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More "Sternness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sternness. She adored his look of weariness. She longed hopefully and passionately for ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... had been carried after he had been shot. The sun had set, and a soft twilight was filling the room, but the light which still came in at the window fell full on Paul. Mr. Anketell, entering softly, saw the expression on the boy's face, the look in his eyes, and his heart ached, and all his sternness vanished. "My boy," he said, oh, so tenderly, "tell me what it is that is troubling you; tell me all about it, I know there is something. Can't you bring yourself to trust me not to ...
— Paul the Courageous • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... for your heart, is as important an element in education as gymnastics, and, strange as it may sound, has an equal share in effecting the perfection of both body and mind. The man who devotes his attention exclusively to music will, if he be of a violent disposition, lose his savage sternness at first; he will become gentle and pliable as metal in the fire. But at last his courage will disappear too; his passionate temper will have changed into irritability, and he will be of little worth as a warrior, the calling ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and sensitive. Was it the new love which had flung off its shield of sternness and left it exposed to every lash that flew? The misery of others afflicted him. Thoughts of injustice grew into motives of action, the loss of faith into the gain of unutterable longing. Who were these gods who heard not the cry of the weak and were ever on the side of ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... reverently uncovered his head, saluting an invisible Habeas Corpus Act. He took his daughter by the hand, with a certain parental sternness: his voice trembled with emotion as ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... in, in a vain effort to amuse, as the singing-master in the former of these same stories, or the naturalist in the latter. Humor, Cooper certainly had; but it is the humor that gleams in fitful flashes from the men of earnest purposes and serious lives, and gives a momentary relief to the sternness and melancholy of their natures. The power of producing an entire (p. 240) humorous creation he had not at all, and almost the only thing that mars the perfectness of "The Pathfinder" is the occasional effort to make one out of Muir, the character ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... a simulated sternness: "I hope you haven't let that son of yours run away with my ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... don't say a word. I'll make your excuses at Carlton House; and the better to cover your retreat, I'll employ you on service. Here, Gordon, let Captain O'Malley have the despatches for Sir Henry Howard, at Cork." As he said this, he turned towards me with an air of affected sternness in his manner, and continued: "I expect, Captain O'Malley, that you will deliver the despatches intrusted to your care without a moment's loss of time. You will leave London within an hour. The instructions for your journey will be sent to your hotel. And now," said he, again ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... There was no sternness or smartness in my expression, but the gaze was mathematical. I was measuring her candor, and ...
— A Christmas Story - Man in His Element: or, A New Way to Keep House • Samuel W. Francis
... Diana noticed, the man's face was grave almost to sternness, and there was a slightly worn look about it as of one who had passed through some fiery discipline of experience and had forced himself to meet its demands. The lines around the mouth, and the firm closing of the lips, held a suggestion of suffering, but there was no ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Seminary for Chaplains, Girard began, through his seeming sternness and his real dexterity, to win for the Jesuits an ascendant over monks thus compromised, and over parish-priests of very vulgar manners and ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet
... stood speechless, wringing her hands. Her own passion was puny beside the sternness, the reality, and the intensity of the quiet rage before her. She was completely mastered by it. She forgot all but the evident agony she ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... Paul. He had passed his mother's door without entering or even calling out to her, and had climbed on doggedly to the top floor. Now he was shut in his sanctuary, his room, sitting at his table. His head rested on a hand, his dark eyes had an expression of confused anguish, a look of guilt and sternness mingled.... He could no more have visited his mother, he told himself, than he could voluntarily have chopped off his hand. And yet he was amazed at the cruelty in himself, a hard cold cruelty which prompted the thought: ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... humanity. The crews of the whole fleet now retired from the guns, and immediately after they were seated around their kids, indulging ravenously in the food for which the exercise of the morning had given keen appetites. Still there was something of the sternness of battle in the merriment of this meal, and the few jokes that passed were seasoned with a bitterness that is not usual among the light-hearted followers of the sea. Here and there, a messmate was missed, and the vacancy produced some quaint ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... 16. It was then the senate and the people unanimously agreed to send deputies to him, with proposals for his restoration, in case he would draw off his army. 17. Coriola'nus received these proposals at the head of his principal officers, and, with the sternness of a general that was to give the law, refused ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... Hester was not deceived. Debby Alden came from a race who had for generations looked upon the expression of love and sentiment as a weakness. Whenever Debby felt her emotions conquering her, she unconsciously resorted to the ways of her forbears; she lashed herself into a semblance of sternness in an endeavor to ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... a religious character, whilst in the Fronde the religious element did not intervene at all, thanks to the enlightened protection enjoyed by the Protestants. It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles at that moment. No sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... dislike of the radicalism of the Parisian proletariat caused riots and outbreaks in such important and widely separated cities as Lyons, Marseilles, and Bordeaux. With the same devotion and thoroughness that had characterized their foreign policy, but with greater sternness, the officials of the National Convention stamped out all these riots and insurrections. By 1795 all France, except only the emigres and secret conspirators, had more or less graciously accepted ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... a note of sternness in his voice that Milly had never heard before, and she saw a hard look come into his averted face which was new to her. When she spoke ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... bare and barren. The precipitous parts of the cliffs are very grand; the whole scene, indeed, might be characterized as one of stern grandeur with an embroidery of rich beauty, without lauding it too much. All the sternness of it is softened by vegetative beauty wherever it can possibly be thrown in; and there is not here, so strongly as along Windermere, evidence that human art has been helping out Nature. I wish it were possible to give any idea of the shapes of the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... better not to go," Maria replied. Her tone was at once stern and pitiful. Evelyn noticed only her sternness. She ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments. Where there is too much sympathy, then the great voluntary centers of the spine are weak, the child tends to be delicate. Then the father by instinct supplies the roughness, the sternness which stiffens in the child the centers of resistance and independence, right from the very earliest days. Often, for a mere infant, it is the father's fierce or stern presence, the vibration of his voice, which starts the frictional and independent activity of the great ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... things do not count. It is right enough she should feel so, and she will lead a useful life. But how could it ever accord with mine? She is Lady Bountiful, and rules through love and wisdom. I am officer on a man-of-war, and command with sternness and inflexibility, never bending to coaxing or cajolery. Her ambition is to serve and uplift; mine to hold down with a steady hand, that my men may do my bidding like intelligent machines. We both may do good in our spheres, but we would inevitably pull apart, if we tried to unite them. ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... was not strictly true. He was one of the boys of the village, and was of a wild and reckless character. This was, however, partly his father's fault, who never gave him any kind and friendly instruction, and always treated him with a great degree of sternness ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott
... to the grave; but that enthusiasm which had impelled them to emigrate, preserved all its force; and they met, with a firm unshaken spirit, the calamities which assailed them. Our admiration of their fortitude and of their principles, sustains, however, some diminution from observing the sternness with which they denied to others that civil and religious liberty which, through so many dangers and hardships, they sought for themselves. Their general court decreed that none should be admitted as freemen, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... impossible;" and his features, which had relaxed from their habitual sternness while he spoke to her, suddenly assumed an expression of severity which almost terrified her; the color mounted to her fair face, as she felt that, perhaps, her request had been unwarrantable to a perfect stranger. He saw her ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... most pious sovereign enjoined it, as because his high view of the papal office prompted him to employ the temporal power for the benefit of his spiritual authority. A meek man and a benevolent prince, Pius IX was, as a pontiff, lofty even to sternness. With a soul not only devout, but mystical, he referred everything to God, and respected and venerated his own person as standing in God's place. He thought it his duty to guard with jealousy the temporal sovereignty of the Church, because he thought it essential to the safe-keeping ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish, and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... von Hemelstein, did you say?" He spoke with a touch of sternness. "I do not think that I have ever had the pleasure of meeting you, sir. I did meet a Count Heinrich ...
— L. P. M. - The End of the Great War • J. Stewart Barney
... indeed, but choked up with the bodies and heads of countrymen, who, though no members of the council, felt no scruple in intruding themselves upon deliberations in which they were so deeply interested. By expostulation, by threats, and even by some degree of violence, Burley, the sternness of whose character maintained a sort of superiority over these disorderly forces, compelled the intruders to retire, and, introducing Morton into the cottage, secured the door behind them against impertinent curiosity. At a less agitating moment, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of the island, his attire was of a description much superior to that of his poorer fellow-countrymen.[1] His countenance was open and dignified, and so calm that it appeared like a rock which nothing could move. Not that it had any character of sternness in it; on the contrary, it possessed a placidity, blended with firmness, which was anything but forbidding. The moment Miaoulis came on deck, he cordially shook hands with Lord Cochrane, and a broken conversation commenced between them in ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... were bestirring themselves to strike a good stroke for Florence that night. I found him standing quietly alone, with his hand resting in a kindly command upon the neck of the steed that he had chosen, and a look of great happiness softening the native sternness of his regard. I stood by him in silence till we rode, for after our first salutation he chose to be taciturn, and that in no unfriendly seeming, but as one might that had great thoughts to think and counted very certainly upon the acquiescence of a friend. And I was ever a man to respect ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... troops, and give free rein to the military genius that inspired their critical dissertations. Wellington, however, has been rightly termed of iron, and never did he show himself more of iron than in those trying days of 1810. Stern, but with a passionless sternness, he pursued his way towards the goal he had set himself, allowing no criticism, no censure, no invective so much as to give him ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... I believe, of King Frederick of Prussia.' These remarks being offered to Mr George Sampson, who had not the courage to come out for single combat, but lurked with his chest under the table and his eyes cast down, Mrs Wilfer proceeded, in a voice of increasing sternness and impressiveness, until she should force that skulker to give himself up. 'Mamma would appear to have had an indefinable foreboding of what afterwards happened, for she would frequently urge upon me, "Not a little man. Promise me, my child, not a little man. Never, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... region of masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm mostly in single heads and detached figures, some of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness. "Molles Senae," the delicate and femininely variable, fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through defect of sternness, was the fit mother of this ingenious and ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... been treating Frontenac with equal sternness. The danger from New England had for a time relieved him of domestic troubles; but with the failure of Sir William Phipps, his clerical enemies at Quebec once more began their machinations, in spite of which the versatile old Governor still contrived to hold his way and course. Politically, ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... gesture. He saw the sternness of her eyes, and he had not the heart to tell her the truth. Mrs. Crowley ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... to you? I should n't be alive at this moment if it were not for your treatment. Oh, Grace!" She began to cough again; the paroxysm increased in vehemence. She caught her handkerchief from her lips; it was spotted with blood. She sprang to her feet, and regarded it with impersonal sternness. "Now," she said, "I am sick, and I want ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... became so distinguished in the days of the Commonwealth, was at this time becoming the most influential leader of the army. He was not the commander-in-chief in form, but he was the great planner and manager in fact. He was a man of great sternness and energy of character, and was always ready for the most prompt and daring action. He conceived the design of seizing the king's person at Holmby, so as to take him away from the control of the Parliament, and transfer him to that ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... retirement, thinking that virtue could be safe wherever it went in its own courageous heart; and so she armed her countenance with pride, and pleased herself with making it stern, but not to the effect she looked for, for the sternness itself pleased. While yet a child her little right hand would control the bit of the charger, and she wielded the sword and spear, and hardened her limbs with wrestling, and made them supple for the race; and then as she grew up, she tracked the footsteps of the bear ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... then?" asked the captain with affected sternness, for, although by nature disinclined to admit that he could be wrong, he had no objection to be ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... do not see by what right you interfere with either me or my amusements," says Cecil, hotly, after a decided pause. Never has he addressed her with so much sternness. She raises her eyes to his and colors richly all through her ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... been crushed by machinery, or caused by shot, sword, and spear. So the Hakim toiled away hour after hour till his last patient had left the space in front of his tent and he had leisure to re-examine the chief's son, the father looking anxiously on in spite of an assumed sternness, and waiting till the keen-eyed surgeon rose from ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... Italy, which gave Marius time to discipline the bodies of his men and to confirm their courage; and what was most of all, it gave the soldiers an opportunity of knowing what kind of a man their general was. For the first impression created by his sternness and by his inexorable severity in punishing, was changed into an opinion of the justice and utility of his discipline when they had been trained to avoid all cause of offence and all breach of order; and the violence of his temper, the harshness of his voice, and ferocious expression of his countenance, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... the relaxation of a moment, and exhibited a pale, care-worn countenance—and, though still young, a head over which were thickly scattered the silver tokens of age. A sad smile played over his intelligent features, a smile meant to shake the sternness of the man who was troubling his peace, as he replied in ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... the patient, nurse?' braced my faltering nerves in a moment, and enabled me to answer him without embarrassment. He had his grave professional air, and looked hard and impenetrable. I had reason afterwards to think that this sternness of manner was assumed for my benefit, for once, when I was preparing some lint for him, I looked up inadvertently and saw that he was watching me with an expression that was at ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... bearing the little child in the same position in which it rested when he passed me at the door of the hotel. The same fixed look of independence was in his face and his position. There was much of sternness on the face of the woman, but it was marked by pain, referable perhaps to her situation, and to the marks of recent grief. Something was to be done, but what I could not yet determine. As I pressed nearer to the man the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... been staggered at the austerity of Christ's morality not less has it been shocked at the quality of His mercy. His gentleness to the sensual sinner has been compared, with amazement, to the sternness of His attitude to the sins of the spirit. Not the profligate or the harlot but the Pharisee and the scribe were those who provoked His sternest rebukes. And perhaps the most characteristic of all His dealings ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... view to this profession, and, therefore, was not tormented with unsatisfied desires. He did not hold his present occupations in abhorrence, because they withheld him from paths more flowery and more smooth, but he found in unintermitted labour, and in the sternness of his master, sufficient occasions for discontent. No opportunities of recreation were allowed him. He spent all his time pent up in a gloomy apartment, or traversing narrow and crowded streets. His food was coarse, and his lodging ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... the note of a little flute, sounded from the farther side of the stream, was reiterated many times. Nigel's face relaxed. The sternness vanished from it, and was replaced by an ardent expression that made it look almost like the ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Upon his countenance sternness has replaced sorrow; the soft lines have become rigid; the melancholy glance is gone, replaced by one ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... misunderstandings through explanation volunteered when possible,—not apologetically, but as it were casually, yet appealing to men's reason. Watchfulness and sympathetic foresight were with him as constant as sternness, though less in evidence. ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... orthodox tradition; a European disguise, purchased at a slop dealer's by the precious Harry, a rope, a midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an English ship; the anchor weighed; and the lovers were free on the bounding main. A most refreshing story! I put on a sudden air of sternness, and shot a question at her like ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... dressing on the following morning, Thorndyke entered my room. His face was grave even to sternness, and he held a ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... observed Dr. Theophilus, with sternness, "for every disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you an extra ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... one respect the doctor had shown a certain sternness. He had told his son, with some emphasis, that, until he accomplished some creditable work in the world, he must never expect one penny more than his present allowance of L150 a year. There were good ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Dionis. "The actual case of the bequest of an uncle to an illegitimate child may not yet have been presented for trial; but when it is, the sternness of French law against such children will be all the more firmly applied because we live in times when religion is honored. I'll answer for it that out of such a suit as I propose you could get a compromise,—especially if they see you are determined ...
— Ursula • Honore de Balzac
... out of the room together. Yes, it was self-evident; the man idolized the child. Strange mixture of sternness and softness! The supposed sin of the father was never to be pardoned; but natural affection was to have its way, and be lavished upon the son; and the son could not return it, because the influence of the banished scapegrace was too strong—he had won it all for himself, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... his fame, he was seen in his true colours, as well of weakness as of amiableness, on strangers and such as were out of this immediate circle, the spell of his poetical character still continued to operate; and the fierce gloom and sternness of his imaginary personages were, by the greater number of them, supposed to belong, not only as regarded mind, but manners, to himself. So prevalent and persevering has been this notion, that, in some ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... that medicines may assuage pain, that skill may close wounds, that those who are incontestably dying may be snatched from the grave. The Jewish physician became a living, an accepted protest against the fatalism of the Koran. By degrees the sternness of predestination was mitigated, and it was admitted that in individual life there is an effect due to free-will; that by his voluntary acts man may within certain limits determine his own course. But, so far ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... youthful widow and her aged husband's son did not long continue. The people of England were very much shocked at such a marriage, and a great prelate, the Bishop of Winchester, remonstrated against it with such sternness and authority, that Ethelbald not only soon put his wife away, but submitted to a severe penance which the bishop imposed upon him in retribution for his sin. Judith, thus forsaken, soon afterward sold the lands and estates which ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... have flung herself at Juliet's feet; but the latter drew back, and said, with a sternness ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... his walk, and faced his son with some sternness of look and tone. "Max, you haven't learned to smoke? tell me: have you ever smoked a cigar? or tobacco ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... Pathfinder, and the solemn dignity which he had assumed, under a purely natural impulse, disappeared in the expression of the earnest simplicity inherent in all his feelings. He met the grasp of his young friend with a squeeze as cordial as if no chord had jarred between them, and a slight sternness that had gathered about his eye disappeared in ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... unhurried motion, in her extended hand, in the sightless effect of her grey eyes luminous in the half-light. He had never seen such an expression in her face before. It had dreaminess in it, intense attention, and something like sternness. Arrested in the doorway by Heyst's extended arm, she seemed to wake up, flushed faintly—and this flush, passing off, carried away with it the strange transfiguring mood. With a courageous gesture she pushed back the heavy masses of her hair. The light clung to her forehead. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... resembles rather a substantial, well-fed farmer, than one who has wielded the destinies of this mighty Confederation, and been bred in the ceremony and etiquette of an European Court. In fact, he appears to possess none of that sternness of character which you would suppose to belong to one a large part of whose life has been spent in political warfare, or, at any rate, amidst scenes requiring a vast deal of nerve ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... him; and he advanced within five miles of the city, ravaging the lands of the Plebeians, but sparing those of the Patricians. The city was filled with despair. The ten first men in the Senate were sent in hopes of moving his compassion. But they were received with the utmost sternness, and told that the city must submit to his absolute will. Next day the pontiffs, augurs, flamens, and all the priests, came in their robes of office, and in vain prayed him to spare the city. All seemed lost; but Rome was saved by her women. Next morning the ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... in dealing with his children. He seemed to feel that nearly every kind of amusement that young people delighted in was sinful, and he held up before his children such sober ways of living that Washington at least came to think that everything pleasant was wicked. No amount of sternness, however, could keep the five boys of the family and their three sisters wholly out of mischief, nor hinder them from having many a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... changed into mock sternness. "Very well, Miss Baker; having heard your confession and remembering a promise to exercise clemency, this court is about to impose sentence. Are you ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... not ventured to look at him; if she had she would have seen his face grow suddenly pale, then assume an expression of mingled sternness and pain. ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... which Dante left, on those who beheld him was far different. In allusion to his own personal appearance, he used to relate an incident that once occurred to him. When years of persecution and exile had added to the natural sternness of his countenance, the deep lines left by grief, and the brooding spirit of vengeance; he happened to be at Verona, where, since the publication of his Inferno, he was well known. Passing one day by a portico, wherein several women were seated, one of them whispered, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... broad, spreading picture slowly impressed itself upon his brain, effacing and taking the place of personal animosity. In so fair a world Hope is ever a returning angel with healing in his wings; and Winston's face brightened, the black frown deserting his forehead, all sternness gone from his eyes. There surely must be a way somewhere, and he would discover it; only the weakling and the coward can sit down in despair. Out of the prevailing silence he suddenly distinguished voices at hand, ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... Cinna, as consul, received the embassy, sitting in the curule chair, and returned a kind answer to the messengers; Marius stood by him and said nothing, but gave sufficient testimony by the gloominess of his countenance, and the sternness of his looks, that he would in a short time fill the city with blood. As soon as the council arose, they went toward the city, where Cinna entered with his guards, but Marius stayed at the gates, and, dissembling his rage, professed that he ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... is a third light in which God's holiness is shown to us, and that is in the sternness with which He recoils from guilt. When Christ died for man, I know what God's love means; and when Jesus wept human tears over Jerusalem, I know what God's compassion means; and when the stern denunciations ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... to tell her lover; this so-called pride, for which she has been censured, is clearly only a very wise precaution to protect her from herself. Being aware that, unfortunately, her own temperament is inflammable, she dreads the least spark, and keeps out of reach so far as she can. Her sternness is due not to pride but to humility. She assumes a control over Emile because she doubts her control of herself; she turns the one against the other. If she had more confidence in herself she would ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... nothing more than a paralytic or nervous affection; yet one might fancy that it had its origin in some unspeakable wrong, perpetrated half a lifetime ago in this old gentlewoman's presence, either against herself or somebody whom she loved still better. Her features had a wonderful sternness, which, I presume, was caused by her habitual effort to compose and keep them quiet, and thereby counteract the tendency to paralytic movement. The slow, regular, and inexorable character of the motion,—her look of force and self-control, which had the appearance of rendering it voluntary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... Swedes sang as they advanced towards the enemy. The king had given orders to march straight on Lutzen. "He animated his men to the fight," says Richelieu, "with words that he had at command, whilst Wallenstein, by his mere presence and the sternness of his silence, seemed to let his men understand that, as he had been wont to do, he would reward them or chastise them, according as they did well or ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... almost felt that he was too gentle and indulgent, and the thought she would have liked a confessor who was severe, who would have inflicted heavier penances, compelled her to fast and pray, who would have listened in deeper sternness to the sins of thought which she with averted face shamefully owned to having entertained. She was disappointed that he did not warn her with the loss of her soul, that he did not invent specious expedients for her use, whereby the Evil ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... in your senses or out of them?" demanded Mr. Carlyle, a certain sternness in his tone. "Your lady miserably unhappy! ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... even do that, a little better than you could lay your hand in his and promise to be his wife, I should think!" said the other, and there was even some sternness ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... essential progress. The world had been too pleasant to him to allow of his giving many of his hours to work. His father was one of the best men in the world, revered on the bench, and loved by all men; but he had not sufficient parental sternness to admit of his driving his son well into harness. He himself had begun the world with little or nothing, and had therefore succeeded; but his son was already possessed of almost everything that he could want, and therefore ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... he said with a new sternness in his voice. "Aunt Ray, it was necessary for Jack and me to leave that night. I can not tell you why—just yet. As to where we went, if I have to depend on that as an alibi, I shall not tell. The whole thing is an absurdity, a trumped-up ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... dear Mr. Pleydell," continued Lucy, "how much Miss Mannering and I were alarmed, when a ruffian, equally dreadful for his great strength, and the sternness of his features, rushed ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... you say!" and his voice had a ring of sternness in its mellow tone—"If I know what you think I know, on what ground do you suppose I have built my knowledge? Only on that faith which you call 'conventional'—that faith which has never been understood by the ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... his father and mother may be the sternest Protestants. He cannot help it; it is his nature! And you"—she looked up at him with infinite tenderness in her brown eyes,—"you were born a Presbyterian, dear; you can't help it. Perhaps you need the sternness and the horror of some of the doctrines as a balance for your gentleness. I never knew any one ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... princess Mary herself was at first the object of his hopes or wishes: but if this were really the case, she must speedily have quelled his presumption by the lofty sternness of her repulse; for it is impossible to discover in the history of his life at what particular period he could have been occupied ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... a strange mixture of sternness in his countenance and pity in his voice; "well, mother, ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... patience, whatever the cause of its sufferings, brings with it a blessed sense of the faithful sternness, the fruitful lovingness of God, who will not let even the feeblest of sinners be satisfied with less than he can attain, in whose hands the punishment, like fire, runs swiftly and agonisingly to and fro, consuming the baser ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... down as a devout Christian of the Cromwellian type, and he certainly was a man of remarkable intellectual powers, both in art and in theology. His Christianity might have taken a form of less domestic sternness, but I remembered my own father too well to find it inconsistent with genuine piety, though not even my mother ever inspired the awe Linnell and his religious severity excited ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... in prison is quite limitless. I remember once in Reading, as I was going out to exercise, seeing in the dimly lit cell opposite mine a small boy. Two warders—not unkindly men—were talking to him, with some sternness apparently, or perhaps giving him some useful advice about his conduct. One was in the cell with him, the other was standing outside. The child's face was like a white wedge of sheer terror. There was ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... when this letter was published in Darwin's Life, the authorship of the review was not actually mentioned; but it is necessary to mention it, as it justifies the sternness with which Huxley exposed Owen on an occasion shortly to be described. The review in the Quarterly was written by Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, in July, 1860, and almost at once the authorship of it became known to Darwin's friends. In connection with this, Huxley wrote in 1887, in Darwin's ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... as we know, was imaginative, exuberant, unrestrained, and, like some of the greatest actors on the stage of human affairs, he had associated his own personality with the prevalence of right ideas and good influences. In Turgot, on the other hand, we discern something of the isolation, the sternness, the disdainful melancholy of Tacitus. He even rises out of the eager, bustling, shrill-tongued crowd of the Voltairean age with some of that austere moral indignation and haughty astonishment with which Dante had watched the stubborn ways of men centuries before. On one side Turgot shared the ...
— Burke • John Morley
... Netherlands had passed through as many as five hands. The Duchess of Parma's indecision soon imparted itself to the cabinet of Madrid, which in a short time tried in succession almost every system of policy. Duke Alva's inflexible sternness, the mildness of his successor Requescens, Don John of Austria's insidious cunning, and the active and imperious mind of the Prince of Parma gave as many opposite directions to the war, while the plan of rebellion remained the ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... disappeared into the kitchen, a small tent at the rear of the cook tent. They were gone for some time. Finally, Mrs. Livingston and Miss Partridge returned. Miss Elting was not with them. The Chief Guardian's face wore an expression of sternness such as none of the girls ever ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls Under Canvas • Janet Aldridge
... interrogatively; and, as she waited for an explanation of the American's presence, surprise gave way to a look of great sternness and severity, almost of dislike. Nay more, Madame de Lera's attitude was instinct with protest—the protest of an honest woman drawn unwillingly into what she feels to be an atmosphere of untruth and intrigue. She was ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... her hands together above her head, and burst into a flood of tears. Her father looked upon her with such sad sternness as his tender nature was capable of. He laid hold of one of her arms to draw a hand from the face ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... them,—especially those thick-legged, romping, cherry-cheeked damsels, of whom, no doubt, his son would marry one. They were all of the earth earthy, without an idea among them. And yet he did not dare to forbid his son to go to the house, lest people should say of him that his sternness was unendurable. ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... said he, "my strength would become sternness. Nature gave me a despotic disposition. I have had, and have still, many times the greatest difficulty to control it; but with God's help I shall succeed! My Elise, we will improve ever. On the children's account, in order to make them happy, we will endeavour to ennoble ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... gratified. Once again she gazed upon the face of her only and beloved son. He was little changed—somewhat sunburned, it was true; but there was less of the old pride and sternness, a kindly smile playing round his lips. There was, too, a shade of sadness that plainly would never leave him; Lord Earle could never ...
— Dora Thorne • Charlotte M. Braeme
... my cousin," replied Atterbury with strange sternness. "And, since the fellow is here in disguise, it ought to be our business to ask him some questions. Come ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... Jake's eyes, as he grasped the Colonel's hand and looked into the face which had relaxed from its sternness, and was quivering in every muscle. The proud man was moved, and felt that if he were alone he would have knelt in the hot sand by Eudora's grave, and asked pardon for the wrong he had done her. But Jake was there, and the child looking on with wide-open eyes, and though she did not understand ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... eyes filled with tears, and he stooped as if to give her the coveted caress, but hastily drawing back again, said with much of his accustomed sternness— ...
— Holidays at Roselands • Martha Finley
... for untainted fruit never blossomed from a dunghill. Remember that the Lord loveth all his creatures even the same as he loveth thee. As thou hast good and evil both within thee, so have others; wherefore judge them in mercy as thou wouldst thyself. And judge thyself in sternness as thou wouldst them; so shalt thou keep the balance true. Now thou art sleeping through my preaching—well, never mind! Kiss thy mother, dear one, and I ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... I done?" I asked, amazed at the sternness she had suddenly thrown into her voice. And she burst into a ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... suppose, to disgust me; to tire me out; to make me withdraw from the debate, and give him the opportunity of saying he had put me to flight. He was mistaken. I kept my ground. And I kept my temper. And I kept my gravity. I rebuked him at times with becoming sternness, and then went on with my task. It is probable that I spoke more strongly against the Bible, and that I said harder things against the church and the ministry, than I should have done, if he had conducted himself with any regard to truth and decency; but I did not raise my voice ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... snow-cloaked, the trees chilly and naked, the houses standing out as though they were freezing and longing for their summer wrap of ivy. And naked were the rattling trees on their side of the river, on the Palisades. But the cold breeze enlivened them, the sternness of the swift, cruel river and miles of brown shore made them gravely happy. As they tramped briskly off, atop the cliffs, toward the ferry to New York, five miles away, they talked with a quiet, quick seriousness which discovered them to each other. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... sentiment of individual attachment—attachment was chiefly for their own sex [78]. The Ionians, on the contrary, were susceptible, flexile, and more characterized by the generosity of modern knighthood than the sternness of ancient heroism. Them, not the past, but the future, charmed. Ever eager to advance, they were impatient even of the good, from desire of the better. Once urged to democracy— democracy fixed their character, as oligarchy fixed the Spartan. For, to change is the ambition of a democracy—to conserve ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... strange stirring in Rhoda in response to Cartwell's gaze. He was looking at her with something of tragedy in the dark young eyes, something of sternness and determination in the clean-cut lips. Rhoda wondered, afterward, what would have been said if Katherine had not chosen this moment to come out on ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... anxiously. "And my father—and Aura?" The Big Business Man thought her face looked years older than when he had last seen it. Her expression was set and stern, but her eyes stared into his with a gentle, sorrowful gaze that belied the sternness of her lips. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... said Magdalen. "But how are we to teach her? that is the difficulty—the least severity or sternness which does good to other children, seems to rouse her very worst feelings and only to harden her. She is not hardened now, poor little soul, she is perfectly humble. Oh, how I do wish I could find her ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... the gold collar about his neck and the gold bracelets upon his arms, marked the chief. Standing by the rheda, he met Marcia's look of proud defiance, for a moment; then his eyes shifted and seemed to wander; but, cloaking with martial sternness the embarrassment of the barbarian, he spoke ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... a pause—they were now in the parlour—said, speaking very slowly, that they were in a sore affliction of Satan, and that they must withstand him with a good courage—"and look you," he added, turning with a great sternness to the three, "if there be any mortal sin upon your hearts, see that you confess it and be shriven speedily—for while such a thing lies upon the heart, so long hath Satan power to hurt—otherwise have no fear ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... are black and still, the tearful sky is dreary gray. All Nature is like the grief of manhood in its soft and thoughtful sternness. Shall I lend myself to its influence, and as the heaven settles down into one misty shroud of 'shrill yet silent tears,' as if veiling her shame in a cloudy mantle, shall I, too, lie down and weep? Why not? for am I not 'a part of all I see'? And even now, in fasting and mortification, ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... She saw signs of a new sternness about the closely-drawn lips, the steel-grey eyes, from which a momentary tenderness seemed to ...
— The Traitors • E. Phillips (Edward Phillips) Oppenheim
... slowly, and with a slight touch of sternness, 'is indeed contained in a book; but I wish to ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... in the making of maps with inky fingers—a bootless toil, as it always hath seemed to me. Next to her sat SALLY, the little milkmaid, casting coy glances at mother, who would have none of them, but with undue sternness, as I thought then, and still think, tossed them back to the shame-faced SALLY. Lower down sat JOHN TOOKER, "GIRT JAN DOUBLEFACE" he was ever called, not without a sly hint of increasing obesity, for JOHN, though a mighty ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 23, 1891 • Various
... he had expended all his sternness, but his caution remained. With a significant glance toward his prisoner, the dwarf, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... so unpopular in American literature? Is it because she is, after all, just what that loftiest if not most impeccable of Puritans called her, stern daughter of the voice of God? Is there to be no more sternness in our morals now we understand their psychology, no voice commanding us to do this or not to do that because there is a gulf set between worth and worthlessness? Is it true that because we are not to be damned for playing golf on Sunday, nothing can damn ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... Grimaldi occasionally looked at the quiet and apparently contrite Maso, and stretched his arm towards the Leman, in a way to give the observers an inkling of his subject. The countenance of the Herr Hofmeister changed from official sternness to an expression of decent concern as he listened, and ere long it took a decidedly forgiving laxity of muscle. When the other had done speaking, he bowed a ready assent to what he had just heard, and returned ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... disproportionate length of limb and development of muscle, which ripened later into the rarest union of activity and strength that I have ever known. His features were very dark and pale, too strongly marked to be called handsome; about the lips and lower jaw especially there was a set sternness that one seldom sees before the beard is grown. The eyes were very dark gray, nearly black, and so deeply set under the thick eyebrows that they looked smaller than they really were; and I remember, even at that early age, their expression, when angered, was any thing but pleasant to meet. ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Old Testament is everywhere represented as the direct author of Evil, commissioning evil and lying spirits to men, hardening the heart of Pharaoh, and visiting the iniquity of the individual sinner on the whole people. The rude conception of sternness predominating over mercy in the Deity, can alone account for the human sacrifices, purposed, if not executed, by Abraham and Jephthah. It has not been uncommon, in any age or country of the world, for men to recognize the existence of one God, without ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a region like this, beauty must be looked for below the surface. There is a probability of finding hollows of repose, sunken spots of loveliness, hidden away altogether from the general aspect of sternness, or perhaps sterility, that meets the eye in glancing over the outspread landscape; just as in the natures of stern men you may expect to find, if opportunity should be afforded you, sunny spots of tender verdure, kept ever green by that very sternness which is turned towards the common gaze—thus ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... they looked at each other without speaking. She saw the dancing spirit in his eyes turn grave and darken to a passionate sternness. He stooped and kissed her, and she sat ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... feudal baron ever dismounted with more assuredness at his own hall, to toss careless rein to a retainer. He stood now, tall and straight, a trifle rough-looking in his careless planter's dress, but every inch the master. A slight frown puckered up his forehead, giving to his face an added hint of sternness. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... and her beautiful face grew anxious, for the sternness of her husband's voice, in answer to those feeble plaints, gave little hopes of conciliation. Directly Mellen came through the boudoir and sat down on a couch near his wife, shading his face with one hand, not wishing her to see how ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... mother consumed with grief and white as a ghost. He had felt a pitying surprise. But that, of course, was of no importance. Mothers did not matter. He could not shake off the poignant impression of that silent, quiet, white-haired woman, but a sort of sternness crept into his thoughts. These were the consequences. Well, what of it? "Am I then on a bed of roses?" he had exclaimed to himself, sitting at some distance with his eyes fixed upon that figure of sorrow. He had said all he had ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... Jersey mourns an only son, and she a widow," he interrupted, his voice implacable in its sternness. "Miss Harriet, I lament the cruel necessity which alone can induce so distressing a measure. It is my desire not only to soften the inevitable calamities of war, but even to introduce on every occasion as great a share of tenderness and humanity as can possibly ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... Signora Buonatti was forgotten! The people were amazed at the nonchalant manner of the young favorite, who actually received a burst of enthusiasm, such as rarely had greeted any singer, with such coolness-who and what was this slender, youthful being, that was neither awed by their sternness, nor delighted ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray
... cried, as he staggered, and caught at a backstay to save himself from falling. He sat down on the house and tried to keep back a sob. Madge stooped, and looked anxiously into his face. She had known him for two years as a man of unusual sternness and self-control; obstinate, reserved, willful, and moody, yet one that gave always the impression of unflinching courage and resolution. It was inexplicable now to see him crying like a woman, his square shoulders bent and heaving, his sinewy ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... only the first, but the only object of his public action: and with this patriotic loyalty there mingled something of a personal feeling, more akin to romance in its paternal tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn strength and sternness of his general character. A thorough soldier, with a soldier's contempt for fine-spun diplomacy, he had been led into many a blunder when acting as a chief of party and of State; but his absolute single-minded honesty had more than redeemed ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... which distinguished the senator's abode in times of security, still prevail over it in the time of imminent danger which now threatens rich and poor alike in Rome, Vetranio himself appears far from partaking the tranquility of his patrician household. His manner displays an unusual sternness, and his face an unwonted displeasure, as he sits, occupied by his silent reflections and thoroughly unregardful of whatever occurs around him. Two ladies who are his companions in the apartment, exert all their blandishments to win him back to hilarity, but in vain. The services of his expectant ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... to think it the stateliest of cities. The Exchange and other public buildings, and the shops in Buchanan Street, are very magnificent; the latter, especially, excelling those of London. There is, however, a pervading sternness and grimness resulting from the dark gray granite, which is the universal building-material both of the old and new edifices. Later in the forenoon we again walked out, and went along Argyle Street, and through the Trongate and the Salt-Market. The two latter were formerly the principal ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was reached on her return, Edith found Lady Oxford in the parlour. The sternness with which the Countess had treated Aubrey was quite laid aside. To Lady Louvaine she showed a graceful and grateful mixture of sympathy and respect, endeavoured to reassure her, hoped there would be no search nor inquiry, thought it was almost too late, highly approved of ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... to these compliments the other bade him hold his tongue, and keep his noise to himself, and laid upon him many similar injunctions, with great fluency of speech and sternness of manner. ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... ribboned eye-glass; his hair was arranged differently; he closely resembled an average plain man,—he, the unique Ozzie! With all his faults, he had previously been both good-natured and negligent, but his expression was now one of sternness and of resolute endeavour. Sissie had already metamorphosed him. Even now he was obediently following her lead and her mood. Mr. Prohack's women had evidently determined to revenge themselves for being asked to meet Miss Fancy at lunch, and Ozzie had been set on to assist them. ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... believe it! Only slander, malice, lies. Well, take my word for it, the love that comes out of the brandy flask will never get into the teapot. I wish you both a very good morning; ay, better one than this, a great deal;" and with a sternness of manner quite unusual, the old man took ...
— Nearly Lost but Dearly Won • Theodore P. Wilson
... upon the kneeling man before her, and suddenly the wild look of hatred and unrelenting sternness died out ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... this unfortunate affair of Alice Hook's is laid remotely to me?" he said, with a sternness, which he could not help, in his tone. "People are saying that if I gave them decent dwellings, decent conduct would ensue. It is so. God knows that I feel its truth more keenly than ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... away from her, recovering his sternness, felt cut by that mocking laugh and said ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... forget herself entirely; her little ambitious projects should be wholly thrown aside, that no effort might be spared for the accomplishment of her one great duty. Tenderness and sympathy and example should do their utmost, but she would not spoil her boy: there should be sternness if it were needed; and she felt that this would try ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... of irreproachable and voiceless servants he moved about his silent house. The hush of death seemed to him to lie heavy in the lovely rooms that had been Rachael's delight, and over the city that was just breaking into the green of spring. He dressed, and left directions with unusual sternness; he would be at the hospital, or the club, if he was wanted. He would come home to ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... constantly to amuse, as well as instruct. I soon found that the constant demand on my stock of animal spirits reduced them to the lowest state of exhaustion; at times I felt—and, I suppose seemed—depressed. To my astonishment, I was taken to task on the subject by Mrs. Sidgwick, with a sternness of manner and a harshness of language scarcely credible. Like a fool, I cried most bitterly. I could not help it; my spirits quite failed me at first. I thought I had done my best, strained every nerve to please her; and to be treated in that way, merely because I was shy and sometimes melancholy, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the music changed. It became soft and low. It appealed to the better and higher nature. It was like the revivifying breath of spring after winter's sternness, and the sun's radiant smile following the raging tempest. It affected Joe. The light in his eyes changed, and his face softened. His body relaxed. Then the player knew that the victory was won. Gently he drifted off to the ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... vain And an unthinking grief! The tenderest mood [1] Of that Man's mind—what can it be? what food Fed his first hopes? what knowledge could he gain? 'Tis not in battles that from youth we train 5 The Governor who must be wise and good, And temper with the sternness of the brain Thoughts motherly, and meek as womanhood. Wisdom doth live with children round her knees: Books, leisure, perfect freedom, and the talk 10 Man holds with week-day man in the hourly walk Of the mind's business: these are the degrees By which true Sway doth mount; this is the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... not by so much as the flicker of an eyelash did he betray that this was so. He had considered himself such a public character since the night of the McBride murder that he now deemed it incumbent to preserve a stoic manner; the admiration of his fellows could win nothing from the sternness of his nature, so he ignored the neighbors, while he was barely civil to the landlord. The big roll of bills which, with something of a flourish, he produced from the pocket of his greasy overalls, settled the rent, and the neighbors noted ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... landscapes of Velasquez could not be more Spanish than they are; and, disagreeing with those who say that he had no feeling for nature, the bits of countryside and mountain Goya shows are truly peninsular in their sternness. It may be well to remark here that the softness of Tuscany is not to be found in the lean and often arid aspects of Spain. Spain, too, is romantic—but after its own fashion. Goya revived the best traditions of his country's art; he was the last of the great masters and the first of the moderns. ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... not quite like the proposition. There had been a savage ferocity in that Marquis's eye, and there was habitually a heavy sternness about Melmotte, which together made him resist the invitation. 'I don't think I have a right to do that,' he said, 'because it is Mr Melmotte's ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... assumed his more normal look of set sternness. This was the man she knew and she preferred him that way, rather than buoyant because of some other woman, even though that other was as lovable and innocent of any deliberate mischief as her niece. Not that she was jealous so much as she was hurt. When a woman has fortified herself, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... eyes blaze. Then, as his glance rested upon the stranger's starved, almost ashen face—it seemed to be gradually growing livid—the sternness of ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... have your holiday," laughed he. "But"—with mock sternness—"in moderation! He must be an incident only. With those who win the high places, sex is an incident—a charming, necessary incident, but only an incident. He must not spoil your career. If you allowed that you would ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... and the glory of them, differ from the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which are God's forever, is seldom, as far as I have heard, intelligibly explained from the pulpit; and still less the irreconcilable hostility between the two royalties and realms asserted in its sternness ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... this incident because whenever I think of Shepstone, whom I had known off and on for years in the way that a hunter knows a prominent Government official, it always recurs to my mind, embodying as it does his caution and appreciation of danger derived from long experience of the country, and the sternness he sometimes affected which could never conceal his love towards his friends. Oh! there was greatness in this man, although they did call him an "African Talleyrand." If it had not been so would every native from the Cape to the Zambesi ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... good-night and she watched him depart. Still standing where he had left her she looked through the graceful palms that from their setting of marble partially veiled the drawing-room from the hall and saw him standing, never so handsome as now in his pale sternness, fastidiously drawing on his gloves according to ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... person, twenty-two years of age, full and finely formed, and dressed always with the most studied neatness. She was, in truth, a seductive creature. She made an instantaneous impression on my senses. There was, however, somewhat of a sternness of expression, and a dignity of carriage, which caused at once to fear and respect her. Of course, at first, all went smoothly enough, and seeing that mamma treated me precisely as she did my sisters, I came to be regarded as quite a child by Miss Evelyn. ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... doubt, his son would marry one. They were all of the earth earthy, without an idea among them. And yet he did not dare to forbid his son to go to the house, lest people should say of him that his sternness was unendurable. ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... "Obey! Obey!" with sternness she commands The high, the low, in great or little lands. She folds us all within her ample gown. A forward act is ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... retainer. He stood now, tall and straight, a trifle rough-looking in his careless planter's dress, but every inch the master. A slight frown puckered up his forehead, giving to his face an added hint of sternness. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... existing under the apprenticeship. They are incessantly exposed to multiplied and powerful temptations. The persecution which they are sure to incur by a faithful discharge of their duties, has already been noticed. It would require men of unusual sternness of principle to face so fierce an array. Instead of being independent of the planters, their situation is in every respect totally the reverse. Instead of having a central office or station-house to hold their courts ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... authority, and at the same time insisting upon salutary measures. Men willingly obey and support such a ruler if he does not act in a harsh and tyrannical fashion: but he has a very difficult and laborious part to play, and it is hard for him to combine the sternness of a sovereign with the gentleness of a popular leader, If, however, he succeed in combining these qualities, they produce the truest and noblest harmony, like that by which God is said to regulate the universe, as everything is brought ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... but the wardress who had conceived a liking for her intimated that she wouldn't look too closely at her watch. Honoria came too—with Mrs. Warren—but after kissing her friend and leaving some beautiful flowers (which the wardress took away at once with pretended sternness and brought back in a vase after the visitors had left) Honoria with glistening eyes and a smile that was all tremulous sweetness, intimated that Mrs. Warren had so much to say that she, Honoria, was not going to stay more than ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... to this kind of language at Bellwood School, Mr. Mace," observed the professor with dignity and sternness. "You will kindly desist from using the same and act like a gentleman, or ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... him sooner," he said, with a touch of sternness, "you would not find yourself tied now to a ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... view to the wonder only of the hearer. The Persians are notoriously the Frenchmen of the East; the same gaiety, the same levity, the same want of depth both as to feeling and principle. The Turks are much nearer to the English: the same gravity of temperament, the same meditativeness, the same sternness of principle. Of all European nations, the French is that which least regards truth. The whole spirit of their private memoirs and their anecdotes illustrates this. To point an anecdote or a repartee, there is no extravagance ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... higher life and a mightier voice than can be given or taken away by any earthly affection. While therefore she often spoke with a pathos which melted and subdued those who listened to her, she also rose into a loftier strain, and spoke with the mingled love and sternness of ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... isn't it?" asked Captain Cai with sternness. "Pokin' an' pryin' in at somebody else's windows—what ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... scene, that the sweet creature is but a pretty coward at bottom; and that I can terrify her out of her virulence against me, whenever I put on sternness and anger. But then, as a qualifier to the advantage this gives me over her, I find myself to be a coward too, which I had not before suspected, since I was capable of being so easily terrified by the apprehensions of her offering ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... on the other side, it is too kind to him. It ignores the hardness and cynicism which were indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are indubitably present and painfully marked. His sternness, itself left out of sight by this theory, is no defect; but he is much more than stern. Polonius possibly deserved nothing better than the words addressed to ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... The sternness of the hour was brought home to me by one obscure incident. Straggling across Trafalgar Square in mufti and commanded by a sergeant came a little procession of recruits. They were roughly dressed men of the navy ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... but, above all, the gold collar about his neck and the gold bracelets upon his arms, marked the chief. Standing by the rheda, he met Marcia's look of proud defiance, for a moment; then his eyes shifted and seemed to wander; but, cloaking with martial sternness the embarrassment of the barbarian, he ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... young seems always to betoken the futility of, and to warn against the folly of, struggle against what must be; yet they were kind eyes, and humourous, with many of the small lines of laughter at their corners. Reading the eyes and mouth together one perceived gentleness and sternness to be well matched, working to any given end in amiable and effective compromise. "Uncle Peter" he had long been called by the public that knew him, and his own grandchildren had come to call him by ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... chillness, immovable and grey, struck more to her heart than many sudden words of unkindness could have done. They might be attributed to the hot impulses of a hasty temper—to the vehement anger of an accuser; but this measured manner was the conscious result of some deep-seated feeling; this cold sternness befitted the calm implacability of some severe judge. The watching, which Ruth felt was ever upon her, made her unconsciously shiver, as you would if you saw that the passionless eyes of the dead were ...
— Ruth • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... least, shall be at thy command." She said—and saw, surprised, Josiah kneel, And gave his lips the offer'd pulse to feel; The rosy colour rising in her cheek, Seem'd that surprise unmix'd with wrath to speak; Then sternness she assumed, and—"Doctor, tell; Thy words cannot alarm me—am I well?" "Thou art," said he; "and yet thy dress so light, I do conceive, some danger must excite:" "In whom?" said Sybil, with a look demure: "In more," said he, "than I expect to cure; - I, in thy light luxuriant robe behold Want and ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... grave fascination in the exceeding sternness of the scene-the grey heaps of stone, the mountains raising their shining white summits against the blue, the dark, fathomless, lifeless lake, and the utter absence of all forms of life. Armine's spirit fell under the ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to die, my child," said a voice above her; and, starting up, Kitty found herself confronted by a tall, fine-looking man, of about thirty years of age; his handsome face just now wearing an expression of sorrowful sternness as he fixed his eyes upon Kitty's, ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin
... interest, as the Duke of Wellington and Sir John Burgoyne had pointed out the possibility of an invasion, and the defenceless state of the coasts and of the country generally. The coup d'etat in France had also created considerable public uneasiness. The secrecy, sternness of purpose, swiftness of action, boldness, and indifference to bloodshed shown by the president of the French republic, caused most men to reflect upon the possibility of some terrible coup de main being attempted against England; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... of the night, and he remembered not only seeing Mr. Ridley in considerable excitement from drink, but hearing it remarked upon by one or two persons who were familiar with his life at Washington, the truth dawned upon his mind, and he said abruptly, with considerable sternness of manner and ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... remained but the lines indicative of a stern settled purpose. Most of the robbers around him had like himself fled from harsh masters, and become hardened in a career of crime. The expression of almost every countenance was vindictive, sensual, coarse. Ruyter's was not so. Unyielding sternness alone marked his features, which, we have elsewhere remarked, were unusually good for a Hottentot. Being a man of superior power he had become the leader of this robber-band. It was only one of many that existed at that time among the almost inaccessible heights of the mountain-ranges ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... will perhaps lead us to think that, as the sculpture of Antiquity, in its superb idealism, its devotion to the perfect line and curve of beauty, achieved the highest that mere colourless art can achieve—thanks to the very purity, sternness, and narrowness of its sculpturesque feeling—so also, perhaps, modern sculpture, should it ever re-arise, must be a continuation of the tendencies of the Renaissance, must be the humbler sister of painting, must ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... all the Gauls are of a lofty stature, fair, and of ruddy complexion; terrible from the sternness of their eyes, very quarrelsome, and of great pride and insolence. A whole troop of foreigners would not be able to withstand a single Gaul if he called his wife to his assistance, who is usually very strong, and with blue eyes; especially when, swelling her neck, gnashing her teeth, ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... speaking to your grandfather of his sister," Mr. Dinsmore answered, with a touch of sternness in ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... Was there a hint of sternness underlying the placidity of the rejoinder? There might have been, but Aunt Philippa was too intent upon the matter she had taken in hand ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... liked him much. Then what other woman's tongue should be brought to speak of the man's softness and tender bearing! It was out of the question that Lady Laura Kennedy should appear. She did not even propose it when her brother with unnecessary sternness told her it could not be so. Then his wife looked at him. "You shall go," said Lord Chiltern, "if you feel equal to it. It seems to be nonsense, but they say that ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... I must learn the truth?" the lawyer asked, with some sternness, "and though I am averse to using threats to a lady, if you will not tell me voluntarily I shall be obliged to use means to compel you ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... than the will proved by Mr Boffin (address whom again, as you have addressed him already, and I'll knock you down), leaving the whole of his property to the Crown,' said John Harmon, with as much indifference as was compatible with extreme sternness. ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... Remember that the Lord loveth all his creatures even the same as he loveth thee. As thou hast good and evil both within thee, so have others; wherefore judge them in mercy as thou wouldst thyself. And judge thyself in sternness as thou wouldst them; so shalt thou keep the balance true. Now thou art sleeping through my preaching—well, never mind! Kiss thy mother, dear one, and I ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... a little volume of poems by a deaf-blind lady, Madame Bertha Galeron. Her poetry has versatility of thought. Now it is tender and sweet, now full of tragic passion and the sternness of destiny. Victor Hugo called her "La Grande Voyante." She has written several plays, two of which have been acted in Paris. The French Academy has ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... submission, and contempt of material gains. He won the admiration of his superiors for his attainments and his piety, being equally versed in Aristotle and the Holy Scriptures. He delighted most in the Old Testament heroes and prophets, and caught their sternness and invective. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... have swelled somewhat in consequence. While making this reply, Ralph again caught his glance, still curiously fixed upon himself, with an expression which again provoked his surprise, and occasioned a gathering sternness in the look of fiery indignation which ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... and I had the rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the very first symptom I had seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. "You want so to go ...
— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James
... mean that Ireland was to bear her own burdens, and in her impoverished state was to be saddled with the financial responsibilities inseparable from so pitiable a collapse of prosperity. Bread riots and agrarian disturbances grew common, and the Government met them with rather more than becoming sternness, instead of dealing promptly with the land-tenure system which lay at the root of so much of the misery. At the beginning of the session of 1847 it was stated that 10,000,000l. would be required to meet the exigencies of the situation. ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... isn't a table girl, a kitchen girl or any other girl in this house who does not know all about you. They read those yarns about you so much that they neglect their business. And, Mr. Merriwell," with sudden sternness, "I think you will have to settle ...
— Frank Merriwell's Cruise • Burt L. Standish
... of his inward frame, Draining the natural juices that were spread Around his vitals; in his arid jaws Set flame upon his tongue: his wearied limbs No sweat bedewed; dried up, the fount of tears Fled from his eyelids. Tortured by the fire Nor Cato's sternness, nor of his sacred charge The honour could withhold him; but he dared To dash his standard down, and through the plains Raging, to seek for water that might slake The fatal venom thirsting at his heart. Plunge him in Tanais, in Rhone and Po, Pour on his burning tongue the ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... those arenas of contention. It seemed as if the bitterer feelings he checked in private life, he delighted to indulge in public. Yet even there he gave not way to momentary petulance or gushing passion; all seemed with him systematic sarcasm or habitual sternness. He outraged no form of ceremonial or of society. He stung, without appearing conscious of the sting; and his antagonist writhed not more beneath the torture of his satire than the crushing contempt of his self-command. Cool, ready, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... not be stopped without great parental sternness and the danger of deceit, for co-education will go on outside of school if not inside, and the safest way is to let sentiment and study go hand in hand, with teachers and parents to direct and explain the great ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... him swiftly, and there was a sternness in her face that made the fool recoil involuntarily and wince as if at a coming blow. But there was little anger in the girl's clear speech as she condemned ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... done with women," said the poet with cold sternness. "I have done with the cold-hearted, treacherous, meretricious women of the town. But the simple, trusting and trustworthy country girl, the daughter of the soil, in perpetual touch with nature—surely communion with her would be ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... never called him by his Christian name before, and now the forced sternness of her tone gave it almost the accent ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... folk-lore, semi-magic, semi-allegorical, semi-moral tales which express the ideals and experiences of a different and younger world than ours of today. And it replies, "Give them these." It feels in the sternness of saga stuff and in the humanity of folk-lore, a validity and a dignity and a simplicity which seem to make them suitable for children. These tales tell of beliefs of folk less experienced than we: we have outgrown them. They ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... parted; her eyes clear and sparkling with delight. Dr. Hartwell sighed, and, turning from the bay road, approached his home. Beulah longed to speak to him of what was pressing on her heart; but, glancing at his countenance to see whether it was an auspicious time, she was deterred by the somber sternness which overshadowed it, and before she could summon courage to speak, they stopped at ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... uttered with some sternness, but bodily weakness subdued the voice, which shook. And when he ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion. He was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately prejudiced; a man of many extremes, ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... producing his rifle immediately if the stranger ventured to urge his request. Of late the insolence of the Boers had greatly increased; the manner in which England had, instead of demanding justice with the sternness and determination that the circumstances called for, permitted her remonstrances to be simply ignored, was put down as a consciousness of weakness. And having now collected arms sufficient not only for ...
— With Buller in Natal - A Born Leader • G. A. Henty
... nearly reached it when the rough challenge of "Who's there?" from the bushes halted him, and Demorest suddenly swung into the trail. But the singular look of sternness and impatience which he was wearing vanished as he saw Barker, and with a loud shout of "All right, it's only Barker! Hooray!" he ran toward him. In an instant he was joined by Stacy from the cabin, and the two men, catching ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... moving power for your heart, is as important an element in education as gymnastics, and, strange as it may sound, has an equal share in effecting the perfection of both body and mind. The man who devotes his attention exclusively to music will, if he be of a violent disposition, lose his savage sternness at first; he will become gentle and pliable as metal in the fire. But at last his courage will disappear too; his passionate temper will have changed into irritability, and he will be of little worth as a warrior, the calling and character most desired in your country. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... station into the brighter air of the London streets, there pausing for a second or two to look around him. He was a man of about fifty, short, thin, wiry, square-shouldered; his features firm even to sternness, and hardened by exposure to wind and weather; his hair gray; his beard also gray and clipped short. The harshness of his face, however, was in a measure tempered by the look of his eyes; these were ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... know how to look out for yourself at the cost of others, a heavy cost." The commissioner's easy tone had changed to sternness. Knoll felt this, and a sharp gleam shot out from his dull little eyes, while the tone of his voice was gruff and impertinent again as he asked: "What ...
— The Lamp That Went Out • Augusta Groner
... the swish of the warrior's sabre. The peasant has vanished or else gapes through the open window while his master goes through the paces of a courtlier dance. We encounter sequential chords of the seventh, and their use, rhythmically framed as they are, gives a line of sternness to the dance. Niecks thinks that the second Mazurka might be called The Request, so pathetic, playful and persuasive is it. It is in E minor and has a plaintive, appealing quality. The G major part is very pretty. In the last lines the passion mounts, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Magdalen. "But how are we to teach her? that is the difficulty—the least severity or sternness which does good to other children, seems to rouse her very worst feelings and only to harden her. She is not hardened now, poor little soul, she is perfectly humble. Oh, how I do wish I could find ...
— Hoodie • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... Religion.—It has generally been said that the Arabs before Islam were irreligious. They themselves contrasted the sternness of the new period with the gaiety of the old one. The truth is, as Wellhausen has admirably shown,[1] that the working religion of the country had become before the period of Islam entirely effete. ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... rattling avenues and passed between rows of houses with sternness and stolidity stamped upon their features. She hung her head for she felt ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... dimness. I think little difference was made in our household while we mourned the dead King. Krak was still sharp, imperious, and exacting. She had been my mother's governess, and came with her from Styria. I suppose she had learned the necessity of sternness from her previous experience with Princess Gertrude, for that lady, my mother, a fair, small, slim woman, who preserved her girlishness of appearance till the approach of middle age, was of a strong and masterful temper. Only Krak and Hammerfeldt had any power over her; Krak's ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... suicidal inhumanity. The intolerableness of this moral condition poisons the beauty which continues to be felt. If this beauty did not exist, and was not still desired, the tragedy would disappear and Jehovah would be deprived of the worth of his victim. The sternness of moral forces lies precisely in this, that the sacrifices morality imposes upon us are real, that the things it ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... that on the west wall which illustrates the Baptist admonishing the soldiers. "Do violence to no man ... and be content with your wages." Wellington earned his name of the Iron Duke for the firmness and sternness with which he punished pillaging and outrage.[96] The stained-glass window by Mr. Kempe has been lately put in to the memory of James Augustus Hessey, Archdeacon of Middlesex (1875-93), whose Bampton Lectures, "Sunday," still remain for theologians ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... Karnegie carried her to her bed. As she was laid down her left hand fell helpless over the side of the bed. Mrs. Karnegie suddenly checked the word of sympathy as it rose to her lips—suddenly lifted the hand, and looked, with a momentary sternness of scrutiny, at the third finger. There was a ring on it. Mrs. Karnegie's face softened on the instant: the word of pity that had been suspended the moment before passed her lips freely now. "Poor soul!" said the respectable landlady, taking appearances for granted. "Where's your ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... He sent her from his late diocese a young professor, twenty-five years of age, named Ruffin, whose mind had a special vocation for the art of teaching. This young man's knowledge was great, and his nature was one of deep feeling, which, however, did not preclude the sternness necessary in the management of youth. In him religion did not in any way hamper knowledge; he was also patient, and extremely agreeable in appearance and manner. "I make you a fine present, my dear daughter," wrote the prelate; "this young man is fit ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... to bother with four whole years at a deadly institution—some of the girls say you have to study awfully hard. Amy Mathers is going to come out next year and I want to, too." Isobel talked fast and defiantly, as she caught the sudden sternness that ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... erstwhile bronco character. That out of such conditions, out of this hardy and indomitable population, the great state could bring order and quiet so soon and so permanently over vast unsettled regions, is proof alike of the fundamental sternness and justness of the American character and the value of the ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... said, in a tone of greater sternness than I thought him capable of using, 'I have hitherto spoken to you as a friend, but I have not forgotten that I am also your guardian, and that my authority as such gives me a right to control your conduct. I shall put a question to you, and I expect and ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... that a stranger could not be mistaken in the man; he was remarkably dignified in his manners, and had an air of benignity over his features which his visitant did not expect, being rather prepared for sternness of countenance.... his smile was extraordinarily attractive. It was observed to me that there was an expression in Washington's face that no painter had succeeded in taking. It struck me no man could be better formed for command. ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... time McKeith came back, booted and spurred, and stood as before looking at her with forbidding sternness. ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... should never have attained to our present proud position of being allowed to write for (and be printed in) the "Atlantic Monthly," without much previous polish, through the companionship of the fairer sex. Why was it made a crime worthy of Draconian sternness to address our she-comrades in the pleasant paths of learning? Why did we behold the severe Magister Morum himself, in utter forgetfulness of his own rule, mingle in the mazy dance on an evening occasion, at which we were allowed to sit up? Did the girls of a larger ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... sympathetic interest of years suddenly cut off at the meter, as it were. Gerald felt that he ought, at a time like this, to have been the centre of interest. And he wasn't. They could actually talk about supper. Well, let them. He didn't care! He spoke with sharp sternness: "Leave the pantry window undone for me to get in by when I've done my detecting. Come on, Mabel." He caught her hand. "Bags I the buns, though," he added, by a happy afterthought, and snatching the bag, pressed it on Mabel, and the sound of four boots ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... the age of dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to use their minds (an epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke) they divined the secret of the cares that lined their father's forehead, and they recognized beneath that mask of sternness the relics of a kind heart and a fine character. They vaguely perceived how he had yielded to the forces of religion in his household, disappointed as he was in his hopes of a husband, and wounded in the tenderest fibres ...
— A Daughter of Eve • Honore de Balzac
... an embodiment of fair youth and innocent pleasure, and her mother, with a mother's admiration and sympathy in her heart, gave her a lingering glance before she put on a little sternness, and said, "My child, I don't like to hear you talk in that light way. Your heart's desires, I trust, are set upon better things, those of ...
— The Bay State Monthly - Volume 2, Issue 3, December, 1884 • Various
... with the spade, but no further discoveries had been made. In addition to this, Jernyngham rode to and fro about the prairie, talking to the farmers whom he met on the trail or found at work in the fields. They were all sorry for him, but there was something deterrent in his sternness and his formal English manner, and they were less communicative than they might have been. This was why he failed to learn that the Colstons had stayed at Prescott's homestead, though, for that matter, the fact was ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... very difficult to prove that, Mr. Burnit," said Sharpe, with a sternness which could not quite conceal a ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... at Cheyenne, whose usually placid countenance expressed indecision and worry. Cheyenne seemed positive about the missing horses. Then Bartley saw an expression in Cheyenne's eyes that indicated more sternness of spirit than he ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... moved by the same influences, and the alert movement of his head, at such moments, was in singular contrast to his otherwise heavy inactive manner. His face, when he was calm and giving careful attention to any thing said to him, wore a look of exceeding sternness, enhanced by a peculiar twitch of the muscles of the mouth and eye. He had a German face with all the Irish expressions. A wound received in a duel had shortened one leg and gave him a singular gait, something between ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... at Mrs. Matthews as he put the five-dollar note back into his pocket, seemed to choke a little, shook his head, and all trace of the official sternness that had crept ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... in rather a forced and silly fashion, quite different from the ordinary way with him, and would sometimes, on these occasions, blush so violently that his face would become almost purple. His soldierly alertness and sternness relaxed surprisingly at some times and at others were exaggerated into unnecessary acerbity, his conduct in this regard suggesting that of a drunken man who knows that he is drunk and who now and then makes a brave effort to appear sober. All these things, and ...
— The Ape, the Idiot & Other People • W. C. Morrow
... hearts to our religion; we must have the inward soil broken up, freely and deeply its roots must penetrate our inner being. We must take to ourselves in silence and in sincerity its words of judgment with its words of hope, its sternness with its encouragement, its denunciations with its promises, its requirements, with its offers, its absolute intolerance of sin with its inconceivable and divine long-suffering towards sinners.' But preaching like this would have frightened away poor Pliable. He would not have understood ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... his death at six-and-seventy. He was repeatedly elected governor, and died in the governor's chair. In 1645 he was made Major-general of the Colonial troops; nine years before he had headed a campaign against the Pequot Indians. His character illustrated the full measure of Puritan sternness; he was an inflexible persecutor of the Quakers, and was instrumental in causing four of them to be executed in Boston. In his career is found no feeble passage; he was always Endicott. He was a man grown before he attained, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... could become sarcastic, but never condescended to be furious. If he was at all sycophantic, it was his will rather than his nature to be so. On the bench, he loomed large, being long in body, and looked stately and agreeable. He could be stern, but sternness was less natural to him than concealment. He never told all he knew, nor did his face ever betray the innermost recesses of his heart. On the whole, Mr. Sewell was a good man, and he was an excellent Chief Justice. Such are the characters ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... which he gave full vent to his indignation at anything were very rare; but when these came, he manifested a strength of sway only to be described as regal. Without the least violence, he brought a searching sternness to bear that was utterly overwhelming, carrying as it did the weight of perfect self-control. Something even of the eloquent gift of old Colonel Hathorne seemed to be locked within him, like a precious heirloom rarely shown; for in England, where his position ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... went on with the increasing sympathy of his audience, who were feeling the effects of a generous reaction in his favor. Uncle Ben, touched a little with honest obstinacy as he was, gradually relaxed in the sternness of his looks, straightening up by degrees until he sat upright facing the speaker in a sort of half-reluctant, pleased wonder. Just at the close of a specially vigorous burst of declamation, the old man exclaimed, in a ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... bottomed the doctrine of purgatory, which every good Catholic is obliged to believe for the benefit of the priests, who reserve to themselves, as is very reasonable, the power of compelling by their prayers a just and immutable God to relax in his sternness, and liberate the captive souls, which he had only condemned to undergo this purgation in order that they might be made meet for the ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... came deliberately towards the window. "Why do you call me?" he said, with a sternness that took her completely unawares, his face being now pale. "Is it not enough that you see me here moiling and muddling for my daily bread while you are sitting there in your success, that you can't refrain from opening old wounds by ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... Antonio thus spoke he so drew up his slight figure, and in his sweet voice was a ring of such commanding sternness, that he was for the moment transformed. Here was a man wholly different from the gentle scholar whom I had already learned to love. In the glimpse that I thus had of his underlying character I saw vivified again the spirit of the early Christian Church; and I understood, as ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... habitation. It was of large proportions and faced to the north, where the mountains were most wildly figured. The embers of a fire smouldered and smoked upon the hearth, to which a chair had been drawn close. And yet the aspect of the chamber was ascetic to the degree of sternness; the chair was uncushioned; the floor and walls were naked; and beyond the books which lay here and there in some confusion, there was no instrument of either work or pleasure. The sight of books ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she should always love him and pray for him. Even when he heard within the year that she was about to make a brilliant marriage with a titled Frenchman whom she had met at Newport, he persisted in thinking of her as the victim, not of her own inconstancy, but of parental sternness. He sometimes saw her pretty face quite distinctly before his eyes, as he looked out across the swiftly spinning wheel, into the smoke-hung barroom,—the pretty face with the tearful eyes and the quivering lip ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... with sternness, "for every disrespectful allusion to the ladies, I shall give you ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."[50:9] As respects truth, philosophy has an indubitable priority. The very sternness of the philosopher's task is due to his supreme dedication to truth. But if validity be the merit of philosophy, it can well be supplemented by immediacy, which is the merit of poetry. Presuppose in the poet conviction ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... hair was arranged differently; he closely resembled an average plain man,—he, the unique Ozzie! With all his faults, he had previously been both good-natured and negligent, but his expression was now one of sternness and of resolute endeavour. Sissie had already metamorphosed him. Even now he was obediently following her lead and her mood. Mr. Prohack's women had evidently determined to revenge themselves for being asked to meet Miss Fancy at lunch, and Ozzie had been set ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... came in with a look of black sternness on her face, which made Margaret feel she had arrived at a bad time to trouble her with her request. However, it was only in compliance with Mrs. Thornton's expressed desire, that she would ask for whatever ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... deep breath which tore savagely at all the best within her. It wrestled with her affection for Miss Shellington, for her duty to Floyd's friend. Not daring to glance up, she still stood in silence. Horace's voice shocked her with the sternness of it. ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... is impossible that a sentiment of tenderness should not strike athwart the sternness of politics, and make us recall to painful memory the difference between this insolent and bloody theatre and the temperate, natural majesty of a civilized court, where the afflicted family of Asgill did not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... to disgust me; to tire me out; to make me withdraw from the debate, and give him the opportunity of saying he had put me to flight. He was mistaken. I kept my ground. And I kept my temper. And I kept my gravity. I rebuked him at times with becoming sternness, and then went on with my task. It is probable that I spoke more strongly against the Bible, and that I said harder things against the church and the ministry, than I should have done, if he had conducted himself with any regard to truth and decency; ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... everything since I have known them) stupidly. If they had dropped in a single night to 3/4, I should at least have had my thrill. I should have suffered in a single night the loss of some pounds, and I could have borne it dramatically; either with the sternness of the silent Saxon, or else with the volubility of the volatile—I can't think of anybody beginning with a "V." But, alas! Jaguars never dropped at all. They subsided. They subsided slowly back to 1—so slowly ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... Catti assume this distinction, and grow hoary under the mark, conspicuous both to foes and friends. By these, in every engagement, the attack is begun: they compose the front line, presenting a new spectacle of terror. Even in peace they do not relax the sternness of their aspect. They have no house, land, or domestic cares: they are maintained by whomsoever they visit: lavish of another's property, regardless of their own; till the debility of age renders them unequal to such a rigid course of ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... boast of no other eloquence but that which finds expression in tears, in sobs, and in those hackneyed but energetic exclamations, which two happy lovers are sure to address to reason, when in its sternness it compels them to part from one another in the very height of their felicity. Henriette did not endeavour to lure me with any hope for the future, in order to allay my sorrow! Far from ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... somewhat pleased at this speech; but he did not relax the sternness of his features ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... piteous sound and took a sly peep over his shoulder, seeing such a mournful spectacle that he felt appeased, saying to himself as if to excuse his late sternness,— ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... any to be spied out, Dolly," Faith answered, with some sternness, and a keen look at her sister, whose eyes fell beneath her gaze. "You will be sorry, when you think of what you said to me, who have done nothing whatever to offend you. But that is a trifle compared with acting unfairly to our father. Father is the ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... and take your monstrosity with you," said the mother, pushing away her daughter with pretended sternness, and turning to the visitor she added: "She ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... propre of the Romans by singing French romances of her own composition in the lesson-scene of "Il Barbiere." She learned of the death of her father while in Rome, news which plunged her in the deepest despondency, for the memory of his sternness and cruelty had long been effaced by her appreciation of the inestimable value his training had been to her. She had often remarked to her friend, Mme. Merlin, that without just such a severe system her voice would never ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... then. His face relaxed its sternness a little. Even the hottest blaze of wrath could not burn quite so fiercely when exposed to a generous penitence like his young brother's. He understood Ted was working hard not only to make peace but to spare himself the sharp battle with the demon ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... country whose good had ever been, not only the first, but the only object of his public action: and with this patriotic loyalty there mingled something of a personal feeling, more akin to romance in its paternal tenderness than seemed consistent with the granite-hewn strength and sternness of his general character. A thorough soldier, with a soldier's contempt for fine-spun diplomacy, he had been led into many a blunder when acting as a chief of party and of State; but his absolute single-minded honesty had more ...
— Great Britain and Her Queen • Anne E. Keeling
... there did be no cause either that I should have the cloak for a bed; for how should I perceive any softness from the cloak, through all the sternness of mine armour; but yet did I see that the Maid had made a couch that should be for the two of us, and did be so sweet and natural, and to lie by me; but yet to preserve her sweet modesty, and to ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... European disguise, purchased at a slop dealer's by the precious Harry, a rope, a midnight flitting, a passage taken on board an English ship; the anchor weighed; and the lovers were free on the bounding main. A most refreshing story! I put on a sudden air of sternness, and shot a question at her like ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... destined the spot for a gloomy and infrangible prison. From these heights, on the contrary, the picturesque and smiling landscape of the interior forms the most striking contrast to its external sternness, and suggests the idea of a gifted mind, compelled by painful experience to shroud its charms under a forbidding veil of ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... Politicians Revolutionists Lerroux An offer Socialists Love of the workingman The conventionalist Barriovero Anarchists The morality of the alternating party system On obeying the law The sternness ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... intimates, and those who had got, as it were, behind the scenes of his fame, he was seen in his true colours, as well of weakness as of amiableness, on strangers and such as were out of this immediate circle, the spell of his poetical character still continued to operate; and the fierce gloom and sternness of his imaginary personages were, by the greater number of them, supposed to belong, not only as regarded mind, but manners, to himself. So prevalent and persevering has been this notion, that, in some disquisitions on his character published since his death, and containing ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... into which the first shock of recognition had plunged him, rushed forward and clasped his long-lost son to his bosom. The big tear-drops rolled down his manly cheeks, and, relaxing the dignity of the king, and the sternness of the warrior, all the energies of his nature were embodied in the one single feeling, that he was a happy and a ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... Marshal, with a sternness of manner which till now he had never shown, "to screen yourself, you accused an innocent man; and by your vile arts would have driven him from Hereford, and have set two families for ever at variance, to conceal that you ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... eyes, as well as the understanding, of the multitude. From nature he had received the gift of a handsome person, [35] till it was swelled and disfigured by intemperance: and his propensity to laughter was corrected in the magistrate by the affectation of gravity and sternness. He was clothed, at least on public occasions, in a party-colored robe of velvet or satin, lined with fur, and embroidered with gold: the rod of justice, which he carried in his hand, was a sceptre of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... that young people delighted in was sinful, and he held up before his children such sober ways of living that Washington at least came to think that everything pleasant was wicked. No amount of sternness, however, could keep the five boys of the family and their three sisters wholly out of mischief, nor hinder them from having many a harmless ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... shadow of the doorway watching that lean, handsome face with the suggestion of mockery in the eyes and the trace of sternness around the thin lips. Not a formidable figure by any means, but since his experiences of the past few days, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... so distinguished in the days of the Commonwealth, was at this time becoming the most influential leader of the army. He was not the commander-in-chief in form, but he was the great planner and manager in fact. He was a man of great sternness and energy of character, and was always ready for the most prompt and daring action. He conceived the design of seizing the king's person at Holmby, so as to take him away from the control of the Parliament, and transfer ...
— Charles I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... "Sergeant!" he said quietly, "You'd better leave the leg-irons on, but remove his handcuffs—for the time-being, anyway. . . ." He addressed himself to the prisoner with a sort of sad sternness. "It's little I can do for you now, Gully . . . but I can do that, ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... which seemed to emanate from an anteroom, and presently a figure was solemnly gliding forward—a figure slight, emaciated, and habited in a long black cassock. This was relieved at the throat by one peeping patch of purple, and above the throat was a face the delicate sternness of which was like semitransparent ivory. The company parted, making way for the great Churchman, and then a scene enacted itself which cannot be better described than in the words written many years previously by the author of Lothair himself. "The ladies did their best to signalize ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... there's an end of it. There is something exceedingly winning, to us, in that sturdy sense, that thirst for mathematical precision, that impatience of theory, that positive and self-reliant—we don't mind saying, somewhat dogmatical—air, that sternness of feature, thinness of lip, and coldness of eye, which belong to the best examples. We respect even the humbler ones; for they at least hate sentiment, they do not comprehend or approve of humor, and they never relish ...
— Punchinello Vol. 1, No. 21, August 20, 1870 • Various
... children, unto the third and to the fourth generation." But someone will say, This is terrible. It is terrible; but the question is, Does the Bible speak the truth about nature? Is nature a "fairy godmother," or does she bring men up with sternness and inflict suffering upon the innocent children, if necessary, lest they copy after their sinful parents? Do the children of the defaulter and drunkard and debauchee suffer because of the sins of their father, or do they not? If the blessings won by parental virtue ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... the talk seemed to satisfy the clergyman. "You must think my questions very peculiar," he said, the sternness of his face relaxing a little, "but it was necessary to understand your exact position before proceeding further. The gravity of my undertaking demands it. However, you must not let my words alarm you." He waited a moment, ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... It is solidly, awfully suggestive of the sternness of its duty and of the hopelessness of its failing in it. It stands like a great fortress of the Middle Ages in a quadrangle of cheap brick and white dwelling-houses, and a few mean shops and tawdry saloons. It has the towers ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... incongruity between Garibaldi and his worshippers. It is not easy to conceive anything finer, simpler, more thoroughly unaffected, or more truly dignified, than the man himself. His noble head; his clear, honest, brown eye; his finely-traced mouth, beautiful as a woman's, and only strung up to sternness when anything ignoble or mean had outraged him; and, last of all, his voice contains a fascination perfectly irresistible, allied, as you knew and felt these graces were, with a thoroughly pure, untarnished nature. The true measure of the ...
— Cornelius O'Dowd Upon Men And Women And Other Things In General - Originally Published In Blackwood's Magazine - 1864 • Charles Lever
... to his own easy-chair; and I then saw his profile. It was delicate as that of Dante, which in form it marvellously resembled. But all the sternness which Dante's evil times had generated in his prophetic face was in this old man's replaced by a sweetness of hope ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... tenderness was one of her chief characteristics. Although she was a reformer by nature there was no sternness in her composition. Forgetfulness of others there was certainly sometimes, arising from her hopeless absent-mindedness and the preoccupation consequent upon her work; but her whole life was swayed and ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... long as the band of believers was a small and persecuted one, no temptation to violate the rule could exist. But as the Church grew, and acquired influence and position, it discovered that good policy demanded that the sternness and inflexibility of its youthful theories should undergo some modification. It found that it was not the most successful method of enticing stragglers into its fold to stigmatize the gods they ignorantly worshipped as ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... prophets of the Old Testament, a contemporary of Isaiah, Hosea, and Amos; his prophecies are in the same strain as those of Isaiah, and numerous are the coincidences traceable between them; though a great sternness of temper and severity of tone appears in his prophecies, a deep tenderness of heart from time to time reveals itself, and a winning persuasiveness (chap. vi. 8); chap. vii. 8-20 has been quoted as one of the sweetest passages of prophetic writing; his prophecies ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... citizens received him with groans and hisses; the soldiers murmured; the officers tendered their resignations. He merely replied that his orders left nothing to his discretion; but the reply was made with a sternness of ...
— The History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans - to the Accession of King George the Fifth - Volume 8 • John Lingard and Hilaire Belloc
... payment of a small license fee. This favor was taken away in 1870, for the alleged reason that American captains failed to procure licenses, and in the course of this year many of our ships were seized and confiscated. New sternness had been imparted to the provincial policy by the Canadian Act of Confederation, valid from July I, 1867, which joined Ontario and Quebec with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, thus inspiring our neighbors to the north with a new sense of ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... was dressed in a manner which was "a little equivocal," wore a broad hat and a thick moustache, which, joined with the sternness of his pale cheek and the piercingness of his eye, must indeed have suggested something extremely eerie to a well-shaven, three-corner hat, respectable man of the eighteenth century; so that we are not ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... King Humphrey looked sternly about the council-table. Sternness did not become him, but dignity did. He said with dignity, "You who are to stay here have to think of dealing with a victorious Mekin. We who are to go have to think of making our defeat count. There is no point in further discussion. The fleet will ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... it, as though he were trying to think what such an one was thinking of, or what he were fit for. Sometimes he caught the eye of one or other, and then that kindly smile spread over his face, but faded off it into the sternness and sadness of a man who has heavy and great thoughts hanging about him. But when John Ball first mounted the steps of the cross a lad at some one's bidding had run off to stop the ringers, and so presently the voice of the bells ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... his parting spell! 20 No, BURKE! thy heart, by juster feelings led, Mourns for the spirit of high Honour fled; Mourns that Philosophy, abstract and cold, Withering should smite life's fancy-flowered mould; And many a smiling sympathy depart, That graced the sternness of the manly heart. Nor shall the wise and virtuous scan severe These fair illusions, ev'n to nature dear. Though now no more proud Chivalry recalls Her tourneys bright, and pealing festivals; 30 Though now on high her idle spear is hung, Though Time her mouldering harp has half unstrung; Her ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... success. No young man of his age was more courted both by men and women. There was no one who in his youth had suffered fewer troubles from those causes of trouble which visit English young men,—occasional impecuniosity, sternness of parents, native shyness, fear of ridicule, inability of speech, and a general pervading sense of inferiority combined with an ardent desire to rise to a feeling of conscious superiority. So much ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
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