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More "Rant" Quotes from Famous Books



... country lyceum- halls, are one thing,—and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice, acting in those love-dramas which ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... looked back upon his mad wanderings from street to street, his fierce emotional agony. The very sincerity of his sufferings made them seem unreal to him now. He wondered how he could have been so foolish as to rant and rave about the inevitable. The only question that seemed to trouble him was, whom to make away with; for he was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest. Not ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... a church politician," protested the professor. "I'm bitterly opposed to the lily-white crowd who continually rant against the thing they don't understand. I'm practical, as ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... but he only emitted some effusions of the witticisms of fancy. His declamation, indeed, was better calculated for the stage of Sadler's Wells than the floor of the House of Commons. A mountebank, with but one-half of the honorable gentleman's talent for rant, would undoubtedly make his fortune. However, I am somewhat surprised he should entertain such a particular asperity against me, as I never did him a favor. But, perhaps, the honorable gentleman imagines he may talk himself into consequence; if so, I should be sorry to obstruct his promotion; he ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... there being, as they say, to be sixteen scarlet robes.' (11 December, 1667.) In the first quarto (1672), of Buckingham's The Rehearsal, Bayes refers to Catiline saying that his design in a certain scene is 'Roman cloaths, guilded Truncheons, forc'd conceipt, smooth Verse, and a Rant.' The words 'Roman cloaths' are omitted in ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... about it. The attitude of the public toward the theatre has changed. To-day we would not tolerate the heavy melodramas which enchained our parents and grandparents. The age of rant and fustian has passed away, and Edwin Forrest could never gain a second fortune from such a combination of these qualities as "Metamora." We are more sophisticated; we refuse to be thrilled by Ingomar, no matter ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... and we'll roar like true British sailors, We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas, Until we take soundings in the Channel of Old England From Ushant to Scilly ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... "Rant doesn't win elections, Brydges! It has to be fought out! Sooner we accept the challenge and put 'em to bed for good, ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... much can I get?' An' yet, as I says, sech parties mighty likely holds themse'fs moral to a degree which is mountainous, an' wouldn't take a twist at faro-bank, or pick up a poker hand, more'n they'd mingle with t'rant'lers an' stingin' lizards. An' some of their moral sports is so onlib'ral! I tells you, son, I've met up with 'em who's that stingy that if they owned a lake, they wouldn't give ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... The arrangements are all made. Van Slyke can handle the last stages of the thing far better than I can. I loathe hanging round and hearing the fools rant about my stuff and wonder what the devil I meant by this or that or if I didn't mean anything. I am infinitely better off three thousand ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper

... many things in this counthry," the obscene tirade ended. "You came out of these woods with rags on your back and started at bein' a gentleman when we were only bhoys. You've made a gr-reat success av it with the ladies, we'll gr-rant you that; but you should have stuck to your soft and lily-white pastime. For when you aimed to turn this river into a gentleman's proposition you started something too big for you to finish. I'm taking it off your hands, now. ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... afterwards passed the evening at a tavern with him and old Giffard. Johnson, who was ever depreciating stage-players, after censuring some mistakes in emphasis which Garrick had committed in the course of that night's acting, said, 'The players, Sir, have got a kind of rant, with which they run on, without any regard either to accent or emphasis.' Both Garrick and Giffard were offended at this sarcasm, and endeavoured to refute it; upon which Johnson rejoined, 'Well now, I'll give you something ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... ran his thoughts. "I am consumed with it all of a sudden. I have ranted to a tramp. Now I rant at myself. I am sloughing the rags that have protected me. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day

... necessity of undertakings of incalculable consumption, by men who could see no national disgrace in the circumstance that several millions of the persons composing the nation could not read the ten commandments. Or the national safety has been pleaded to a similar purpose, with a rant or a gravity of patriotic phrases, upon the appearance of some slight threatening symptoms; and the wise men so pleading, would have scouted as the very madness of fanaticism any dissuasion that should have advised,—"Do you, instead, apply your best efforts, and the nation's means, to raise ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... Shakespeare sole, A hundred hurts a day I do forgive ('Tis little, but, enchantment! 'tis for thee): Small curious quibble; Juliet's prurient pun In the poor, pale face of Romeo's fancied death; Cold rant of Richard; Henry's fustian roar Which frights away that sleep he invocates; Wronged Valentine's unnatural haste to yield; Too-silly shifts of maids that mask as men In faint disguises that could ne'er disguise — Viola, Julia, Portia, ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... rant and talk about British gold, And opinions that are bought and sold, But facts, no matter how hard to face, Are facts, and the horrors taking place In that little land, pledged to honor's creed, Make your cause a luckless one to plead. There are two sides? True. But when both are heard, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... in a body's power, To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shared; How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And ken na ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... inspiration as the making of great poetry and great pictures. What is commonly called acting is acting acting. This is what is generally accepted as acting. A man speaks lines, moves his arms, wags his head, and does various other things; he may even shout and rant; some pull down their cuffs and inspect their finger nails; they work hard and perspire, and their skin acts. This is all easily comprehended by the masses, and passes for acting, and is applauded, but the man who is actually the embodiment of the character he is creating will often be ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... had got through she dropped her rake on the hay, searched for a long, nail-like thorn, and thrust it through, for the good-looking, careless hussy never had any provision of pins about her. Then, taking a June rose which pricked her finger, she put the flower by the "rant", or tear, and went to join the rest of the hay-makers. The blood welled up out of the scratch in the finger more freely than would have been supposed from so small a place. She put her lips to it to suck it away, as folk do in all quarters of the earth yet discovered, being ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... dose of all the Allopaths; and Christian Science has attenuated the Hahnemannian theory of attenuations, it having been found that the blank tablet often cures quite as effectively as the one that is medicated. Christian Science does not shout, rant, defy nor preach. It is poised, silent, sure, and the flagellants, like the dervishes, are ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... nothing for your rant, fellow, but out of consideration for the feelings which your fancied injuries have put into your heart, I tell you that I did what I could to liberate you, and received from the keeper a promise that you should be allowed to ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major

... said Vermont contemptuously. "Don't begin to rant—you're not on the stage now. I kept all my promises to you, at any rate. I got you on at the Rockingham and I introduced you to Leroy; and if you had only played your cards properly you would have hooked him by this time. As it is, he'll marry his cousin, if you're ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... father a chance to vent his vexation with himself upon his son. "I wish you wouldn't talk that walking-delegate's rant with me, Matt. If I let you alone in your nonsense, I think you may fitly take it as a sign that I wish to be let ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells

... destruction of property belonging to American citizens by her agency and her fault. And now Mr. Johnson and Lord Clarendon had concluded a treaty which practically admitted that the complaints of the United States, as a government, against the conduct of Great Britain, as a government, had been mere rant and bravado on the part of the United States, and were not to be insisted on before any International tribunal, but to be merged in an ordinary claims convention, by whose award a certain amount in dollars and cents might be paid to the ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... and for all," cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his knuckles angrily on the table, "I tell you, once and for all, my man, that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or cant here. Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most religious people are not those who talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions and do ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... jour, mon cher Monsieur Hugo, au revoir!"—and they part:—Justice taking off his hat and bowing, and the author of "Ruy Blas" quite convinced that he has been treating with him d'egal en egal. I can hardly bring my mind to fancy that anything is serious in France—it seems to be all rant, tinsel, and stage-play. Sham liberty, sham monarchy, sham glory, sham justice,—ou diable donc la ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Mr. Blackwood, who assured me of it.] "Then there was 'The Involuntary Experimentalist,' all about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and came out alive and well, although certainly done to a turn. And then there was 'The Diary of a Late Physician,' where the merit lay in good rant, and indifferent Greek—both of them taking things with the public. And then there was 'The Man in the Bell,' a paper by-the-by, Miss Zenobia, which I cannot sufficiently recommend to your attention. It is the history of a young person who goes to sleep under the clapper of a church bell, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... immediate future, that it has entered into a new phase; into what does he call it? the domain of practical politics. As for me, you don't suppose I don't want everything we poor women can get, or that I would refuse any privilege or advantage that's offered me? I don't rant or rave about anything, but I have—as I told you just now—my own quiet way of being zealous. If you had no worse partisan than I, you would do very well. My son has talked to me immensely about your ideas; and even if ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... he said, happily. "I'm no tramp, though I did rant in like a trespasser. I want to ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... said Uncle Rufus, kindly. "Dar's a do' shet 'twixt dat leetle fice an' dem crazy cats. Dar's sho' nuff wot de papahs calls er armerstice 'twixt de berlig'rant pahties—ya-as'm! De berry wust has happen' already, so yo' folkses might's ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... soon have sped That flossy tail—that lofty head— Far, far away from danger. But—fatal error of his race— In sandy bank he hid his face, And thought by this to evade the chase Of the ostrich-bagging ranger. So he who, like the ostrich vain, Is ign'rant, and would so remain, Of what folks do, it's very plain In folly's road he's walking. For if in sand you hide your head Just to escape that which you dread, And, seeing not, say danger's fled: 'Tis worse ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... gatekeepers of Baal, They dare not sit or lean, But fume and fret and posture And foam and curse between; For being bound to Baal, Whose sacrifice is vain, Their rest is scant with Baal, They glare and pant for Baal, They mouth and rant for Baal, For ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... Rant was seized in his own house and shot. Clos was met by a company, and seeing Trestaillons, with whom he had always been friends, in its ranks, he went up to him and held out his hand; whereupon Trestaillons drew a pistol from his belt and blew his brains out. Calandre being chased down the rue ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... how little becoming such actions are to my character and person or to your own: but pray how came it that you, acting, as you say, a play, should fall upon anything that could so alarm Frank?" "That is what I can hardly tell, sir: he passed all in a moment from rant about battles and lovers and Cleodora and Antigenes to something I could not follow at all, and then dropped down as you saw." "Yes: was that at the moment when you laid your hand on the top of his head?" Lord Saul gave a quick look at his questioner—quick and spiteful—and ...
— A Thin Ghost and Others • M. R. (Montague Rhodes) James

... sit now in the house; and, that I may not lose my temper and my spirits, I shut my ears against the sophisms and rant against the treaty, and divert my ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... [Coming and going in excitement.] Oh, wonderful, and again wonderful, and then again wonderful!—Hear me rant! ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... ob clay, an' in holes in de groun'—dey kill an' eat one anoder, an' dey'm allers at war wid one anoder. But de white man he gwoe dar, an' he buy 'em fur twenty pieces ob silver—dat's' zactly de price—twenty silver dollars—dey pay dat fur 'em up ter dis day—dem pore, ign'rant folks won't take nuffin' but silver. Well, de white man buy 'em, and he fotch 'em to dis country, which am like de lan' ob Egypt, full ob schools, ob churches, ob larnin,' an' ob all manner ob good tings. Shore, we hab to wuck hard har; some ob us hab to bear ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... same failure and the same mortification, due to the same causes. In this play, as Jeffrey points out, the preservation of the unities had a still more disastrous effect. The author's determination to avoid rant did not hinder his frequently adopting an inflated style; while professing to follow the ancient rules, he forgets the warning of Horace so far as to permit the groans of the tortured Foscari to be heard ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... a great go!" a promoted "super" once observed to certain of his fellows, "I play a policeman! I go on in the last scene, and handcuff Mr. Rant. I have to say, 'Murder's the charge! Stand back!' ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... into ill repute with persons of good taste. But so had the Red Bull, and the actors there had no right to throw stones. Apparently the large numbers that could be accommodated in the great public theatres, and the quality of the audience attracted by the low price of admission, made noise and rant inevitable.[473] As chief sinners in this respect the Fortune and the Red Bull are ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... roar. Rant, song, lay. Rape, rope. Raw, row. Reaming, foaming. Reck, observe. Rede, counsel. Red up, cleared up. Reek, smoke. Reike, (smoky), Edinburgh. Restricket, restricted. Reveled, ravelled, trouble-some. Reynynge, running. Reytes, water-flags, iris. Rig, ridge. Rigwoodie, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... "What rant and cant have you expressed, Yon sordid wretch! It is the mind, And not the gold, corrupts mankind. Shall my best medium be accused Because its virtues are abused? Virtue and gold alike betrayed, When knaves demand a cloak to trade; So likewise power in their possession Grows ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay

... has been extensive. He was the real founder of the school of melodramatic opera which is now so popular. Violent contrasts with him do duty for the subtle characterisation of the older masters. His heroes rant and storm, and his heroines shriek and rave, but of real feeling, and even of real expression, there is little ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... against me in his confidential letters to Cunningham. And thus having 'no doubt' of his conjecture, he considers it as proven, goes on to suppose the contents of the letter (19, 22), makes it place Mr. Adams at my feet suing for pardon, and continues to rant upon it, as an undoubted fact. Now I do most solemnly declare, that so far from being a letter of apology, as Mr. Pickering so undoubtingly assumes, there was not a word or allusion ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... champion of his contrary, and blackened their own faults, and made light of their own virtues, when they beheld them in a master. Macconochie had soon smelled out my secret inclination, took me much into his confidence, and would rant against the Master by the hour, so that even my work suffered. "They're a' daft here," he would cry, "and be damned to them! The Master—the deil's in their thrapples that should call him sae! it's Mr. Henry ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... this great doctrine: La carriere ouverte aux talens; 'The Tools to him that can handle them.' . . . Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and first Missionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant, yet as articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom notwithstanding the peaceful ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... is the best young one in the world," Mrs. Foley confessed, referring to "Spotted Snake, the Witch." "Sometimes I rant at her like a good one. But she saves me a good bit, and if ever a child earned her keep, ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... of a man stabbed to the heart? His suffering is as real to us as the agony of a lion would be if we stood by and saw some one drive a knife into the beast up to the hilt. It equals in reality any exhibition of simple unfeigned bodily pain, with all its intensity of violence. The word "rant" never once comes into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... righteous Lazarus is lying at your gate. But wait a little! He shall soon lie in Abraham's bosom, while you shall roast on the devil's great gridiron, and be seasoned just to his tooth!—Will the prophets say, "Come here gamester, and teach us the long odds?"—'Tis odds if they do!—Will the martyrs rant, and swear, and shuffle, and cut with you? No! The martyrs are no shufflers! You will be cut so as you little expect: you are a field of tares, and Lucifer is your head farmer. He will come with his reapers and his sickles ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... kindled, as if the whole satire had been The oppression of virtue, not wages of sin: He began, as he bragg'd, with a rant and a roar; He bragg'd how he bounced, and he swore how he ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion' with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... say shoo has to want, For Johnny ofttimes gets o'th spree; He spends his wages in a rant, An' leeaves his wife to pine or dee. An' monny a time aw've ligged i' bed, An' cursed my fate for bein poor, An' monny a bitter tear aw've shed, When thinkin ov sweet Mistress Moore. For shoo's mi life Is ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... an' light o' heel, Young lads and lasses trip thegither; The native Norlan rant and reel Amang the halesome Hielan' heather! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... with other elements, and in each combination altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... litle village standing upon the Lindre, about 7 leagues from Portpile, wher I played one of the Gascons a pret[347] in the boat; wheir also I saw a reservoire of fisches. Heir I was wery sick, so that I suped none, as I had not dined, my Poictiers rant incapacitating me. Yea, I was distempered al the way after, so that I cost not wery dear to my Messenger for ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... rabble. Risping, grating. Rout, rowt, to roar, to rant. Rowth, abundance. Rudas, haggard old woman. Runt, an old cow past ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... against his trousers-pocket, 'as I've been a-doin' pretty good business lytely. Been growin' a bit—see? I'm runnin' round an' keepin' my heyes open understand? Thoughts I, now, if I could come acrosst a nicet little openin', somethink in the rest'rant line, that's what 'ud sewt me jest about down to the ground. I'm cut out for it—see? I've got the practical experience, and I've got the capital; and as soon as I got a squint of this little ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... the poets. Mr. Clutton Brock feels this surely enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility—part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems—that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that quality which most distinguishes ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... Ray, this fellow, like all rangers, seeks notoriety. He made that play with Snecker just for a chance to rant against your father. He tried to inflame all Fairdale against him. That about the lawsuits was the worst! Damn him! He'll ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey

... Hector of the glancing helm: "Ajax, brave leader, son of Telamon, Deal not with me as with a feeble child, Or woman, ign'rant of the ways of war; Of war and carnage every point I know; And well I know to wield, now right, now left, The tough bull's-hide that forms my stubborn targe: Well know I too my fiery steeds to urge, And raise the war-cry in the standing fight. But not in secret ambush ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... represented in grotesque and tragic disguise the magnificent figure of Marlowe's creative invention or discovery by dint of genius. (I do not remember the curious verb "to rand" except in this little book: "he randed out these sentences": I presume it to be the first form of "rant.") The account of St. Paul's in 1609 is very curious and scandalous: "the very Temple itself (in bare humility) stood without his cap, and so had stood many years, many good folks had spoke for him because he could not speak for himself, and somewhat had been gathered in his behalf, but not half ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... carpet warrior. On the contrary, when they were talking of the war amongst themselves they had an air of quiet determination, of good-humoured banter, and of easy, serious confidence far more ominous for an enemy than any amount of fluent rant. After the world of politics, with its hair-splitting and word-mincing, it was good to be with soldiers—the men who do the work. They knew no fine political shades, they bandied no epithets; England was at ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... you going to do?' she repeated vehemently. 'What does all this amount to? or is it anything but dissenting rant?' ...
— A Red Wallflower • Susan Warner

... a magnificent Confederate victory at Bull Run continued to pour in, Major Burgoyne shared for a time in the general elation, believing that independence, recognition abroad, and peace had been virtually secured. All the rant about Northern cowardice appeared to be confirmed, and he eagerly waited for the announcement that Washington had been captured by Johnston's ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... of these my new attempts in the old line, by him in English; and then tell me fairly your opinion. But don't measure me by YOUR OWN old or new tailors' yards. Nothing so easy as intricate confusion of plot and rant. Mrs. Centlivre, in comedy, has ten times the bustle of Congreve; but are they to be compared? and yet she ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... be the sufferer by misplaced affection, and commencing, "Stay, my Willie, yet believe me," though published, remain likewise in obscurity. "Roy's Wife" was originally written to an old tune called the "Ruffian's Rant," but this melody is now known by the name of its favourite words. The sentiment of the song is peculiarly pleasing. The rejected lover begins by loudly complaining of his wrongs, and the broken assurances of his former sweetheart: then he suddenly recalls ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... honest Mr. Black could sanction with his presence, such suicidal rant, such absurd bosh of that pair of demagogues, who hurried down these four hundred diggers from Creswick, helpless, grog-worn, that is, more or less dirty and ragged, and proved the greatest nuisance. One of them, MICHAEL TUEHY, behaved ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... were grandees, had such incapacity been shown by any restless patrician. Frederic Spinola, at the age of thirty-two, a landsman and a volunteer, thinking to measure himself on blue water with such veterans as John Rant, Joost de Moor, and the other Dutchmen and Zeelanders whom it was his fortune to meet, could hardly escape the doom which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... mine shall dare to say, Aurora usher'd in the day, Or ever name the milky-way. You all agree, I make no doubt, Elijah's mantle is worn out. The bird of Jove shall toil no more To teach the humble wren to soar. Your tragic heroes shall not rant, Nor shepherds use poetic cant. Simplicity alone can grace The manners of the rural race. Theocritus and Philips be Your guides to true simplicity. When Damon's soul shall take its flight, Though poets have the second-sight, They shall ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... the people, and the people rise to the upper class. I could have found a count for my daughter, if I had wanted to. But it is just simply a case of evil instincts, evil passions, and these communist ideas—it is all this which is against wealth. We hear a lot of rant about poverty and misery. Well, I can tell you this, there has never been so much done for the people as at present. There is great progress with regard to comfort and well-being in France. People who never used to eat meat, now eat it twice a week. These are facts; and I am sure that on that subject ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... to rant too much, even in thy service; and though we do set up for prophets and the like, let us not forget occasionally to laugh at our ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... follies and your cousin's fliskies, were nothing to this! Drink clean cap-out, like Sir Hildebrand; begin the blessed morning with brandy-taps like Squire Percy; rin wud among the lasses like Squire John; gamble like Richard; win souls to the Pope and the deevil, like Rashleigh; rive, rant, break the Sabbath, and do the Pope's bidding, like them a' put thegither—but merciful Providence! tak' care o' your young bluid, and ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... first matinee at the theatre, and, oh, the joy we took of it! Years afterward did we children in our playroom, clad in "the trailing garments of the night" in lieu of togas, sink our identity for the moment and out-rant Damon and his Pythias. Thrice happy days so long ago ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... have thought himself beloved," said the maiden; "but by what slight creatures!—things whose heads could be rendered giddy by a playhouse rant—whose brains were only filled with red-heeled shoes and satin buskins—and who run altogether mad on the argument of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... So in the measure of time alone, your life is more valuable to you than mine is to me. If you choose, therefore, you can kill me,—now, if you like! I have a very convenient dagger in my belt—I think it has a point—which you are welcome to use for the purpose; but, for heaven's sake, don't rant about it—do it! You can kill me—of course you can; but you cannot—mark this well, Denzil!—you cannot prevent my loving the same woman whom you love. I think instead of raving about the matter here in the moonlight, which has the effect of making us look ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... poem. Guiscard's answer, when first reproached by Tancred, is noble in Boccace—nothing but this: Amor puo molto piu che ne voi ne io possiamo. This, Dryden has spoiled. He says first very well, 'the faults of love by love are justified,' and then come four lines of miserable rant, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... parted, and the fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane, surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud comment upon the players, went on,—went on until there entered Darden's Audrey, dressed in red silk, with a jeweled circlet like a ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... Percival," said Rupert, in a slightly wearied tone, "if you are going to rant and rave, I'll go out. My room is quite at your disposal, but I am not. I've got a headache. Why don't you go to a theatre or a music hall, and work off your superfluous energy there by clapping ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... pleasure felt in caricaturing those great men, not only because they were heathens, but also because they were kings; for when Christian princes and lords appear on the stage, the satire is often continued. Thus Lancelot of the Lake appears unexpectedly at the Court of king Herod, and after much rant the lover of queen Guinevere draws his invincible sword and massacres the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... point out a passage indicating that exuberant confidence in his own prowess, and contempt of every one else, so liberally exhibited by Almanzor. Instances of this defect are but too thickly sown through the piece; for example the following rant. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... you may fancy how them poor ign'rant furriners left that Custom House. Sam told me arterwards 'twere like shellin' ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... unbend your noble strength, my lord!" she said, "to think so brainsickly of things!" throwing into the word, "brainsickly," exaggerated stage-rant. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... great dramatists know well enough, the very violence of the emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hurricane blows the sea smooth. But where fanciful language is employed to express the extreme of passion, it is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly called rant and bombast: and where it is not used to express passion at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet's mind, or of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is considered, as it ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... to say, that I think there is hardly one play I have seen, or read hitherto, but has too much of love in it, as that passion is generally treated. How unnatural in some, how inflaming in others, are the descriptions of it!—In most, rather rant and fury, like the loves of the fiercer brute animals, as Virgil, translated by Dryden, describes them, than the soft, sighing, fearfully hopeful murmurs, that swell the bosoms of our gentler sex: and the respectful, timorous, submissive ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... be great. Of course I know too little, I've seen too little. But I've always liked it; I've never liked anything else. I used to learn things and do scenes and rant about the room when I was but five years old." She went on, communicative, persuasive, familiar, egotistical (as was necessary), and slightly common, or perhaps only natural; with reminiscences, reasons, and anecdotes, an unexpected ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James

... There were stuffs, and brocades, and rich laces and blonde; There were Damascene blades, and thy silks Trebisond; There was armor from Milan, both cuirass and helm, Abelards, Eloisas, and Father Anselm: There were jewels, and gold, and the amulet's power, A hero to spout, and to rant by the hour; A lady to love, and be loved, and to faint, As a matter of course, turning pale through her paint! There were clowns who the grave-digger clown could outvie, And princes who on the stage strutted so high That Prince Hamlet they'd cut; who could pick up a scull, Vote ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various

... is here kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts! would not a man have thought that the poet had been bound prentice to a wheel-wright, for his first rant? and had followed a rag-man, for the clout and blanket, in the second? Fortune is painted on a wheel, and therefore the writer, in a rage, will have poetical justice done upon every member of that engine: after this execution, he bowls the nave down-hill, from heaven, to the fiends: (an unreasonable ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... this for fervent appeal. Articulate distinctly. Pause after each question. Do not rant ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser

... observed; "I begin to fear these heroics are contagious. Possibly I, too, shall begin to rant in a moment. Meanwhile, as I understand it, you decline to perform the ceremony. I have had to warn you before this, Simon, that you mustn't take too much gin when I am apt to need you. You are very pitifully drunk, man. So you defy me and my evil courses! You defy me!" Rokesle laughed, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... not time, they say, to transcribe all that was worthy of my resentment in this letter: so I must find an opportunity to come at it myself. Noble rant, they say, it contains—But I am a seducer, and a hundred vile fellows, in it.—'And the devil, it seems, took possession of my heart, and of the hearts of all her friends, in the same dark hour, in order to provoke her to meet me.' Again, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... refined society be, indeed, incompatible—if the love of freedom and active enterprise necessarily exclude the grace and softness which lessen, or at least teach us to forget, the burden of existence, let us be what we are; and, indeed, it is the opinion of many, that the rant of social pleasure is the price we pay for the excellence of our political institutions. It is because before the law all men are equal, that in the world so much care is taken to show that they are different. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... gave it birth. The speech is only an effect; live over in your own heart the causes that produced it and try to deliver it at white heat. It is not possible for you to put too much real feeling into it, though of course it would be quite easy to rant and fill it with false emotion. This speech, according to Thomas Jefferson, started the ball of the Revolution rolling. Men were then willing to go out and ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... of Oliver Cromwell, in these his letters and speeches, has been questioned and discussed; the sincerity of their present editor may become a question at least as difficult and perplexing. Is there any genuine conviction at the bottom of all this rant and raving? Our extravagant worshipper of the "old heathen" Goethe, stands forth the champion and admirer of certain harsh, narrow-thoughted, impetuous sectaries, proclaims them the only "Reformers" of the world; descends to their lowest prejudices, to their saddest bigotries, to their gloomy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... force from his virtues, and life from the man. Accordingly, in the panegyric of cold spirits, Washington disappears in a cloud of commonplaces; in the rhodomontade of boiling patriots, he expires in the agonies of rant. Now, the sooner this bundle of mediocre talents and moral qualities, which its contrivers have the audacity to call George Washington, is hissed out of existence, the better it will be for the cause of talent and the cause of morals; contempt of that is the condition ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various

... records which can tell us any thing about the matter are full; declaring its whole history so uncertain that the ratio of truth to error must be a vanishing fraction;—the advocates of these systems yet proceed to rant and rave—they are really the only words we know which can express our sense of their absurdity—in a most edifying vein about the divinity of Christianity, and to reveal to us its true glories. 'Christ,' says Strauss, 'is not an individual, but an idea; that is to ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... next Dey hear dem rant and rail, Der bresident vas a forger, Shoost bardoned oud of jail. He does it oud of cratitood, To dem who set him vree: "Id's Harmonie of Inderesds," ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland

... thousand vulgarities, both of sentiment and style. The burden of both poems consists of bitter denunciations poured forth by disappointed and deserted love; with this difference, that the passion which Mr Tennyson gives utterance to, Mr Patmore reverberates in rant. A small poet, indeed, could not have worked after a more unsafe model. For while he might hope to mimic the agitated passions of "Locksley Hall," in vain could he expect to be visited by the serene imagination which, in that poem, steeps their violence in an atmosphere of beauty. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... wretches? Of Saint Genou, said they. And how, said the monk, does the Abbot Gulligut, the good drinker,—and the monks, what cheer make they? By G— body, they'll have a fling at your wives, and breast them to some purpose, whilst you are upon your roaming rant and gadding pilgrimage. Hin, hen, said Sweer-to-go, I am not afraid of mine, for he that shall see her by day will never break his neck to come to her in the night-time. Yea, marry, said the monk, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... Massa Spence brung us to Texas in wagons, and the way we knowed when we hit Texas am 'cause massa 'gin to talk 'bout a norther. When dat norther done strike, all de weeds and leaves jus' starts rollin'. Us poor, ig'rant niggers thunk at first dey was rabbits, 'cause we'd never seed a rabbit den. Massa Spence rid his hoss and Missie Spence come 'long in de richer way, in a coach. De chillen walked mornin's and de older folks ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... halfwitted, amusing, pretty creatures, only made to be men's playthings. It was Steele who first began to pay a manly homage to their goodness and understanding, as well as to their tenderness and beauty.(102) In his comedies, the heroes do not rant and rave about the divine beauties of Gloriana or Statira, as the characters were made to do in the chivalry romances and the high-flown dramas just going out of vogue, but Steele admires women's virtue, acknowledges their sense, and adores their purity and beauty, with an ardour and strength which ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Queen! appear; Let falsehood fill the dreary waste; Thy democratic rant be here, To fire the brain, corrupt the taste. The fair, by vicious love misled, Teach me to cherish and to wed, To low-born arrogance to bend, Establish'd order spurn, and call each ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... man enslaved to his needs may best be compared to a bear with a ring in its nose, that is led about and made to dance at will. The likeness is not flattering, but you will grant that it is true. It is in the train of their own needs that so many of those men are dragged along who rant for liberty, progress, and I don't know what else. They cannot take a step without asking themselves if it might not irritate their masters. How many men and women have gone on and on, even to dishonesty, for the sole reason that they had too many needs and ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner

... volume there is a pleasing absence of the rant which pervades some eugenic literature. The author has something of importance to contribute to science and he presents his contribution in a sober, dignified manner in keeping with the important character of his contribution. W. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... dodged my question. I asked you what you thought of my father's power with the Indians. You rant about his wickedness in bringing me here. For the last time I ask you to answer my question and finish your ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... mainly by Dr. Liebknecht, was ignored by the Government. The war-machine was running so smoothly, and, from the German standpoint, so victoriously, that the Government thought it could safely let Liebknecht rant to his heart's content. ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... him issuing his cruel order for the killing of the children. But when the foul deed is done there await the murderer two kings whom he cannot slay, Death and the Devil. A banquet is in full swing, Herod's officers are about him, the customary rant and bombast is on his lips when those two steal in. 'While the trumpets are sounding, Death slays Herod and his two soldiers suddenly, and the Devil receives them'—so ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... why, having got rid of the committee of exasperating buffoons, he was now prolonging breakfast far beyond the usual hour. The meal was over at last; and still he felt disinclined to move. Those people had disquieted his composure with their mephitic rant about philanthropy; they had almost succeeded in spoiling his morning. And now this funeral! Would he go into the house and do some reading or write a few letters? No. He could not write letters just them. He was not feeling sufficiently ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... horses' feet; but there was naught save the occasional cracking of twigs as some wild thing jumped from the roadside frightened, or the stir of the high wind in the giant trees. On they rode, and Cedric's heart was first sorry for his kinsman's ills, then—he would rant because Katherine had taken no notice of his importunities, and he swore under his breath in good, round Scotch oaths for his allowing her to go thus long without espousal; and again he looked at the matter dispassionately. She was a very young maid, without the protection of womankind ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne

... worshipers of the status quo. To natives and foreigners alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... Philippina began to rage and rant: "Daniel's a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he'd mix with the right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she's going to git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain't got a ghost of an idea as to how to work people." ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... cold entertainment here on earth, nay, is denied all admittance into the court of princes, where notwithstanding my handmaid Flattery finds a most encouraging welcome: but this petulant monitor being thrust out of doors, the gods can now more freely rant and revel, and take their whole swinge ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus

... kept his temper completely, and waving his hand to add impression to his speech, he said, with a calmness which aggravated Sir Henry's wrath, "Nay, good friend, I prithee be still, and brawl not—it becomes not grey hairs and feeble arms to rail and rant like drunkards. Put me not to use the carnal weapon in mine own defence, but listen to the voice of reason. See'st thou not that the Lord hath decided this great controversy in favour of us and ours, against thee and thine? Wherefore, render ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... while Lord George Gordon was suffered to rant unimpeded. At last Colonel Holroyd, seizing hold of him, threatened to move for his immediate committal to Newgate, while Colonel Gordon, with a blunter and yet more efficacious eloquence, declared that ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... all so horribly seriously," protested Stanton. "Why you rave and rant about it as though it was actually ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... with my terms "mere verbiage" and "extravagant rant." I recommend a careful consideration of the scene over the grave of Ophelia; and then let any one say whether or not the "wag" of tongue between Laertes and Hamlet be not fairly described by the expressions I have used,—a paraphrase ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various

... more than that, real, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the very life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must all seem ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... that he fails chiefly in nerve, as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary art involves the element of risk, and the greatest literary artists have commonly been those who have run the greatest risk of talking nonsense. Almost all great poets rant, from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning was Elizabethan in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her as we feel with Shakespeare, that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton

... unable to comprehend what either he or Rousseau mean, when they frequently use this indefinite term. If they told us, that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about innate elegance. But if he only meant to say that the exercise of the faculties will produce this fondness, I deny it. It is not natural; but arises, like false ambition in men, from a ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... we ever going into battle?" growled Jack Powell from the other side. "Here I've been at this blamed drilling until I'm stiff in every joint, and I haven't seen so much as the tail end of a fight. You may rant as long as you please about martial glory, but if there's any man who thinks it's fun merely to get dirty and eat raw food, well, he's welcome to my share of it, that's all. I haven't had so much as one of the necessities of life since ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... heart of craft and cant, Sick of the crazed enthusiast's rant, Profession's smooth hypocrisies, And creeds of iron, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... this play is, in general, very well written, and contains less rant than he usually puts in the mouths of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... rites, and shall endow His daughter sumptuously, and as he ought. For this expensive wooing, as I judge, Till then shall never cease; since we regard No man—no—not Telemachus, although In words exub'rant; neither fear we aught Thy vain prognostics, venerable sir! But only hate thee for their sake the more. 270 Waste will continue and disorder foul Unremedied, so long as she shall hold The suitors in suspense, ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... HARALD'S voice). And you—you mountebank, who can stand up in public and seek applause before your brother's corpse is cold—don't come talking rant to me! You are more contemptible than I am! I couldn't have done that; I couldn't stand there, as you are doing now, impatient to get to your champagne and pretty speeches!—Oh, how I despise all such lying and heartlessness! (They all look at him and ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson

... the vile rant I strode forward and thus presently came on a small dell or dingle full of the light of a fire that crackled right merrily; at the which most welcome sight I made shift to scramble down the steepy bank forthright and approached the blaze on eager ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... will fill the void—in a way, and for a time at least. Darby marries Joan and is content, though any other woman would have served his turn as well. With us of the finer feelings and higher standards, the only difference is that we rant more and sophisticate more, as belongs to our wider range. No one ever felt thus before—because the feeling is new to us, and newer each time it comes: so Festus protests to each successive mistress, perjuring himself in all sincerity. Nor was any mistress ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... have treated his memory. "The business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother by a son." "Seneca," ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... aux talens, (the tools to him who can handle them,) which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is true, as enthusiasts and first missionaries are wont; with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the case admitted. Or call him if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... told, who sharply criticise Our modern theatres' unwieldy size. We players shall scarce plead guilty to that charge, Who think a house can never be too large: Griev'd when a rant, that's worth a nation's ear, Shakes some prescrib'd Lyceum's petty sphere; And pleased to mark the grin from space to space Spread epidemic o'er a town's broad face.— O might old Betterton or Booth return To view our ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb

... has a race of Heroes fill'd the stage, That rant by note, and thro' the gamut rage; In songs, and airs, express their martial fire, Combat in trills, and in a feuge expire; While lull'd by sound, and undisturb'd by wit, Calm and serene, you indolently fit; And from the dull fatigue of thinking free, Hear the facetious fiddle's rapartee; ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber

... now declared, for the sake of having them "fire the first gun," would have been as unwise as it would be to hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at one's breast, until he has actually fired. The disingenuous rant of demagogues about "firing on the flag" might serve to rouse the passions of insensate mobs in times of general excitement, but will be impotent in impartial history to relieve the Federal Government from the responsibility of the assault made by sending a hostile fleet against the harbor ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... it; such is the deplorable unhappiness of their priests, that having acted the cheat so long already, they are forced now to stand to it for fear of endangering the apostacy of their people. Going out of church after the rant was over, we saw several people gathered about the Stone of Unction, who, having got a good store of candles lighted with the holy fire, were employed in daubing pieces of linen with the wicks of them and the melting wax, which pieces of linen were designed for winding-sheets. And it ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... my office, where we sat all the morning, and a great rant I did give to Mr. Davis, of Deptford, and others about their usage of Michell, in his Bewpers,—[Bewpers is the old name for bunting.]—which he serves in for flaggs, which did trouble me, but yet it was in defence of what was truth. ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... power,—such ambition as stirred the English nation when it called halt to the encroachments of Spain, and announced that henceforth it must be reckoned with in the councils of the Continent. Though Tamburlaine is largely rant and bombast, there is something in it which fascinates us like the sight of a wild bull on a rampage; for such was Timur, the hero of the first play to which we confidently give the name Elizabethan. In the latter part of the play the action grows more intense; ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... naturally not enough wind to keep his instrument going and face the hill at the same time. He strode up and down in the deadliest part of the valley where a well-sent musket ball would never lose him, and played a tune they call "The Galley of the Waves," a Stewart rant with a hint of the zest of the sea in it Nobody thought of firing at him, though his work was an encouragement to our foes, and anon the hill-tops rang with a duel of pibrochs between him and a lad of our garrison, who got round on the top ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... hope or fond ambition; the quiet heart cannot leap with gratitude or joy at that "word spoken in due season" which aids its noblest aspirations to become realized! The DEAD poet?—Press the cold clods of earth over him, and then rant above his grave,—tell him how great he was, what infinite possibilities were displayed in his work, what excellence, what merit, what subtlety of thought, what grace of style! Rant and rave!—print reams of acclaiming verbosity, pronounce ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... vanity, or the mean purpose of engrossing a lover's admiration and affection, better than they love the virtue and honour of the man they may be brought to prefer. He that serves his religion, his prince, and his country, with ardour and devotion, need not plead his cause with the commonplace rant of romantic passion—the woman whom he honours with his love becomes his debtor, and her corresponding affection is engaged to repay his ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott

... Mrs. G[rant] of L. intimates that she will take her pudding—her pension, I mean (see 30th November), and is contrite, as H[enry] M[ackenzie] vouches. I am glad the stout old girl is not foreclosed; faith, cabbing a pension in these times is like hunting a pig with a soap'd tail, monstrous ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott

... and this is well-nigh heartbreaking to them. But that does not bother my Lord Jesus, nor Dr. Luther, for we believe that the Gospel will and must continue. Let a layman ask such Romanists, and let them give answer, why they despoil and mock all of God's commandments, and rant so violently about this power, whereas they cannot show at all why it is necessary, or what it is good for. For ever since it has arisen, it has accomplished nothing but the devastation of Christendom, and no one is able to show anything good or useful that has resulted ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... me, was considered by him as a high, religious service, which he performed ceremonially. Nothing could equal the vigorous gravity of his demeanour when leading his men in fight. His words were few at such times; he was the only officer I ever knew void absolutely of rant in action. Others would shout and scream and shriek their orders redundant and unwholesome; Haskell's eye spoke better battle English than all their distended throats. He was merciful and ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... left long in doubt. Proceeding, Andre-Louis spoke as he conceived that Philippe de Vilmorin would have spoken. He had so often argued with him, so often attended the discussions of the Literary Chamber, that he had all the rant of the reformers—that was yet true in substance—at his ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... poetical representation of common nature, than that which characterizes her art. Her acting has all the finish of high breeding, with just as much feeling as is necessary to keep alive the illusion. As for rant, there is not as much about her whole system, as would serve a common English, or American actress, ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... much for an 'Ode,' which some people think superior to the 'Bard' of Gray, and which others think a rant of turgid obscurity; and the latter are the more numerous class. It is not obscure. My 'Religious Musings' I know ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... unfavorable impression which he made on men who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, and who were not personally ill-used by him. Sharp and Rogers both speak of him as an unpleasant, affected, splenetic person. I have heard hundreds and thousands of persons who never knew him rant about him, but I never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any one who knew him well. Yet even now there are those who cannot talk a quarter of an hour about Charles Fox without tears—after ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold

... has taken us to several socialist meetings...we borrow the servants' coats and mutilate our oldest hats....Socialism seems to me rather more endurable than the socialists, and of these Kirkpatrick is about the sanest I have heard. They rant and froth, contradict themselves and one another, wander from the point and never get anywhere....That would give me hope if it were not for the fact that poor California is a magnet for the cranks of every fad as well as for the riff-raff and derelicts....My other hope is that even they—that ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... noirs ont l'air trs tonns de ce silence. Ils vont et viennent dans l'infirmerie, et trouvent mille prtextes pour rester prs du malade, esprant toujours qu'il se dcidera parler; mais le petit Chose ne se ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet

... shouted Zouche, who had been steadily drinking for the last few moments,—"Speak on, man! Whoever heard of a dumb Socialist! Rant—rant! Rant and rave!—as I do, when the fit is on me! Do I not, Thord? Do I not move you ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli

... we be at the immense superiority of Shakespeare over his contemporaries;—and yet what contemporaries!—giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet, in no genuine part of Shakespeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies, and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge

... evil and to do good is, that when a man hears evil words, he be able to overlook the wickedness and injustice. Seek thus after peace, so shall you find it; when your enemy has wasted his breath and done all that he can, if you hear him, but rail and rant not back, he must subdue himself by his own violence. For thus Christ also on the cross subdued his enemies, not by the sword or by violence. Therefore is it a saying, which should be written with gold, where it says, ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther

... Thou next must be undone, 'Cause thou hast undone us before; This cause and this tyrant Had never play'd this high rant Were't not for ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... leagues from Ushant to the Scilly Isles. Also there is a tender love-lyric called "O Tarry Trousers" which is even more English than the heart of The Midsummer Night's Dream. But our greatest bards and sages have often shown a tendency to rant it and roar it like true British sailors; to employ an extravagance that is half conscious and therefore half humorous. Compare, for example, the rants of Shakespeare with the rants of Victor Hugo. A piece of Hugo's eloquence is either a serious triumph or a serious collapse: one feels the poet ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... spoil it! Now you begin to rant and become heroic. I know what you're going to say. You cannot see a woman bullied—what? Well, by heaven, you can, and you will see it. You cannot stand an act of treachery? Come, come, my son, you have better blood in you than to ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand

... Convention now being held in this city, talk as fluently of the Bible and God's teachings in their speeches, as if they could draw an argument from inspiration in maintenance of their Woman's Rights stuff.... The poor creatures who take part in the silly rant of "brawling women" and Aunt Nancy men, are most of them "ismizers" of the rankest stamp, Abolitionists of the most frantic and contemptible kind, and Christian(?) sympathizers with such heretics as Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, C. C. Burleigh, and ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... Winston go over to the same place and explain his father away. If he obtained a hearing in the Ulster Hall in the company of Redmond, Devlin, and Pirrie the legend of Ulster as an impregnable loyalist stronghold would be wiped out, and Randolph's rant could be made to appear a foolish joke in comparison with the more mature ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, . . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approbation, than the restoration ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... reverence for established institutions is upheld, and the disgust, hatred, and scorn uttered for the excesses which marked the godless revolutionists of the age. It is singular that so fair-minded a biographer as Parton could see nothing but rant and nonsense in the most philosophical political essay ever penned by man. It only shows that a partisan cannot be an historian any more than can a laborious collector of details, like Freeman, accurate as he may be. Adams, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... were nothing to this! Drink clean cap-out, like Sir Hildebrand; begin the blessed morning with brandy-taps like Squire Percy; rin wud among the lasses like Squire John; gamble like Richard; win souls to the Pope and the deevil, like Rashleigh; rive, rant, break the Sabbath, and do the Pope's bidding, like them a' put thegither—but merciful Providence! tak' care o' your young bluid, and gang na near ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... if the whole satire had been The oppression of virtue, not wages of sin: He began, as he bragg'd, with a rant and a roar; He bragg'd how he bounced, and he swore how he swore.[5] Knock ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift

... have curst the plant; Kings bade its use to cease; But all the Pontiff's rant And Royal Jamie's cant Ne'er made ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings

... Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. Small 8vo, IS. (Smith). This is a satirical production calculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of some parliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons, the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has never been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent." The reviewer had probably read the work through from one paper cover to the other. It was in fact too ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... Clutton Brock feels this surely enough, because he possesses, besides intellect, that other and rarer critical faculty, that spiritual tuning-fork by which a fine critic distinguishes between emotion and sentimentality, between rhetoric and rant. It is because Mr. Brock possesses this peculiar sensibility—part aesthetic, part ethical, and part intellectual, it seems—that he can be trusted to detect and dislike even the subtlest manifestations of that ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... Godolphin," she protested. "Oh, well, my dear, hang on to your laugh, then." However he meant to do Haxard himself, his voice was for simplicity and reality in others. "Is that the way you would do it, is that the way you would say it, if it were you?" he stopped one of the men in a bit of rant. ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... be frank about it. The attitude of the public toward the theatre has changed. To-day we would not tolerate the heavy melodramas which enchained our parents and grandparents. The age of rant and fustian has passed away, and Edwin Forrest could never gain a second fortune from such a combination of these qualities as "Metamora." We are more sophisticated; we refuse to be thrilled by Ingomar, no matter ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... pas oublier que, la langue franaise diffrant compltement par ses racines de l'anglo-saxon, il ne m'a pas t permis d'luder les difficults de l'original comme on a pu le faire parfois en anglais ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker

... calmness of his thought shows itself in logic which, while it may invite confidence, does not compel admiration. When he is moved, however, the freedom of his utterances from exaggeration and from that tendency to rant which mars many orations makes such periods as those with which he closes his speech on the Electoral Bill models of expression for all who wish to realize the highest possibilities ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... reproaches he had uttered against me in his confidential letters to Cunningham. And thus having 'no doubt' of his conjecture, he considers it as proven, goes on to suppose the contents of the letter (19, 22), makes it place Mr. Adams at my feet suing for pardon, and continues to rant upon it, as an undoubted fact. Now I do most solemnly declare, that so far from being a letter of apology, as Mr. Pickering so undoubtingly assumes, there was not a word or allusion ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... George Gordon was suffered to rant unimpeded. At last Colonel Holroyd, seizing hold of him, threatened to move for his immediate committal to Newgate, while Colonel Gordon, with a blunter and yet more efficacious eloquence, declared that if any ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... to this deescendant of Warsaw's last champion, personal. Which I'm a heap like Enright in sech reespects, an' shore tol'rant. I finds out long ago that the reason we-all goes fault-findin' about people, mostly is because we don't onderstand concernin' them folk's surroundin's. Half the things we arches our necks over, an' for which mebby we feels like killin' 'em ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis

... it was almost with a sense of shame that he looked back upon his mad wanderings from street to street, his fierce emotional agony. The very sincerity of his sufferings made them seem unreal to him now. He wondered how he could have been so foolish as to rant and rave about the inevitable. The only question that seemed to trouble him was, whom to make away with; for he was not blind to the fact that murder, like the religions of the Pagan world, requires a victim as well as a priest. Not ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde

... and the fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane, surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud comment upon the players, went on,—went on until there entered Darden's Audrey, dressed in red silk, with a jeweled circlet like a line ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... man hears evil words, he be able to overlook the wickedness and injustice. Seek thus after peace, so shall you find it; when your enemy has wasted his breath and done all that he can, if you hear him, but rail and rant not back, he must subdue himself by his own violence. For thus Christ also on the cross subdued his enemies, not by the sword or by violence. Therefore is it a saying, which should be written with gold, where it says, "Striking back ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther

... on classic French prose. It is simple, direct, manly, genuine. It is fresh and racy of the writer. It is flexible to every turn, it is sensitive to every rise or fall, of the thought. It is a steadfast rebuke to rant and fustian. It quietly laughs to scorn the folly of that style which writhes in an agony of expression, with neither thought nor feeling present to be expressed. Montaigne's "Essays" have been a great and a beneficent ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson

... ign'rant, young feller, wit' all yer buke l'arnin'. 'Tis gold I mean—gold thot ye can show t' thim thot gits cur'us. But if it was me, I'd sink me shaf' in a likelier spot than what this spot is—I wuddn't be bringing up durt like this, an' be callin' the hole a mine! I kin show ye places where ye kin git ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower

... groun'—dey kill an' eat one anoder, an' dey'm allers at war wid one anoder. But de white man he gwoe dar, an' he buy 'em fur twenty pieces ob silver—dat's' zactly de price—twenty silver dollars—dey pay dat fur 'em up ter dis day—dem pore, ign'rant folks won't take nuffin' but silver. Well, de white man buy 'em, and he fotch 'em to dis country, which am like de lan' ob Egypt, full ob schools, ob churches, ob larnin,' an' ob all manner ob good tings. Shore, we hab to wuck hard har; some ob us hab to bear heaby burdens, an' ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... and out of place." I said this, with the conviction that there was a purpose in everything that Shakspeare wrote; and being still of this persuasion, allow me to protest against the terms "mere verbiage" and "extravagant rant," which your correspondent applies to the passage in question. The poet does not present common things as they appear to all men. Shakspeare's art was equally great, {120} whether he spoke with the tongues of madmen or philosophers. H. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 68, February 15, 1851 • Various

... too, that in this "Second Part" the reviser begins to show himself as something more than the sweet lyric poet. He transposes scenes in order to intensify the interest, and where enemies meet, like Clifford and York, instead of making them rant in mere blind hatred, he allows them to show a generous admiration of each other's qualities; in sum, we find here the germs of that dramatic talent which was so soon to bear such marvellous fruit. ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... contemporaries:—and yet what contemporaries!—giant minds indeed! Think of Jonson's erudition, and the force of learned authority in that age; and yet in no genuine part of Shakspeare's works is there to be found such an absurd rant and ventriloquism as this, and too, too many other passages ferruminated by Jonson from Seneca's tragedies and the writings of the later Romans. I call it ventriloquism, because Sejanus is a puppet, out of which the poet makes his own voice appear ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... cheer but not inebriate." It came near it in our case, however. It was our first matinee at the theatre, and, oh, the joy we took of it! Years afterward did we children in our playroom, clad in "the trailing garments of the night" in lieu of togas, sink our identity for the moment and out-rant Damon and his Pythias. Thrice happy days so ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... temper completely, and waving his hand to add impression to his speech, he said, with a calmness which aggravated Sir Henry's wrath, "Nay, good friend, I prithee be still, and brawl not—it becomes not grey hairs and feeble arms to rail and rant like drunkards. Put me not to use the carnal weapon in mine own defence, but listen to the voice of reason. See'st thou not that the Lord hath decided this great controversy in favour of us and ours, against thee and thine? Wherefore, render up thy stewardship peacefully, and deliver up ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... They dare not sit or lean, But fume and fret and posture And foam and curse between; For being bound to Baal, Whose sacrifice is vain, Their rest is scant with Baal, They glare and pant for Baal, They mouth and rant for Baal, For Baal ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... in a body's pow'r To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shar'd,— How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And kenna how ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop

... heathens, but also because they were kings; for when Christian princes and lords appear on the stage, the satire is often continued. Thus Lancelot of the Lake appears unexpectedly at the Court of king Herod, and after much rant the lover of queen Guinevere draws his invincible sword and massacres ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... employed. His influence upon modern opera has been extensive. He was the real founder of the school of melodramatic opera which is now so popular. Violent contrasts with him do duty for the subtle characterisation of the older masters. His heroes rant and storm, and his heroines shriek and rave, but of real feeling, and even of real expression, there ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... Simon swung back to his desk, a grim smile on his lips. "It always boils down to the same thing—they don't know what they're going to do about it. Let 'em rant all they please, in the end what ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... me with leaping in her grave? Be buried quick with her, and so will I: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair

... for the first time what a woman's voice could be. The girl's soul was filled and shaken with passion. She did not cry aloud nor rant, but every accent thrilled through him from head to foot. And it seemed to him that she needed no words—that, had she been speaking in an unknown tongue, the very intonation, the mere sound, the vibration of her voice, would have told him of her wounded heart, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... Uncle Rufus, kindly. "Dar's a do' shet 'twixt dat leetle fice an' dem crazy cats. Dar's sho' nuff wot de papahs calls er armerstice 'twixt de berlig'rant pahties—ya-as'm! De berry wust has happen' already, so yo' folkses might's well ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... not; you know how they rant at the Base when we have to protect ourselves," I replied, not without a certain amount of bitterness. "They'd like to pacify the Universe with never a sweep of a disintegrator beam. 'Of course, Commander Hanson' some silver-sleeve will say, 'if it was absolutely vital to protect your ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... said Rupert, in a slightly wearied tone, "if you are going to rant and rave, I'll go out. My room is quite at your disposal, but I am not. I've got a headache. Why don't you go to a theatre or a music hall, and work off your superfluous energy there ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... doctrine: La carriere ouverte aux talens; 'The Tools to him that can handle them.' . . . Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and first Missionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant, yet as articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even theft; whom notwithstanding ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... in doubt. Proceeding, Andre-Louis spoke as he conceived that Philippe de Vilmorin would have spoken. He had so often argued with him, so often attended the discussions of the Literary Chamber, that he had all the rant of the reformers—that was yet true ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... 'em up thar, an' that's a fack." He shook his head gloomily. "Folks on Misty is hongrier, and drunker, and meaner than ever—most as mean as they be in the cities. They're pison ign'rant. That's the trouble. The Word of God comes to 'em, but they're too ign'rant to onderstand. 'Tain't wrote in no language they knows, and ef it was, they couldn't read it. Take this here, now—'Love ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... from. En'sign (pro. en'sin). an officer of low rank. Fire'lock, an old-style musket, with flintlock. 7. Bran'-dish-ing, waving, flourishing. 13. Self'-pos-sessed, undisturbed, calm in mind, manner, etc. 14. Pac'i-fied, calmed, quieted. War'rant, a writ authorizing an officer to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... once and for all," cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his knuckles angrily on the table, "I tell you, once and for all, my man, that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or cant here. Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most religious people are not those who talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... she dropped her rake on the hay, searched for a long, nail-like thorn, and thrust it through, for the good-looking, careless hussy never had any provision of pins about her. Then, taking a June rose which pricked her finger, she put the flower by the "rant", or tear, and went to join the rest of the hay-makers. The blood welled up out of the scratch in the finger more freely than would have been supposed from so small a place. She put her lips to it to suck it away, as folk do in all quarters of the ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... thy resistless light, Disperse those phantoms from my sight, Those mimic shades of thee: The scholiast's learning, sophist's cant, The visionary bigot's rant, The monk's philosophy. ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... mourning, sitting in a mourning chair, and attended by a mourning maid. The play was Congreve's tragedy of "The Mourning Bride," one of the best of a class of sentimental and stiltified dramatic productions which the public of our great-grandfathers meekly accepted,—quaffing the frothy small-beer of rant and affectation, in lieu of deep draughts of Nature and passion, the rich, red wine of human life, poured generously forth by the dramatists of a better era. The excesses of fashion then prevailing, hoops, high heels, powder, and patches, were not more essentially ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various

... Holiness! Cant, rant, and fustian! The nations are rotten with dirty pride, and dirty greed, and mean lying, and petty ambitions, and sickly sentimentality. Holiness! I should be ashamed to show my face at Heaven's gates and say I came from ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... He hopes to turn the mob from despising him by the grandeur of their public entertainments. He enlarges for them the circus. He calls unheard-of beasts to be baited and killed for their enjoyment. The finest actors rant, the sweetest musicians sing, that Nero may forget his mother, and that his people may ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale

... halls, are one thing,—and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe figure, and a pleasant voice, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... we may fairly presume, proceeded from the pithy lecture of Ellen Connor; but the truth was, that the undefinable old squire was the greatest parental coward in the world. In the absence of his daughter he would rant and swear and vapor, strike the ground with his staff, and give other indications of the most extraordinary resolution, combined with fiery passion, that seemed alarming. No sooner, however, did he go into her presence, and contemplate ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... him who can handle them,) which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is true, as enthusiasts and first missionaries are wont; with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the case admitted. Or call him if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and even ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... sick at heart of craft and cant, Sick of the crazed enthusiast's rant, Profession's smooth hypocrisies, And creeds of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... The Prophet enlarged his rant. To the whites he proclaimed that he, the Open Door, Tecumseh, the Shooting Star, and the other twin brother all had come at one birth. He asserted that their father had been the son of a Shawnee chief and a princess, daughter of a great English ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin

... associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.... The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler like Werter, or ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... of youthful genius is the tragedy of Lecrine, and this is the youth of Marlowe rather than of Shakspeare. The London Prodigal and the Puritan, Lord Cromwell and Sir John Oldcastle, have no trace of youthful fire or even rant. They are the offspring of sober, contented, irreclaimable, unimprovable mediocrity, with a decided tendency to the stupid rather than the sublime. They were probably the journey-work of some of the legion playwrights connected with the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various

... great Hector of the glancing helm: "Ajax, brave leader, son of Telamon, Deal not with me as with a feeble child, Or woman, ign'rant of the ways of war; Of war and carnage every point I know; And well I know to wield, now right, now left, The tough bull's-hide that forms my stubborn targe: Well know I too my fiery steeds to urge, And raise the ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... is ignorant of what is termed hygienic law, is more receptive of spiritual power and of faith in one 382:15 God, than is the devotee of supposed hygienic law, who comes to teach the so-called igno- rant one. Must we not then consider the so-called law 382:18 of matter a canon "more honored in the breach than the observance"? A patient thoroughly booked in medi- cal theories is more difficult to heal through Mind than 382:21 one who ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... louder, stronger, and more urgent and thrilling cry, Repent! Repent! We want more fearless plain speaking, more personal appeal. It is not refined to preach of the grave and death, judgment and hell,—it is 'ranting:' but nevertheless let us 'rant;' let us be faithful; let us tell the sinner that he must die; and that he will die in his sins and perish for ever, except he repent and be converted that his sins may be blotted out. Let us tell him that he 'is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the Name ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam

... specious form, dread Queen! appear; Let falsehood fill the dreary waste; Thy democratic rant be here, To fire the brain, corrupt the taste. The fair, by vicious love misled, Teach me to cherish and to wed, To low-born arrogance to bend, Establish'd order spurn, ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis

... comprehend what either he or Rousseau mean, when they frequently use this indefinite term. If they told us, that in a pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress, and brought this inclination with it into a new body, I should listen to them with a half smile, as I often do when I hear a rant about innate elegance. But if he only meant to say that the exercise of the faculties will produce this fondness, I deny it. It is not natural; but arises, like false ambition in men, from ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]

... roar like true British heroes, We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas, Until we strike soundings in the channel of old England; From Ushant to Scilly ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... turn out, let us say, eight ill-trained children at a disadvantage, to become the servants and unsuccessful competitors of the offspring of the restrained. That fact bites us all; it does not require a search. It is all very well to rant about "race-suicide," but there are the clear, hard conditions of contemporary circumstances for all but the really rich, and so patent are they that I doubt if all the eloquence of Mr. Roosevelt and ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells

... up to go). You rant like any common fellow. Go, then, and marshal your thousands; and make haste; for Mithridates of Pergamos is at hand with reinforcements for Caesar. Caesar has held you at bay with two legions: we shall see what he ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... Pedantry of Virtue, ascribes all good Qualifications, of what kind soever, to the virtuous Man. Accordingly [Cato][1] in the Character Tully has left of him, carried Matters so far, that he would not allow any one but a virtuous Man to be handsome. This indeed looks more like a Philosophical Rant than the real Opinion of a Wise Man; yet this was what Cato very seriously maintained. In short, the Stoics thought they could not sufficiently represent the Excellence of Virtue, if they did not comprehend in the Notion of it all possible Perfection[s]; ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... good. The curate was just as confident and uncompromising in the discharge of his office as he was yielding and diffident when only himself was in question. He was so honest, and straightforward, and true—so free from rant or cant—so strong in his simple theology, that Guy soon trusted him implicitly when he spoke of the past and of the future that was so near. The repentance that was begun by Constance's dying bed was completed, I am ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... thyself to feed a num'rous train, Or like the bee (sweet as thy blood) design'd To be destroy'd to propagate his kind, 570 Lest thy redundant and superfluous juice, Should fading leaves instead of fruits produce, The pruner's hand, with letting blood, must quench Thy heat, and thy exub'rant parts retrench: Then from the joints of thy prolific stem A swelling knot is raised (call'd a gem), Whence, in short space, itself the cluster shows, 577 And from earth's moisture mixed with sunbeams grows. I' th'spring, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... became successful; and the decadence of that empire was the fatal fruit of that day's folly. In like manner we have had the letter of the Constitution thrust between us and victory. The leaders of the Opposition carried it before them, with ostentation and loud pharisaical rant, in the late political battle. But, much as it has embarrassed and retarded our cause, terrifying and bewildering weak minds, the device has not availed in the past, and it shall avail still less in the future. The spirit of the Constitution we shall remember and obey; but the sword of justice, edged ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various

... admitted, into a deliberation on public affairs. And here were manifested an ability and decorum which civilized nations even, have viewed with admiration and surprise. For though we might suppose their eloquence must have partaken of rant and rhapsody, presenting a mass of incoherent ideas, depending for their interest on the animation of gesture and voice, with which they were uttered, yet we would do injustice to their memory, if we did not give their orators the credit of speaking as much to the purpose, and of exhibiting ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard

... made a huge fire down by the shore, and left them alone. They sat by it until nearly ten o'clock, he talking incessantly; her overtures had roused in him the desire to please, and, instead of the usual monologue of egotism and rant, he poured out poetry, eloquence, sense and humorous shrewdness. Had he been far less the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, in other moods, she found as insupportable ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... been restored, Philippina began to rage and rant: "Daniel's a dunderhead. He could live like a Kaiser if he'd mix with the right people. I know a woman who is lousy with money, and she's going to git a lot more; but Daniel, the poor bloke, ain't ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... the letters eagerly read. The Journal announced them the day before publication, the newsboys cried them, and papers called attention to them, some by daring to indorse, but more by abusing Mr. Riddle for publishing such unpatriotic and "incendiary rant." In quoting the strong points, a venal press was constrained to "scatter the living coals of truth." The name was held to be a nom de plume, for in print it looked so unlike the common pronunciation of that of one of the oldest families in the county that it was not recognized. ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... 'How little can I pay an' how much can I get?' An' yet, as I says, sech parties mighty likely holds themse'fs moral to a degree which is mountainous, an' wouldn't take a twist at faro-bank, or pick up a poker hand, more'n they'd mingle with t'rant'lers an' stingin' lizards. An' some of their moral sports is so onlib'ral! I tells you, son, I've met up with 'em who's that stingy that if they owned a lake, they wouldn't give ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis

... less than justice, Miss Faith. You can hear me rant about philosophical niceties,—and yet think that I would not have patience to listen to a lecture from ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... deliberately dodged my question. I asked you what you thought of my father's power with the Indians. You rant about his wickedness in bringing me here. For the last time I ask you to answer my question and finish your ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter

... harbouring a pharisaical presumption, that would be odious were it not ridiculous. If the state of society in Westmoreland be as corrupt as they describe, what, in the name of wonder, has preserved their purity? Away then with hypocrisy and hollow pretext; let us be no longer deafened with a rant about throwing off intolerable burthens, and repelling injuries, and avenging insults! Say at once that you disapprove of the present Members, and would have others more to your own liking; you have named your Man, or ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... bravado that distinguish the carpet warrior. On the contrary, when they were talking of the war amongst themselves they had an air of quiet determination, of good-humoured banter, and of easy, serious confidence far more ominous for an enemy than any amount of fluent rant. After the world of politics, with its hair-splitting and word-mincing, it was good to be with soldiers—the men who do the work. They knew no fine political shades, they bandied no epithets; England ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... while their fire the lightest heart enchains. Through these and all our Bards to whom belong The pow'rs transcendent of immortal song, How difficult to steer t'avoid the cant Of polish'd phrase, and nerve-alarming rant; Each period with true elegance to round, And give the Poet's meaning in the sound. But, wherefore should the Muse employ her verse, The peril of our labors to rehearse? Oft has your kind, your generous applause, E're now, convinc'd ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... capital. They are untouched by theory because they are so intent on fact. The "liberty, equality and fraternity" cry of the French Revolution—they regard as so much hot air. Canadians since 1837 have had "liberty, equality, fraternity." Why rant about it? And when they didn't have it, they fought for it and went to the scaffold for it, and got it. The day's work—that's all. Why posturize and theorize about platitudes? Canadians are not interested in the Lloyd George ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... look at. Are you still afraid. Look, more than a year has gone and nothing has changed. You are the far-away one, the dream figure, and my heart comes on wings to you.... I write with difficulty. What language is there to talk to you? How does one converse with a dream? Idiot phrases rant across the paper like little fat actors flourishing tin swords. I've come to distrust words. There are too many of them. Yet I keep fermenting with words. Interlopers. Busybody strangers. I can't think ... because of them.... Alas! if I could keep my ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... temperament, will fill the void—in a way, and for a time at least. Darby marries Joan and is content, though any other woman would have served his turn as well. With us of the finer feelings and higher standards, the only difference is that we rant more and sophisticate more, as belongs to our wider range. No one ever felt thus before—because the feeling is new to us, and newer each time it comes: so Festus protests to each successive mistress, perjuring himself in all sincerity. Nor was any mistress ever so beautiful and divine ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... Souf, 'case he lose his money on he hoss-race. No, my chil'ren, our HEABENLY Massa am rich, RICH, I say. He own all dis worle, and all de oder worles dat am shinin' up dar in de sky. He own dem all; but he tink more ob one ob you, more ob one ob you—pore, ign'rant brack folks dat you am—dan ob all dem great worles! Who wouldn't belong to sich a Massa as dat? Who wouldn't be his nigger—not his slave—He doant hab no slaves—but his chile; and 'ef his chile, den his heir, de heir ob God, and de jined heir wid de ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... converse with the same number of men in society on the merits of the case; and his gestures were those which might be used without serious remark in animated conversation. His postures were sometimes negligent enough; he had a contempt for rant, and hated show and pomp. His voice was pleasant, and of ample compass for an ordinary court-room, and he never dealt in vociferations; indeed, his style of argument to the jury, as well as to the bench, would have ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby

... Tomfoolery Convention now being held in this city, talk as fluently of the Bible and God's teachings in their speeches, as if they could draw an argument from inspiration in maintenance of their Woman's Rights stuff.... The poor creatures who take part in the silly rant of "brawling women" and Aunt Nancy men, are most of them "ismizers" of the rankest stamp, Abolitionists of the most frantic and contemptible kind, and Christian(?) sympathizers with such heretics as Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... scarcely more lax or licentious; yet if Fortune, in its caprices, had ordained our Indian subjects to be heathen Greeks, with a Whig Governor-General bringing them back in triumph to their homes, Lord Palmerston, who now, in a mingled rant of mythology, and methodism, talks of "Dii and Jupiter hostis," would himself have penned a paragraph about the restored temple of Mars or Venus, and would have held up the scruples of Sir Robert Inglis and Mr. Plumptre to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... came into play. He kindled with responsive fire at a beautiful thought, and burned with contagious enthusiasm over a phrase which struck his fancy. Yet all the while the poetic rapture was underlain by a groundwork of robust sense. Rant, and gush, and affectation were abhorrent to his nature, and even in his grandest flights of fancy ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate the invention ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... himself beloved," said the maiden; "but by what slight creatures!—things whose heads could be rendered giddy by a playhouse rant—whose brains were only filled with red-heeled shoes and satin buskins—and who run altogether mad on the argument of a ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... created only, like the fly That spreads his motley wings in the eye of noon, To sport their season and be seen no more. The rest are sober dreamers, grave and wise, And pregnant with discoveries new and rare. Some write a narrative of wars, and feats Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history; describe the man, of whom His own coevals took but little note, And paint his person, character, and views, As they had known him from his mother's womb; They disentangle from the puzzled skein, In which obscurity has wrapped them up, The threads of politic and shrewd design That ran ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... The evil time's sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest's cant, Or statesman's rant. ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Before Rachel came, it had been thought that the new romantic drama of MM. Hugo and Dumas, because of its greater truth to nature, had given the coup de grace to the old classic plays; but the public, at her bidding, turned gladly from the spasms and the rant of "Angelo" and "Angele," "Antony" and "Hernani," to the old-world stories, the formal tragedies of the seventeenth century poet-dramatists of France. The actress fairly witched her public. There was something of magic in her very presence upon ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... this rant and nonsense, how much finer is the speech that the Count really did make! "It is a very fine evening,—egad it is!" The "egad" did the whole business: Mrs. Cat was as much in love with him now ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray

... sporadic Social Democratic opposition to the war, mainly by Dr. Liebknecht, was ignored by the Government. The war-machine was running so smoothly, and, from the German standpoint, so victoriously, that the Government thought it could safely let Liebknecht rant to his ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... much, but he only emitted some effusions of the witticisms of fancy. His declamation, indeed, was better calculated for the stage of Sadler's Wells than the floor of the House of Commons. A mountebank, with but one-half of the honorable gentleman's talent for rant, would undoubtedly make his fortune. However, I am somewhat surprised he should entertain such a particular asperity against me, as I never did him a favor. But, perhaps, the honorable gentleman imagines he may talk himself into consequence; ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous

... take it all so horribly seriously," protested Stanton. "Why you rave and rant about it as though it was actually ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... flash of the lightning of her soul, and finished her rant, she found herself much easier in the resolves on revenge she had fixed there: she scorned by any vain endeavour to recall him from his passion; she had wit enough to have made those eternal observations, that love once gone is never to be retrieved, ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn

... field-marshals because they were grandees, had such incapacity been shown by any restless patrician. Frederic Spinola, at the age of thirty-two, a landsman and a volunteer, thinking to measure himself on blue water with such veterans as John Rant, Joost de Moor, and the other Dutchmen and Zeelanders whom it was his fortune to meet, could hardly escape the doom which so rapidly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Bacchant arms. A vine her forehead girds; the nimble deer Clothes with his skin her sides; her shoulder bears A slender spear. Thus maddening, Procne seeks The woods in ire terrific, crowded round By all her followers: rack'd by inward pangs, The furious rant of Bacchus veils her woes. The lonely stable seen at length, she howls Aloud,—"Evoe, ho!"—and bursts the door; Drags thence her sister;—her thence dragg'd, invests I In Bacchanalian robes; her face inshrouds In ivy foliage; and astonish'd leads The trembling ...
— The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidus Naso in English blank verse Vols. I & II • Ovid

... treated his memory. "The business of a philosopher," says Lord Macaulay, in his most scornful strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... being sorry that Shakespeare should have gone out of his way to select such a subject. It leaves a disagreeable taste in the mouth. The aristocrat is overdone. No true aristocrat would talk such rant as Coriolanus talks in Act i. Sc. I. Shakespeare omits Plutarch's account of the oppression of the plebeians, or only slightly alludes to it. Volumnia's contempt for the people is worse than that of Coriolanus. To her they are not ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford

... hardly in a body's pow'r To keep, at times, frae being sour, To see how things are shar'd; How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And ken na how to wair't; But, Davie, lad, ne'er fash your head, Tho' we hae little gear; We're fit to win our daily bread, As lang's we're hale and fier: "Mair spier na, nor fear na,"^1 Auld age ne'er mind a feg; The last o't, the warst o't ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... Berwick Law a league or less to sea, About its feet the breakers beat, abune the sea-maws flee, There's castle stark and dungeon dark, wherein the godly lay, That made their rant for the Covenant through mony a weary day. For twal' years lang the caverns rang wi' preaching, prayer, and psalm, Ye'd think the winds were soughing wild, when a' the winds were calm, There wad they preach, each Saint to each, and glower as the soldiers ...
— Ban and Arriere Ban • Andrew Lang

... and we fully coincide in the verdict. Bouffe, is one of the most intelligent, accomplished, and agreeable actors we ever saw; subtle and delicate in his conceptions of character, energetic without rant, ever true to Nature, and of a rare versatility of talent. We have known several persons who fancied, partly perhaps on account of his name, that he only acted comic parts: they should see him obtain a succes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various

... is the title of MASCAGNI'S new Opera. The title, anglicised, would be suitable for an old-fashioned transpontine melodramatic tragedian, who could certainly say of himself, "I rant so!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various

... whisper in your ear John Horne, For one great end we both were born, Alike we roar, and rant and bellow— Give us your ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange

... here kept in raising the expression of trifling thoughts! would not a man have thought that the poet had been bound prentice to a wheel-wright, for his first rant? and had followed a rag-man, for the clout and blanket, in the second? Fortune is painted on a wheel, and therefore the writer, in a rage, will have poetical justice done upon every member of that engine: after this execution, he bowls the nave down-hill, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden

... belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the "brutes," but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular sorrows and privations, of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot

... escaped and revealed the mother's true character. Here is a telling situation for a sensation novelist; and the minuteness with which the story is worked out, whilst we are kept in suspense, supplies the place of the ordinary rant; to say nothing of the increased effect due to apparent veracity, in which certainly few sensation novelists can even venture a distant competition. The end of the story differs still more widely from modern art. Roxana has to go abroad with her husband, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay the vital existence of his COUNTRY in the ensuing age;—compare such a man with any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns—a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good-fellowship—who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself—if there be any grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegado to common ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... and to an elaborate exaggeration of the motions, whether of stealth or of onslaught, involved in their deeds of exploit. Similarly in athletic sports there is almost invariably present a good share of rant and swagger and ostensible mystification—features which mark the histrionic nature of these employments. In all this, of course, the reminder of boyish make-believe is plain enough. The slang of athletics, by the way, is in great part made up of extremely sanguinary ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen

... through the avenues of professional life; and so professional life is full of "nobodies." The pulpit is crowded with goodish "nobodies"—men who have no power—no unction—no mission. They strain their brains to write common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with "nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the pettifoggers are many. The bar, more than any other medium, is that through which the ambitious youth of the country seek to attain political ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... ring; it just paid for their places at the theater, where they saw the living puppets of the colony mop and mow and rant under the title of acting. This was so interesting that Robinson was thinking of his ring the whole time, and how to get it back. The girls agreed between themselves they had never ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... the Duke sat lost in thought, What time Sir Pertinax did stamp and snort: "Ha, by the Mass! Now, by the Holy Rood! Ne'er heard I roguish rant so bold and lewd! He should be whipped, hanged, quartered, ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol

... well in all his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this one act of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is not ashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in the sight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He was breaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... romantic, equally passionate; but more than that, real, actual, modern, a thing in the very heart of the very life in which she moved. And here he sat, this Jadwin, quiet, in evening dress, listening good-naturedly to this beautiful music, for which he did not care, to this rant and fustian, watching quietly all this posing and attitudinising. How small and petty it must ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... So the very moral and the very true are not for the statesman but for the charity-boy. This perhaps may be defended as irony; hardly, but even so, in such irony the character appears as plainly as in volumes of solemn rant. To us it stands out clearly as the characteristic attitude of the English Government. The English people are used to it, practise it, and will put up with it; but the Irish people never were, are not now, and never will be used to it; and we won't put up with it. We get ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... best and all that, but her day is past, and here's plenty of young flesh and blood to fill her place. This one is rather young, but she's smart as a whip—she's full of mettle and is fresh and healthy-looking. It won't do to have pale girls around, for it gives cursed busybodies a chance to rant about women standing all day. (Out of the corner of his eye he measured Belle from head to foot.) She can stand, and stand it, too, for a long while. She's compact and stout. She's built right for the business." ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... of its gables, the splendour of its fretted roofs, the expanse of its tiers of seats; we need not call to mind that this place is sometimes the scene for the foolery of the mime, the dialogue of comedy, the sonorous rant of tragedy, the perilous antics of the rope-walker, the juggler's sleight of hand, the gesticulation of the dancer, with all the tricks of their respective arts that are displayed before the people by other artists. All these considerations ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius

... freaks in sober sadness Are a mere poetic madness: Pegasus is but a horse; He that follows him is worse. See, the rain soaks to the skin, Make it rain as well within. Wine, my boy; we'll sing and laugh, All night revel, rant, and quaff; Till the morn, stealing behind us, At the table sleepless find us. When our bones, alas! shall have A cold lodging in the grave; When swift Death shall overtake us, We shall sleep and none can wake us. Drink we then the juice o' the vine Make our breasts ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan

... siffling night; Monastic caverns rasp each isle; A poisoned skink croaks from a well. And mournful wraiths sob hard and loud, A smothered sigh proclaims more woe, The lounging imps grasp tomes of old And rant therefrom each damn'd one's name. And horrors, snarling at each crowd, Assail each kingdom with its show: A noctivagous dragon bold, Hastes thro' the aisles of death and shame And haunts the cajons of the dead, There fungus-tapers gleam like gold ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque

... "There's a rest'rant in the next block," replied the clerk, instantly impressed. Here was one who obviously was not "alike." "A two-minutes' walk, Mr.—" (looking ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... "full of grace"? One would have to think about a keg "full of" beer or a purse "full of" money. So I translated it: "You gracious one". This way a German can at last think about what the angel meant by his greeting. Yet the papists rant about me corrupting the angelic greeting—and I still have not used the most satisfactory German translation. What if I had used the most satisfactory German and translated the salutation: "God says hello, Mary dear" (for that is what the angel was intending ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann

... but his tone conveyed the malice and the menace of a man who had been nursing a grudge for a long time. "Two years ago his newspaper letters and his rant killed that Consolidated project, and I had a contingent fee of fifty thousand dollars at stake; as it was, I got only a little old regular lobby fee and my expense money. And the power hasn't been developed by the infernal, dear, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... line; the colloquial abbreviation of "in the"; not to mention the fanciful vein of the whole passage, which might lead any one unacquainted with Milton to look for this quotation among the dramas of the prime. The great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabethans, which so often broke into rant, is caught and nobly echoed ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... will be obvious, that nothing is more frivolous than the declamations of a gloomy philosophy against the desire of power; nothing more absurd than the rant of superstition against the pursuit of grandeur; nothing more inconsistent than homilies against the acquisition of riches; nothing more unreasonable than dogmas that forbid the enjoyment of pleasure. These objects are desirable for man, whenever his situation allows ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach

... rarest of blessings. We live in an age of morbid emotion and introspectiveness; wherein the poets, such as they are, have sunk to the level of mere pathologists engaged in the dissection of their own ultra-sophisticated spirits. The fresh touch of Nature is lost to the majority, and rhymesters rant endlessly and realistically about the relation of man to his fellows and to himself; overlooking the real foundations of art and beauty—wonder, and man's relation to the unknown cosmos. But Miss Jackson is not of the majority, and has not overlooked these things. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... female friend, in which the lady is made to be the sufferer by misplaced affection, and commencing, "Stay, my Willie, yet believe me," though published, remain likewise in obscurity. "Roy's Wife" was originally written to an old tune called the "Ruffian's Rant," but this melody is now known by the name of its favourite words. The sentiment of the song is peculiarly pleasing. The rejected lover begins by loudly complaining of his wrongs, and the broken assurances ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... is combined with other elements, and in each combination altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.' One of them has yet to learn that pictures, vestments, music, processions, candlesticks, and confessionals are not religion, and the other that it does not consist in oratory, excitement, camp-meetings, rant, or novelties. There are many, very many, unobtrusive, noiseless, laborious, practical duties which clergymen have to perform; what a pity it is they won't occupy themselves in discharging them, instead of entangling themselves in controversies ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... sedate bearing, are henceforth characteristic of all her literary attitudes. It is almost a case of running from one to the other extreme. The force of style which even adverse critics acknowledged in Frankenstein was sometimes perilously akin to the most disputable kinds of romantic rant. But in the historical or society novels which followed, in the contributions which graced the 'Keepsakes' of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication of so many poems of Shelley, his wife succumbed ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley

... fowk say shoo has to want, For Johnny ofttimes gets o'th spree; He spends his wages in a rant, An' leeaves his wife to pine or dee. An' monny a time aw've ligged i' bed, An' cursed my fate for bein poor, An' monny a bitter tear aw've shed, When thinkin ov sweet Mistress Moore. For shoo's mi life Is Johnny's wife, An' tho' to love her ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... proposed to send a deputation with an address to Avaux; but the Speaker pointed out the gross impropriety of such a step; and, on this occasion, his interference was successful, [219] It was seldom however that the House was disposed to listen to reason. The debates were all rant and tumult. Judge Daly, a Roman Catholic, but an honest and able man, could not refrain from lamenting the indecency and folly with which the members of his Church carried on the work of legislation. Those gentlemen, he said, were not a Parliament: they were a mere rabble: they resembled ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... still the same cry, and dismal to my heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good country we were going to." And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues. ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that exuberant confidence in his own prowess, and contempt of every one else, so liberally exhibited by Almanzor. Instances of this defect are but too thickly sown through the piece; for example the following rant. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... plays the part, was excellent in his quiet moods, and when he was obliged to rant was no worse than other ranters. The superb solidity of Mr. SASS as the Russian officer served as an admirable foil to the mercurial methods of Quixano. Miss PHYLLIS RELPH as the heroine mitigated the effect of her obvious sincerity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various

... were to break out to-morrow with the riotous tomfoolery of Pickwick at the trial, or of Weller and Stiggins, a thousand lucid criticisms would denounce it as vulgar balderdash. Glaucus and Nydia at Pompeii would be called melodramatic rant. The House of the Seven Gables would be rejected by a sixpenny magazine, and Jane Eyre would not rise above a common "shocker." Hence the enormous growth of the Kodak school of romance—the snap-shots at everyday ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison

... For these the devil's devices curse, condemn and impede everywhere God's Word and his blessing. These things are evils so pernicious, so diabolical, they do not merit our love. The more we serve the ecclesiasts and the more we yield to them, the more obdurate they become. They rant and rage against the Word of God and the Spirit, against faith and love. Such conduct Christ calls blasphemy—sin—against the Holy Spirit—unpardonable sin. Mt 12, 31. And John says (1 Jn 5, 16), "There is a sin unto death; not concerning ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. II - Epiphany, Easter and Pentecost • Martin Luther

... why the Wanderoo[A] should rant In wild, unmeaning rhymes, Whereas the Indian Elephant Will only read ...
— More Beasts (For Worse Children) • Hilaire Belloc

... Siddhattha, spare thy monkish rant, Far better than thy cowardly submission, Far nobler and befitting it would be, To draw the sword ...
— The Buddha - A Drama in Five Acts and Four Interludes • Paul Carus

... incongruous in Lucy's moral outburst over Mr. Eager. It was as if one should see the Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine. He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman's power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant. But possibly rant is a sign of vitality: it mars the beautiful creature, but shows that she is alive. After a moment, he contemplated her flushed face and excited gestures with a certain approval. He forebore to ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... over in your own heart the causes that produced it and try to deliver it at white heat. It is not possible for you to put too much real feeling into it, though of course it would be quite easy to rant and fill it with false emotion. This speech, according to Thomas Jefferson, started the ball of the Revolution rolling. Men were then willing to go ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... Risping, grating. Rout, rowt, to roar, to rant. Rowth, abundance. Rudas, haggard old woman. Runt, an old cow past breeding; ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson

... no situation to rant at smug William, the linen draper. The old sea wolf who had outlived the most glorious era of the storied buccaneers, had a few gold pieces tucked away in his belt and at first he was content to loaf about the tavern, with an audience to listen to his wondrous tales which ranged ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... go right into dinnah; I'll take keer of the auto'bile; I'll see that nun of those ign'rant folk stannin' roun' lay their han's on it; they think Sambo doan know an auto'bile; didn't I see you heah befoh? an' didn't I hole de hose when you put de watah in? Me an' you are de only two pussons in dis whole town who knows about ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... how Massa Spence brung us to Texas in wagons, and the way we knowed when we hit Texas am 'cause massa 'gin to talk 'bout a norther. When dat norther done strike, all de weeds and leaves jus' starts rollin'. Us poor, ig'rant niggers thunk at first dey was rabbits, 'cause we'd never seed a rabbit den. Massa Spence rid his hoss and Missie Spence come 'long in de richer way, in a coach. De chillen walked mornin's and de older folks ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration

... the benches in the yard below. The rough mob of the pit inspired, as it felt, the vigorous life, the rapid transitions, the passionate energy, the reality, the lifelike medley and confusion, the racy dialogue, the chat, the wit, the pathos, the sublimity, the rant and buffoonery, the coarse horrors and vulgar bloodshedding, the immense range over all classes of society, the intimacy with the foulest as well as the fairest developements of human temper, which characterized the English stage. The new drama ...
— History of the English People, Volume V (of 8) - Puritan England, 1603-1660 • John Richard Green

... the deplorable unhappiness of their priests, that having acted the cheat so long already, they are forced now to stand to it for fear of endangering the apostacy of their people. Going out of church after the rant was over, we saw several people gathered about the Stone of Unction, who, having got a good store of candles lighted with the holy fire, were employed in daubing pieces of linen with the wicks of them and the melting wax, which pieces of linen were designed for ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell

... not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards off, and, grumbling anathemas ...
— Deserted - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... dissatisfied with my terms "mere verbiage" and "extravagant rant." I recommend a careful consideration of the scene over the grave of Ophelia; and then let any one say whether or not the "wag" of tongue between Laertes and Hamlet be not fairly described by the expressions I have used,—a paraphrase ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 72, March 15, 1851 • Various

... anybody but Mr. Blackwood, who assured me of it.] "Then there was 'The Involuntary Experimentalist,' all about a gentleman who got baked in an oven, and came out alive and well, although certainly done to a turn. And then there was 'The Diary of a Late Physician,' where the merit lay in good rant, and indifferent Greek—both of them taking things with the public. And then there was 'The Man in the Bell,' a paper by-the-by, Miss Zenobia, which I cannot sufficiently recommend to your attention. It is the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... presently, in a cautious voice, laying an open hand against his trousers-pocket, 'as I've been a-doin' pretty good business lytely. Been growin' a bit—see? I'm runnin' round an' keepin' my heyes open understand? Thoughts I, now, if I could come acrosst a nicet little openin', somethink in the rest'rant line, that's what 'ud sewt me jest about down to the ground. I'm cut out for it—see? I've got the practical experience, and I've got the capital; and as soon as I got a squint of this little corner shop—understand what ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... I believe I have elsewhere observed, that we male-delinquents in love-matters have of the other sex:—for while they, poor things! sit sighing in holes and corners, or run to woods and groves to bemoan themselves on their baffled hopes, we can rant and roar, hunt and hawk; and, by new loves, banish from our hearts all remembrance of ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson

... heard a very funny specimen of rant from a gentleman of the name of Turner, who was suffering from an attack of Anglophobia. He would delight the Mortons and Conybeares whom we have to tolerate, and his pronunciation of the Old Country's ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss

... Parallel of Bonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign states? Cromwell's interference for the Albigenses, B[uonaparte]'s against the Swiss. Then Religion would come in; and Milton and you could rant about our countrymen of that period. This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because I want my Supper. I have just finished Chapman's Homer. Did you ever read it?—it has most the continuous power of interesting you all along, like a rapid original, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... the best young one in the world," Mrs. Foley confessed, referring to "Spotted Snake, the Witch." "Sometimes I rant at her like a good one. But she saves me a good bit, and if ever a child earned ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... conceptions, the emotions consequent upon the presentment of a great idea to the fancy. He had the true poetical enthusiasm—the rarest faculty among players. None that I remember possessed even a portion of that fine madness which he threw out in Hotspur's famous rant about glory, or the transports of the Venetian incendiary at the vision of the fired city. His voice had the dissonance, and at times the inspiriting effect of the trumpet. His gait was uncouth and stiff, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... player Push'd all his interest for the vacant chair. The buskin'd heroes of the mimic stage No longer whine in love, and rant in rage; The monarch quits his throne, and condescends Humbly to court the favour of his friends; For pity's sake tells undeserved mishaps, And, their applause to gain, recounts his claps. Thus the victorious chiefs of ancient Rome, To win the mob, a suppliant's ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... calls it, a frigid equality, a stupid languor, and a torpid apathy. These must be roused by something strong and excessive, or they will never rise even to mediocrity; while the few who have a tendency to rant, are very easily reclaimed; and ought to be treated in pronunciation and action, as Quintillion advises to do in composition; that is, we should rather allow of an exuberance, than, by too much correctness, check the vigour and luxuriancy ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore

... call upon God to help you?" says he. "He has helped you a lot in the past, hasn't he, Roy? And He has helped her a lot, hasn't he? Helped her to stand me. Oh, that's a joke! The just and merciful One—d'you remember how old Baintree used to rant? You approved, didn't you. You agreed with old Baintree. So did I, Roy, ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... which it was written. It has in the mean while a richness of melody, and a picturesqueness of action, that enables it to delude, and that even draws tears from the eyes of, persons who can be won over by the eye and the ear, with almost no participation of the understanding. And this unmeaning rant and senseless declamation sufficed for the time to throw into shade those exquisite delineations of character, those transcendent bursts of passion, and that perfect anatomy of the human heart, which render the master-pieces of Shakespear a property ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... Does Pa Pulsifer rant any more rants? No. He gets his perfecto goin' nicely, blows a couple of smoke rings up towards the ceilin', and then remarks in sort of ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... adventure, when grandees became admirals and field-marshals because they were grandees, had such incapacity been shown by any restless patrician. Frederic Spinola, at the age of thirty-two, a landsman and a volunteer, thinking to measure himself on blue water with such veterans as John Rant, Joost de Moor, and the other Dutchmen and Zeelanders whom it was his fortune to meet, could hardly escape the doom which so ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... with anguish at the mere hint of oppression. No cheek is so easily bedewed by the unnecessary tear as the cheek of the ruffian—and those who compose the "editorials" for Mr Hearst's papers have cynically realised this truth. They rant and they cant and they argue, as though nothing but noble thoughts were permitted to lodge within the poor brains of their readers. Their favourite gospel is the gospel of Socialism. They tell the workers that the world is their ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... you call upon God to help you?" says he. "He has helped you a lot in the past, hasn't he, Roy? And He has helped her a lot, hasn't he? Helped her to stand me. Oh, that's a joke! The just and merciful One—d'you remember how old Baintree used to rant? You approved, didn't you. You agreed with old Baintree. So did I, Roy, to ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... comic were interwoven; the stage was thronged with a motley variety of figures, humors, and conditions—knights, citizens, soldiers, horse-boys, peasants; there was a court-jester; songs and lyric passages were interspersed; there were puns, broad jokes, rant, Elizabethan metaphors, and swollen trunk-hose hyperboles, with innumerable Shakesperian reminiscences in detail. But the advice of Herder, to whom he sent his manuscript, and the example of Lessing, whose "Emilia Galotti" had just appeared, persuaded Goethe to recast the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... he is, all of a sudden, squarin' off in front o' me, his mug stuck up and his eyes like a couple o' headlights. Imagine! The guy ain't got enough meat on his bones for a rest'rant chicken. Honest to God, he looked like he'd been through a mile o' sausage mill. But crazy as a bedbug. And there's somethin' ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... call it? the domain of practical politics. As for me, you don't suppose I don't want everything we poor women can get, or that I would refuse any privilege or advantage that's offered me? I don't rant or rave about anything, but I have—as I told you just now—my own quiet way of being zealous. If you had no worse partisan than I, you would do very well. My son has talked to me immensely about your ideas; and even if I should enter into them only because he does, I should do so quite enough. You ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. II (of II) • Henry James

... &c. adj[obs3].; scrabble. empty sound, dead letter, vox et praeterea nihil[Lat]; "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; "sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal." nonsense, utter nonsense, gibberish; jargon, jabber, mere words, hocus-pocus, fustian, rant, bombast, balderdash, palaver, flummery, verbiage, babble, baverdage, baragouin[obs3], platitude, niaiserie[obs3]; inanity; flap-doodle; rigmarole, rodomontade; truism; nugae canorae[Lat]; twaddle, twattle, fudge, trash, garbage, humbug; poppy-cock ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the"; not to mention the fanciful vein of the whole passage, which might lead any one unacquainted with Milton to look for this quotation among the dramas of the prime. The great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabethans, which so often broke into rant, is caught and nobly echoed in praise ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... what most people suppose to be 'the extreme case,' Magazine Poetry. Of course there is to-day a great deal of rant and twaddle published under the name of verse in magazines; yet I could point to scores and scores of poems that have thus appeared during the last ten years,[5] which half a century ago would have made—and deservedly have ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn

... lying at your gate. But wait a little! He shall soon lie in Abraham's bosom, while you shall roast on the devil's great gridiron, and be seasoned just to his tooth!—Will the prophets say, "Come here gamester, and teach us the long odds?"—'Tis odds if they do!—Will the martyrs rant, and swear, and shuffle, and cut with you? No! The martyrs are no shufflers! You will be cut so as you little expect: you are a field of tares, and Lucifer is your head farmer. He will come with his reapers ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... enthusiastic character; but it would be hard to point out a passage indicating that exuberant confidence in his own prowess, and contempt of every one else, so liberally exhibited by Almanzor. Instances of this defect are but too thickly sown through the piece; for example the following rant. ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden

... who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, and who, as far as I know, were never personally ill-used by him. Sharp and Rogers both speak of him as an unpleasant, affected, splenetic person. I have heard hundreds and thousands of people who never saw him rant about him; but I never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well. Yet, even now, after the lapse of five-and-twenty years, there are those who cannot talk for a quarter of an hour about ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan

... "Don't rant, old thing. You know you'll never keep it up," Nevil urged more gently than he had ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... only because they were heathens, but also because they were kings; for when Christian princes and lords appear on the stage, the satire is often continued. Thus Lancelot of the Lake appears unexpectedly at the Court of king Herod, and after much rant the lover of queen Guinevere draws his invincible sword and ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... Hope of Gain depends upon it; None who neglect it ever did grow rich, Or ever will, or can by Indian Commerce. By this old Ogden built his stately House, Purchas'd Estates, and grew a little King. He, like an honest Man, bought all by Weight, And made the ign'rant Savages believe That his Right Foot exactly weigh'd a Pound: By this for many Years he bought their Furs, And died in ...
— Ponteach - The Savages of America • Robert Rogers

... thus characterized, there is much false morality, much depraved sentiment, and much hollow rant; but still it carries within it the germ of an excellence, which, sooner or later, must in the progress of national genius arrive at its full development. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that nothing really immoral is ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... clever forgeries by a certain alloy of truth, and it may be that her Beethoven letters are, after all, fictions founded on fact. The language of these letters is somewhat overstrained, but Beethoven could rant on occasion, and Ludwig Nohl believed the letters to be genuine, since a friend of his said he had seen them and recognised Beethoven's script. Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's life, "a happy circumstance ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes

... fled: Those legs of his would soon have sped That flossy tail—that lofty head— Far, far away from danger. But—fatal error of his race— In sandy bank he hid his face, And thought by this to evade the chase Of the ostrich-bagging ranger. So he who, like the ostrich vain, Is ign'rant, and would so remain, Of what folks do, it's very plain In folly's road he's walking. For if in sand you hide your head Just to escape that which you dread, And, seeing not, say danger's fled: ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... betimes and to my office, where we sat all the morning, and a great rant I did give to Mr. Davis, of Deptford, and others about their usage of Michell, in his Bewpers,—[Bewpers is the old name for bunting.]—which he serves in for flaggs, which did trouble me, but yet it was in defence of what was truth. So home to dinner, where ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... his tone conveyed the malice and the menace of a man who had been nursing a grudge for a long time. "Two years ago his newspaper letters and his rant killed that Consolidated project, and I had a contingent fee of fifty thousand dollars at stake; as it was, I got only a little old regular lobby fee and my expense money. And the power hasn't been developed by the infernal, dear, protected people, has it?" he ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... Lindre, about 7 leagues from Portpile, wher I played one of the Gascons a pret[347] in the boat; wheir also I saw a reservoire of fisches. Heir I was wery sick, so that I suped none, as I had not dined, my Poictiers rant incapacitating me. Yea, I was distempered al the way after, so that I cost not wery dear to ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... preached in the meeting house of the First Baptist Church, Richmond, was well ordered, without the rant common to some preachers of that day, dignified and pathetic, and left a lasting impression on the audience.[54] Teague had often remarked to William Crane, "Sir, I don't hear any of your white ministers ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various

... Bonaparte with Cromwell, particularly as to the contrast in their deeds affecting foreign States? Cromwell's interference for the Albigenses, B[onaparte]'s against the Swiss. Then religion would come in; and Milton and you could rant about our countrymen of that period. This is a hasty suggestion, the more hasty because I want my supper. I have just finished Chapman's Homer. Did you ever read it? It has most the continuous power of interesting you ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb

... how they rant at the Base when we have to protect ourselves," I replied, not without a certain amount of bitterness. "They'd like to pacify the Universe with never a sweep of a disintegrator beam. 'Of course, Commander Hanson' ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright

... being held in this city, talk as fluently of the Bible and God's teachings in their speeches as if they could draw an argument from inspiration in maintenance of their woman's rights stuff.... The poor creatures who take part in the silly rant of "brawling women" and Aunt Nancy men are most of them "ismizers" of the rankest stamp, Abolitionists of the most frantic and contemptible kind and Christian (?) sympathizers with such heretics as Wm. Lloyd Garrison, ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... despotism of Cromwell, the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, . . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approbation, than the restoration of Charles ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... of "Again! 'Ay bor'! again!" the blackeyed lover, hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to Yetholm or Carnarvon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Gaboon can scarce surpass Pall-Mall In vicious, gibbering vulgarity Of coarse vituperation. Decency, Courtesy, common-sense, all cast aside! Pheugh! GARNER, in his cage, would open wide His listening ears, did Jacko of the forest So "slate" a foeman when his head was sorest. Strange that to rave and rant, like scullion storm, Like low virago scold, should seem "good form" To our Society Simians, when one name Makes vulgar spite oblivious of its shame! "Voluntary and deliberate," their speech, "Articulate ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various

... the fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane, surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud comment upon the players, went on,—went on until there entered Darden's ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... and you shall see, We every one shall Captains be, To Whore and rant as well as they, When o'er the Hills and far ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various

... symptom that he is reduced to distracting his mind by making an analysis of a dull sermon. 'There is nothing particular in it,' he admits, but at least it is better, he thinks, to listen to a bad sermon than to the blasphemous rant of deistical societies. Indeed, Crabbe's spirit was totally unlike the desperate pride of Chatterton. He was of the patient enduring tribe, and comforts himself by religious meditations, which are, perhaps, rather commonplace ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... he would make a soldier, and who never will think so. As well expect the excited animal of the ring to think in the presence of the red rag of the toreador as to expect them to think on the subject of the Negro soldier. They can curse, and rant, when they see the stalwart Negro in uniform, but it is too much to ask them to think. To them the Negro can be a fiend, a ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward

... Qualifications, of what kind soever, to the virtuous Man. Accordingly [Cato][1] in the Character Tully has left of him, carried Matters so far, that he would not allow any one but a virtuous Man to be handsome. This indeed looks more like a Philosophical Rant than the real Opinion of a Wise Man; yet this was what Cato very seriously maintained. In short, the Stoics thought they could not sufficiently represent the Excellence of Virtue, if they did not comprehend in the Notion of it ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... Fables;'—rejecting the whole of that supernatural clement with which the only records which can tell us any thing about the matter are full; declaring its whole history so uncertain that the ratio of truth to error must be a vanishing fraction;—the advocates of these systems yet proceed to rant and rave—they are really the only words we know which can express our sense of their absurdity—in a most edifying vein about the divinity of Christianity, and to reveal to us its true glories. 'Christ,' says Strauss, 'is not ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... scenes with all the fond minuteness that belongs to love; no pompous rhetoric about the inferiority of the brutes, but a warm plea on their behalf against man's inconsiderateness and cruelty, and a sense of enlarged happiness from their companionship in enjoyment; no vague rant about human misery and human virtue, but that close and vivid presentation of particular deeds and misdeeds, which is the direct road to the emotions. How Cowper's exquisite mind falls with the mild warmth of morning sunlight on the commonest objects, at once disclosing every ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke

... strain, "was to declaim in praise of poverty, with two millions sterling out at usury; to meditate epigrammatic conceits about the evils of luxury in gardens which moved the envy of sovereigns; to rant about liberty while fawning on the insolent and pampered freedmen of a tyrant; to celebrate the divine beauty of virtue with the same pen which had just before written a defence of the murder of a mother ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar

... impersonated by Miss O'Neill. Before Rachel came, it had been thought that the new romantic drama of MM. Hugo and Dumas, because of its greater truth to nature, had given the coup de grace to the old classic plays; but the public, at her bidding, turned gladly from the spasms and the rant of "Angelo" and "Angele," "Antony" and "Hernani," to the old-world stories, the formal tragedies of the seventeenth century poet-dramatists of France. The actress fairly witched her public. There was something of magic in her ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various

... the drama hold divided sway, Sometimes by evil counsellors, 'tis said, Like earth-born potentates have been misled. In those gay days of wickedness and wit, When Villiers criticised what Dryden writ, The tragic queen, to please a tasteless crowd, Had learn'd to bellow, rant, and roar so loud, That frighten'd Nature, her best friend before, The blustering beldam's company foreswore; Her comic sister, who had wit 'tis true, With all her merits, had her failings too: And would sometimes ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan

... blessings. We live in an age of morbid emotion and introspectiveness; wherein the poets, such as they are, have sunk to the level of mere pathologists engaged in the dissection of their own ultra-sophisticated spirits. The fresh touch of Nature is lost to the majority, and rhymesters rant endlessly and realistically about the relation of man to his fellows and to himself; overlooking the real foundations of art and beauty—wonder, and man's relation to the unknown cosmos. But Miss Jackson is not of the majority, and has not overlooked these things. In ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... in holes in de groun'—dey kill an' eat one anoder, an' dey'm allers at war wid one anoder. But de white man he gwoe dar, an' he buy 'em fur twenty pieces ob silver—dat's' zactly de price—twenty silver dollars—dey pay dat fur 'em up ter dis day—dem pore, ign'rant folks won't take nuffin' but silver. Well, de white man buy 'em, and he fotch 'em to dis country, which am like de lan' ob Egypt, full ob schools, ob churches, ob larnin,' an' ob all manner ob good tings. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... swung back to his desk, a grim smile on his lips. "It always boils down to the same thing—they don't know what they're going to do about it. Let 'em rant all they please, in the end what I ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... herself wanting to talk of it. She wanted to rage and rant. She was astonished at the primitiveness of her emotions. She had laughed her way through life and had prided herself on the dispassionateness of her point of view. And now it was only by the exercise of the utmost self-control that she was able ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey

... Ada!" said Vermont contemptuously. "Don't begin to rant—you're not on the stage now. I kept all my promises to you, at any rate. I got you on at the Rockingham and I introduced you to Leroy; and if you had only played your cards properly you would have hooked him by this time. As it is, he'll marry his ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... as I believe I have elsewhere observed, that we male-delinquents in love-matters have of the other sex:—for while they, poor things! sit sighing in holes and corners, or run to woods and groves to bemoan themselves on their baffled hopes, we can rant and roar, hunt and hawk; and, by new loves, banish from our hearts all ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson

... Cf. again the scene at Ophelia's grave, where a strong strain of aesthetic disgust is traceable in Hamlet's 'towering passion' with Laertes: 'Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou' ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... upheld, and the disgust, hatred, and scorn uttered for the excesses which marked the godless revolutionists of the age. It is singular that so fair-minded a biographer as Parton could see nothing but rant and nonsense in the most philosophical political essay ever penned by man. It only shows that a partisan cannot be an historian any more than can a laborious collector of details, like Freeman, accurate ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... for all," cried Mr. Cumberland Vane, rapping his knuckles angrily on the table, "I tell you, once and for all, my man, that I will not have you turning on any religious rant or cant here. Don't imagine that it will impress me. The most religious people are not those who talk about it. (Applause.) You answer the questions and ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... Baal, They dare not sit or lean, But fume and fret and posture And foam and curse between; For being bound to Baal, Whose sacrifice is vain, Their rest is scant with Baal, They glare and pant for Baal, They mouth and rant for Baal, For ...
— Sea Warfare • Rudyard Kipling

... it!" said the others. "Give us a rant, Factor," and round the table they gathered: the candles were being lit, the ambrosial ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... to go). You rant like any common fellow. Go, then, and marshal your thousands; and make haste; for Mithridates of Pergamos is at hand with reinforcements for Caesar. Caesar has held you at bay with two legions: we shall see what he ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw

... indeed, incompatible—if the love of freedom and active enterprise necessarily exclude the grace and softness which lessen, or at least teach us to forget, the burden of existence, let us be what we are; and, indeed, it is the opinion of many, that the rant of social pleasure is the price we pay for the excellence of our political institutions. It is because before the law all men are equal, that in the world so much care is taken to show that they are different. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various

... great deal of warmth, that it was no such thing, but that as he had lived with the character of the boldest fellow of his profession he was resolved to die with it, and leave his memory to be admired by all the gentlemen of the road in succeeding ages. This was the rant which took up the poor fellow's head, and induced him to bear 250 pound weight upon his breast for upwards of seven minutes, and was much the same kind of bravery as that which induced the French lacquey to dance a minuet immediately before he danced his last upon the wheel, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward

... land and naval forces, with hostile purpose now declared, for the sake of having them "fire the first gun," would have been as unwise as it would be to hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at one's breast, until he has actually fired. The disingenuous rant of demagogues about "firing on the flag" might serve to rouse the passions of insensate mobs in times of general excitement, but will be impotent in impartial history to relieve the Federal Government from the responsibility of the assault made by sending a hostile ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... have been the champion of his contrary, and blackened their own faults, and made light of their own virtues, when they beheld them in a master. Macconochie had soon smelled out my secret inclination, took me much into his confidence, and would rant against the Master by the hour, so that even my work suffered. "They're a' daft here," he would cry, "and be damned to them! The Master—the deil's in their thrapples that should call him sae! it's Mr. Henry should be master now! They were nane sae ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... even unconvinced. Then his face brightened. "That's 'cause you was too little, like that canary at th' Res't'rant what ain't got its feathers yet. You was too little fer yer wings to have growed afore you come away," and his lively imagination having thus settled the problem, the two continued ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin

... like true British sailors, We'll rant and we'll roar across the salt seas, Until we take soundings in the Channel of Old England From Ushant to ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... Facque nonenarios de cifris, cu{m} remeabis Occ{ur}rant si forte cifre; dum demps{er}is vnum ...
— The Earliest Arithmetics in English • Anonymous

... Alfieri, and try the interest, &c. of these my new attempts in the old line, by him in English; and then tell me fairly your opinion. But don't measure me by YOUR OWN old or new tailors' yards. Nothing so easy as intricate confusion of plot and rant. Mrs. Centlivre, in comedy, has ten times the bustle of Congreve; but are they to be compared? and yet she drove Congreve from ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... the title of MASCAGNI'S new Opera. The title, anglicised, would be suitable for an old-fashioned transpontine melodramatic tragedian, who could certainly say of himself, "I rant so!" ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 19, 1892 • Various

... professional life is full of "nobodies." The pulpit is crowded with goodish "nobodies"—men who have no power—no unction—no mission. They strain their brains to write common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with "nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the pettifoggers are many. The bar, more than any other medium, is that through ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb

... was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy, the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton

... the bench, fate sent into the room all in one moment, as if to insult his sorrow, a creature that seemed the goddess of gayety, impervious to a care. She swept in with a bold, free step, for she was rehearsing a man's part, and thundered without rant, but with a spirit and fire, and pace, beyond the conception of our poor tame ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... hoarse wailings, and Bastille Devoilee (Bastille unveiled). Loquacious Abbe Raynal, at length, has his wish; sees the Histoire Philosophique, with its 'lubricity,' unveracity, loose loud eleutheromaniac rant (contributed, they say, by Philosophedom at large, though in the Abbe's name, and to his glory), burnt by the common hangman;—and sets out on his travels as a martyr. It was the edition of 1781; perhaps the last notable ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barbarous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward.... The highest inspirations of poetry are resolvable into three ingredients: the rant of unregulated passion, the whining of exaggerated feeling, and the cant of factitious sentiment; and can therefore serve only to ripen a splendid lunatic like Alexander, a puling driveler like Werter, or a morbid dreamer like Wordsworth. It can never make a philosopher, nor a statesman, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... heartbreaking to them. But that does not bother my Lord Jesus, nor Dr. Luther, for we believe that the Gospel will and must continue. Let a layman ask such Romanists, and let them give answer, why they despoil and mock all of God's commandments, and rant so violently about this power, whereas they cannot show at all why it is necessary, or what it is good for. For ever since it has arisen, it has accomplished nothing but the devastation of Christendom, ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther

... in our day rant like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... when he accuses them as politicians of lying, cheating, and stealing, he estimates them by his knowledge of himself as a politician. He supposes that they would not hesitate to do what, without compunction, he does himself. They are all players together, and this is a kind of stage rant designed to impress the groundlings, who, after all, compose the larger part of ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis

... to her sons, that fiends would refuse to execute, Lavinia does not shriek, nor rant, nor call upon the gods, but speaks what nobody but Shakspere ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith

... Rair, roar. Rant, song, lay. Rape, rope. Raw, row. Reaming, foaming. Reck, observe. Rede, counsel. Red up, cleared up. Reek, smoke. Reike, (smoky), Edinburgh. Restricket, restricted. Reveled, ravelled, trouble-some. Reynynge, running. Reytes, water-flags, iris. Rig, ridge. Rigwoodie, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... me," Lord Rokesle observed; "I begin to fear these heroics are contagious. Possibly I, too, shall begin to rant in a moment. Meanwhile, as I understand it, you decline to perform the ceremony. I have had to warn you before this, Simon, that you mustn't take too much gin when I am apt to need you. You are very ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell

... Mrs Simpson, who had not yet resumed her work, and was looking at the fire thoughtfully, 'I shall tell you the story. You will please keep it to yourself, if you don't mind? Thank you. Now it is just this. I had an old uncle, a Dr Rant. Perhaps you may have heard of him. Not that he was a distinguished man, but from the odd way he ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James

... Titles wore; Some who knew how to rail, some to accuse, And some who haunted Taverns and the Stews. Some roaring Bullies, who ran th'row the Town Crying, God damn 'um, they'd support the Crown: Whose wicked Oaths, and whose blasphemous Rant, Had quite put down the holy zealous Cant. Some were for War, and some on Mischief bent; And some who could, for gain, new Plots invent. Some Priests and Levites too among the rest, Such as knew how to blow the Trumpet best: Who ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.

... position was perfectly tenable, and he defended it with unsurpassed force. For the hour unfortunately his influence was gone. Great newspapers thought themselves safe in describing one of these performances as something between the rant of the fanatic and the trick of the stage actor; a mixture of pious grimace and vindictive howl, of savage curses and dolorous forebodings; the most unpatriotic speech ever heard within the walls of parliament. In sober fact, it was one of the three or four most masterly deliverances evoked by the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... party will have failed. But, sir, if such a failure take place, rest assured that the "Bishops, Elders, and other Ministers" of the Methodist Church, South, will not help to bring about such a failure! We can afford to let such minions of party as you are, rave and rant, and publish their expositions, and issue their warnings to Churches: they will all serve to swell our ranks. All true American hearts, not chained to the car of party, or bound down by the cords of plunder, think alike upon the great questions that have called the American party into existence. ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... her best and all that, but her day is past, and here's plenty of young flesh and blood to fill her place. This one is rather young, but she's smart as a whip—she's full of mettle and is fresh and healthy-looking. It won't do to have pale girls around, for it gives cursed busybodies a chance to rant about women standing all day. (Out of the corner of his eye he measured Belle from head to foot.) She can stand, and stand it, too, for a long while. She's compact and stout. She's built right for the business." At last he said, aloud, "In ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... thought himself beloved," said the maiden; "but by what slight creatures!—things whose heads could be rendered giddy by a playhouse rant—whose brains were only filled with red-heeled shoes and satin buskins—and who run altogether mad on the argument of a George and ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... happy. Life will never have much joy in it for Mark. By the time he is five-and-twenty he will wonder why people ever laugh, and think all fools who seem merry. Poetry will not exist for Mark, either in literature or in life; its best effusions will sound to him mere rant and jargon. Enthusiasm will be his aversion and contempt. Mark will have no youth; while he looks juvenile and blooming, he will be already middle-aged in mind. His body is now fourteen years of age, but his soul is ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... growth of a plant which has been in China for at least twelve centuries, which has had medicinal uses for nine, and whose medicinal properties have been put in the capsule for six, is not an easy matter, far more difficult, in fact, than the average Englishman and even those who rant so much about the whole business upon little knowledge can imagine. Opium has been made in China for four centuries, and although used then with tobacco, has been smoked since the middle of ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... pleasure, delight. delicado, -a delicate, sweet. delicia f. delight. delicioso, -a delicious, delightful. delirante adj. delirious, raving. delirar rave, dote. delirio m. delirium, madness, rapture, rant, idle talk. delito m. crime. demasa f. excess. demasiado, -a too much, too great. demonio m. devil, demon. denso, -a dense, thick. dentro adv. within; —— de prep. within. denuesto m. insult, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup

... you wouldn't rant, mother. It only hardens me. Come: I suppose I am the only young woman you ever had in your power that you did good to. Don't spoil it ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw

... performed ceremonially. Nothing could equal the vigorous gravity of his demeanour when leading his men in fight. His words were few at such times; he was the only officer I ever knew void absolutely of rant in action. Others would shout and scream and shriek their orders redundant and unwholesome; Haskell's eye spoke better battle English than all their distended throats. He was merciful ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... of the glancing helm: "Ajax, brave leader, son of Telamon, Deal not with me as with a feeble child, Or woman, ign'rant of the ways of war; Of war and carnage every point I know; And well I know to wield, now right, now left, The tough bull's-hide that forms my stubborn targe: Well know I too my fiery steeds to urge, And raise the war-cry in the standing fight. But ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... places his favourite metaphysical gabble—his dissertations about the stars, the passions, the Greek plays, and what not—his eternal whine about what he calls the good and the beautiful—is a fellow as mean and paltry as can be well imagined; a man of rant, and not of action; foolishly infirm of purpose, and strong only in desire; whose beautiful is a tawdry strumpet, and whose good would be crime in the eyes of an honest man. So much for the portrait of Ernest Maltravers: as for the artist, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... Eden's ring; it just paid for their places at the theater, where they saw the living puppets of the colony mop and mow and rant under the title of acting. This was so interesting that Robinson was thinking of his ring the whole time, and how to get it back. The girls agreed between themselves they had never ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade

... sealed-up eyes can never more unclose to lighten with glad hope or fond ambition; the quiet heart cannot leap with gratitude or joy at that "word spoken in due season" which aids its noblest aspirations to become realized! The DEAD poet?—Press the cold clods of earth over him, and then rant above his grave,—tell him how great he was, what infinite possibilities were displayed in his work, what excellence, what merit, what subtlety of thought, what grace of style! Rant and rave!—print reams of acclaiming ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... sudden death weeps with anguish at the mere hint of oppression. No cheek is so easily bedewed by the unnecessary tear as the cheek of the ruffian—and those who compose the "editorials" for Mr Hearst's papers have cynically realised this truth. They rant and they cant and they argue, as though nothing but noble thoughts were permitted to lodge within the poor brains of their readers. Their favourite gospel is the gospel of Socialism. They tell the ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley

... like the bee (sweet as thy blood) design'd To be destroy'd to propagate his kind, 570 Lest thy redundant and superfluous juice, Should fading leaves instead of fruits produce, The pruner's hand, with letting blood, must quench Thy heat, and thy exub'rant parts retrench: Then from the joints of thy prolific stem A swelling knot is raised (call'd a gem), Whence, in short space, itself the cluster shows, 577 And from earth's moisture mixed with sunbeams grows. I' th'spring, like youth, it yields ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... of it!" said the others. "Give us a rant, Factor," and round the table they gathered: the candles were being lit, the ambrosial ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... clamor for their dear Parisian dainties. Against such a petticoat insurrection the governor is helpless. Bah! it sickens me. I wonder not that our men prefer the Indian maidens, for they at least have common sense. But by my soul, Captain, here I stand and rant like some schoolboy mouthing his speech. Tush, it ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... while Henry said "Don't kick and flounce so, my little beauty. If there's any thing I hate, it's seeing girls make believe they're modest. That clodhopper Bill kisses you every day, I'll war rant." ...
— The English Orphans • Mary Jane Holmes

... of rant. I have eaten three eggs, swallowed sundries of tea and bread and butter, purely for the purpose of amusing myself, and I have seen the horse fed. When at Cross, where I shall dine, I shall think of your happy dinner celebrated under the auspices of humble ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen's delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as ...
— Plays and Puritans - from "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley

... ouverte aux talens; 'The Tools to him that can handle them.' . . . Madly enough he preached, it is true, as Enthusiasts and first Missionaries are wont, with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant, yet as articulately perhaps as the case admitted. Or call him, if you will, an American Backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, rioting, and ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various

... Pulsifer rant any more rants? No. He gets his perfecto goin' nicely, blows a couple of smoke rings up towards the ceilin', and then remarks in sort ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford

... of this play is, in general, very well written, and contains less rant than he usually puts in the ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden

... That spreads his motley wings in the eye of noon, To sport their season and be seen no more. The rest are sober dreamers, grave and wise, And pregnant with discoveries new and rare. Some write a narrative of wars, and feats Of heroes little known, and call the rant A history; describe the man, of whom His own coevals took but little note, And paint his person, character, and views, As they had known him from his mother's womb; They disentangle from the puzzled skein, In which obscurity has wrapped them up, The threads of politic and shrewd design ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper

... from Erasmus to Butler and Swift. Ridicule is more efficacious than argument; when that keen instrument cuts what cannot be untied. "The Rehearsal" wrote down the unnatural taste for the rhyming heroic tragedies, and brought the nation back from sound to sense, from rant to passion. More important events may be traced in the history of Ridicule. When a certain set of intemperate Puritans, in the reign of Elizabeth, the ridiculous reformists of abuses in Church and State, congregated themselves ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... not left long in doubt. Proceeding, Andre-Louis spoke as he conceived that Philippe de Vilmorin would have spoken. He had so often argued with him, so often attended the discussions of the Literary Chamber, that he had all the rant of the reformers—that was yet true in substance—at his ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... doubtful of his fate, Made choice of me to be his advocate, Relying on my knowledge in the laws; And I as boldly undertook the cause. I left my client yonder in a rant, Against the envious, and the ignorant, Who are, he says, his only enemies: But he condemns their malice, and defies The sharpest of his censurers to say, Where there is one gross fault in all his play. The language is so fitted for each ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. II • Edited by Walter Scott

... Vermont contemptuously. "Don't begin to rant—you're not on the stage now. I kept all my promises to you, at any rate. I got you on at the Rockingham and I introduced you to Leroy; and if you had only played your cards properly you would have hooked him by this time. As it is, ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice

... to," retorted Bill, "for I was about t' d'rect th' conversation in them channels when you makes them ign'rant interruptions." ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart

... yo'!" said Uncle Rufus, kindly. "Dar's a do' shet 'twixt dat leetle fice an' dem crazy cats. Dar's sho' nuff wot de papahs calls er armerstice 'twixt de berlig'rant pahties—ya-as'm! De berry wust has happen' already, so yo' folkses might's well ...
— The Corner House Girls at School • Grace Brooks Hill

... Charlotte, a pink passion in her sallow cheeks, "everybody thinks because I don't rant every day, that I haven't any more feeling than a stick or a stone. Oh! do excuse me, Mrs. Fisher, but I love Polly so!" And she flung herself down on her knees, burying her face among the little flannel petticoats in Mother ...
— Five Little Peppers Grown Up • Margaret Sidney

... those great men, not only because they were heathens, but also because they were kings; for when Christian princes and lords appear on the stage, the satire is often continued. Thus Lancelot of the Lake appears unexpectedly at the Court of king Herod, and after much rant the lover of queen Guinevere draws his invincible sword and massacres the Innocents ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... pant, puff, gasp; spout; inflate, puff up, distend; explode, shatter; (Colloq.) boast, brag, bluster, vaunt, gasconade; rant, scold, censure. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... you waste time. Tell me exactly the arrangements with De Boer. Le grand coup! now; to-night most important of nights—and you rant of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various

... Cooper in it. The reason is plain: to the portraying of madness, the injudicious can imagine no limits. The more a madman raves and roars, the better; rags, slovenliness, and matted hair, and beard too, are the usual associates of awkwardness and vulgarity. Any man, therefore, who can rant and play the extravagant, no matter how ungracefully, may pass with some audiences for a very natural Octavian—an abominable absurdity! For these two reasons, Octavian is a very hazardous part for a performer who aims at substantial ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... tail—that lofty head— Far, far away from danger. But—fatal error of his race— In sandy bank he hid his face, And thought by this to evade the chase Of the ostrich-bagging ranger. So he who, like the ostrich vain, Is ign'rant, and would so remain, Of what folks do, it's very plain In folly's road he's walking. For if in sand you hide your head Just to escape that which you dread, And, seeing not, say danger's fled: 'Tis ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... go over to the same place and explain his father away. If he obtained a hearing in the Ulster Hall in the company of Redmond, Devlin, and Pirrie the legend of Ulster as an impregnable loyalist stronghold would be wiped out, and Randolph's rant could be made to appear a foolish joke in comparison with the more mature ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... ever going into battle?" growled Jack Powell from the other side. "Here I've been at this blamed drilling until I'm stiff in every joint, and I haven't seen so much as the tail end of a fight. You may rant as long as you please about martial glory, but if there's any man who thinks it's fun merely to get dirty and eat raw food, well, he's welcome to my share of it, that's all. I haven't had so much as one of the necessities of life ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... then Boys and you shall see, We every one shall Captains be, To Whore and rant as well as they, When o'er the Hills and far away: Over ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various

... charnel shard assails the damn'd Thro' vapours green and siffling night; Monastic caverns rasp each isle; A poisoned skink croaks from a well. And mournful wraiths sob hard and loud, A smothered sigh proclaims more woe, The lounging imps grasp tomes of old And rant therefrom each damn'd one's name. And horrors, snarling at each crowd, Assail each kingdom with its show: A noctivagous dragon bold, Hastes thro' the aisles of death and shame And haunts the cajons of the dead, There fungus-tapers gleam like gold Before ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque

... figured in them in country lyceum- halls, are one thing,—and private theatricals, as they may be seen in certain gilded and frescoed saloons of our metropolis, are another. Yes, it is pleasant to see real gentlemen and ladies, who do not think it necessary to mouth, and rant, and stride, like most of our stage heroes and heroines, in the characters which show off their graces and talents; most of all to see a fresh, unrouged, unspoiled, high bred young maiden, with a lithe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... Monsieur Hugo, au revoir!"—and they part:—Justice taking off his hat and bowing, and the author of "Ruy Blas" quite convinced that he has been treating with him d'egal en egal. I can hardly bring my mind to fancy that anything is serious in France—it seems to be all rant, tinsel, and stage-play. Sham liberty, sham monarchy, sham glory, sham justice,—ou diable donc la verite va-t-elle ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... body's power, To keep at times frae being sour, To see how things are shared; How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, And ken na ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth

... admirals and field-marshals because they were grandees, had such incapacity been shown by any restless patrician. Frederic Spinola, at the age of thirty-two, a landsman and a volunteer, thinking to measure himself on blue water with such veterans as John Rant, Joost de Moor, and the other Dutchmen and Zeelanders whom it was his fortune to meet, could hardly escape the doom which so rapidly ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... of Marlowe's creative invention or discovery by dint of genius. (I do not remember the curious verb "to rand" except in this little book: "he randed out these sentences": I presume it to be the first form of "rant.") The account of St. Paul's in 1609 is very curious and scandalous: "the very Temple itself (in bare humility) stood without his cap, and so had stood many years, many good folks had spoke for him ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... regarded as a bad symptom that he is reduced to distracting his mind by making an analysis of a dull sermon. 'There is nothing particular in it,' he admits, but at least it is better, he thinks, to listen to a bad sermon than to the blasphemous rant of deistical societies. Indeed, Crabbe's spirit was totally unlike the desperate pride of Chatterton. He was of the patient enduring tribe, and comforts himself by religious meditations, which are, perhaps, rather commonplace in expression, but when ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... a Home Ruler, Father McFadden, whose speech, being simply anti-British rant from end to end, must have cost many votes; and I was not surprised when, a day or two afterward, his bishop recalled ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... them "fire the first gun," would have been as unwise as it would be to hesitate to strike down the arm of the assailant, who levels a deadly weapon at one's breast, until he has actually fired. The disingenuous rant of demagogues about "firing on the flag" might serve to rouse the passions of insensate mobs in times of general excitement, but will be impotent in impartial history to relieve the Federal Government from the responsibility of the assault made by sending a hostile fleet against ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis

... had not time, they say, to transcribe all that was worthy of my resentment in this letter: so I must find an opportunity to come at it myself. Noble rant, they say, it contains—But I am a seducer, and a hundred vile fellows, in it.—'And the devil, it seems, took possession of my heart, and of the hearts of all her friends, in the same dark hour, in order to provoke her to meet me.' Again, 'There is a fate in her error,' she ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... already pure Borrow, with a vigour excusing if not quite transmuting its rant. He creates a sort of hero in his own image, and it should be read as an introduction and invocation to "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye." It is one of the few contemporary records of Borrow at about the age when he wrote ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas

... Gray: On Pope's refin'd, or Dryden's lofty strains, Dwell, while their fire the lightest heart enchains. Through these and all our Bards to whom belong The pow'rs transcendent of immortal song, How difficult to steer t'avoid the cant Of polish'd phrase, and nerve-alarming rant; Each period with true elegance to round, And give the Poet's meaning in the sound. But, wherefore should the Muse employ her verse, The peril of our labors to rehearse? Oft has your kind, your generous ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent

... cries of "Again! 'Ay bor'! again!" the blackeyed lover, hypnotizing himself into an ecstasy, poured out race and passion and war with the law, in the true Gipsy rant which is sung from Transylvania to Yetholm or Carnarvon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... purer, more severe, more faultless, and yet more poetical representation of common nature, than that which characterizes her art. Her acting has all the finish of high breeding, with just as much feeling as is necessary to keep alive the illusion. As for rant, there is not as much about her whole system, as would serve a common English, or American actress, for a ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... through she dropped her rake on the hay, searched for a long, nail-like thorn, and thrust it through, for the good-looking, careless hussy never had any provision of pins about her. Then, taking a June rose which pricked her finger, she put the flower by the "rant", or tear, and went to join the rest of the hay-makers. The blood welled up out of the scratch in the finger more freely than would have been supposed from so small a place. She put her lips to it to suck it away, as folk do in all quarters of the earth yet discovered, ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies

... destiny according to his private goodwill and pleasure.[9] The greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley

... city, talk as fluently of the Bible and God's teachings in their speeches, as if they could draw an argument from inspiration in maintenance of their Woman's Rights stuff.... The poor creatures who take part in the silly rant of "brawling women" and Aunt Nancy men, are most of them "ismizers" of the rankest stamp, Abolitionists of the most frantic and contemptible kind, and Christian(?) sympathizers with such heretics as Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, C. C. Burleigh, and S. S. Foster. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... there lay, uprooted quite, The object of my heart's delight— I did not weep or rant, And yet a grain or two of spite My secret ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... a case of running from one to the other extreme. The force of style which even adverse critics acknowledged in Frankenstein was sometimes perilously akin to the most disputable kinds of romantic rant. But in the historical or society novels which followed, in the contributions which graced the 'Keepsakes' of the thirties, and even—alas—in the various prefaces and commentaries which accompanied the publication ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley

... not received a Sanction from some of that illustrious Line," and the "unthinking Part of the Town" followed the fashion set by royalty. Unlike "The Fair Captive," which suffered from a plethora of incidents, Mrs. Haywood's second tragedy contains almost nothing in its five acts but rant. An analysis of the plot is but a ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... skies: 230 Then Fancy, sick of follies that deform The face of day, and in the sunshine swarm; Sick of the fluttering fopperies that engage The vain pursuits of a degenerate age; Sick of smooth Sophistry's insidious cant, Or cold Impiety's defying rant; Sick of the muling sentiment that sighs O'er its dead bird, while Want unpitied cries; Sick of the pictures that pale Lust inflame, And flush the cheek of Love with deep, deep shame; 240 Would fain the shade of elder days recall, The ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... to my office, where we sat all the morning, and a great rant I did give to Mr. Davis, of Deptford, and others about their usage of Michell, in his Bewpers,—[Bewpers is the old name for bunting.]—which he serves in for flaggs, which did trouble me, but yet it was in defence of what was truth. So home ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... literature, thus characterized, there is much false morality, much depraved sentiment, and much hollow rant; but still it carries within it the germ of an excellence, which, sooner or later, must in the progress of national genius arrive at its full development. Meanwhile, it is a consolation to know that ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... act well, you must only act furiously. No matter what you do, or how you act, so that it be but odd and strange. We will have all the pit packed, and the newspapers hired. Whatever you do different from famous actors, it shall be insisted that you are right and they were wrong. If you rant, it shall be pure passion; if you are vulgar, it shall be a touch of nature. Every one shall be prepared to fall into raptures, and shout and yell, at certain points which you shall make. If you do but escape pelting the first night, your fortune and the fortune ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... a huge fire down by the shore, and left them alone. They sat by it until nearly ten o'clock, he talking incessantly; her overtures had roused in him the desire to please, and, instead of the usual monologue of egotism and rant, he poured out poetry, eloquence, sense and humorous shrewdness. Had he been far less the unusual, the great man, she would still have listened with a sense of delight, for in her mood that night his penetrating voice, which, ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips

... of the vile rant I strode forward and thus presently came on a small dell or dingle full of the light of a fire that crackled right merrily; at the which most welcome sight I made shift to scramble down the steepy bank forthright and approached the blaze on eager feet. Drawing near, I saw the fire burned ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... and stormy, he can lift up an eye to Heaven, radiant with hope, and glistening with gratitude. At such a season, no dangers can alarm, no opposition can move, no provocations can irritate. He may almost adopt, as the language of his sober exultation, what in the philosopher was but an idle rant: and, considering that it is only the garment of mortality which is subject to the rents of fortune; while his spirit, cheered with the divine support, keeps its place within, secure and unassailable, he can sometimes almost triumph at the stake, or on the scaffold, ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce

... Having exhausted every imaginable variety of tone, he abruptly said, "Let us pray," and twisting his chair round, knelt before it. Every one knelt before the seat they had occupied, and listened for another half hour to a rant of miserable, low, familiar jargon, that he presumed to improvise to his Maker as a prayer. In this, however, the cottage apostle only followed the example set by every preacher throughout the Union, excepting those of the Episcopalian and Catholic congregations; ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... words, he be able to overlook the wickedness and injustice. Seek thus after peace, so shall you find it; when your enemy has wasted his breath and done all that he can, if you hear him, but rail and rant not back, he must subdue himself by his own violence. For thus Christ also on the cross subdued his enemies, not by the sword or by violence. Therefore is it a saying, which should be written with gold, where it says, "Striking back again makes hatred, and whoever strikes ...
— The Epistles of St. Peter and St. Jude Preached and Explained • Martin Luther

... the rant, I must observe, 1. That the operation of the winds must be confined to the lower region of the air. 2. That the name, etymology, and fable of the Pleiads are purely Greek, (Scholiast ad Homer, S. 686. Eudocia in Ionia, p. 399. Apollodor. l. iii. c. 10. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... public, but was constantly compelled to dominate a multitude that never heard any sound short of thunder and never felt anything till it was hit with a club. The bulk of Forrest's great fortune was gained by him with Metamora, which is rant and fustian. He himself despised it and deeply despised and energetically cursed the public that forced him to act in it. Forrest's best powers, indeed, were never really appreciated by the average mind of his fervent admirers. He lived in a rough period and he had ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter

... frightened denials of those who, shocked at the growing materialism of the age, would fain persuade this generation to walk blindfold through the superb temple a loving God has placed us in. While every sane and earnest mind must turn, disgusted and humiliated, from the senseless rant which resolves all divinity into materialistic elements, it may safely be proclaimed that genuine aesthetics is a mighty channel through which the love and adoration of Almighty God enters the human soul. It were an insult to the Creator to reject the influence ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans

... while we admit the ingenuity of the means employed. His influence upon modern opera has been extensive. He was the real founder of the school of melodramatic opera which is now so popular. Violent contrasts with him do duty for the subtle characterisation of the older masters. His heroes rant and storm, and his heroines shriek and rave, but of real feeling, and even of real expression, there is little in ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... power of every kind. His position was perfectly tenable, and he defended it with unsurpassed force. For the hour unfortunately his influence was gone. Great newspapers thought themselves safe in describing one of these performances as something between the rant of the fanatic and the trick of the stage actor; a mixture of pious grimace and vindictive howl, of savage curses and dolorous forebodings; the most unpatriotic speech ever heard within the walls of parliament. In sober fact, it was one of the three or four ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... bare and ashen, And bend on me without a beam. Since love is held the master-passion, Its loss must be the pain supreme— And grinning Fate has wrecked my dream. But pardon, dear departed Guest, I will not rant, I will not rail; For good the grain must feel the flail; There are whom ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... the blasphemous rant and fustian and crude speculation which make up his poem of "Festus," which has had such extraordinary popularity among our transcendentalists, and which Shakspeare Hudson so excellently well reviewed in the Whig Review a year or two ago, we think a correspondent of The Tribune speaks justly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... kinship with the blind worshipers of the status quo. To natives and foreigners alike for many years the paper was single and invaluable: in it one could find set forth acutely and dispassionately the broad facts and the real purport of all great legislative proposals, free from the rant and mendacity, the fury and distortion, the prejudice and counter-prejudice of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... noticed, too, that in this "Second Part" the reviser begins to show himself as something more than the sweet lyric poet. He transposes scenes in order to intensify the interest, and where enemies meet, like Clifford and York, instead of making them rant in mere blind hatred, he allows them to show a generous admiration of each other's qualities; in sum, we find here the germs of that dramatic talent which was so soon to bear such marvellous fruit. No better example of Shakespeare's growth in dramatic power and ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris

... the arbitrary sequestrations of committee-men, the iniquitous decimations of military prefects, the sale of British citizens for slavery in the West Indies, the blood of some shed on the scaffold without legal trial, . . . the persecution of the Anglican Church, the bacchanalian rant of sectaries, the morose preciseness of puritans . . . It is universally acknowledged that no measure was ever more national, or has ever produced more testimonies of public approbation, than the restoration of Charles II. . . . For the late government, whether under the parliament ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... bloodshed wallow Of Saints, and let the CAUSE lie fallow? 505 The Cause for which we fought and swore So boldly, shall we now give o'er? Then, because quarrels still are seen With oaths and swearings to begin, The SOLEMN LEAGUE and COVENANT 510 Will seem a mere God-dam-me rant; And we, that took it, and have fought, As lewd as drunkards that fall out. For as we make war for the King Against himself the self-same thing, 515 Some will not stick to swear we do For God and for Religion too: For if bear-baiting we allow, What good can ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... and so will I: And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw Millions of acres on us, till our ground, Singeing his pate against the burning zone, Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... jes' go right into dinnah; I'll take keer of the auto'bile; I'll see that nun of those ign'rant folk stannin' roun' lay their han's on it; they think Sambo doan know an auto'bile; didn't I see you heah befoh? an' didn't I hole de hose when you put de watah in? Me an' you are de only two pussons in dis whole town who knows about ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... tone conveyed the malice and the menace of a man who had been nursing a grudge for a long time. "Two years ago his newspaper letters and his rant killed that Consolidated project, and I had a contingent fee of fifty thousand dollars at stake; as it was, I got only a little old regular lobby fee and my expense money. And the power hasn't been developed by the infernal, ...
— All-Wool Morrison • Holman Day

... us be frank about it. The attitude of the public toward the theatre has changed. To-day we would not tolerate the heavy melodramas which enchained our parents and grandparents. The age of rant and fustian has passed away, and Edwin Forrest could never gain a second fortune from such a combination of these qualities as "Metamora." We are more sophisticated; we refuse to be thrilled by Ingomar, no matter how loudly he bellows. What we ask for principally is to be amused, and consequently ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson

... should each have been the champion of his contrary, and blackened their own faults, and made light of their own virtues, when they beheld them in a master. Macconochie had soon smelled out my secret inclination, took me much into his confidence, and would rant against the Master by the hour, so that even my work suffered. "They're a' daft here," he would cry, "and be damned to them! The Master—the deil's in their thrapples that should call him sae! it's Mr. Henry should be master now! They were nane sae fond o' the Master when they had him, I'll ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the door," called Jesse. "Bate, you grab any loose guns an' knives.... Now, boss, rant an' be damned!" ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... was in no situation to rant at smug William, the linen draper. The old sea wolf who had outlived the most glorious era of the storied buccaneers, had a few gold pieces tucked away in his belt and at first he was content to loaf about the tavern, with an audience to listen ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... institutions is upheld, and the disgust, hatred, and scorn uttered for the excesses which marked the godless revolutionists of the age. It is singular that so fair-minded a biographer as Parton could see nothing but rant and nonsense in the most philosophical political essay ever penned by man. It only shows that a partisan cannot be an historian any more than can a laborious collector of details, like Freeman, accurate as he may be. Adams, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord

... Critical Review for December 1785 there is the following notice: "Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. Small 8vo, IS. (Smith). This is a satirical production calculated to throw ridicule on the bold assertions of some parliamentary declaimers. If rant may be best foiled at its own weapons, the author's design is not ill-founded; for the marvellous has never been carried to a more whimsical and ludicrous extent." The reviewer had probably read the work through from one paper cover ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... is lying at your gate. But wait a little! He shall soon lie in Abraham's bosom, while you shall roast on the devil's great gridiron, and be seasoned just to his tooth!—Will the prophets say, "Come here gamester, and teach us the long odds?"—'Tis odds if they do!—Will the martyrs rant, and swear, and shuffle, and cut with you? No! The martyrs are no shufflers! You will be cut so as you little expect: you are a field of tares, and Lucifer is your head farmer. He will come with his reapers and his sickles and his forks, and you will be cut down and bound and pitched ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... an' says they: Votin' seems a healthy exercise an' we'd like to thry it. Give us th' franchise or we'll do things to ye. An' they got it. Thin it wint down through th' earls an' th' markises an' th' rest iv th' Dooley fam'ly, till fin'lly all that was left iv it was flung to th' ign'rant masses like Hinnissy, because they made a lot iv noise an' threatened to set ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne

... delivered 'em such offal. It isn't a place for a self-respecting man, and I feel it more and more. If a shop-boy wants to take out his sweetheart and make a pretence of doing it grand, where does he go to? Why, to Chaffey's. He couldn't afford a real rest'rant; but Chaffey's looks the same, and Chaffey's is cheap. To hear 'em ordering roast fowl and Camumbeer cheese to follow—it fair sickens me. Roast fowl! a old 'en as wouldn't be good enough for a real rest'rant to make inter soup! And the Camumbeer! ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing

... intonation of voice, and, above all, that complete identification of themselves in the part they represented—all these qualities, which had distinguished the acting of Betterton, had given way to noisy rant, formal and affected attitudes, and a heavy stilted style of declamation. Betterton died in 1710, and six years after, in 1716, Garrick was born. About twenty years after, in 1737, Samuel Johnson and his friend and pupil, David Garrick, set ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... At this yere epock, Tucson ain't spraddled to its present proud dimensions. A gent might have thrown the loop of a lariat about the outfit an' drug it after him with a pony. No one, however, performs this labour, as the camp is as petyoolant as a t'rant'ler an' any onauthorised dalliance with its sensibilities would have led to vivid plays. Still, she ain't big, Tucson ain't; an' I learns my way about from centre to suburbs in ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis

... Bill got to the pump the shell burst on him—it made a proper mess of him"—this with a stare of horror. And they never criticise or rant about it, but accept it as their share for ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous

... altered and modified. The combination which more immediately arrests attention is that with the ludicrous. In this the genius of Hood seemed to hold a very festival of antics, oddity, and mirth; all his faculties seemed to rant and riot in the Saturnalia of comic incongruity. And it is difficult to say whether, in provoking laughter, his pen or his pencil is the more effective instrument. The mere illustrations of the subject-matter are in themselves irresistible. They reach at once and directly the instinctive ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... an officer of low rank. Fire'lock, an old-style musket, with flintlock. 7. Bran'-dish-ing, waving, flourishing. 13. Self'-pos-sessed, undisturbed, calm in mind, manner, etc. 14. Pac'i-fied, calmed, quieted. War'rant, a writ authorizing an officer ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... them,) which is our ultimate Political Evangel, wherein alone can Liberty lie. Madly enough he preached it is true, as enthusiasts and first missionaries are wont; with imperfect utterance, amid much frothy rant; yet as articulately, perhaps, as the case admitted. Or call him if you will, an American backwoodsman, who had to fell unpenetrated forests, and battle with innumerable wolves, and did not entirely forbear strong liquor, ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various

... says George (with a bow to his guest, General Lambert), "I think we were not inclined to weep, like the ladies, because we stood behind the author's scenes of the play, as it were. Looking close up to the young hero, we saw how much of him was rant and tinsel; and as for the pale, tragical mother, that her pallor was white chalk, and her grief her pocket-handkerchief. Own now, Theo, you ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... another hour of walking, "if you're goin' to Flat Rock I'd better leave you heah, an' make my way to Arden. Our hunt's ended, right enough; an' Gawd have mercy on his poh, ign'rant soul!" ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris

... blundering Indian uncle of mine is furious against me, on account of an absurd private affair and misunderstanding, which he is too obstinate to see in the proper light. What is my return for the abuse and rant which he lavishes against me? I cannot forget that he is my grandfather's son, an old man, utterly ignorant both of society and business here; and as he is interested in this Indian Banking Company, which must be preciously conducted when it ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... as ye list. Ye have been at the ordinaries, and in Alsatia, and learned the ruffian's rant, I doubt not. But I repeat, you have spoken an untruth, when you said you knew not of my wife's falsehood; for, when you were twitted with it among your gay mates, it was a common jest among you, and your lordship took all the credit ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... nothing to this! Drink clean cap-out, like Sir Hildebrand; begin the blessed morning with brandy-taps like Squire Percy; rin wud among the lasses like Squire John; gamble like Richard; win souls to the Pope and the deevil, like Rashleigh; rive, rant, break the Sabbath, and do the Pope's bidding, like them a' put thegither—but merciful Providence! tak' care o' your young bluid, and gang na ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... vulgarity Of coarse vituperation. Decency, Courtesy, common-sense, all cast aside! Pheugh! GARNER, in his cage, would open wide His listening ears, did Jacko of the forest So "slate" a foeman when his head was sorest. Strange that to rave and rant, like scullion storm, Like low virago scold, should seem "good form" To our Society Simians, when one name Makes vulgar spite oblivious of its shame! "Voluntary and deliberate," their speech, "Articulate too"—those ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various

... much an inspiration as the making of great poetry and great pictures. What is commonly called acting is acting acting. This is what is generally accepted as acting. A man speaks lines, moves his arms, wags his head, and does various other things; he may even shout and rant; some pull down their cuffs and inspect their finger nails; they work hard and perspire, and their skin acts. This is all easily comprehended by the masses, and passes for acting, and is applauded, but the man who is actually ...
— [19th Century Actor] Autobiographies • George Iles

... reproached by Tancred, is noble in Boccace—nothing but this: Amor puo molto piu che ne voi ne io possiamo. This, Dryden has spoiled. He says first very well, 'the faults of love by love are justified,' and then come four lines of miserable rant, quite a ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various

... was our first matinee at the theatre, and, oh, the joy we took of it! Years afterward did we children in our playroom, clad in "the trailing garments of the night" in lieu of togas, sink our identity for the moment and out-rant Damon and his Pythias. Thrice happy days ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard

... hear him issuing his cruel order for the killing of the children. But when the foul deed is done there await the murderer two kings whom he cannot slay, Death and the Devil. A banquet is in full swing, Herod's officers are about him, the customary rant and bombast is on his lips when those two steal in. 'While the trumpets are sounding, Death slays Herod and his two soldiers suddenly, and the Devil receives them'—so runs ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... bonnet frum 'er head an' begun to tear a seam open. She made a grab over his spindlin' legs fer it, but I paid no attention to 'er, pretendin' to be fixin' it. Then the fun begun. I seed 'im lay hold of 'er wrists an' look 'er spank, dab in the eyes, an' 'en he begun to rant. Purty soon I seed her back limberin' up an' I knowed, as the sayin' is, that she was our meat. All at once, still a-hold o' 'er hands, he turned to me, an' sez he: 'Go ax Brother Quagmire to sing "How firm a foundation" three times, with the second ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben

... fiddlers strove for warlike music. Tamerlane, surrounded by the Tartar host, received his prisoners, and the defiant rant of Bajazet shook the rafters. All the sound and fury of the stage could not drown the noise of the audience. Idle talk and laughter, loud comment upon the players, went on,—went on until there entered Darden's Audrey, dressed in red silk, with a jeweled circlet like a line of flame about her ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... for months had been vitiated by the germs arising from the half-crazed mob. He read the newspapers and was an assiduous frequenter of public meetings, where he would often smile and shrug his shoulders at the rant and fustian of the speakers, but nevertheless would go away with the most ultra notions teeming in his brain, ready to engage in any desperate undertaking in the defense of what he considered truth and justice. And sitting by the window in his little ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... still say 'hypocaust', 'hypocrit', 'hypochondria' (whence 'hypped'), 'hypothesis', and others, but a large group of technical and scientific words seems determined to have a long y. It looks as though there were a belief that y is naturally long, though the French influence which gives us 't[y]rant' does not extend to 'tyranny'. I do not know what Mr. Hardy calls his poem, but I hope he follows the old use and calls it 'The D[)y]nasts'. It might be thought that 'd[)y]nasty' was safe, but it is not. Some modern words like 'dynamite' have ...
— Society for Pure English Tract 4 - The Pronunciation of English Words Derived from the Latin • John Sargeaunt

... heart an' light o' heel, Young lads and lasses trip thegither; The native Norlan rant and reel Amang the halesome Hielan' heather! Hey ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... the custom of all but a few of the officers to discuss openly and fully all matters of regimental policy and utterly to discountenance covert action of any kind. Blake was thoroughly popular, and generally respected, despite a tendency to rant and rattle on most occasions. Nevertheless, there were signs of dissent as to the line of action he proposed, though it were only for his ...
— The Deserter • Charles King

... between Messrs. Steevens and Malone: the former being for the river, the latter for the vinegar; and he endeavored even to get over the drink up, which stood much in his way. But after all, the challenge to drink vinegar, in such a rant, is so inconsistent, and even ridiculous, that we must decide for the river, whether its name be exactly found or not. To drink up a river, and eat a crocodile with his impenetrable scales, are two things equally impossible. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 46, Saturday, September 14, 1850 • Various

... denied, that the good Doctor was guilty of a certain amount of weakness in listening patiently to all this rant. Not that the rant was very blamable in a lad of eighteen; for have we not all, while we are going through our course of Shelley, talked very much the same abominable stuff, and thought ourselves the grandest fellows upon earth on account ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... come, gif I the road can find; But if ye raise the deil, he'll raise the wind; Syne rain and thunder, maybe, when 'tis late Will make the night sae mirk, I'll tine the gate. We're a' to rant in Symie's at a feast,— O! will ye come, like badrans, for a jest? And there you can our different haviours spy; There's nane shall ken o't there but you ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant

... in the house; and, that I may not lose my temper and my spirits, I shut my ears against the sophisms and rant against the treaty, and divert my attention by ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing

... he lose his money on he hoss-race. No, my chil'ren, our HEABENLY Massa am rich, RICH, I say. He own all dis worle, and all de oder worles dat am shinin' up dar in de sky. He own dem all; but he tink more ob one ob you, more ob one ob you—pore, ign'rant brack folks dat you am—dan ob all dem great worles! Who wouldn't belong to sich a Massa as dat? Who wouldn't be his nigger—not his slave—He doant hab no slaves—but his chile; and 'ef his chile, den his heir, de heir ob God, and de jined ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore

... church politician," protested the professor. "I'm bitterly opposed to the lily-white crowd who continually rant against the thing they don't understand. I'm practical, as practical as ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers

... and going in excitement.] Oh, wonderful, and again wonderful, and then again wonderful!—Hear me rant! ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At last I've been able to break ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... broke in the Jewess angrily, 'we are weary of the very word! We crucified Him as you hang rebels, and He happened to be a Charmer who inspired a new religion—yours! and for ever since you Christians who rant of pardon, tenderness, moderation, love of all the world—you have oppressed us with a vengeance so terrible, so relentless, that we in our turn have learnt to hate ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... you put yourself out, Mr. Netlips, don't, that's a good feller!" he said in sarcastically soothing tones—"There's no elections going on just at present—when there is you can bring your best leg foremost, and rant away for all you're worth! My lady don't gamble, if that's what you mean,—though she's always with the swagger set, and likely so to remain. But you keep up your spirits!- -your groceries 'ull be paid for all right!—she don't run up no bills—so don't you fear, cards ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... understood for the first time what a woman's voice could be. The girl's soul was filled and shaken with passion. She did not cry aloud nor rant, but every accent thrilled through him from head to foot. And it seemed to him that she needed no words—that, had she been speaking in an unknown tongue, the very intonation, the mere sound, the vibration of her voice, would have told ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... Since when does a German speak like that—being "full of grace"? One would have to think about a keg "full of" beer or a purse "full of" money. So I translated it: "You gracious one". This way a German can at last think about what the angel meant by his greeting. Yet the papists rant about me corrupting the angelic greeting—and I still have not used the most satisfactory German translation. What if I had used the most satisfactory German and translated the salutation: "God says hello, Mary dear" (for that is what the angel was intending to say and what he would have said ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann

... the Lindre, about 7 leagues from Portpile, wher I played one of the Gascons a pret[347] in the boat; wheir also I saw a reservoire of fisches. Heir I was wery sick, so that I suped none, as I had not dined, my Poictiers rant incapacitating me. Yea, I was distempered al the way after, so that I cost not wery dear to my Messenger for ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder

... Eager. It was as if one should see the Leonardo on the ceiling of the Sistine. He longed to hint to her that not here lay her vocation; that a woman's power and charm reside in mystery, not in muscular rant. But possibly rant is a sign of vitality: it mars the beautiful creature, but shows that she is alive. After a moment, he contemplated her flushed face and excited gestures with a certain approval. He forebore to repress ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster

... theory because they are so intent on fact. The "liberty, equality and fraternity" cry of the French Revolution—they regard as so much hot air. Canadians since 1837 have had "liberty, equality, fraternity." Why rant about it? And when they didn't have it, they fought for it and went to the scaffold for it, and got it. The day's work—that's all. Why posturize and theorize about platitudes? Canadians are not interested in the Lloyd George theory of the poor plundering the prosperous, because ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... Lord George Gordon was suffered to rant unimpeded. At last Colonel Holroyd, seizing hold of him, threatened to move for his immediate committal to Newgate, while Colonel Gordon, with a blunter and yet more efficacious eloquence, declared that if any of the rioters attempted to force his way past the door of the House, he, ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... of our sonnets should not be less pleasing than the iterated nodes of a sea-shell, or the resembling difference of a group of flowers. The pairing of the birds is an idyl, not tedious as our idyls are; a tempest is a rough ode, without falsehood or rant; a summer, with its harvest sown, reaped, and stored, is an epic song, subordinating how many admirably executed parts. Why should not the symmetry and truth that modulate these, glide into our spirits, and we participate ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... for the strong, deep Germany of old, the Germany of music and of philosophy, against this monstrous modern aberration the Germany of blood and of iron, the Germany from which, instead of the old things of beauty, there come to us only the rant of scolding professors with their final reckonings, their Weltpolitik, and their Godless theories of the Superman who stands above morality and to whom all humanity shall be subservient. Instead of the world-inspiring ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... them fellers speak, an' rip an' rant an' rave, When 'lection time's er-comin' on, who tell yer how ter save Ther kentry frum tarnation ruin, by sendin' only men That's fit ter draw ther salaries, an' honest—jest ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy

... fierce rencontre—shall cease the idle rating; Then debates shall he no longer without a head or tail; And while the power of song every soul is demonstrating, Each member cherubimical will scorn to rant or rail. Rap! rap! rap! To quell the rising clamor; Order! ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various

... drama hold divided sway, Sometimes by evil counsellors, 'tis said, Like earth-born potentates have been misled. In those gay days of wickedness and wit, When Villiers criticised what Dryden writ, The tragic queen, to please a tasteless crowd, Had learn'd to bellow, rant, and roar so loud, That frighten'd Nature, her best friend before, The blustering beldam's company foreswore; Her comic sister, who had wit 'tis true, With all her merits, had her failings too: And would sometimes in mirthful moments use A style too flippant for a well-bred muse; Then female ...
— Scarborough and the Critic • Sheridan









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