoque. The gallant count was, according to tradition, very prodigal in his favors, and a certain road, leading to the neighboring village of Charmey where the unhappy Countess Marguerite could watch her faithless lord as he rode away on his various adventures, is still known as the ...
— The Counts of Gruyere • Mrs. Reginald de Koven
... Jesus mean by "lost"? This, above all, that sin cuts a man adrift from God. In the parable of the Prodigal Son this is brought out (Luke 15:11-32). There the youth took from his father all he could get, and then deliberately turned his back on him forever; he went into a far country, out of his reach, outside his influence, and beyond the range of his ideas, and he devoted ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal indulgence ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... about the amount of air they breathe and the amount of appreciation they will allow themselves to give to anything. They shrivel—body and soul. Economy is waste: it is waste of the juices of life, the sap of living. For there are two kinds of waste—that of the prodigal who throws his substance away in riotous living, and that of the sluggard who allows his substance to rot from non-use. The rigid economizer is in danger of being classed with the sluggard. Extravagance is usually a reaction ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... unity in this infinite variety; the shell and the skin bear witness equally. What! deny God because shell does not resemble leather! And journalists have been prodigal of eulogies about these ineptitudes, eulogies they have not given to Newton and Locke, both worshippers of the Deity who ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... rude hearth with huge chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and cupids, with quaintly-interlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly-carved chairs and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose influence on the general health of the people can hardly be overrated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the new manor halls. Every merchant's house ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... doughnut and a cup of coffee almost anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something more than serious—it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one night," said he. He always was rather ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the sad reality) nothing of the sort? To take an example from those eating and drinking recreations which absorb so large a portion of existence:—If the rich proprietors of the "mansions" in the "park" could give their grand dinners, and be as prodigal as they pleased with their first-rate champagne, and their rare gastronomic delicacies; the poor tenants of the brick boxes could just as easily enjoy their tea-garden conversazione, and be just as happily and hospitably prodigal, in turn, with their porter-pot, their teapot, their plate of bread-and-butter, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... eyes have seen The beauty of the roses uncreate, Imperial June, magnificent, elate Beholding all the ripening loves that stray Among her blossoms, and the golden time Of the full ear and bounty of the boughs,— And the great hills and solemn chanting seas And prodigal meadows, answering to the chime Of God's good year, and bearing on their brows The glory of processional mysteries From dawn to dawn, the woven shadow and shine Of the high moon, the twilight secrecies, And ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... part of the town now known by the name of the Halfway Houses. The old woman lived upon a small pension allowed by the Dutch court, having been employed for many years in a subordinate capacity in the king's household. She was said to have once been handsome, and when young, prodigal of her favours; at present she was a palsied old woman, bent double with age and infirmity, but with all her faculties as complete as if she was in her prime. Nothing could escape her little twinkling bloodshot eyes, or her acute ear; she could scarcely hobble fifty ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... fifteen I was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as my father. Boy-like, I was prodigal of my bounding vigor, which had not tempered down to the strength of my mature manhood. It was well for me that a sobering responsibility fell on me early, else I might have squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy story-teller ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... I watched her eat. She was famished. I learned that she had had nothing since the early morning coffee and roll. In spite of pain, I was curiously flattered by her return. I represented something to her, after all—even though the instinct of the prodigal cat had driven her hither. I am sure it had never crossed her mind that my doors might be shut against her. Her first words were, "I have come home." The first thing she did when we went into the drawing-room after dinner was to fondle my hand ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... paid for his pictures about two centuries after his death. The "Flemish Kermes" was bought for the Brussels Museum in 1867 for twenty-five thousand dollars, and at the San Donato sale, in 1880, the "Prodigal Son" sold for sixteen thousand two hundred dollars, and the "Five Senses" for fifteen thousand dollars. It is difficult to distinguish the etchings of the son from those of the father, David Teniers the elder, ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of the Indian, made with perfect simplicity, and without any appearance of astonishment at these magnificent offers. This was natural. Djalma would have done for others what they were doing for him, for the traditions of the prodigal magnificence and splendid hospitality of Indian princes are well known. Djalma had been as moved as grateful, on hearing that a woman loved him with maternal affection. As for the luxury with which she nought to surround him, he accepted ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... absorbed in the affairs of this world, and indifferent to the revelation I have brought from heaven, attend to the interment of the dead; but delay not thou, who art kindled with a lively interest in the truth, to proclaim the kingdom of God." When the returning prodigal had been joyfully received, the father said, in reply to the murmurs of the elder son, "Thy brother was dead and is alive again;" he was lost in sin and misery, he is found in penitence and happiness. Paul writes to the Romans, "Without the law sin was dead, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... during peace they abate nothing in the grimness and horror of their countenance. They have no house to inhabit, no land to cultivate, nor any domestic charge or care. With whomsoever they come to sojourn, by him they are maintained; always very prodigal of the substance of others, always despising what is their own, till the feebleness of old age overtakes them, and renders them unequal to the ...
— Tacitus on Germany • Tacitus
... fast, that night, from springs of love unsealed Once more within the ancient house—rare tears Of reconciliation, grief, and joy! A miracle, it seemed, had here been wrought, The dead brought back to life. And with him came The prodigal, repenting. ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... yourself by eating! Now I will tell you one thing. You are a child of the world; you don't belong here; therefore go in peace! Eat of the swine's husks which do not satisfy; but when you are sick of them, you will be welcome here again. The father's house always stands open for the prodigal son." ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... a prodigal doth Nature seem, When thou, for all thy gold, so common art! Thou teachest me to deem More sacredly of every human heart, Since each reflects in joy its scanty gleam Of heaven, and could some wondrous ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... to come. Its harbingers, in their livery of red and green, were already showing on the hillsides. The redbud was burning on the Southern slopes; the turf was springing, fresh and green; dandelions were dappling the grass like golden coins sown by a prodigal; violets were beginning to peep from the shelter of leaves caught along the fence-rows; and some favored peach-trees were ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... 223) that Sappho "felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms." Theodore Watts wrote: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since, did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers." That amazing prodigal of superlatives, the ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... have satisfied observant and reflecting men that a debt of eighty millions was less to the England which was governed by Pelham than a debt of fifty millions had been to the England which was governed by Oxford. Soon war again broke forth; and, under the energetic and prodigal administration of the first William Pitt, the debt rapidly swelled to a hundred and forty millions. As soon as the first intoxication of victory was over, men of theory and men of business almost unanimously pronounced that the fatal day had now really arrived. The only ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in every direction by sierras or chains of lofty and rugged mountains, naked, rocky, and precipitous, rendering it almost impregnable, but locking up within their sterile embraces deep, rich, and verdant valleys of prodigal fertility. ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... thou up yon dangling Apricocks, Which, like unruly children, make their sire Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... never rested, but ran evermore. And with his coming he did use his trade; A heap of names within his cloak he bare, And in the river did them all unlade; Or, to say truth, away he cast them all Into this stream, which Lethe we do call. This prodigal old wretch no sooner came Unto this cursed river's barren bank, But desperately, without all fear of blame, Or caring to deserve reward or thank, He hurl'd therein full many a precious name Where millions soon unto the bottom sank: Hardly in every ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... have but one, and a good share of that gone already, perhaps there will be some peace in the house for the time to come." My aunt always complained that her brother had one very serious fault, he was prodigal of time, and took too little thought for the future, and on this ground she replied in rather a snappish voice: "Well, at any rate, if every one was as slack and careless as you, they would hardly survive for one life time; and I can tell you one thing Nathan Adams, ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... a lonesome booming, far and ghostly in the stillness of the great empty hotel. It was the Garlands' crazy clock, memento of Mister in his prodigal bridal days. Harried forever by some obscure intestinal disorder, the mad timepiece stayed voiceless for days together, and then, without warning, embarked upon an orgy of profligate strikings. Now it struck fourteen, and fell ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... can. Literature and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always found them. If the legislators of the State have been sparing of their benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than this University ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... with the publication of each successive number, month by month, that the colourists could not keep pace with the printers. The alternate scenes of high life and low life, the contrasted characters, and revelations of misery side by side with prodigal waste and folly, attracted attention, while the vivacity of dialogue and ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... that Reuben might appear at evening; and he forecast a good turn which he would make, in such event, upon the parable of the Prodigal Son (with the omission, however, of the fatted calf). But the prodigal did not return. Next day there was the same hope, but fainter. Still, the prodigal Reuben did not return. Whereupon the parson thought it his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... only one of Dick Forrest's similar dissipations. He stole from the Federal Government, at a prodigal increase of salary, its star specialist in livestock breeding, and by similar misconduct he robbed the University of Nebraska of its greatest milch cow professor, and broke the heart of the Dean of the College of Agriculture of the University ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... look of relief had passed across the face of Elise. It was for her peace of mind he had lied, as into the hours of dawn he had lain awake, trying to unravel the meaning of the nocturnal scene. He knew that her prodigal brother had been forbidden the ancestral home, but it was hardly necessary that he should lie in hiding like a negro slave dreading the hounds upon his track. And yet, as he recalled the sudden glimpse of Dick's face, Selwyn remembered that there had been a hunted look ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... butchers of Nottingham To study as they did stand, Saying, "Surely he 'is' some prodigal, That ...
— A Collection of Ballads • Andrew Lang
... the first place the money had to be got. Though it was to go into the hands of swindlers, still it had to be paid. I don't know how your father and Percival get on together;—but I felt very like the prodigal son." ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... the country shops he would get out, and show his unwelcome visage. In the tavern, prints from Scripture, varnished and on rollers,—such as the Judgment of Christ; also, a droll set of colored engravings of the story of the Prodigal Son, the figures being clad in modern costume,—or, at least, that of not more than half a century ago. The father, a grave, clerical person, with a white wig and black broadcloth suit; the son, with a cocked hat and laced clothes, drinking wine out ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... pity me, then, that I may not become utterly cast away!" Then she wept softly, and it seemed that, in this hour of keen repentance, the errors of the past would be atoned for—that a new life would dawn around her; that in prodigal's attire of repentance and tears, she would return humbly to her Father's house. But the spirit of the world had wound its deadly fetters too closely around her; the time of her return and purification, and welcome—if it ever came, was veiled in the ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... rendering the whole thing of dubious value. A model father! In my bewilderment I nearly cut myself. And yet, supposing, as I had been supposing, that Mr. Carville had set out with the definite object of contrasting himself vividly with his prodigal brother, would he not eventually take up the role of dutiful parentage? The extraordinary thing was that the model father ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... brothers, no peculiar privileges given to males over females, or to older sons. In the Institutes of Justinian, we see on every page a regard to the principles of natural justice. We discover that the property of the wife cannot be alienated nor mortgaged by a prodigal husband; that wards are to be protected from the cupidity of guardians; that property could be bequeathed by will, and that wills are sacred; that all promises are to be fulfilled; that he who is intrusted with the property of another is bound to restitution by ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... sighed. "My poor, poor boy. So thus I leave you because I must. But some day, when your stubborn will is broken, when your proud head is bowed with grief and shame, come back, dear prodigal, come back, and you shall find these arms outstretched in eager welcome, this solitary heart still open to shelter and protect. Farewell, my Peregrine—I go to weep and pray for you in the night silences. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... transactions recorded are very often given with a scrupulous and microscopic accuracy of reporting which no detective could outdo. Defoe is not more circumstantial in detail of fact than Balzac; Richardson is hardly more prodigal of character-stroke. Yet a very large proportion of these characters, of these circumstances, are evidently things invented or imagined, not observed. And in addition to this the artist's magic glass, his Balzacian speculum, if we may so say (for none else has ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... get away for a European port as I hoped when I left you, as the authorities seemed to be taking my case seriously, and I was lucky to get off as a deck-hand on a south-bound boat. I expected to get a slice of English prodigal veal at Christmas, but as things stand now, I am grateful to be loose even in this God-forsaken hole. The British bulldog is eager to insert its teeth in my trousers, and I was flattered to see my picture bulletined in a conspicuous place the day I struck Vera Cruz. You see, ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... now apparent to all that the fort could be no longer defended. The works were in ruins. The position of the Vigilant rendered any farther continuance on the island a prodigal and useless waste of human life; and on the 16th, about 11 at night, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... the physical state and bring the savage to duty. The germ of the beautiful will find an equal difficulty in developing itself in countries where a severe nature forbids man to enjoy himself, and in those where a prodigal nature dispenses him from all effort; where the blunted senses experience no want, and where violent desire can never be satisfied. The delightful flower of the beautiful will never unfold itself in the case of the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... days when she was rested, and hastened back to Ashland to his work; for his soul was happy now and at ease, and he felt he must get to work at once. Rogers would need him. Poor Rogers! Had he found his daughter yet? Poor, silly child-prodigal! ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... no one could look upon them without emotion—but of what kind, the reader, who has doubtless seen many kindred specimens in this department of a modern education, may decide for himself. The next piece was the Prodigal Son, taking leave of his benevolent father, in a red dress-coat and white-top boots! The drawings were copies, and the needlework resembling the darnings in the hose to be seen on the heels of the ladies sitting in the country markets. Thus much for ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... grave. "I believe the prodigal was afterwards a better as well as a wiser man than the one who stayed at home, and I am not quite sure that Lance's history is so nearly like that of the son in the parable as we have believed it to be. A residence in the sty is apt to leave a stain which I have not found ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... the coolness which succeeded the first glow of tenderness on the part of Joseph and Madame Descoings; but she hastened to tell them of Philippe's sufferings in exile, and so lessened it. Madame Descoings, wishing to make a festival of the return of the prodigal, as she called him under her breath, had prepared one of her good dinners, to which old Claparon and the elder Desroches were invited. All the family friends were to come, and did come, in the evening. Joseph had invited Leon Giraud, d'Arthez, Michel ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... has watered it abundantly with noble rivers; neither stinted it of deep shade nor removed it too far from the timely stroke of the sun; has caused it, finally, to be graced here and enriched there with divers great and grave cities. Man, who has it not in him to be thrifty in so prodigal a midst, has here also thought it lawful to go free. Out of that lake of rustling leaves rise, like the masts of ships crowding a port, church towers, the belfries of pious convents, the domes and turrets of great buildings walled into cities. Among which, prized as they all are and honourably additioned,—Vicenza, ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... Brunswick married the sister of George III; but their daughter, the Princess Caroline, was now the reluctant choice of the Prince of Wales. The parents, both at Windsor and at Brunswick welcomed the avowal by the royal prodigal of the claims of lawful wedlock. The Duchess of Brunswick fell into raptures at the brilliant prospects thus opened out for her daughter; and it seemed that both Hymen and Mars, for once working in unison, conspired to bring from ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... to leave the place where he had left her, until he came. All that her friends had done for her, was introduced incidentally; Howel understood that she had been taken to her relations again, as the prodigal son to his father, but he was ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... is all free, the path all clear. Come, Mary, and sit to-night at the feet of Jesus. Come, Bartimeus, and have your eyes opened. Come, O prodigal! and sit at thy father's table. Come, O you suffering, sinning, dying the soul! and find rest on the heart of Jesus. The Spirit and Bride say "Come," and Churches militant and triumphant say "Come," and all ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... speak—for it was a part of his ironic destiny that he, who was prodigal of light words, should find himself stricken dumb ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... my heart and does its darnedest to sing. It impresses me as life on such a sane and gigantic scale that I want to be an actual part of it, that I positively ache to have a share in its immensities. It seems so fruitful and prodigal and generous and patient. It's so open-handed in the way it produces and gives and returns our love. And there's a completeness about it that makes me feel it can't ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... handsome scamp who had put this outrage upon them all. It was bad enough to be a thief, but to this he had added deception, falsehood, and gross ingratitude. Nor did the girl's contempt spare herself. Neither warning nor advice—and Lady Jim had been prodigal of both—had availed to open her eyes about the Westerner. She had been as foolish over him as a schoolgirl in the matter of a matinee idol. That she would have to lash herself for her folly through many sleepless hours of the night was ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... have shifted in her grave at sight of the prodigal repast which Ollie soon spread on the kitchen table. Granting, of course, that people in their graves are cognizant of such things, which, according to this old standard of comparison in human ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... nearest to defining itself in the idea that he had gone too far—he who had not left his seat. When the hymn was finished, and Ensign Sand said, "The meeting is now open for testimonies," he knew that all her hope was upon him, though she looked at the screen above his head; and he sat abashed, with a prodigal sense surging through him of what he would rejoice to do for her in compensation. In the little chilly silence that followed he surprised his own eyes moist with disappointment—it had all been so anxious and so vain—and he felt relief and gratitude when the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... that old, but somewhat exaggerated, canon in natural history of "Natura non facit saltum." We meet with this admission in the writings of almost every experienced naturalist; or, as Milne Edwards has well expressed it, "Nature is prodigal in variety, but niggard in innovation." Why, on the theory of Creation, should there be so much variety and so little real novelty? Why should all the parts and organs of many independent beings, each supposed to have been separately created ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. A fine example was the Prodigal Son—when ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... shadow of which Adelais Vernon was the substance. At times these rhapsodists might have supported their contention with a certain speciousness, such as was apparent to-day, for example, when against the garden's hurly-burly of color, the prodigal blazes of scarlet and saffron and wine-yellow, the girl's green gown glowed like an emerald, and her eyes, too, seemed emeralds, vivid, inscrutable, of a clear verdancy that was quite untinged with either blue or gray. Very black lashes shaded them. The long oval of her face (you might have objected), ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... sockets, and leaue them all darke. Another did nothing but winke and make faces. There was a parasite, & he with clapping his hands and thripping his fingers seemed to dance an antike to and fro The onely thing they did well, was the prodigal childes hunger, most of their schollers being hungerly kept, and surely you would haue sayd they had ben brought vp in hogs academie to learne to eate acornes, if you had seene how sedulously they fell to them. Not a iest had they to keepe their auditors from sleepe but of swill and ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... of England, Lord Howard of Effingham, prodigal of all things in his country's cause, and who had recently had the noble daring to refuse to dismantle part of the fleet, though the Queen had sent him orders to do so in consequence of an exaggerated report that the enemy had been driven back and shattered by a storm. Lord Howard—whom ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... for a certain morrow.' He smiled again. 'Why, I am no more an old man as I had thought to be. I have walked that far path beside thy horse.' It pleased him for two things: because he had walked with little fatigue and because he had been enabled to show her great and prodigal honour by so serving her for groom. 'This too I set to thy account as my good omen. And that thou art. No woman shall have such honours as thou in this land, save only the Mother of God.' And, after touching ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... sitting at their pothooks and spelling for the first half hour or so, and then were allowed to crowd round the teacher, who read and talked to them, and showed them the pictures. Tom found the Bible open at the story of the prodigal son, and read it out to them as they clustered round his knees. Some of the outside ones fidgeted about a little, but those close round him listened with ears, and eyes, and bated breath; and two little ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... bedside of the dying prodigal or prostitute he would sit with intense interest, pointing them to Him who casts out none. In our house to house visitation he would sit down and read of the Saviour's love, making special reference to those that are poor in this world, assuring them it was for the outcast and the ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... I smile at childish tales, old age has made me wise. Once proudly in prodigal youth I trod, now by age my foot is heavily shod; yet my heart—my heart would fly. I am driven by fire and bound by ice, no rest ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... whom I saw, was a man morbid and without force, who early came to a sorrowful end. His redeeming quality was a fine aesthetic taste, which he had no doubt through heredity, together with a sad burden of disease. The world remembers kindly that he was a prodigal patron of art. ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... win this time," she wrote, "and, though life here is not a bed of roses, yet it is not so very bad, and when the week is over I shall look back at it with lots of funny thoughts. Oh, Nan, prepare a fatted calf for Thursday night, for I shall come home a veritable Prodigal Son! Of course, I don't mean this literally; we have lovely things to eat here, but it's 'hame, hame, fain wad I be.' I won't write again, I'll probably get no chance, but send Miller for me at ...
— Patty's Success • Carolyn Wells
... dreary life of thirty-six years in penitence and neglect in a Carmelite convent. Madame de Montespan retained her ascendency longer for she had talents as well as physical beauty; she was the most prodigal and imperious of all the women that ever triumphed over the weakness of man. She reigned when Louis was in all the pride of manhood and at the summit of his greatness and fame,—accompanying him in his military expeditions, presiding at his fetes, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... to be consoled by the employment of every specious fallacy and base-born trick known to those whose doom it is to handle children. For me their hollow cajolery had no interest, I could pluck no consolation out of their bankrupt though prodigal pledges I only waited till that hateful, well-known "Some other time, dear!" told me that hope was finally dead. Then I left the room without any remark. It made it worse—if anything could—to hear that stale, worn-out old phrase, still supposed by those dullards ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... have planned to marry. It is time the prodigal marry and settle down, is it not? So long as we were in England it did not matter, except to that Faroy girl you seduced and ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... enemy, the gendarme, each silently waiting his turn to explain his situation. To the credit of the gendarme and all those in authority, it must be said that contrary to their usual custom they acted like loving fathers with these prodigal sons of the Republic—possible information without the sign of a grumble, and advising those who were still streaming in at the door to come back towards five o'clock, when the line should have advanced a little. It was then scarcely ten ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... excited Sir Henry's indignation, and made him caution Lord Tame to look well to his proceedings; but the humanity of Lord Tame was not to be frightened, and he returned a suitable reply. At another time, this official prodigal, to show his consequence and disregard of good manners, went up into a chamber, where was appointed for her grace a chair, two cushions, and a foot carpet, wherein he presumptuously sat and called his man to pull off his boots. As soon ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... noonday from midnight. The courtier who ruins his fortune for the attainment of a title which can do him no good, or power of which he can make no suitable or creditable use, the miser who hoards his useless wealth, and the prodigal who squanders it, are all marked with a certain shade of insanity. To criminals who are guilty of enormities, when the temptation, to a sober mind, bears no proportion to the horror of the act, or the probability ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... reputation by "break-downs," and has clutched the burlesque diadem with, innumerable bounds of her elastic legs. Now, however, she has grown weary of offering up her fatted calves at the shrine of a prodigal New-York audience, and desires to hide the lightness of her legs under a bustle and crinoline. Wherefore she exchanges her PIPPIN for a MOSQUITO, and appears in ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... all Men ought to bless Fortune, who still has been indulgent to you on all Occasions; and scatter'd her Favours on you, with as prodigal a Hand as tho you were her sole ...
— The City Bride (1696) - Or The Merry Cuckold • Joseph Harris
... the latter summer-tide of this same year (1867), I again persuaded him to visit me. Ah! how sacred now, how sad and sweet, are the memories of that rich, clear, prodigal August of '67! ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... remedy? Does the devil kill, and cannot Christ relieve? Fear sin, but not repentance. Be ashamed to be in danger, not to be delivered out of it. Who will snatch a plank from one lost by shipwreck? Who will envy the healing of wounds?" He mentions the parables of the lost drachma, the lost sheep, the prodigal son, the Samaritan, and God's threats, adding: "God would never threaten the impenitent, if he refused pardon. But you'll say, only God can do this. It is true; but what he does by his priests, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... turned and jumped from the dog-cart as he had jumped from the old coach long ago, and ducking in and out among the horses and carriages, ran for his life. The men came after him; but he ran like the wind—pant, pant, nearer, nearer; at last the coach was reached, and Melchior seized the prodigal by his rags ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... a picturesque dress and her most becoming mood, welcomed him with careful cordiality as a prodigal whose husks, clinging about his coat, were to be handled tenderly as if they were pearls. She saw that something was gravely wrong, and she grasped the line of connection if she did not understand the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... the bottom of his trunk was a Bible, given to him years before by his mother, when he was but a mere lad. This he brought forth, and till a late hour poured over its precious contents. Then falling upon his knees, this prodigal of many years found in Jesus the true way to the beautiful land. He Himself said that no man cometh unto the Father but by Him. And an unspeakable ...
— Rosa's Quest - The Way to the Beautiful Land • Anna Potter Wright
... of the woods." (1/6.) Apart from this the two brothers "were one"; they understood one another in a marvellous fashion, and always loved one another. Henri never failed to watch over Frdric with a wholly fatherly solicitude; he was prodigal of advice, helpful with his experience, doing his best to smooth away all difficulties, encouraging him to walk in his footsteps and make his way through the world behind him. He was his confidant, giving an ear to all that befell him of good or ill; to his ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the German painters at the beginning of the sixteenth century succeed in representing with perfect mastery these scenes of country life, as, for instance, Albrecht Durer, in his engraving of the prodigal son. But it is one thing if a painter, brought up in a school of realism, introduces such scenes, and quite another thing if a poet, accustomed to an ideal or mythological framework, is driven by inward impulse into realism. Besides which, priority ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... humanity far more comprehensive than those by which the policy of the empire was moulded. His tastes were pure and refined, and though he multiplied his villas, and decorated them with cost and elegance, it is certain that he was perfectly free alike from the prodigal ostentation and from the debauchery of the time indeed his vast intellectual industry implies a temperate life. For the game- preserving tendencies of the great oligarchs, he had a hearty dislike and contempt; in spite of the ill-looking, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... lingered Krishna in the deep, green wood, And gave himself, too prodigal, to those; But Radha, heart-sick at his falling-off, Seeing her heavenly beauty slighted so, Withdrew; and, in a bower of Paradise— Where nectarous blossoms wove a shrine of shade, Haunted by birds and bees of unknown skies— She sate ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... combined to gather the fancied golden harvest of Virginia, received a charter from the Crown, and taken possession of their El Dorado. From tavern, gaming-house, and brothel was drawn the staple the colony,—ruined gentlemen, prodigal sons, disreputable retainers, debauched tradesmen. Yet it would be foul slander to affirm that the founders of Virginia were all of this stamp; for among the riotous crew were men of worth, and, above them all, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... preserving his property as he was in spending it. This tendency of his to be liberal and profuse he had acquired from having been a soldier in his youth, for the soldier's life is a school in which the niggard becomes free-handed and the free-handed prodigal; and if any soldiers are to be found who are misers, they are monsters of rare occurrence. My father went beyond liberality and bordered on prodigality, a disposition by no means advantageous to a ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... publicity of an hotel with the refinements of a well-appointed home. That it offered, together with a luxurious table, the society of youthful persons of both sexes. And if everything around Mrs. Downey was on a liberal scale, so was Mrs. Downey herself. She was expansive in her person, prodigal in sympathy, exuberant in dress. If she had one eye to the main chance, the other smiled at you in pure benignity. On her round face was a festal flush, flooding and effacing the little care-worn lines and wrinkles which appeared ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... little life; and our whole life but a day repeated. Those that dare lose a day are dangerously prodigal; those that dare misspend it, desperate. What is the happiness of your life made up of? Little courtesies, little kindnesses, pleasant words, genial smiles, a friendly letter, good wishes, and good deeds. One in a million—once in a ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... the city where he had spent his student years. On foot, weary, and dusty, and worn, he entered it like a returning prodigal. Few Scotchmen would think he had made good use of his learning! But he had made the use of it God required, and some Scotchmen, with and without other learning, have learned to think that a good use, and in itself a sufficient success—for that man came into the world not to make money, but ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... insensible of mankind; but I found a far more glorious treasure in the angelic heart of your daughter. Her virtue, the immaculate purity of her soul, her gentle and magnanimous sentiments,—in a word, the prodigal gifts of mind and body which God has lavished on her,—have increased my admiration to love, my love to absolute idolatry! How dare I conceal my emotion from you any longer? I cannot live without Lenora; the very ...
— The Poor Gentleman • Hendrik Conscience
... few moments they were silent, drinking in the beauty prodigal Nature lavished all about them. Furtively Lucile examined this cavalier of hers. Straight of feature, bronzed from living in the open, eyes so full of fun you had to laugh in sympathy—oh, he was handsome; there was no doubt ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... new-fashioned talk about education and work for women, which then had just begun, nice girls were not quite so sure as they used to be that to reclaim a prodigal, or consolidate a penitence, was their mission in life. Perhaps they were right; but the old idea was good for the race, if not for the individual woman, human sacrifices being a fundamental principle of natural religion, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... is the story of the Prodigal Son. We look over the fence of goodness into the mystery of the great unknown world beyond and in that unknown realm we ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... deliberation and dignity, not the spontaneity of northern creations; strength, and at times great vigour, but not munificence, not the lavishness of art and wealth and adornment, of which the younger style was prodigal. Few generalisations are flawless, but it may be truly said that Romanesque Cathedrals are lacking in splendour; and it will be found in a large majority of cases that they are also without the impressiveness of great size; that they are almost devoid of shapely windows or stained glass, of notable ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... radiant and immortal street Lavishly and omnipotently as ever In the open hills, the undissembling dales, The laughing-places of the juvenile earth. For lo! the wills of man and woman meet, Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befel, To share his shameless, elemental mirth In one great act of faith, while deep and strong, Incomparably nerved and cheered, The enormous heart of London joys to beat To the measures ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... demon in the form of a woman, who lives in the parish of Saint-Etienne, in the house of the innkeeper Tortebras, situated in the quit-rent of the chapter, and under the temporal jurisdiction of the archiepiscopal domain. The which foreigner carries on the business of a gay woman in a prodigal and abusive manner, and with such increase of infamy that she threatens to ruin the Catholic faith in this town, because those who go to her come back again with their souls lost in every way, and refuse the assistance of the Church with ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... the peaceful reign of Numa, or the splendid ensigns of Tarquinius, or the glorious death of Cato. I will celebrate, out of gratitude, with the choicest verses, Regulus, and the Scauri, and Paulus, prodigal of his mighty soul, when Carthage conquered, ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... it should be so different this time! I had gone out as a missionary; and deeper than ever in my consciousness, I must feel the want and woe of the returning prodigal; the same old story, the ever-recurring failure. It seemed as though all the wonder and impatience might well go out ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... see that upon occasion I have some left; only I beg Monsieur not to be too prodigal of it if he wishes it ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... and all the enjoyments of this world, the man, without action is unable to enjoy them long, but the high-souled man, who is even diligent, is able to find riches buried deep in the Earth and watched over by the fates. The good man who is prodigal (in religious charities and sacrifices) is sought by the gods for his good conduct, the celestial world being better than the world of men, but the house of the miser though abounding in wealth is looked upon by the gods as the house of dead. The man that does not exert himself is never contented ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Vaux; if he, D'Artagnan, were really the captain of the musketeers, and M. Fouquet the owner of the chateau in which Louis XIV. was at that moment partaking of his hospitality. These reflections were not those of a drunken man, although everything was in prodigal profusion at Vaux, and the surintendant's wines had met with a distinguished reception at the fete. The Gascon, however, was a man of calm self-possession; and no sooner did he touch his bright steel blade, than he knew how to adopt morally the cold, keen ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Florentines stood rather for a mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were it not stereotyped as part of an inspired record, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... stranger gets accustomed to all this sweetness without evil results. In a northern climate the consequence would probably be at least a bilious attack; but in the tropics, where salt fish and fruits are popularly preferred to meat, the prodigal use of sugar or sugar-syrups ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... blood of Christ, which tells you that in spite of all your daily sins and failings, you can still look up to God as your Father; to the Lord Jesus as your life; to the Holy Spirit as your guide and your inspirer; that though you be a prodigal son, your Father's house is still open to you; your Father's eternal love ready to meet you afar off the moment that you cry from your heart—"Father, I have sinned, and am no more worthy to be called Thy child;" and that you must be converted and ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... the habit of this man never to be prodigal in the display of energy. He usually sat when there was no need for standing; he always considered speech to be golden, but silence, to his way of thinking, was priceless. And like most men of such opinion ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... Ojeda immediately, but his prodigal generosity had exhausted even his large resources, and he was detained by clamorous creditors, the law of the island being that no one could leave it in debt. The gallant little meat-carver labored with success to settle various suits pending, and thought {10} he had everything ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... of Roper Ellwell where the wife had fitted boys "in the classical tongues" for Camberton, the family had come to this uncertain state, feverish, like the fickle fluctuations of the stock market; now prodigal and easy, again in a panicky distress with dire fear of unknown depths of poverty and humiliation. Whatever happened—reckless, with a philosophy that did ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... of the friend thus addressed—was a card-sharper, and he instantly seized the opportunity to make something out of the happy disposition of this modern prodigal son, this scion of gentility. With the utmost frankness he explained to the young man his wonderful method of keeping his pockets full of money, and showed that nothing could be easier than for Olivier to go and do likewise in his terrible condition;—in short, on one ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... beaten, hungry, pain'd, diseas'd, and poor. Then nature, pointing to the only spot Which still had comfort for so dire a lot, Although so feeble, led him on the way, And hope look'd forward to a happier day: He thought, poor prodigal! a father yet His woes would pity and his crimes forget; Nor had he brother who with speech severe Would check the pity or refrain the tear: A lighter spirit in his bosom rose, As near the road he sought an hour's ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... calmly revolving these things, such pursuits seem far more noble objects of ambition than any upon which the vulgar herd of busy men lavish prodigal their restless exertions. To diffuse useful information, to further intellectual refinement, sure forerunner of moral improvement,—to hasten the coming of the bright day when the dawn of general knowledge shall ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Denmark who complained of the smallness of his salary, and said that he could keep neither an equipage nor a table; the king's remark to him was—"You are a prodigal; you ought to know that it is more healthy to go on foot than it is to go in a carriage; and that, so far as eating is concerned, another man's table ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... not at all disposed to deny themselves the luxuries with which they had been surrounded in Soho Square. In a few months Shadwell brought these valiant fops and epicures on the stage. The town was made merry with the character of a courageous but prodigal and effeminate coxcomb, who is impatient to cross swords with the best men in the French household troops, but who is much dejected by learning that he may find it difficult to have his champagne iced ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... did no go to her mother's pew, but sat down close to the door. To her surprise she saw Tom not far off. He was on his way to his chapel when he noticed Catharine alone, walking towards the church, and he had followed her. Mr. Cardew took for his text the parable of the prodigal son. He began by saying that this parable had been taken to be an exhibition of God's love for man. It seemed rather intended to set forth, not the magnificence of the Divine nature, but of human nature—of that nature which God assumed. ...
— Catharine Furze • Mark Rutherford
... by which the solar system came into its present form was sketched in vast outline by Moses. He gave us the fundamental idea of what is called the nebular hypothesis. Swedenborg, that prodigal dreamer of vagaries, in 1734 threw out some conjectures of the way in which the outlines were to be filled up; Buffon followed him closely in 1749; Kant sought to give it an ideal philosophical completeness; as he said, "not as the result of observation and computation," but as evolved ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... re-union! And such it is to thousands of happy families. But, somehow, we always think of the vacant places that death or absence leaves at many tables; and of the shadows that come over the feelings of those who gather in the old homestead. Of the absent, how many are wanderers, like the poor prodigal! And how gladly would they be received if they would only return, and let all the unhappy past be forgotten and forgiven! Does, by any chance, such a wanderer's eye fall upon these few sentences? If so, we do earnestly ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... none, not even of those who had most grievously failed, or most utterly turned their back on purity. The parables in the Third Gospel of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son lay emphasis upon the possibility of recovery, and, in the case of the prodigal, specially on the ability to return for those who have ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... beau-monde took an interest in the labours of the critic. He wreathed the rod of criticism with roses. Yet even BAYLE, who declared himself to be a reporter, and not a judge, BAYLE, the discreet sceptic, could not long satisfy his readers. His panegyric was thought somewhat prodigal; his fluency of style somewhat too familiar; and others affected not to relish his gaiety. In his latter volumes, to still the clamour, he assumed the cold sobriety of an historian: and has bequeathed no mean legacy to the literary world, in thirty-six small volumes of criticism, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... the uncandid and cruel turn I had done my father brought me almost to the verge of suicide. On Sunday morning I entered a church in Toronto, and tears flowed down my face as I heard the minister read the parable of the Prodigal Son. It seemed to me as a voice from home, and I determined to go to my father. Without hesitating, or stopping an hour, I took all the money I had to pay my way, and in about six days afterward, sitting beside the driver on the stage-coach, looked from a hill upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... loves rather the silent language of the hand, to be seen than heard. He lies ever close within himself, armed with wise resolution, and will not be discovered but by death or danger. He is neither prodigal of blood to misspend it idly, nor niggardly to grudge it, when either God calls for it, or his country; neither is he more liberal of his own life than of others. His power is limited by his will, and he holds it the noblest revenge, that ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... simplest kind—the Parable of the prodigal son, contains his creed. Discarding what are commonly called "plans of salvation," he believed in the light "which lighteth every man that cometh into the world," and that if people would follow this light, they would thus seek "the kingdom of Heaven and its righteousness and all other ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... agitations and alarms, to display and expose his miserable passion. Moliere, on the other hand, without attaining this object, puts a complicated machine in motion. Here we have a lover of the daughter, who, disguised as a servant, flatters the avarice of the old man; a prodigal son, who courts the bride of his father; intriguing servants; an usurer; and after all a discovery at the end. The love intrigue is spun out in a very clumsy and every-day sort of manner; and it has the effect of making us at different times lose ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... "No, sir," replied the prodigal. "You see, we had a flare up, and I expressed my opinion of them pretty plainly. They wouldn't take me back if I'd come ...
— Do and Dare - A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... established on the throne, he began to alienate himself from a minister whose character was so little suited to his own. Charles's favor for the Catholics was always opposed by Clarendon, public liberty was secured against all attempts of the over-zealous royalists, prodigal grants of the king were checked or refused, and the dignity of his own character was so much consulted by the chancellor, that he made it an inviolable rule, as did also his friend Southampton, never to enter into any connection with the royal mistresses. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... with them, and quite inappropriate to witness the home-coming,—they took themselves off, but each resolved to flutter unseen in the neighbourhood until he, or she, could make quite sure that the prodigal had returned. ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... from being obvious, evident, or commonplace, and the attorney's heart grew heavy within him. The paternal displeasure was signified in the usual manner—the supplies were cut off. Edmund Burke, however, was no ordinary prodigal, and his reply to his father's expostulations took the unexpected and unprecedented shape of a copy of a second and enlarged edition of his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful, which he had published in 1756 at the price of three shillings. Burke's father promptly sent the author a bank-bill ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Higglesby-Browne. You now heard the voice of Violet in exhortation, mingled with Aunt Jane's sobs. I seemed to see that an ear of Mr. Tubbs was cocked attentively in that direction, He had indeed erred in the very wantonness of triumph, for a single glance would have kept Aunt Jane loyal and prodigal of excuses for him in the face of any treachery. Not even Violet could have clapped the lid on the up-welling fount of sentiment in Aunt Jane's heart. Only the cold condemning eye of H. H. himself had congealed that ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... us," she answered. "God himself shows that we ought to receive those who have done wrong when they repent and desire to return to the right way. He himself in His mercy is always thus ready to receive repentant sinners who desire to be reconciled to Him. I'll read to you the parable of the prodigal son, and you will then understand how God the Father, as He in His goodness allows us to call Him, receives all His children who come back to Him, acknowledging their sins and transgressions. He ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... staying to bend a swarthy face to the white may to smell it, and then plucking a huge branch on which the blossom lies like a heavy fall of snow, and throwing that aside for a better, and tearing off another and yet another, with the prodigal recklessness of a pauper; and so, whistling, on into the ...
— Jackanapes, Daddy Darwin's Dovecot and Other Stories • Juliana Horatio Ewing
... Learning that is converted into a tyranny will never bring forth good fruit. It is the duty of parents and schoolmasters to impress upon the mind of youth that a seat of learning is the home of an easy frugality rather than of prodigal rivalry; that the university will only give degrees and honours where there is industry and good moral conduct. It is to be feared that youth, quitting the discipline of the school, looks upon the university as the place where he may indulge in his own wayward will, and be as idle and indolent ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... compatibility of ill temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics. The truth is, there are two great classes of sins—sins of the BODY and sins of the DISPOSITION. The Prodigal Son may be taken as a type of the first, the Elder Brother of the second. Now, society has no doubt whatever as to which of these is the worse. Its brand falls, without a challenge, upon the Prodigal. But are we right? We have no balance to ...
— Addresses • Henry Drummond
... mean?—But why is there a universe at all? Why has the unlimited become limited? What was the need for the long cosmic struggle, the ignorance and pain, the apparently prodigal waste of life and beauty? Why does a perfect form appear only to be shattered and superseded by another? What can it all mean, if indeed it has a meaning? This is what thinkers have been asking themselves since thought began, and I have ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... when a man sings, denotes him to be of a strong constitution, and of a good understanding, neither too penurious nor too prodigal, also ingenious and an admirer of the fair sex. A weak and trembling voice shows the owner of it to be envious, suspicious, slow in business, feeble and fearful. A loud, shrill and unpleasant voice, signifies one bold ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... panic came to the business and monetary affairs of the country. It was the logic of an inflated currency, wild and visionary enterprises, bad investments, and prodigal living. Banks tottered and fell, large business houses suspended, and financial ruin ran riot. Northern attention was diverted from Southern politics to the "destruction that seemed to waste at noon-day." Taking advantage of this the South seized the shot-gun and wrote on ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... images, cycles or customs of sensations, and fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have been vouchsafed to me!) to the will which is the reason,—will in the form of reason—I can form a sufficient gleam of the possibility ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... jam-pots, and no end of pears in the straw. With their money little Briggs will be able to pay the tick which that imprudent child has run up with Mrs. Ruggles; and I shall let Briggs Major pay for the pencil-case which Bullock sold to him.—It will be a lesson to the young prodigal for the future. But, I say, what a change there will be in his life for some time to come, and at least until his present wealth is spent! The boys who bully him will mollify towards him, and accept his pie and sweetmeats. They will have feasts in the bedroom; and that ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... hate, joy and sorrow, fear and faith,—which are an essential part of our human nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it awaken a response in men of every race. Every father must respond to the parable of the prodigal son; wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks on the strange phenomenon of evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of Job; in whatever ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... got imprisoned, escaped, outwitted the gendarmes, got retaken: his adventures sound like a legend or romance. It is because he was so romantic, that he is so interesting. He returned to France full of generous impulses. He was as prodigal of his money as he had been of his blood. In the bitter cold winters he fed and clothed the poor of Belleville, going from attic to attic with money and consolation. You remember what Victor Hugo says of the sublime ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... would be the decent thing to do as far as she was concerned, and also to hide his hurt and disappointment, which were deep. The rumour of lion was genuine and the excitement, extending far down the Nile, intense. In fact, with the aid of the Oriental's prodigal imagination the one royal beast of feminine persuasion which was reported as having been seen prowling around Deir el-Bahari had been multiplied to two pairs ravaging the ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... and ignominiously defeated! Ay, but that was a trifle now, scarcely worthy of consideration. The girl had hoodwinked him, had lied more skilfully than he, yet in the fact that she had lied he found a prodigal atonement. Whigs and Jacobites might have their uses in the cosmic scheme, he reflected, as house-flies have, but what really mattered was that at Halvergate yonder Marian awaited his coming. And in place of statecraft he fell to thinking of two hazel ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the power of the image or picture to lead to action. Only the Father knows how many sons have come home from the far country because of the matchless story of the prodigal. Only He knows how many consecrated men and women are in Africa and China and Japan because they saw the heroes in God's Hall of Fame. Surely this is why the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write, "Whatsoever things ...
— The Unfolding Life • Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux
... difficulty peculiar to the translating of Dante into English. English is essentially a diffuse and prodigal language. The great English writers have written with a free hand, prolific, excursive, diffuse. Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Browning, all the typical writers of English, have been many-worded. They have been ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... That "sir," so familiar to his ear, and yet seemingly so incongruous in the present instance, baffled him completely. In the first moment of his discovery he had intended, figuratively speaking, to fall upon the prodigal's neck, and converse with him in the old, familiar style; but now, between Valentine Fenleigh, Esq., of the ——sex, and Private Fenleigh, of the Royal Blankshire, there was a great gulf fixed, and the latter, especially, seemed determined to recognize that the former conditions ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... complex life. We have attacked the problem on one side by the promotion of cooperative marketing, and we might well inquire into the benefits of cooperative buying. Admittedly, the consumer is much to blame himself, because of his prodigal expenditure and his exaction of service, but Government might well serve to point the way of narrowing the spread of price, especially between the production ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Warren Harding • Warren Harding
... balls—at which the entire population, irrespective of age or worldly position, dressed in silks or in flannel shirts, as the case might be, still gathered almost weekly in truly democratic comradeship—the egg-shells were no longer filled with gold-dust, as sometimes happened in the prodigal Spanish days; yet time was still regarded as a thing of so little value that no one thought of abandoning the pleasures of the dance until broad daylight. Along the narrow, crooked streets of the little town, with its precarious ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... was to revive the old subjects which contained the eternal essentials of life and present them in "palpitatingly modern" form. I eloquently developed my thesis. We were sick to death, for instance, of the quasi-scriptural Prodigal Son, sitting half-naked in a desert beside a swine trough. Was it not more "palpitating" to set ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... compare his position with that of Dr. Gore we see at once the width of the gulf which separates the traditionalist from the philosopher. To Dr. Gore the creeds and the miracles are essential to Christianity. No Virgin Birth, no Sermon on the Mount! No Resurrection of the Body, no Parable of the Prodigal Son! No Descent into Hell, no revelation that the Kingdom of Heaven is within! Need we wonder that Dr. Gore cries out despairingly for more discipline? He summons reason, it is true, but to defend and explain creeds without which there ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... publication of each successive number, month by month, that the colourists could not keep pace with the printers. The alternate scenes of high life and low life, the contrasted characters, and revelations of misery side by side with prodigal waste and folly, attracted attention, while the vivacity of ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... back to the home which he had so wickedly left. Whenever he thought of this home, of the Uncle Daniel who had in charity cared for him—a motherless, fatherless boy—and of returning to it, with not even as much right as the Prodigal Son, of whom he had heard Uncle Daniel tell, his heart sank within him and he doubted whether he would be allowed to remain even if he should be so fortunate as ever ...
— Toby Tyler • James Otis
... presumption rather, in two respects. First, when yet there was only probability, not a certain and determinate place of habitation selected, neither any demonstration if commodity there in esse, to induce his followers; nevertheless, he both was too prodigal of his own patrimony and too careless of other men's expenses to employ both his and their substance upon a ground imagined good. The which falling, very like his associates were promised, and made it their best ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... he would not force him to come. It was a piece of childish folly on the boy's part no doubt, this going away; due to his impetuous nature and his immature years; but, he had made his bed, now let him lie in it till he should come to a realization of what he had done, and, like the prodigal son of old, should come back of his own accord, and ask to be forgiven. Yet the days went by, and the weeks grew long, and no prodigal returned. There was no abatement of determination on the grandfather's ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... had once been white marble, the probable remains of the ancient tomb from which the sarcophagus was taken. Here and there a marble acanthus-leaf, or the capital of an old column, or a fragment of sculpture jutted from under the mosses, ferns, and grasses with which prodigal Nature had filled every interstice and carpeted the whole. These sculptured fragments everywhere in Italy seem to whisper from the dust, of past life and death, of a cycle of human existence forever gone, over whose tomb the life of to-day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... deeply degraded—if the termagant and imperious Castlemaine; the lovely and intriguing Denham; the coquettish, cold, and cunning Richmond; the innately-dissipated and unrestrainable Southesk; the equivocal Middleton; the rapacious, prodigal, and insinuating Querouaille,—are rendered infamous in our national history—let us not confound the innocent with the guilty. We can point out to our daughters, for admiration and example, the patient, affectionate, and enduring ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... du Camp's authority there is a charming touch to add to his son's description of him. 'Il me semble,' said the royal old prodigal in his last illness, 'que je suis au sommet d'un monument qui tremble comme si les fondations etaient assises sur le sable.' 'Sois en paix,' replied the author of the Demi-Monde: 'le monument est bien bati, et la base est solide.' He was right, as we know. It is good ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... caused an elation that amounted to hilarity. On the other hand, the deadly blight of non-fulfilment, that annually attacked his most cherished hopes for the future development of his native town, failed in any wise to depress him, or check the prodigal casting of his optimistic daily bread on the placid social waters where, as the years multiplied, his enthusiasms scarce ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... if not, what was she to do with or for him? Was he to keep the money so vilely appropriated? And what was he to do when it was spent? If want would drive him home, the sooner he came to it the better! We pity the prodigal with his swine, but then first a ray of hope begins to break through the darkness of ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... that the state should use the instrument of taxation as a means of mitigating the inequalities of wealth. I am as desirous as any one that means should be taken to diminish those inequalities, but not so as to relieve the prodigal at the expense of the prudent. To tax the larger incomes at a higher percentage than the smaller is to lay a tax on industry and economy; to impose a penalty on people for having worked harder and saved more than their neighbors. It is not the fortunes which ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... doesn't like it. It's perfectly disgusting the way young people now speak of their elders, who are barely middle-aged, as if they were centenarians. Well, I think, and your father thinks, that Anita had a fancy for Broussard. He was a very attractive man. Your father thought him a prodigal with his money, but, of course, some fault must be found with every man who ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... justice; towns and cities will hereafter flourish where all is now desert; the waters, over which scarcely a solitary boat is yet seen to glide, will reflect the flags of all nations; and a happy, prosperous people receiving with thankfulness what prodigal Nature bestows for their use, will disperse her treasures over every part ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... posterity will do them justice; towns and cities will flourish where all is now desert; the waters over which scarcely a solitary boat is yet seen to glide will reflect the flags of all nations; and a happy, prosperous people receiving with thankfulness what prodigal nature bestows for their use will dispense her treasures over every part of ...
— History of California • Helen Elliott Bandini
... perjurer, a flatterer, a wanderer, pilfering and greedy; now a dead flea, a decayed dog, a vile worm, not a hermit, but a hypocrite; not a solitary, but a gad-about in mind; a devourer of alms, dainty over good things, greedy and negligent, lazy and snoring, ambitious and prodigal, one who is not worthy to serve others, and yet every day beats and scolds those who serve him: this, and worse than this, you may write of Godric." "Then he was silent as one indignant," says Reginald, "and I went off in some confusion," ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... is Liberality, the excess Prodigality, the defect Stinginess: here each of the extremes involves really an excess and defect contrary to each other: I mean, the prodigal gives out too much and takes in too little, while the stingy man takes in too much and gives out too little. (It must be understood that we are now giving merely an outline and summary, intentionally: and we will, in a later part of the treatise, ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... along with nuts and apples in a basket to sell. I bought an apple for five cents. It was regarded by my teacher, Maggie, as a prodigal expenditure! I shared it with her, and she in turn shared her half with ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... by handfuls and throwing it upon the fire. Leonnatus reproved him for this extravagance, and told him that when he became master of the countries where these costly gums were procured, he might be as prodigal of them as he pleased, but that in the mean time it would be proper for him to be more prudent and economical. Alexander remembered this reproof, and, finding vast stores of these expensive gums in Gaza, he sent the whole quantity to Leonnatus, telling him that he sent ...
— Alexander the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... "Jayme Ferrer thinks as I think, that the nearer we come to the Equator the more precious grow all things, the more gold, the more diamonds, rubies and emeralds, the more prodigal and delicious the spices! The people are burnt black, but they grow gentler and more wise, and under the line they are makers of white magic. I have not told you, Juan Lepe, but I hold that now we begin to come to where our Mother Earth ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... race and later upbraiding Jehovah because of the destruction of the gourd that for a time had protected his head from the burning sun. Jehovah's concluding remonstrance voices the message of the book. Like the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of Jonah presents in graphic form the unbounded love of the heavenly father and contrasts it sharply with the petty jealousies and hatred of his favored people. It was a call to Israel to go forth and become a missionary ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies,—the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac,— the canoes inverted on the bank, the ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... very jealous for the Church, and therefore felt deeply the conversion of my gardener. Like the elder brother of the Prodigal Son, I was grieved, and even angry, because he was restored to favour and joy. The remonstrance of the father prevailed nothing to mollify his feelings; in like manner, nothing seemed to give me any rest in this ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... he had much hope himself; he dared not hope. Hope meant a prop to his old age; hope meant joy to Jane, who would welcome the prodigal; hope meant relief to the doctor, who could then claim his own; hope meant redemption for Lucy, a clean name for Archie, and honor to himself and ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Valdez, who saw more vividly than the besieged could do, the uncertainty of his own position, now poured daily into the city, the enemy becoming more prodigal of his vows, as he felt that the ocean might yet save the victims from his grasp. The inhabitants, in their ignorance, had gradually abandoned their hopes of relief, but they spurned the summons to surrender. Leyden was sublime in its despair. ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... was a part of his ironic destiny that he, who was prodigal of light words, should find himself stricken dumb in ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... indwelling spirit. A free spirit, certainly, as of old! Through all his pantheistic flights, from horizon to horizon, it was still the thought of liberty that presented itself to the infinite relish of this "prodigal son" of Dominic. God the Spirit had made all things indifferently, with a largeness, a beneficence, impiously belied by any theory of restrictions, distinctions, absolute limitations. Touch, see, ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... for it to your face, and what you are now told, comes from one unknown, and it may be, from an enemy. You will allow yourself indeed to be prudent in the management of your fortune; you are not a prodigal, like Clodius[10] or Catiline, but surely that deserves not the name of avarice. I will inform you how to be convinced. Disguise your person; go among the common people in Rome; introduce discourses about yourself; inquire your own character; ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... "Wicked prodigal! What shall we do to reform him, Mr. Douglas? He has not been to see us for three years past, and during that time we have had ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... the way. Cartier had disposed of his ships, and taken up his permanent residence at Limoilou. To purchase a new vessel would cost money; and Charles, ever prodigal, had but small means that he could call his own. On Cartier he depended for help; but that shrewd seaman knew how the enterprise must end, and instead of putting his hand into his money-bag, he did his utmost to dissuade La ...
— Marguerite De Roberval - A Romance of the Days of Jacques Cartier • T. G. Marquis
... came up to the house at Walcote, the windows from within were lighted up with friendly welcome; the supper-table was spread in the oak-parlor; it seemed as if forgiveness and love were awaiting the returning prodigal. Two or three familiar faces of domestics were on the look-out at the porch—the old housekeeper was there, and young Lockwood from Castlewood in my lord's livery of tawny and blue. His dear mistress pressed his arm as they passed into ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... example and impulse to extravagance through every department of the public service; and of securing, perhaps by design, to private wealth, a monopoly of administration. A man vigilantly prudent might perhaps have lived within his income in Mr. Canning's situation, and it is known that he had no prodigal or expensive tastes; but it is also known that he had that utter carelessness of money through which fortune is not less ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... fairest regions of the world is the Malay Archipelago of the East Indies. Here nature is prodigal with her gifts to man, and the cocoa-palm, cinnamon and other trees flourish, and rice, cotton, the sugar cane and tobacco yield their increase under cultivation. But beneath these scenes of loveliness, there are terrific ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... and uncertain rivulets of Cephisus and Ilissus [3],—streams breaking into lesser brooks, deliciously pure and clear. The air is serene—the climate healthful —the seasons temperate. Along the hills yet breathe the wild thyme, and the odorous plants which, everywhere prodigal in Greece, are more especially fragrant in that lucid sky;—and still the atmosphere colours with peculiar and various taints the marble of the existent temples and the face of ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... this he was principally indebted to Sandford, who took pains to bring his works to the notice of connoisseurs. But, with all his success, the object of his ambition was as far off as at first. Imperceptibly he had acquired expensive habits. He was not prodigal, not extravagant; but, having a keen sense of the beautiful, he gradually became more fastidious in dress, and in all those nameless elegancies which seem of right to belong to the accomplished man, as to the gentleman in easy circumstances. This desire for ease and luxury did not conflict with simplicity; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... creature. For if he hated his sin, nay if he felt weary and heavy laden in the least degree because of it, he might leave it. There is a free grace, and a proffered assistance of the Holy Ghost, of which he might avail himself at any moment. Had he the feeling of the weary and penitent prodigal, the same father's house is ever open for his return; and the same father seeing him on his return, though still a great way off, would run and fall upon his neck and kiss him. But the heart is hard, and the spirit is utterly selfish, and the will is perverse and determined, and therefore ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... "Alexandre Dumas a la Maison d'Or," M. Philibert Audebrand tells the tale of this Micawber of newspapers. Everything went into it, good or bad, and the name of Dumas was expected to make all current coin. For Dumas, unluckily, was as prodigal of his name as of his gold, and no reputation could bear the drafts he made on his celebrity. His son says, in the preface to Le Fils Naturel: "Tragedy, dramas, history, romance, comedy, travel, you cast all of them in the furnace and the mould of your brain, and you peopled the world ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... in solitude in the mountains have, indeed, been precious days to me, Miss Liddiard," he continued. "I felt like the prodigal son, who had returned to his father, and the bright gleam of His smile seemed to rest on me. My only regret was, that I had not His word to apply to, but many precious verses which I had learned as a child came back to me, and afforded me comfort and consolation, and ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... mother read the chapter instead of him, as was his wont when greatly fatigued. Whereupon that sweet saint, as I must ever have leave to call her, turned, not to the prophecy of Ezekiel, but to the gospel of Saint Luke, and read out from that chapter which contains the parable of the Prodigal Son. And when she came to the words, "For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found"—when she had come to this place, my father, who had sat and listened hitherto, cried out ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... delicious freshness of this dawning hour may be preserved even to midday, and may be brought back and restored after it has been for years a stranger. Nature, though a severe disciplinarian, is still, in many respects, most patient and easy to be entreated, and meets any repentant movement of her prodigal children with wonderful condescension. Take Bulwer's account of the first few weeks of his sojourn at Malvern, and you will read, in very elegant English, the story of an experience of pleasure which has surprised and delighted many a patient at a water-cure. The return to the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the New Testament, the parable of the prodigal son teaches us plainly that when we repent and return to God, we shall be received, and that without any reference ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... obligations of friendship; and he refused to retain the Danubian principalities as the price for suffering a further dismemberment of Prussia. "We have made loyal war,'' he said, "we must make a loyal peace.'' It was not long before the first enthusiasm of Tilsit began to wane. Napoleon was prodigal of promises, but niggard of their fulfilment. The French remained in Prussia, the Russians on the Danube; and each accused the other of breach of faith. Meanwhile, however, the personal relations of Alexander and Napoleon were of the most cordial character; ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... Major-General Rundle, chief of staff, usually acted. Personally, either gentleman was all that could be desired. Both were alike ready and courteous in the discharge of their at all times rather onerous duty, giving frequent audience to the numerous contingent of eager newsmen, garrulous and prodigal with pencil and pen. Some of the new-comers to the business felt sorely hit, because they were precluded from writing at large upon all subjects connected with the campaign. The excision of their copy grieved and hurt them as ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... sermon which he had heard that afternoon, and took up the book to look for the text,—"The sea shall give up its dead." The first words upon which his eye fell were,—"For this my son was lost and is found." The beautiful story of the Prodigal Son, as he had heard it in childhood, came full into his mind, and he remembered how often he had read it at his mother's knee. The tears rolled down his cheek, as, sitting down beside the little pine table, he read again that touching picture of God's ...
— Hurrah for New England! - The Virginia Boy's Vacation • Louisa C. Tuthill
... a dozen players round the board—four on one wing, two on the other. Of the latter, one was that very young man who had been responsible for P. Sybarite's change of mind with regard to going home. With a bored air this prodigal was frittering away five-dollar notes on the colours, the columns, and the dozens: his ill success stupendous, his apparent indifference positively magnificent. But in the course of the little while that P. Sybarite watched, he either grew weary or succeeded in emptying his ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... could not preach it into their hearts we would try and burn it in; so we put right over the pulpit in gas-jets these words—God is Love. A man going along the streets one night glanced through the door, and saw the text. He was a poor prodigal. As he passed on he thought to himself, "God is Love! No! He does not love me; for I am a poor miserable sinner." He tried to get rid of the text; but it seemed to stand out right before him in letters of ...
— The Way to God and How to Find It • Dwight Moody
... stretched out on the table asleep, when he stopped there for water. But he was a first-rate man and I didn't want to lose him, so I wrote him a sharp letter and told him that a repetition of his offense would cause him to receive his time instantly. He was as penitent as the prodigal son, and promised never to so offend again; and he kept his word—for just about ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... supply the wants of his prodigal and degenerate nephew, but they increased so enormously that he was forced to remonstrate with the young man upon the recklessness of his conduct. His remonstrances were met with a spirit of impertinence ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... until his eyes ached. Then he looked at the highly-coloured scripture pieces on the walls, in little black frames like common shaving-glasses, and saw how the Wise Men (with a strong family likeness among them) worshipped in a pink manger; and how the Prodigal Son came home in red rags to a purple father, and already feasted his imagination on a sea-green calf. Then he glanced through the window at the falling rain, coming down aslant upon the sign-post over against the house, and overflowing the horse-trough; ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... confidence in God as a real and near friend, which gave to Abraham's life such distinction, and the calm repose which made his character so impressive. Strong in the sense of God's friendship, he lived above the world, prodigal of present possessions, because sure of the future, waiting securely in the hope of the great salvation. He walked with God in sweet unaffected piety, and serene faith, letting his character ripen in the sunshine, and living ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... impoverishing, as well as enriching, men: the prodigal becomes poor by pretending to be richer than he really is, while seeming poverty is the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... the laughter of youth and maid made every dusk resonant with joy. On Poplar Hill houses sprang up like magic and weddings came. The passing stranger was stunned to find out in the wilderness such a spot; gayety, prodigal hospitality, a police force of gentlemen—nearly all of whom were college graduates—and a club, where poker flourished in the smoke of Havana cigars, and a barrel of whiskey stood in one corner with a faucet ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... six gentlemen, and seven soldiers. The narrative of the voyage is signed by Dr. Russell, Thomas Momford, gentleman, and Anas Todkill, soldier. Master Scrivener remained at the fort, where his presence was needed to keep in check the prodigal waste of the stores upon his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... American seas, and of many a desperate battle; there was Sir Martin Frobisher, one of the earliest explorers of the Arctic seas in search of that North-West Passage which is still the darling object of England's boldest mariners. There was the high-admiral of England, Lord Howard of Effingham, prodigal of all things in his country's cause, and who had recently had the noble daring to refuse to dismantle part of the fleet, though the Queen had sent him orders to do so, in consequence of an exaggerated report ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... to the conclusion that you have but one, and a good share of that gone already, perhaps there will be some peace in the house for the time to come." My aunt always complained that her brother had one very serious fault, he was prodigal of time, and took too little thought for the future, and on this ground she replied in rather a snappish voice: "Well, at any rate, if every one was as slack and careless as you, they would hardly survive for one life time; and I can tell you one thing ...
— Walter Harland - Or, Memories of the Past • Harriet S. Caswell
... that. You were disappointed because Uncle Ira had not left you his money, and I suppose that was your way of working it off. If you had just run away and come back again with a headache, I'd have treated you like the Prodigal Son. But there are some things which are too much, and bringing a perfect stranger back with you for an indefinite period is one of them. I'm not saying anything against Mr Chalmers personally. I haven't had time to find out much about him, except that he's an Englishman; but he looks respectable. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... of a mother to her prodigal son that makes her pray for him. True love to souls will become in us the spirit of intercession. It is possible to do a great deal of faithful, earnest work for our fellowmen without true love to them. Just ...
— The Ministry of Intercession - A Plea for More Prayer • Andrew Murray
... the trio reviewing the past and exchanging news of the present. My services, it was clear, would no longer be required by the prodigal. He and his mates ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... the dying prodigal or prostitute he would sit with intense interest, pointing them to Him who casts out none. In our house to house visitation he would sit down and read of the Saviour's love, making special reference to those ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle
... Harbinger three miles distant at Whitewater. But since he had the faculty of not being bored with his own society, this did not worry him. Of local charity, especially to the fishers of the town, whose winter months were nowadays very bare of profit, he was prodigal to the verge of extravagance, for his income was not great. But in politics, beyond acting as the figure-head of certain municipal efforts, he took little or no part. His Toryism indeed was of the mild order, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... root, and often bring others down with them in their fall. Sometimes these trees are split up at the time into rails or firewood; sometimes dragged to the saw-mills to be made into lumber; but are often piled into heaps and burnt—a necessary but prodigal waste of wood, to which I never became reconciled. When the wood has been cleared off, wheat is sown among the stumps, and then grass, which appears only to last about four years. Fire is put on the tops of these unsightly stumps to burn them down ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... rigging up a crane to land the bags, boxes and crates that were piled on deck in prodigal profusion. ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... 1862 composed incidental music for "The Tempest," well received at the Crystal Palace; since then has been a prolific writer of all kinds of music, ranging from hymns and oratorios to popular songs and comic operas; his oratorios include "The Prodigal Son" (1868), "The Light of the World," "The Golden Legend," &c., but it is as a writer of light and tuneful operas (librettos by W. S. GILBERT, q. v.) that he is best known; these began with "Cox and Box" (1866), and include "Trial by Jury," ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... thought of, no doubt, more than once in his solitary and unhappy holidays. A year after he actually ran away, not from school, but from home; and appeared one morning, gaunt and hungry, at Sarah's cottage two hundred miles away from Clapham, who housed the poor prodigal, and killed her calf for him—washed him, with many tears and kisses, and put him to bed and to sleep; from which slumber he was aroused by the appearance of his father, whose sure instinct, backed by Mrs. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... purposes, found but too much justification in the inefficiency and corruption of many both of the bishops and clergy, and in the rapacious and selfish policy of the government, forced to starve and cripple the public service, while great men and favourites built up their fortunes out of the prodigal indulgence ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... where they can. Literature and science will find patrons, and here in Massachusetts have always found them. If the legislators of the State have been sparing of their benefactions, the wealthy sons of the State have been prodigal of theirs. In no country has the private patronage of science been more liberal and prompt than in Massachusetts. Seldom, in the history of science, has there been a nobler instance of that patronage than ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... experience hitherto quite strange to my young life. As I had had nothing to eat, I was obliged repeatedly to leave the gambling table owing to sickness. With this last thaler I staked my life, for my return to my home was, of course, out of the question. Already I saw myself in the grey dawn, a prodigal son, fleeing from all I held dear, through forest and field towards the unknown. My mood of despair had gained so strong a hold upon me that, when my card won, I immediately placed all the money on a fresh stake, and repeated this experiment ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... old couple bustled about the bright carpeted room, making it comfortable, and cooing over the return of their prodigal, till a heaven of homeness was made of ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... steadily refused to turn Jim off. Many a time the old gentleman sat up half the night with the returned and noisy prodigal. A word from the Squire would calm Jim for the time and would occasionally call forth a burst of repentant tears. Jim's case, indeed, was one of the causes that led us at the old farm so bitterly ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... you catch a glimpse of the elegant seat of Francis Vivian, Esq." To judge by the date of the work, the said Francis Vivian might be the grandfather of my friend, his namesake. There could no longer be any doubt as to the parentage of this prodigal son. ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... one other who believed in the Tennessee land—Jane Clemens's favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always had "millions in it"—everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... was fifteen I was almost as tall and broad-shouldered as my father. Boy-like, I was prodigal of my bounding vigor, which had not tempered down to the strength of my mature manhood. It was well for me that a sobering responsibility fell on me early, else I might have squandered my resources of endurance, and in place of this sturdy story-teller whose sixty years sit ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... had thus gathered. Accordingly, when the herald came in to deliver his message, he found the whole city given up to feasting and revelry, and he saw stores of provisions at hand, which were in process of being distributed and consumed with the most prodigal profusion. The herald reported this state of things to Alyattes. Alyattes then gave up all hopes of reducing Miletus by famine, and made a permanent peace, binding himself to its stipulations by a very solemn treaty. To celebrate the event, too, he built two temples ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... shouts to ordinary folk on foot to get out of the way had done that already. Sheikh ben Nazir opened the door in person. His welcome to me was the sort that comes to mind when you read the Bible story of the prodigal son returning from a far-off country. I might have been his blood-relation. But perhaps I am wrong about that; bloodfeuds among blood-relations are notoriously savage. He was the host, and I the guest. Among genuine Arabs that is the most binding ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... married the sister of George III; but their daughter, the Princess Caroline, was now the reluctant choice of the Prince of Wales. The parents, both at Windsor and at Brunswick welcomed the avowal by the royal prodigal of the claims of lawful wedlock. The Duchess of Brunswick fell into raptures at the brilliant prospects thus opened out for her daughter; and it seemed that both Hymen and Mars, for once working in unison, conspired to bring from his inglorious retreat at ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... the contrary; war is recognized as the most potent method still; the prominence of military matters is greater than ever before; at no time in the past has interest in war been so keen as at the present, or the expenditure of blood and money been so prodigal; at no time before has war so thoroughly engaged the intellect and ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... in and sat down at the door. The sermon wass on the Prodigal Son, but there iss only one word I remember. 'You are not forgotten or cast off,' the preacher said; 'you are missed,' and then he will come back to it again, and it wass always 'missed, missed, missed.' Sometimes ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren
... civilian suit of the fashion of '72, the latter much too snug for him, our squadron leader of the Sioux campaign looked little like a trooper as he sauntered with his detective companion into the lobby of the Paxton a few minutes later, and listened to his modernized tale of the prodigal son. It was all known to the police. Lowndes had run through the purse and patience of his Eastern kindred some two years before. Lowndes had been transported to a cattle ranch near Fort Cushing in hopes of permanent benefit, but speedily ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... Messer Domeniddio of the Florentines stood rather for a mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were it not ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... agreed with her if she had not recollected, with some little alarm, the deficit which such an expense must make in their budget. The three francs spent upon this single expedition were the savings of a whole week of work. Thus the joy of the elder of the two sisters was mixed with remorse; the prodigal child now and then turned its eyes toward the back street of ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... has told us about the swine, and since then it puts us into a good humour whenever we hear even the grunt of one. Saint Anthony has taken them under his patronage, and if we think of the "prodigal son," we are at once in the midst of the sty, and it was just before such a one that our carriage stopped in Sweden. By the high road, closely adjoining his house, the peasant had his sty, and that such a one as there is probably scarcely its like ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... one of the new maids is his sister Maggie, and he'd just been callin' friendly in the hopes of sep'ratin' her from a dollar or so. It wa'n't Maggie's day for contributin' to the prodigal son fund, though, and Skeet was statin' his opinion of her reckless when the butler interfered. Come near losin' Maggie her job, that little scene did; but she promises faithful it sha'n't happen again, and was ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... which Iden had planted, flung sackfuls of bloom at his feet. They poured themselves out in abandoned, open-armed, spendthrift, wasteful—perfectly prodigal—quantities of rose-tinted petal; prodigal as a river which flows full to the brim, never questioning but what there will be plenty of water ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... and a cup of coffee almost anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something more than serious—it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one night," said he. He always was rather careless of ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of forgiving love than in the terrors of retribution; hence, with tears and burning sentiments of sympathy for the erring children of men, he led his hearers as it were by the hand to the Father of the prodigal—to that Jesus who forgave and loved the ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... Proceedings (law) proceso—ado. Proceeding procedo. Procession procesio. Process procedo, rimedo. Proclaim proklami. Procrastinate prokrasti. Procure havigi. Procuration konfidatisto. Prodigal malsxpara. Prodigality malsxparemo. Prodigious mireginda. Prodigy miregindajxo. Produce produkti. Produce produktajxo. Product produktajxo. Production produkto. Productive fruktoporta. Proem antauxdramo, antauxdiro. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... at the procession till it disappeared round a bend of the road. Its bequest of dust and smoke was quickly spent by a prodigal young breeze. Landscape and seascape were reindued with their full amenities. Ruskin would have been pleased. So indeed was I; but that railway-car (in which, it romantically struck me, I myself might once, might ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... again. She read of the prodigal son, and of Him who would not condemn the woman that was a sinner. It was a solemn and terrible moment. The fathomless depths of the girl's voice, breaking once and again to a low wail, then rising to a piercing cry, went with the words themselves like ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... in a humour, played the prodigal, And bade my senses to a solemn feast; Yet more to grace the company withal, Invites my heart to be the chiefest guest. No other drink would serve this glutton's turn, But precious tears distilling from mine eyne, Which with my sighs this epicure doth burn, Quaffing carouses in this costly wine; ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith
... worthless weed; but the more historical associations we can link with our localities, the richer will be the daily life that feeds upon the past, and the more valuable the things that have been long established: so that our children will be less prodigal than their fathers in sacrificing good institutions to passionate impulses and impracticable theories. This herb of grace, let us hope, may be found in the old ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... knights; a multitude of noble families without titles, sixty of whom were inscribed in the Capitol by Benedict XIV.; a vast extent of signiorial domains; a thousand palaces; a hundred picture-galleries, large and small; a considerable revenue; a prodigal display of horses, carriages, servants, and armorial bearings; some almost royal entertainments in the course of every winter; the remains of feudal privileges; and the respect of the lower orders: such are the more remarkable features which distinguish the Roman nobility, and expose it to the ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... Radical who could write Tory articles in a newspaper for pay. At the same time, it is only fair to say that Meredith remains a sufficiently splendid figure in. Mr. Ellis's book even when we know the worst about him. Was his a generous genius? It was at least a prodigal one. As poet, novelist, correspondent, and conversationalist, he leaves an impression of beauty, wit, and power in ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... would be to force them into that marriage at first. Oh, my tender-hearted little one, can you not see that the bondage is more humiliating, more craven than is the idea of the veriest chattel mortgage? Yet you refuse to let the injured one go free, as you would not refuse the poorest prodigal whose one chance for home and happiness was passing ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo
... joy. There was music and dancing, as well as feasting, when the prodigal son came home; returned from his sins, washed from his defilement, clothed at last in "the best robe" a sinner can wear.[12] According ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... can conceal her high station and fanciful design; every evening in the year she proceeds to illuminate herself in honour of her own beauty; and as if to complete the scheme—or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country—half-way over to Fife, there is an outpost of light upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sunshine permeating it. No one knows whence it rises, nor at what hour to expect it. It is like a giant spectre which, having lain dormant since the carboniferous age, has been raised into life and being at the call of restless humanity; it is now punishing us for our prodigal use of the wealth it left us, by clasping us in its deadly arms, cutting off our brilliant sunshine, and necessitating the use in the daytime of artificial light; inducing all kinds of bronchial and throat affections, corroding telegraph and telephone ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... supper, and there stood ready wild fowl and fish, fruits and pastry, with the rarest wines and the richest vessels; the great middle table and the side buffet alike made such a show as though Pomona, Ceres, Bacchus, and Plutus had heaped it with prodigal hand. Yet was there no provision for merry-making. My grand-uncle loved to be quit of his guests at an early hour; hence no table was laid for them to sit down to meat, and each one held his plate ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sooner or later, these riches, so laboriously amassed by the miser, will almost inevitably shower magnificences of all sorts; for the proverb says: A miserly father makes a prodigal son." ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue
... miles from Manchester, her majesty paid a visit to that great city. On no occasion, even in the metropolis, was so vast a multitude of persons collected to see the queen; and, probably, on no occasion was she ever welcomed in a provincial city with so prodigal an expenditure and splendid a display of loyalty. Manchester and Salford were both traversed in their great principal thoroughfares by the royal procession, attended with military pomp, and many persons of very great eminence in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... had chosen her imperiously for his assistant and underling in the house of the priest, had informed her that she was to receive twenty-five lire a month for her services, besides food and lodging, and plenty of the good, red wine of Amato. To Lucrezia such wages seemed prodigal. She had never yet earned more than the half of them. But it was not only this prospect of riches which now moved ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... violets which before had perfumed her bosom. I could not help thinking about my old mathematical master. I did not then see any difference between him and his pupil, than that which exists between a frugal man and a prodigal, little thinking that he of the two who seemed to calculate the better, actually calculated the worse. The luncheon went off merrily. Very soon, seated in a little drawing-room newly decorated, before a cheerful ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... line ran east again to Mazar trench with a prodigal expenditure of wire in front of it, and then south for several hundred yards, when it was thrown out to the south-west to embrace a position of high importance known as Umbrella Hill, a dune of blazing yellow sand facing, about 500 yards away, ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... every branch of society, that the ennobling idea of home may be realized in every bosom. Even to this day our unoccupied lands are the storehouse of American freedom,—they are father's mansions to which every son of the Republic, be he prodigal or not, may turn his steps ...
— Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1 • George Boutwell
... eyeglasses which glittered as he bent over. It was said that when a boy he had a love affair with his cousin Juana, that austere senora whom everybody called the "Pope-ess," who lived like a nun, and who enjoyed enormous riches, making prodigal donations in former times to the pretender Don Carlos, and now to the ecclesiastics ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... this direction, the reverse, for the moment, is true. The 900,000 square miles of area (it is eighty-eight times the size of Belgium) have scarcely been scraped by the hand of man, although Nature has been prodigal in her share of the development. Wild rubber, the gathering of which loosed the storm about King Leopold's head, is nearly exhausted because of the one-time ruthless harvesting. Cotton and coffee are infant industries. The principal ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... Randolph Crescent; but the windows looked down, discreetly blinded, on the return of the prodigal. John's pass-key was a recent privilege; this was the first time it had been used; and, oh! with what a sickening sense of his unworthiness he now inserted it into the well-oiled lock and entered that ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... lift up our voices, 'Our Father,' and therein proclaim that God who loves every soul of man, who knows each man's wants, who bends over him in pitying tenderness, who can neither die nor change, and who will gather into His eternal home all His prodigal children and keep them blessed by His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... monastery, and of certain other enormous crimes and excesses hereafter written. In the rule, custody, and administration of the goods, spiritual and temporal, of the said monastery, you are so remiss, so negligent, so prodigal, that whereas the said monastery was of old times founded and endowed by the pious devotion of illustrious princes of famous memory, heretofore kings of this land, the most noble progenitors of our most serene Lord and King that now is, in order ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... seven one Sunday evening when we first entered it. The lights were burning, the blinds were drawn, and there were 23 people in the place. In a pew on the left-hand side a little old man was holding forth as to the "prodigal son." It was the first time he had ever talked in the chapel, and he has never said a word since. He had a peculiarly free and easy style. Sometimes he leaned over the pew door, and beat time with one foot whilst ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... definitely for myself, and conditionally for you," said Hartley cheerfully. "Now I will ring up Wilder and tell him that the prodigal has reappeared, and ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... sorrow, fear and faith,—which are an essential part of our human nature; and the more it reflects these emotions the more surely does it awaken a response in men of every race. Every father must respond to the parable of the prodigal son; wherever men are heroic, they will acknowledge the mastery of Homer; wherever a man thinks on the strange phenomenon of evil in the world, he will find his own thoughts in the Book of Job; in ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... most utterly turned their back on purity. The parables in the Third Gospel of the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son lay emphasis upon the possibility of recovery, and, in the case of the prodigal, specially on the ability to return for those ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... of Caravaggio with power of colour and modelling, all that the science of painting could achieve when bereft of genius. And afterwards the decline continued until Bernini was reached—Bernini, the real creator of the Rome of the present popes, the prodigal child who at twenty could already show a galaxy of colossal marble wenches, the universal architect who with fearful activity finished the facade, built the colonnade, decorated the interior of St. Peter's, and raised fountains, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... recount. The boarders assisted vicariously at weddings and wedding receptions, afternoon teas and dances, given in halls. "Up-town" seemed to them largely given to entertainment and hilarity of an enviably prodigal sort. Mrs. Bowse's guests were not of the class which entertains or is entertained, and the details of banquets and ball-dresses and money-spending were not uncheering material for conversation. Such topics suggested the presence and dispensing of a good deal of desirable specie, which in ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... me to sing in public. Kent had said he would be happier if he knew I had given up that life and was among friends. And they—they had called themselves my friends. When I went back to them they welcomed me. Mr. Cripps called me his 'prodigal daughter,' and Mrs. Cripps prayed over me. It wasn't until I told them I had no 'inheritance,' except one of debt, that they began to show me what they really were. They wouldn't believe it. They said you were trying to defraud me. It was dreadful. I—I think I should have run away again ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... there's nothin' on earth an Indian can do as well as a white man, given the same chance to learn it. Indians know the outdoors because they have to know it to live. The desert's no prodigal mother. Her sons have to rustle right smart to keep their tummies satisfied. If the 'Paches and the Kiowas didn't know how to cut sign an' read it, how to hunt an' fish an' follow a trail, they'd all be in their happy huntin' grounds long ago. They're what old Nature has made 'em. But I'll tell you ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... land, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars? For once, we get a gleam of the truth, but a gleam only, in the "popular writer's" account when he says: "John Jacob Astor's record is constantly crossed by embarrassed families, prodigal sons, mortgages and foreclosure sales. Many of the victims of his foresight were those highest in church and state. He thus acquired for $75,000 one-half of Governor George Clinton's splendid Greenwich country place [in the old Greenwich village on the west ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... elegantly dressed young fellow lounging along between a blue-checkered pinafored girl on one side and a barefooted boy on the other. The ranchmen turned and looked after him curiously. One, a rustic prodigal, reduced by dissipation to the swine-husks of ranching, saw ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Equator Lodge bordering close upon open mutiny. Even Mrs. Kingdom plucked up spirit and read the astonished captain a homily upon the first duties of a parent—a homily which she backed up by reading the story of the Prodigal Son through to the bitter end. At the conclusion she broke down entirely and was led up to bed by Kate and Bella, the sympathy of the latter taking an acute form, and consisting mainly of innuendoes which could only refer to one person ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... out the five eighths of blue ribbon by the aid of certain brass nails on the counter. He gave good measure, not prodigal, for he was loyal to his employer, but putting a very moderate strain on the ribbon, and letting the thumb-nail slide with a contempt of infinitesimals which betokened a large soul in ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Sinai. It is like living at the foot of Mount Pelee, the home of awful eruption, and therefore the realm of gloom and uncertainty and fear. We are not saved by law, neither indeed can we be. Neither can law heal us after our transgressions and defeats. The law has nothing for prodigal men but "blackness, and darkness, and tempest." It has no sound but dreaded decree, no message but menace, no look but a frown. Who will build his house at ...
— My Daily Meditation for the Circling Year • John Henry Jowett
... "Behold the prodigal! You took your time about coming back, didn't you? Was the hospital to your taste, the nurses pretty? How is the wife? Any more children? How goes ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... the epoch of this story, there dwelt in one of the Middle States a man whom we shall call Fauntleroy; a man of wealth, and magnificent tastes, and prodigal expenditure. His home might almost be styled a palace; his habits, in the ordinary sense, princely. His whole being seemed to have crystallized itself into an external splendor, wherewith he glittered in the eyes of the world, and had no other life ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in the King, here concurred with reasons of state. Not only had Brunswick married the sister of George III; but their daughter, the Princess Caroline, was now the reluctant choice of the Prince of Wales. The parents, both at Windsor and at Brunswick welcomed the avowal by the royal prodigal of the claims of lawful wedlock. The Duchess of Brunswick fell into raptures at the brilliant prospects thus opened out for her daughter; and it seemed that both Hymen and Mars, for once working in unison, conspired to bring from his inglorious ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... God's lost prodigal; I left Him for the world's delusive charms. With mild reproof He wooed me to His arms; And when I come, He lights the vaulted hall, Prepares a banquet for the son restored, And makes His noblest creature my reward. From this time forth I'll never leave that Light,— But stand its ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... grinding sounds of carriage wheels on the gravel road without were heard, and in an instant Bessie was at the door to welcome the prodigal. And what a Thaddeus it was that came home that morning! His eyes showed conclusively that he had had no sleep, save the more or less unsatisfactory napping which suburban residents get on the trains. His beautiful pearl-gray scarf, ...
— Paste Jewels • John Kendrick Bangs
... the Germans poured projectiles into the enemy's works; but for the most part their shooting was a waste of ammunition. Just why the defenders of Tsing-tau were so prodigal of ammunition at this time never has been satisfactorily explained. Military correspondents estimated that during one period of twenty-four hours the forts on the three hills containing the main defensive positions fired more than 2,000 shells without ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... scale of life's enjoyment, pray you what is? The world loves contrasts. The deep-dyed sinner raising the standard of piety is picturesque. If, charmed by his own new virtues, he is constant in his enthusiasm, behold a St. Augustine! Everything is with the returned prodigal—the more so if he be of the notorious Vaufontaines, who were ever saints turned sinners, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this word gilt[47] including double sense, The double guilt of his incontinence Might be express'd, that had no stay t' employ The treasure which the love-god let him joy In his dear Hero, with such sacred thrift As had beseem'd so sanctified a gift; 30 But, like a greedy vulgar prodigal, Would on the stock dispend, and rudely fall, Before his time, to that unblessed blessing Which, for lust's plague, doth perish with possessing: Joy graven in sense, like snow[48] in water, wasts: Without preserve ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... middle-class revolution. The revolution was inaugurated by the Parliament of Paris—a pettifogging legal assembly. Marie Antoinette was but one fine useless woman among the millions, and she personified the heedless prodigal selfishness of autocracy. We of the Socialist movement, who are full of the idea of social service, of making a full return to society for the bread we eat, the clothes we wear out, and the house-room we occupy, how can we be expected to ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... on this subject:—"It is remarkable that God is sparing of miracles, and seems to prefer the ordinary processes of nature, if equally effectual for the accomplishment of his purposes. He might have saved Noah and his family by miracles; but he is not prodigal of these, and so he appointed that an ark should be made to bear up the living cargo which was to be kept alive on the surface of the waters; and not only so, but he respects the laws of the animal physiology, as he did those of hydrostatics, in that he put them by pairs into the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... lot gratified me exceedingly. Little had been done for it except by Nature, but she had worked with so prodigal a hand that it showed all kinds of possibilities, both for beauty and for utility. Before leaving the place, I had a little talk ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... me miserable that something stands up on the tip of my heart and does its darnedest to sing. It impresses me as life on such a sane and gigantic scale that I want to be an actual part of it, that I positively ache to have a share in its immensities. It seems so fruitful and prodigal and generous and patient. It's so open-handed in the way it produces and gives and returns our love. And there's a completeness about it that makes me feel it can't ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... of about three tons. With him went Dr. Walter Russell, six gentlemen, and seven soldiers. The narrative of the voyage is signed by Dr. Russell, Thomas Momford, gentleman, and Anas Todkill, soldier. Master Scrivener remained at the fort, where his presence was needed to keep in check the prodigal waste of the stores upon his ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... department of the public service; and of securing, perhaps by design, to private wealth, a monopoly of administration. A man vigilantly prudent might perhaps have lived within his income in Mr. Canning's situation, and it is known that he had no prodigal or expensive tastes; but it is also known that he had that utter carelessness of money through which fortune is ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Miss Bell. "Misers do not wish to owe anything, and prodigal people can bear to have debts. They do not think of the money they have, and they think less of the money they owe. I did not say that Pietro Vanucci of Perugia was a man without property. I said that he had a hard business ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... Bishop, gaily, as he took her hand, "you have not been prodigal of your gracious self of late. A Sabbath without you at service! ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... in an hundred instances give proof of the like predominance of vice over virtue? And that we have risked more to serve and promote the interests of the former, than ever a good man did to serve a good man or a good cause? For have we not been prodigal of life and fortune? have we not defied the civil magistrate upon occasion? and have we not attempted rescues, and dared all things, only to extricate a ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... imagine this was no case of the town-crier being sent out. When the prodigal got ready to return, under prescribed conditions—the ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... where contempt, Nor envy, nor detraction, ever found A harbour yet; an understanding sound; Just views of right and wrong; perception full Of the deformed, and of the beautiful, In life and manners; wit above her sex, Which, as a gem, her sprightly converse decks; Exuberant fancies, prodigal of mirth, To gladden woodland walk, or winter hearth; A noble nature, conqueror in the strife Of conflict with a hard discouraging life, Strengthening the veins of virtue, past the power Of those whose days have been one silken ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... see me again in this life. I am entirely unable to describe what my feelings were at that time. It was almost like the return of the prodigal son. There was weeping and rejoicing. They were filled with surprise and fear; with sadness and joy. The sensation of joy at that moment flashed like lightning over my afflicted mind, mingled with a thousand dreadful ...
— Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself • Henry Bibb
... wanted to know everything at once. How, what, where, when, and why. Also who. And all about Tellus and the Tellurian solar system. How did the visitors like Hodell? And all about Belle's green hair. And the photographers were prodigal of film, shooting everything from ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... Barton at any hour. And the vigorous, dominating woman who had captured my uncle Bash, buried him in a far country, and then effected a hop, skip, and jump from Bangkok to Seattle, was likely to be a prodigal spender of gasoline. Her propensity for travelling encouraged the hope that she would quickly weary of Barton and pine for lands where ...
— Lady Larkspur • Meredith Nicholson
... she was rather enjoying herself. It was all so extremely like the sort of plays over which she had been accustomed to shed tears. The Prodigal's Return! And on Christmas Eve! It only required a little snow to be falling and a crying ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... struggle with physical nature is necessarily and of itself a curse. It may call out man's powers, stimulate to action, and result in growth and development. Where a prodigal nature amply provides for man's bodily necessities without much effort on his part, the result may be, in the absence of other stimulating influences giving rise to new wants, a paralyzing slothfulness, an animal passivity and content. This may be observed in whole peoples highly favored by soil ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... loving sympathy, in heaven. It was this confidence in God as a real and near friend, which gave to Abraham's life such distinction, and the calm repose which made his character so impressive. Strong in the sense of God's friendship, he lived above the world, prodigal of present possessions, because sure of the future, waiting securely in the hope of the great salvation. He walked with God in sweet unaffected piety, and serene faith, letting his character ripen in the sunshine, and living out his life as unto God not unto men. To know the love of God does not ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... that even you are welcome when you come; the gate stands open; the Redeemer from within is calling chief sinners in, He has pledged himself to cast no comer out because of his worthlessness. Nor does the freeness of his grace prove that the prodigal's sins are small; it proves only that the forgiving love ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... certain small capital which his father had agreed to give him as his share of what there might be of the good things of the world among the Shands generally. As Shand himself said of both of them, he was about to go forth as a prodigal son, with a perfect assurance that, should he come back empty-handed, no calf would be killed for him. But he was an active man, with a dash of fun, and perhaps a sprinkling of wit, quick and brave, to whom life was apparently a joke, and ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... the walls, and a lonelier watcher in the chapel. For there, in the sanctuary his sister had erected, knelt the returned prodigal, unknown to all save that sister. His heart was full of deep emotion, as well it might ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... and I wish that not only you but every son and daughter of South Carolina were here, that I might tell them so.' Mr. Cameron, Secretary of War, came up, and after some remarks he said, 'South Carolina [which had already seceded] is the prodigal son.' 'Ah, Mr. Secretary,' said she, 'if South Carolina is the prodigal son, Uncle Sam, our father, ought to divide the inheritance, and let her go; but they say you are going to make war upon us; is it so?' 'Oh, come back,' said Lincoln, 'tell South Carolina to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... Wales, hardly worthy of the name of cathedrals, it was the first that I had seen. To my uninstructed vision, it seemed the object best worth gazing at in the whole world; and now, after beholding a great many more, I remember it with less prodigal admiration only because others are as magnificent as itself. The traces remaining in my memory represent it as airy rather than massive. A multitude of beautiful shapes appeared to be comprehended within ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was gay and frivolous. New hopes had awakened the spirit of folly in the aristocracy, and the "liberator," now at the very height of his physical power, was often conspicuous in the revels. In the intervals of his serious labors Napoleon gave way to a life of sensuality, and the women were prodigal of their charms. One of them was the well-known Countess Walewska, a beautiful woman, who while yet a child had been forced into wedlock with an aged nobleman. She was now made to feel that the future of her country depended upon her captivating Napoleon, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he died abroad, and his widow returned to England. Not having a relation, and scarcely an acquaintance, in the world, she made an appeal to her husband's father, the wealthiest noble in England, and a man who was often prodigal, and occasionally generous, who respected law, and despised opinion. Lord Monmouth decided that, provided she gave up her child, and permanently resided in one of the remotest counties, he would make her a yearly allowance of three ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... man! while in thy early years, How prodigal of time! Misspending all thy precious hours, Thy glorious youthful prime! Alternate follies take the sway, Licentious passions burn; Which tenfold force gives Nature's law, That man was made ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... at once the width of the gulf which separates the traditionalist from the philosopher. To Dr. Gore the creeds and the miracles are essential to Christianity. No Virgin Birth, no Sermon on the Mount! No Resurrection of the Body, no Parable of the Prodigal Son! No Descent into Hell, no revelation that the Kingdom of Heaven is within! Need we wonder that Dr. Gore cries out despairingly for more discipline? He summons reason, it is true, but to defend and explain creeds without which ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... question of taxation, ii. 120. but in the ancient commonwealths chiefly on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state, ii. 120. character of civil freedom, ii. 229. our best securities for it obtained from princes who were either war-like or prodigal, vi. 35. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... that the incredible, once it happened, became as commonplace as the meals we eat or the clothes we wear. It seemed to Colwyn that the unexpected happened too frequently to call forth the astonishment with which it was invariably greeted by most people. In his experience, Life was almost too prodigal of its surprises, so much so, indeed, as to be in danger of reaching the limit of its own resources. But he consoled himself, whimsically enough, with the belief that such an event was too probable ever ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... that, he begged his mother to come very often to Little Market Street and to become intimate with Robin. But when he saw her with Robin he was generally embarrassed, although she was obviously enchanted with that gentleman, for whose benefit she was amazingly prodigal of nods and becks and wreathed smiles. It was a pity, he thought, that his mother was at moments so apparently elaborate. He felt her elaboration the more when it was contrasted with the transparent ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... the cage gazed upon madame with stupid awe, while the strange monster capered, or prostrated himself in great humility at her bidding. When she had withdrawn, and after the Professor had made his prodigal offer, it was Mahdi's duty to stimulate ungovernable ferocity, in order to deter any too-venturesome spirits. Nickie did his best. He bounded madly round the cage, he tore at the straw, tooth and nail, ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... my state of mind that day. In the first place the money had to be got. Though it was to go into the hands of swindlers, still it had to be paid. I don't know how your father and Percival get on together;—but I felt very like the prodigal son." ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... in the case of the precocious boy of the street, the cold vices of cynicism, misanthropy, and avarice—the reptilians of society—are found almost exclusively among adults. The younger brother is the prodigal. Experience has not taught him how to value property and ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... our friends couldn't recognize us with the beards we had grown on our faces, and the soiled clothing we were wearing? Well, I finally reached home and you can imagine how glad I was. I think that I felt much as the Prodigal Son did when he returned home. To get my clothes off and get into a good bed, (which I had not done for about a year) and to be cared for by a kind and loving mother, I never felt more like singing, ...
— The Twenty-fifth Regiment Connecticut Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion • George P. Bissell
... his opponents on the Treasury Bench to a line of exhausted volcanoes. They had taken office when they were full of mighty aspirations; they had poured forth measures of all sorts with prodigal vigour; and at last they were reduced to wait, supine and helpless, for the inevitable swing of the political pendulum. A similar process of exhaustion goes on among literary men; and there are certain symptoms which cause expert persons to say, "Ah, poor ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... seeds. l. 355. Nature would seem to have been wonderfully prodigal in the seeds of vegetables, and the spawn of fish; almost any one plant, if all its seeds should grow to maturity, would in a few years alone people the terrestrial globe. Mr. Ray asserts that 101 seeds of tobacco ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... men who had known Shakespeare personally {211} were dead, we certainly cannot believe that its editor had better information than those of the First Folio, who were the poet's personal friends, and who did not include these plays. The spurious dramas printed in the Third Folio were: The London Prodigal, The History of the Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, The History of Sir John Oldcastle, The Puritan Widow, Yorkshire Tragedy, ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... neighbor of the garden; great, soft blue eyes fringed with long, curving lashes; an expression made up of the trustfulness of a child and the gentleness of a fawn; a beautiful head crowned with its own prodigal gold; a lithe and rounded figure, whose every attitude and movement was instinct ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Candle in hand, the prodigal was kneeling by the dead man's bed. He was not praying, however; but had his head well buried in the oaken chest, among the papers of which ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... finding my family well when I arrived at home. My father was quite satisfied with the letters I conveyed from Professor Von Slammerbogen; my mother delighted to receive me in any character, whether that of pedant or prodigal. Nicholas, my elder brother, I found as much attached, as when I left him, to practising "Dull Care", upon the violin. In Tom, however, there was a considerable modification, he having left his sinister arm at Hougomont, in exchange for a three ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... parents, here he was, in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated that he could have "taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an arbor stripped of all its green, the prodigal son in stooping down found among the autumn leaves a bluish bead that had lain there since the time he had played in ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... New Testament and spelled out a chapter before he went to bed—the chapter which told of the Prodigal going home to the Father's house, and the sweet sense of God's forgiveness for all his wasted years, made him feel so happy that he could not sleep for a ...
— Dick Lionheart • Mary Rowles Jarvis
... habits, or scruples, like all men! He was handsome, celebrated, much sought after, having, to respond to his easily awakened desires, fashionable women, whose modesty is so fragile, women of the demi-monde of the theater, prodigal of their favors with such men as he. One of them, some evening after supper, might follow him and please him, take ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... Wrentham, having run away from home at the ripe age of ten, and told him I had come to see him, as he was a poet; and I well remember how then, much to my chagrin, he gave me plum-pudding for dinner, and sent me to play with his boys till a cart was found in which the prodigal was compelled to return), wrote and published a poetical romance, called 'Dunwich; or, a Tale of the Splendid City;' and Agnes Strickland also made it the subject of her ...
— East Anglia - Personal Recollections and Historical Associations • J. Ewing Ritchie
... fragile, evanescent, leaving only a memory which can never be realised again, is as pathetic and as natural as that a beautiful woman should die young. To the actor, the dancer, the same fate is reserved. They work for the instant, and for the memory of the living, with a supremely prodigal magnanimity. Old people tell us that they have seen Desclee, Taglioni; soon no one will be old enough to remember those great artists. Then, if their renown becomes a matter of charity, of credulity, if you will, it will be but equal with the ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... gone they began to understand that the town had looked upon Pop as a giant of industry, a prodigal of vicarious extravagance. They began to feel more keenly still how good a man he was. While they were flourishing like orchids in the sun and air, he had grubbed in the earth, sinking roots everywhere in search ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... forgotten before the man's renown has given them any importance; the few anecdotes which tradition has preserved are seized upon with the utmost avidity and placed in the most conspicuous position; but in these later books we have illustrious children portrayed with a Pre-Raphaelitic and most prodigal pencil. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... another barren camp. Relief seemed so near at hand we kept good courage and talked freely of the happy ending which would soon come. If we had any way to set a good table we would feast and be merry like the prodigal son, but at any rate we shall be safe if we ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... offered. He was a young man, of a handsome person, and was, what his neighbours called, "A man of spirit." He was an excellent fox-hunter, and as excellent a companion over his bottle at the end of the chace—he was prodigal of his fortune, where his pleasures were concerned, and as those pleasures were chiefly social, his sporting companions and his mistresses (for these were also of the plural number) partook largely ...
— A Simple Story • Mrs. Inchbald
... introduced their age into a freer, better, and larger life; and it will always be so while time shall last. Men will arise equal to the wants of their age wherever men are civilized. The causes which produce emergencies are the agents which educate men to meet them; and nature is prodigal of her material among men, as among the things made for ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... steel—that thirst of the heart for pure domestic joy, which the foaming goblet can never quench—that immortal longing which rises up from the lowest abysses of sin, that yearning for pardon which stirred the bosom of the Hebrew prodigal, constrained the transgressing Louis to burst asunder the bonds of iniquity, and return to his ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... are thinking of your unworthiness; like the Prodigal Son you are ready to say "Father, I have sinned again and again, I am not worthy to be called Thy son." God knows just what you are and what you have been, and He Himself has asked the question, "How shall I put you among the children?" It is a question which none but ...
— The One Great Reality • Louisa Clayton
... companions from the hands of the treacherous savages, Ben brought out his well-worn Testament, which was somewhat the worse for the wetting it had got in salt-water, and, at a sign from Mr Manners, he went up to the stranger, and offered to read to him. Mr Manners told him to select the parable of the Prodigal Son, and several other portions of Scripture likely to interest a person whose mind had long been dormant to spiritual matters. The young man was evidently very much interested. Suddenly he interrupted Ben ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... spiritual. It is indeed the two profiles confronting one another, our sympathy balanced, and suspended, as it were, between them, which characterize our recollections of this whole great field. The modern critics and comparers of English and French drama are fond of contrasting the full, rich, even prodigal characterization, rhetorical and lyrical beauty of the Shakespearean drama with the cold, clear, logical, but resistless movement of the French. Yet the contrast is not quite that between characterization and form; the essential form ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... dance, and walked all the way 'round the head of the lake, home, this proud son of near- nobility doing obeisance to his untutored queen. So Alac and Annette married. They traveled far, first to Canada, then to England. Annette's sheer beauty and remarkable taste in the use of Alac's prodigal gifts of clothing and jewels carried the badly disturbed and certainly unfavorably prejudiced MacReady family by assault. Ten years they lived in the big Northumberland home. A boy and a girl came, both blondes like their father. ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... sometimes destroyed by wasting the breath. Carefully control the breath, using only as much as is necessary for the production of tone. Utilize all that you give out. Failure to do this results in a breathy tone. Take in breath like a prodigal; in speaking, give it out ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the quiet course of nature; nor, so far as I am aware, has anything been heard again. Dr. Moncrieff gave me the history of the youth, whom he never hesitated to name. I did not ask, as Simson did, how he recognized him. He had been a prodigal,—weak, foolish, easily imposed upon, and "led away," as people say. All that we had heard had passed actually in life, the Doctor said. The young man had come home thus a day or two after his mother died,—who was no more than the housekeeper in the ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... must be pressed for money," he said. "Ever prodigal in his expenditure, he is further saddled with the debts of ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... battle; there was Sir Martin Frobisher, one of the earliest explorers of the Arctic seas in search of that North-West Passage which is still the darling object of England's boldest mariners. There was the high-admiral of England, Lord Howard of Effingham, prodigal of all things in his country's cause, and who had recently had the noble daring to refuse to dismantle part of the fleet, though the Queen had sent him orders to do so, in consequence of an exaggerated report that the enemy ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... minute his impulse was to take her in his arms and forget the ingratitude and desertion and deceit, like the father in the parable whose heart went out to the poor prodigal while he was yet a long way off; but the next moment the cold, bitter, resentful feelings quenched the gentler impulse, and he drew away his arm from her detaining hold, and passed on along the flagged path as if he were unconscious of her presence, and this on the very threshold of His ...
— Zoe • Evelyn Whitaker
... gay and prosperous; but when its palaces were desolate, the effect of the old name, recalling happier days, must have been as if the elder brother had come out from the father's house and entreated the prodigal to come back to his place at the fireside. The battle would be more than half won if the appeal that was couched in the very name of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... especially since Lucy had procured for him an Italian Bible, which he could read with much more ease and profit than an English one. He seemed now to have a deep sense of the evil of his past careless life, when even the external forms of religion had been given up, and he had been, like the prodigal, wandering in a ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... appear'd; rising from those Sacred Ashes Testator and Heir; Father and yet Son; Another, and yet the same; introsuming as it were his Spirit, as he breath'd it out, when singing his own Epicedium and Genethliack together, he seem'd prodigal of his own life to have it redouble'd in your felicity: Thus, Rex nunquam moritur. O admirable conduct of the Divine Providence, to immortalize the image of a just Monarch: Ipsa quidem, sed non eadem, quia & ipsa, ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... desires and new disorders arise, and the whole mob of passions gets possession of the Acropolis, that is to say, the soul, which they find void and unguarded by true words and works. Falsehoods and illusions ascend to take their place; the prodigal goes back into the country of the Lotophagi or drones, and openly dwells there. And if any offer of alliance or parley of individual elders comes from home, the false spirits shut the gates of the castle ...
— The Republic • Plato
... child who steals apples, and makes himself sick with them after all. It is not the enormous loss of life which is to me the most tragic part of the story; it is that very simplicity of the Teutons. Bloodshed is a bad thing, certainly; but after all nature is prodigal of human life—killing her twenty thousand and her fifty thousand by a single earthquake; and as for death in battle—I sometimes am tempted to think, having sat by many death beds, that our old forefathers may have ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... Langston, is a man of the woods and fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother Nature herself. If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his "Medicine Woods," and the Harvester's whole being realizes that this is the highest point of life which ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... Dietrich himself, to tell her ruefully he was "laid up very ill" at a waterside tavern in Wapping—not the nicest or most savoury East End sailor-suburb of London. Alexander immediately took the coach to town, put the prodigal into a decent lodging, nursed him carefully for a fortnight, and then took him down with him in triumph to the family home at Bath. There brother William found him safe and sound on his return, under the sisterly care of good Carolina. A pretty dance he had ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
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