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More "Spontaneous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... for Wilson's mediation still impossible, in view of favor hitherto shown to Entente, and after last speeches of Asquith and Lloyd George. Spontaneous appeal for peace, towards which I again ask you to encourage him, would be gladly accepted by us. You should point out Wilson's power, and consequently his duty, to put a stop to slaughter. If he cannot make up his mind to act alone he should get into communication with Pope, King of Spain ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... though dry as dust; but if Dante had finished his Banquet, he might never have had time for his "Divine Comedy"; so perhaps, after all, we shall be well content to be without Watts' "Cosmos," remembering what we have gained thereby. Besides, the continuous and spontaneous self-revelation of an artist or a poet is sometimes truer ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... for sacrificing or destroying property on occasion of death will be referred to in treating of their religious ideas. Wailing for the dead is continued for a long time, and seems to be rather a ceremonial performance than an act of spontaneous grief. The duty, of course, belongs to the woman, and the early morning is usually chosen for the purpose. They go out alone to some place a little distant from the lodge or camp, and in a loud, sobbing ...
— An introduction to the mortuary customs of the North American Indians • H. C. Yarrow
... Commissioner of Indian Affairs, gave his permission to assemble eminent chiefs from the prominent Indian Reservations of the United States, and complemented his courtesy by helpful interest and cooperation. The Superintendents of the various Indian Reservations gave spontaneous and willing service; Major S. G. Reynolds, Superintendent of the Crow Reservation by sympathetic and efficient interest made possible the achievement of the Last Great Indian Council; Hon. Frederick Webb Hodge, in charge ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon
... hard to say, but the truth is that a declaration from a man is not usually quite spontaneous. He looks for some tacit encouragement, a sign that one is not altogether indifferent to him. Now it has struck me that during the past year you have rather ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... very sedulous in manipulating certain notes, he now was careful to show not a scrap of paper; and I must do him the justice to declare that he spun out the words from the reel of his memory as though they all came spontaneous and pat to ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... Manjanga chief had invited the bishop to settle in his country near Magomero, adding that there was room enough for both. This spontaneous invitation seemed to decide ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... prayers and actions, to us at the moment perfectly spontaneous, are eternally foreseen and included within the all-embracing Predestination of God, as factors and causes, working out that final result which, beyond all dispute, is the product of ...
— The Discipline of War - Nine Addresses on the Lessons of the War in Connection with Lent • John Hasloch Potter
... a slowly extorted tribute to excellence, but a spontaneous bestowal. Unlike evil spirits, which, according to popular superstition, need urging over the threshold before they can enter and possess the hearthstone. Love leaps in unsolicited at any unguarded aperture, and becomes ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... call, ready to run swiftly towards us without relaxing the attention they give to their own movements and to all the external objects they encounter—and compare them with the torpid children in the ordinary schools—clumsy in their movements, indifferent to stimuli, incapable of spontaneous association of ideas—we are led to think of the civilization of our own days as compared with that of olden times. The civil environment of bygone years, as compared with our own, was more leisurely: we have learnt how to save time. The stage-coach was once the means of transport, whereas ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... or the palm, were sufficient to maintain an inhabitant, the race of men in the warmer climates might become as numerous as the trees of the forest. But in many, parts of the earth, from the nature of the climate, and the soil, the spontaneous produce being next to nothing, the means of subsistence are the fruits only of labour and skill. If a people, while they retain their frugality, increase their industry, and improve their arts, their numbers must grow in proportion. Hence it is, that the cultivated fields of Europe are more ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... dialect. There have long been reports of a black tribe with woolly hair in the unknown interior of the Great Nicobar, and my friend Colonel H. Man, when Superintendent of our Andaman Settlements, received spontaneous corroboration of this from natives of the former island, who were on a visit to Port Blair. Since this has been in type I have seen in the F. of India (28th July, 1874) notice of a valuable work by F.A. de Roepstorff ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... perfunctory applause, but Colonel Mapleson had resolved that the scene should be enacted, of which we have often read, in which the devotees of the prima donna unhitch the horses from her carriage, and themselves drag it, with wild rejoicings, through the streets. To make sure of such a spontaneous ovation in staid New York was a question which Mapleson solved by hiring fifty or more Italians (choristers, probably) from the familiar haunts in Third Avenue, and providing them with torches, to ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... who examined each phrase and word with the minutest critical care before pronouncing their verdict. As might be expected, the poetry produced in those circumstances is of a more or less artificial type, and is wanting in the spontaneous vigour of the earlier essays of the Japanese muse. Conceits, acrostics, and untranslatable word-plays hold much too prominent a place, but for perfection of form the poems of this time are unrivalled. It is no doubt to this quality that the great popularity of the Kokin-shu is due. Sei Shonagon, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... of all defectives, within or without our public institutions, is defective inhibition,—they are unable to control the spontaneous impulses that continually arise, and ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... satisfactory idea of the labors of the fathers and of their subject Indians. At the outset, it must be confessed that while the fathers understood well the principles of architecture and created a natural, spontaneous style, meeting all obstacles of time and place which presented themselves, they showed little skill in matters of interior decoration, possessing neither originality in design, the taste which would ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... for a time their own private ends and consider themselves part of a whole, in which there is, after all, the spirit of divinity, nay, God Himself—to me every popular festival is a real soul-festival, a pilgrimage, an act of devotion. Even in my capacity as dramatic poet, I always find the spontaneous outburst of an overcrowded theatre ten times more interesting, even more instructive, than the sophisticated judgment of some literary matador, who is crippled in body and soul and swollen up, spider-like, with the blood of authors whom he has sucked dry. As from a huge open volume ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... remove. She seldom smiled, and when she did, the smile played over her countenance like the sickly gleam of a wintry clay through clouds, and seemed rather to chill than to warm what before was cold. It was a formal tribute to the customs of society, not the spontaneous outburst of joy. She presented the tips of her fingers with all the grace of an accomplished lady, to Holden, and meant that her reception of him should be kind, but the hand was cold, and apparently as unfeeling as marble, and ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... delightful. He spoke with good sense, good humour and good breeding, and it was all spontaneous. I wish that a phonograph had been in existence that night, and that a record had been taken of the speech. It would be so good for the people who have asserted that Henry Irving always employed journalists (when he could not get Poets Laureate!) ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... flattered him: and, moreover, she had acted on his advice to carry resistance a outrance. There are many good Shelleyan reasons why he should elope with Harriet; but among them all I do not find that spontaneous and unsophisticated feeling, which is the substance ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... eliminating his difficulties before they could begin, but he couldn't help admiring the way the big cruiser was handled. When the hatch opened and Captain Strong stepped out, resplendent in his black-and-gold uniform, there was a spontaneous roar of welcome from the ground. Vidac stepped forward immediately to ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... is the attempt to prevent children from knowing what life really is maintained for long; the spontaneous impetuosity of the parents breaks it down. Nevertheless the Russian boy and girl, when they come to the awkward age, have not the least idea of what life really is. Dear me, no! They possess simply a bundle of incoherent ideas, ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... repeat these rumours, but nevertheless they ran up and down the land. The Jena and now the Liberte! True, the Board of Inquiry, which had investigated the destruction of the Jena, had decided that that catastrophe was due to the spontaneous combustion of the powder in her magazines. France had accepted the verdict; but now a second battleship was gone. It would be too much to ask any one to believe that this was spontaneous combustion, also! Such ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... order to induce him to befriend them. It is the rarest thing in the world for them to experience disinterested friendship for him. As I have said elsewhere in this paper, a few instances of disinterested and spontaneous affection of animals, other than dogs, for human beings are, however, on record, and I am happy in ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... its fists; but the fists are tightening slowly—and the voice behind them speaks not French, but the jargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer, closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle of spontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies comes—and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the dunghill. I must believe it. For they—we—may kill the laughter of Berlin's streets—as we have ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... 2. The spontaneous and unanimous political action of the Czecho-Slovaks abroad became co-ordinated when Professor Masaryk escaped from Austria and placed himself at the ...
— Independent Bohemia • Vladimir Nosek
... to abolish and prohibit peon slavery elicited an apparently spontaneous and sincere expression of detestation from Douglas of "this revolting system." Black slavery was not abhorrent to him; but a species of slavery not confined to any color or race, which might, because of a trifling debt, condemn the free white man and his posterity to an endless ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... exercise to keep him sturdy and strong, his mother superintended his lessons, as well as those of his sister, Therese. Although Marie Antoinette was young and pleasure-loving and was often called frivolous because of the spontaneous gaiety into which her nature often led her, yet she was a devoted mother, and every morning at ten o'clock, Therese, the Dauphin, and their teachers went to the queen's rooms, and there learned ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... muse's favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti's pension. Stung by such ingratitude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation. He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company. It is not probable that ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... lose my liberty and my property at a blow. The course I mean to take has been advised by no one but myself—is known to no other. I now disclose it, and the causes of it, to you, a gentleman, and my professional adviser, in the expectation that you will guard with the strictest secrecy my spontaneous revelations; this ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... kitchen-gardens is a semi-artificial plant, the produce of our agricultural ingenuity quite as much as of the niggardly gifts of nature. Spontaneous vegetation supplied us with the long-stalked, scanty-leaved, ill-smelling wilding, as found, according to the botanists, on the ocean cliffs. He had need of a rare inspiration who first showed faith in this rustic clown and proposed to improve it in ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... quick surcharge of spirits that makes their race what it is, they threw themselves on their knees begging his blessing. The Bishop bared his head and raised his hand slowly. He was infinitely humbled by the quick, spontaneous outburst of their faith. He had done nothing for them; could do nothing for them. They were homeless, pitiable, without a hope or a stick of shelter. Yet it had needed but the sight of his face to bring out their cheery unbounded confidence ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... those. We are a practical people, but we are fighting for practical paradoxes. Do we expect any massive concentration of results? Our wavering, anaconda system of warfare is typical of our moral status as a people. It is the spontaneous and legitimate exponent of our aims and motives. Many or decisive victories I despair of, till we are better educated in the early lesson of the fathers. But from the President—God bless him that he seems to be more teachable than many others—down to the youngest drummer-boy ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... of the popular feeling, absolutely spontaneous, broke out in one of the least expected places. Louise was encored for her wonderful solo in a modern opera of bellicose trend, and instead of repeating it she came alone on the stage after a few minutes' absence, dressed in Servian national dress. For a ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... become hurtful to the whole, when their removal is called for because society is in need of the energies thus set free, then takes place a more or less general uprising of the oppressed and restricted ones, apparently entirely spontaneous and voluntary, in reality having its origin partly at least in the claim which society is making upon the hitherto restricted class to take ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in spontaneous abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or nourishing. A new language, characterised by simple sweetness and simple energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the spontaneous act of the Prince and his father; the decisive influence was the fear lest the enmity of Napoleon might endanger the position of the Prince of Roumania. Everyone was delighted; the cloud of war was dispelled; two men only were dissatisfied—Bismarck and Grammont. It was the ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam
... the Sun" of St. Francis d'Assisi gives naive and spontaneous expression to the same truth. Natural objects, for this purest of mystics, were no bare symbols, nor did they gain their significance by suggesting beyond themselves. He addressed them as beings who shared with him the joy of existence. "My Brother the Sun"—"my Sister the Moon"—"our ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... mim-mouthed friends and relations hold up their hands in quite a little elegiacal synod about his path: and what cares he for all this? Being a true lover of living, a fellow with something pushing and spontaneous in his inside, he must, like any other soldier, in any other stirring, deadly warfare, push on at his best pace until he touch the goal. "A peerage or Westminster Abbey!" cried Nelson in his bright, boyish, heroic manner. These are great incentives; not for any of these, but for the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... typify innocence; the narrowed line of the flirt's optic proves the invasion of art. The horizontal mouth is the mark of determined cunning; who has not read Nature's most spontaneous lyric in lips rounded for the ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... Tippengray's spontaneous exhibition of tender affection, Mr. Petter involuntarily and reverently took off his hat, while Mrs. Cristie and Lodloe clapped their hands. The lover, with radiant face, now descended the ladder and received congratulations from everybody ...
— The Squirrel Inn • Frank R. Stockton
... would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, whilst the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready spontaneous language of our souls! Devotion is the favourite employment of your heart; so it is of mine: what incentives then to, and powers for reverence, 'gratitude, faith, and hope, in all the fervours of adoration and praise to that Being, whose unsearchable wisdom, power, and goodness, ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... right condition and proper proportion of these humours, disease being due to changes in their quality or distribution. Thus inflammation is regarded as the passing of blood into parts not previously containing it. In the course of a disorder proceeding favourably, these humours undergo spontaneous changes in quality. This process is spoken of as coction, and is the sign of returning health, as preparing the way for the expulsion of the morbid matters—a state described as the crisis. These crises have a tendency to occur at certain periods, which are hence called ...
— Fathers of Biology • Charles McRae
... press, would argue a much greater degree of rottenness in the general social system than the same phenomena in the United States. So, too, some of the characteristic British vices are, so to say, of a spontaneous, involuntary, semi-unconscious growth, and the American observer would commit a grievous error if he ascribed them to as deliberate an intent to do evil as the same tendencies would betoken in his own land. Neither Briton nor American can do full justice to the other unless ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... A spontaneous regret came from all. Some of the women, who certainly could not be accused of any amatory love for him, shed tears to think that he should go, for he was full of kindness to them. Constantly in contact with their department, he was as gentle as a child, never complaining and yet full of work. Industrious ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... than in the Ramayan. But in the fine arts perfection is no proof of a recent age: while the experience and the continuous labour of successive ages are necessary to extend and perfect the physical or natural sciences, art which is spontaneous in its nature can produce and has produced in remote times works of such perfection as later ages have ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... denunciation for having hailed a child of six as "Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!" Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods—nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... Argus of that day for having initiated, with his friend Dr. Cairns, a meeting of that kind. The chairman of the meeting was also the chairman of the meeting at which it was resolved to present a testimonial to Mr. Landsborough; and he was aware that this meeting originated in a spontaneous suggestion made on Friday by Dr. Cairns, who thought that, while it might be convenient to the Exploration Committee to meet in an afternoon, it would be a great pleasure to the community at large to hold an evening meeting at ...
— Journal of Landsborough's Expedition from Carpentaria - In search of Burke and Wills • William Landsborough
... with all my girlish heart. I loved you as I loved my own father—almost as much; and one day, while I sat on your knee, and you were kissing me, I called you 'Father' in spite of myself. It was a cry of the heart, instinctive, spontaneous. Indeed, you were to me a father, nothing but a father. You laughed, and you said to me, 'Address me always in that way, my child; it gives ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... veiled hostility dropped from the girl like a mask, and she laughed—a spontaneous outburst of mirth that kindled new lights in the blue-black eyes, and caused a fanlike array of little wrinkles to radiate from their corners: "I'll answer your question now," she said. "I'm Mrs. Nobody, thank you—I'm Janet McWhorter. But what are you ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... key in her hand, and looking about the room while he watched her. The woman's enormous power of deception showed itself in the spontaneous facility with which she went through a complicated little scene, quite improvised, in order to mislead her husband. She knew that he himself would suggest some place for ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford
... of his way to hunt for them. He is a better writer than any one of these, in that he is always a master of speech and of himself, and that he is always careful yet natural and choice yet seemingly spontaneous. He wrote as a very prince among talkers, and he interfused and interpenetrated English with the elegant and cultured fashion of the men of Queen Anne and with something of the warmth, the glow, the personal and romantic ambition, peculiar to the century ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... with those that are least known, or perhaps not known at all. Beginning with the doctrines of melancholia, of tenderness, of suffering, of exalted pietism, and of social despair—which, whether spontaneous or inspired, demoniac or divine, undoubtedly embody many of the mysterious aspirations of the human soul—we shall find ourselves in a strange and moving world, peopled by those who accomplish, as a matter of course, acts of faith, courage and endurance, foreign to ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... town, stopped with their water-jugs, and looked on with satisfaction. The Kaid was the best man of his men; but Yusuf afterwards dressed and beat the victor, riding with great dexterity, and attracting the spontaneous applause of all the spectators. The Kaid trembled whilst contending with Yusuf, who was set down as a marabout in consequence ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... pleasure of a personal acquaintance with Colonel Davenport will join in Black Hawk's spontaneous tribute to his character as a brave, and a gentleman ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake
... expression of cordiality, and an entreaty from their kind friends to find their way back again as soon as possible. They then proceeded on their way, Kate more than ever delighted with her prospect. In the spontaneous ebullition of her youthful and innocent feelings, and charmed beyond measure at the kind reception she had met with from the amiable people she had just left, she was in the highest spirits, and gave frequent vent to her joy. Her merry peals ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... confiding manner, that Zelma, ere she was aware, grew unrestrained and communicative in turn. One by one, the icicles of pride and reserve, which a strange and ungenial atmosphere had hung around her affluent and spontaneous nature, melted in the unwanted sunshine, dropped away from her, and the quick bloom of a Southern heart revealed itself in smiles and blushes. The divine poet whose volume she now held clasped caressingly in both hands had prepared the way for this, by sending through every vein and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... assent which leads to marriage should no doubt be spontaneous. Who does not feel that? Young love should speak from its first doubtful unconscious spark,—a spark which any breath of air may quench or cherish,—till it becomes a flame which nothing can satisfy but the union of the two lovers. No one should ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... received him coldly, and without the least regret he held aloof from me. I took a hatred to him. His success in the regiment and in the society of ladies brought me to the verge of despair. I began to seek a quarrel with him; to my epigrams he replied with epigrams which always seemed to me more spontaneous and more cutting than mine, and which were decidedly more amusing, for he joked while I fumed. At last, at a ball given by a Polish landed proprietor, seeing him the object of the attention of all the ladies, and especially of the mistress ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... spontaneous and ringing, proving a devotion that few men have ever been able to command. Stern and unflinching as Jackson invariably was in inflicting punishment, his soldiers always regarded him as one of themselves, the best man among them, one fitted by ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... it can be said without hesitation that the intellectual work of theological students has quite justified the course that the affections of Christendom have taken in their spontaneous appreciation of Mary, the Ever-Virgin Mother of Our Lord. What the heart of Christendom has discovered, the mind of Christendom has justified. But here more than in any other doctrinal development it is love that ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... as that of master, but as that of leader. Readers of the dean's report for the Sabbatical year of Miss Hazard's absence, in which Miss Pendleton was acting president, will not have failed to notice the spontaneous expression of this sense of comradeship in Miss Pendleton's reference to ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... happy love, or of condoling commiseration, wherever his gentle footsteps move. And when I rejoin him this autumn, at his father's house in Scotland, and shall tell him that the never-forgotten chief mourner at that simple bier, with whom his own young tears fell in spontaneous sympathy, was the Count Sobieski—a kinsman of his own, whose character was already known to him in its youthful fame and by its honored name—what will be that ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... taste, uniformity of aim will be impossible, and consequently the system must remain artificial. It can never, under any circumstances, entirely replace that more natural one adopted by our ancestors. How can its methods compare for a moment with the spontaneous and hearty interest that guided the tools of those more happily placed craftsmen, whose subjects lay around them, of daily familiarity; whose artistic language was ready to hand and without confusion, affording an endless ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... So now—when a most crucial question was coming to her for decision—for she no longer needed to be informed of the Prince's mind in the matter—she did not allow its serious character to weigh upon her spirits or make her less ready and spontaneous in the bestowal of her liking. On the contrary, if anything, it hastened her verdict of approval. "I do believe that I am going to fall in love with him!" she said to herself after an acquaintance of only twenty-four hours; and having so determined, she set forth with ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... when she was blown up, on Feb. 15, 1898, and 260 American seamen murdered. There was an official investigation to determine the cause of the explosion, but it found no solution of the disaster. Various theories were advanced of internal spontaneous explosion, but no one was misled. The general sentiment of Americans was that the Spanish in Cuba deliberately exploded a submarine torpedo under her, to accomplish the result that followed. Previous to this cowardly act there was much difference ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... vineyard at a distance of about a mile and a half from the place of its ascension. So memorable a feat lighted up the glow of national vanity, and the two Montgolfiers were hailed and exalted by the spontaneous ...
— Up in the Clouds - Balloon Voyages • R.M. Ballantyne
... American observers, men who had been educated in Germany and those who had not, never saw anything of this danger that was boiling in the breasts of even the humblest classes of Teutons? Yes, Anderson was correct. The Germans were, after all, frank enough about it. All was spontaneous and bold. Egged on by their military, political, educational, religious masters, the populace could easily, at any time, work themselves up like this into a frantic state about conquest. And yet Americans heard nothing of it. It was as if their channels of information ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... been seen, moreover, that this recent exodus was a sort of spontaneous movement of the masses of the Negro population and not one composed of its leading elements. This fact has been marveled at, because in this migration the rank and file of Negroes, accustomed to being led, showed some initiative by acting of their own accord, and thereby abandoned the old policy ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... is usually an honored custom in the case of happy marriages, where children grow up who take delight in making much of the days which are sacred to their parents. Where this observance is not a matter of form or done with any ulterior motive, but is spontaneous and joyous, it adds much to the family happiness and strengthens the bonds, not only between parents but between parents ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... destruction: one flaming and almost invisibly incandescent violet which tore at the eyes and excruciatingly disintegrated brain and nervous tissues; the other dully glowing an equally invisible red, at the touch of which body temperature soared to lethal heights and foliage burst cracklingly into spontaneous flame. ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... from over-luxuriance of imagination. But this occasional defect has been unduly exaggerated. Thus Mr. Gosse*1* declares that Lanier is "never simple, never easy, never in one single lyric natural and spontaneous for more than one stanza," — a statement so clearly hyperbolic as hardly to call for notice. As a matter of fact, Lanier has written numerous poems that offer little or no difficulty to the reader of average intelligence, ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... men into protoplasms, and integrates protoplasms into monkeys, and shows the caudal appendage to be the independent variable, a small factor in man, a large factor in monkey. And has not the idea of successive development supplanted the early conception of spontaneous perfection? Take an illustration from India—the new system of competition, which the natives can never understand. Formerly the members of the Civil Service received their warrants by divine authority, so to speak. They were born ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... wind lifted the two flags before the anxious spectators, who saw that one was a British and the other their own ensign. As soon as the eager watchers grasped the fact that the red cross of St. George was beneath the stars and stripes, they broke into spontaneous cheers of rejoicing. Immediately after, the field-gun on the quarterdeck was fired, and the report reverberated over the water and across the island on the one side, and through the streets of the town on the other, with sufficient volume ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... among those kinds of soil which are favorable to the cultivation of tobacco; but I do not recollect one single instance where I have met with tobacco growing wild in the woods, although I have often found a few spontaneous plants about the arable and trodden grounds of deserted habitations. This circumstance, as well as that of its being now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at the period of European discoveries, inclines towards ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... To these spontaneous eliminations through which the club deteriorates, add the constant pressure through which the Committee of Public Safety frightens and degrades it. The lower the revolutionary government sinks, and the more it concentrates its power, the more servile and sanguinary do its agents and employees ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... reputation of Goldsmith had greatly risen, his finances were often at a very low ebb, owing to his heedlessness as to expense, his liability to be imposed upon, and a spontaneous and irresistible propensity to give to every one who asked. The very rise in his reputation had increased these embarrassments. It had enlarged his circle of needy acquaintances, authors poorer in pocket than himself, who came in search ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... (except that of Norfolk)—a spot where shipwrecks have been numbered literally by thousands—there was no lifeboat nor any means of taking a line to the ship. The secret of these failures lies in the fact that the institution relies for its work on spontaneous service and emotion, and is not, like ours, a legalized, systematic business. No permanent force or watch is kept at the stations: a reward of seven shillings is paid to anybody who gives notice of a wreck to the coxswain of the boat. The ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... leading men of science are in this difficulty; on the one hand their experiments and their theories alike teach them that spontaneous generation ought not to be accepted; on the other, they must have an origin for the life of the living forms, which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present get this origin in no other way than by Deus ex machina method, which they reject ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... expected to live many days, he put his prayer-book under his arm, and went off doggedly, feeling that now was the crisis. He went through it in as exemplary a manner as could have been desired, but it was dreadful work to the Rector. If nobody else suspected him, he suspected himself. He had no spontaneous word of encouragement or consolation to offer; he went through it as his duty with a horrible abstractness. That night he went home disgusted beyond all possible power of self-reconciliation. He could not continue this. ...
— The Rector • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... word; so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost. And far from that: These semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go forth again to teach them offer ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... burial hymn—serves as a nebulous buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives atmosphere with facility, and can achieve magical pictures of the sea and the "mad naked summer night." His early poem, Walt Whitman, is for me his most spontaneous offering. He has at times the primal gift of the poet—ecstasy; but to attain it he often wades through shallow, ill-smelling sewers, scales arid hills, traverses dull drab levels where the slag covers ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... been a homage-surfeited ruler in your land who has known the joy that comes with the knowledge that he has earned the right to be cheered from one end of the country to the other? Is there not a difference between your hereditary 'Long live the Prince' and our wild, enthusiastic, spontaneous 'Hurrah for Cleveland!' Miss Guggenslocker? All men are equal at the beginning in our land. The man who wins the highest gift that can be bestowed by seventy millions of people is the man who had brains and not title as a birthright." He was a ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... trained observation had made him aware of the existence of a thousand social solecisms, his sensitive character shrank from their possible committal, and he employed his mimetic genius as an instrument of salvation. And then his English—his drawing-room English—was not spontaneous. It was thought out, phrased, excellent academic English, not the horrible ordinary lingo that we sling at each other across a dinner-table; the English, though without a trace of foreign accent, yet of one who has spent a lifetime in alien lands and has not met his own tongue save ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... great pleasure in the spontaneous accent she contrived to fling into the words. "I ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... follow various methods, almost any listener can unerringly pick the memorized efforts. Let the speaker in delivery strive for variety, pauses, emphasis; let him be actor enough to simulate the feeling of spontaneous composition as he talks, yet no matter how successful he may be in his attempts there will still be slight inconsistencies, trifling incongruities, which will disturb a listener even if he cannot describe his mental reaction. The secret lies in the fact that written and spoken composition differ ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... consumed than in any other country,) is now at the enormous price of eighteen sous (nine-pence sterling) for the loaf of four pounds. Besides, the Parisians have gone through so much during the revolution, that I apprehend they are, to a certain degree, become callous to the spontaneous sensations of joy and pleasure. Be the cause what it may, I am positively assured that the people expressed not so much hilarity at this fete as at the last, I mean that of the ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... chosen a wet day to pay us a visit, Miss Hilton," she said, with a hospitality too effusive to be spontaneous. ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... the 'black earth' and the monks of monasteries, whose hospitality he enjoyed, and with his fellow-comrades of the road. It is life that interests the author. Here we can get it, and it is like splashing about in a clear pool on a warm summer's day, spontaneous in inspiration, mature in philosophic contemplation. This sort of book gives a man honest pleasure. More, it sets his heart beating in unison with the author, in harmony with the awe and ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... mighty host engaged on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... jumping out of the window he always dropped from when the police came. After that we saw the house where Mr. Tulkinghorn, Lady Dedlock's lawyer, used to live, and also the house where old Krook was burned up by spontaneous combustion. Then we went to Bolt Court, where old Samuel Johnson lived, walked about, and talked, and then to another court where he lived when he wrote the dictionary, and after that to the "Cheshire Cheese" Inn, where he and Oliver ...
— Pomona's Travels - A Series of Letters to the Mistress of Rudder Grange from her Former - Handmaiden • Frank R. Stockton
... esteem, which your name and your works have evoked at this meeting of the Academy. The legitimate applause which you everywhere receive in your beautiful country finds its echo on this side of the Loire; and if the spontaneous adoption of you by the French Academy adds nothing to your glory, it will at least serve to ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... sylvan hills with the sea glimmering in the distance. Lothair was pleased with the approaches to the sacred grove: now and then a single tree with gray branches and a green head, then a great spread of underwood, all laurel, and then spontaneous ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... that Greece itself never excelled,' resumed Arbaces. 'But that is not all: she has a soul worthy to match with mine. She has a genius beyond that of woman—keen—dazzling—bold. Poetry flows spontaneous to her lips: utter but a truth, and, however intricate and profound, her mind seizes and commands it. Her imagination and her reason are not at war with each other; they harmonize and direct her course as the winds and the waves direct some lofty bark. With ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... that, for mere shame, foreign countries could hardly persist in maintaining a traffic which those who had derived the greatest profit from it had on such grounds renounced; though our ministers did not trust to their spontaneous sympathies, but made the abolition of the traffic by our various allies, or those who wished to become so, a constant object of diplomatic negotiations, even purchasing the co-operation of some by important ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... thrust its nose instantly between her outstretched arms, and as she patted him delightedly the crowd rippled with spontaneous applause. ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... to assert a preference for that which may really have no root in their minds. But by a careful examination it is usually possible to ascertain what persons or qualities or circumstances or gifts exercise a genuine, spontaneous, magnetic power over them—whether they really value supremely rank or position, or money, or beauty, or intellect, or superiority of character. If you know the ideal of a man you have obtained a true key to his nature. The broad lines of his character, the permanent tendencies ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... effect this training is one of the purposes of Mental Science. When once we recognize the position of the subjective mind as the supporter of the whole individuality we cannot doubt that much of what we take to be the spontaneous movement of the objective mind has its origin in the subjective mind prompting the objective mind in the right direction without our being consciously aware of it. But at times when the urgency of the case seems to demand it, ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... Another child of six years was disciplined because she had been naughty to a playmate and had called her a little pig,—a natural appellation for one who was always dirty. These are typical examples of how the sound instincts of the child are dulled. It was a spontaneous utterance: of the childish heart when a small boy, after an account of the heaven of good children, asked his mother whether she did not believe that, after he had been good a whole week in heaven, he might ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key
... principle of the demanding opposite. He had always been in bondage through his affections, first to his mother, then Aunt Anne, and then suddenly, terrifyingly, but most gloriously because this was the only wildly spontaneous thing of all, to the strange woman in the hut. He was innocent there, he was unthinking, he didn't know what tale his eyes told of him. It wasn't earthly passion they told. She had seen many things in her tumultuous life of the last few years, this woman he called a child. The eyes told how ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... the snow-clad peaks, the deep gorges through which rushed roaring torrents, and the mountain ranges of Ararat or Taurus, where the force of the subterranean fires was manifested by so many startling exhibitions of spontaneous conflagration.* The same spiritualising tendency which had already considerably modified the essential concept of Ahura-mazda, affected also that of the inferior deities, and tended to tone down in them the grosser traits of their character. It had already placed at their head six genii of a superior ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... touches of local colour, revision of choice of words, heart-rending erasions. And here, my child," I concluded, bringing out the beautiful, clean, smooth typed copy—"here is the finished work itself, light, pleasant, fluent, humorous and, most important of all, spontaneous." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... anxious about as making the best possible appointments, and no case in which the best men are more liable to mislead us, by yielding to the solicitations of applicants. For this reason your own spontaneous recommendation would be desirable. Now to ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... decided against it as too like 'Les Precieuses Ridicules,' a play she had never read. A second novel, 'Cecilia,' appeared in 1782, and was as successful as its predecessor. Later readers find it less spontaneous, and after it she never resumed her early style except in her journal and correspondence. Her ambition was fully astir. She had every incentive from her family and friends. But the old zest in composition had departed. The self-consciousness which had always tormented her in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... certain than in other lands. For through his national reserve the highly-cultured Englishman has a cold perfection of good breeding to which heartiness is vulgarity; he emanates intimidation, and in courtesy is rather studious than spontaneous, seldom genial but in an ancient friendship. If you knew him to the concealed heart, and were suffered to assay the fine metal beneath this polished surface, you would win a golden friendship; but only on a desert island ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... "ancient fount of inspiration"[1] was dry. He had delivered his message to his generation, and wisely avoided last words. Then it seems indisputable that he wrote with difficulty. His poetry has little ease, fluency, or spontaneous movement. In every line it bears traces of the laborious file. He had the poet's heart and mind, but they did not readily express themselves in the poetic medium. He longed for poetic utterance, as his only adequate vent, and sought it earnestly with tears. Often ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell
... human character, to justify me in thrusting in my awkward agency among the intricate and unintelligible machinery of Providence. I have always hated to give advice, especially when there is a prospect of its being taken. It is only one-eyed people who love to advise, or have any spontaneous promptitude of action. When a man opens both his eyes, he generally sees about as many reasons for acting in any one way as in any other, and quite as many for acting in neither; and is therefore likely to leave his friends to regulate their own conduct, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... law for men, in a society where the lawyer was considered the greatest citizen, and subtle technicality paramount to justice or commonsense, this was a tremendous step. At that moment, and by that spontaneous and unconsidered statement, Keith, unknown to himself, passed from one side to the other in the great social struggle that ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... and, after rest, it contains but a very small portion of any thing that could prove pernicious, or impede any manufacture. It is also excellently fitted for sea-store; but it then undergoes a remarkable spontaneous change, when preserved in wooden casks. No water carried to sea becomes putrid sooner than that of the Thames. But the mode now adopted in the navy of substituting iron tanks for wooden casks, tends ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... never consorted with sech ez skellingtons. He lit out straight! He made tracks! He never stopped till he reached Colbury, an' thar he told his tale. Then the sheriff he tuk a hand in the game. Skellingtons, he said, didn't grow on trees spontaneous, an' he hed an official interes' in human relics out o' place. So he kem,—the tree is 'twixt hyar an' my house thar on the rise,—an', folks! the tale war plain. Some man chased off 'n the face of the yearth, hid out from the law,—that's the ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... however, is that men also are able, by applying a means in their power, to produce milk from grass and herbs; for when they wish to procure a more abundant supply of milk they feed the cow more plentifully and thus obtain more milk from her.—For these reasons the spontaneous modification of the pradhana cannot be proved from the instance of grass ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sankaracarya - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 1 • George Thibaut
... were merely full. The chief characteristic of his expression was its mobility, but it was the mobility of an actor who knows every emotion that the muscles of a face can command. Sansevero's face, also changeable as an April day, was the spontaneous expression of unconscious mood. Giovanni was of a type to smile sweetly when most angry, or to assume an air of sulkiness when at heart he might be well content. Just now, with an assumption of extreme indifference, he turned ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... that we should have a consciousness of God's presence with us; I still believe and teach it; but I must admit that the most spiritual ofttimes can not perceive God on either hand. They may fear that they are lifeless, because there is not a fresh and sweet spontaneous feeling in their souls. It seems to them that they merely go through the form of worshiping God instead of being in the Spirit. They pray, but their prayers seem to have no depth of heart. In consequence they may ...
— How to Live a Holy Life • C. E. Orr
... to the Son of David! Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord!" Writers who have cited the choice of Barabbas in the place of Christ as an instance of misguided popular judgement, overlook the fact that this choice was not spontaneous; it was the Chief Priests who delivered Christ "from envy" and who "moved the people that Pilate should rather release unto them Barabbas." Then the people obediently cried out, ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... of them, which, with my own recollections, leads me to adopt the opinion of Heinrich von Sybel concerning the much discussed and still unanswered question, whether the Berlin revolution was the result of a long-prepared conspiracy or the spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm for liberty among the citizens. He says: "Both these views are equally well founded, for only the united effort of the two forces could insure a ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... FRIEND BLISS,—I have been received in a sort of tremendous way, tonight, by the brains of London, assembled at the annual dinner of the Sheriffs of London—mine being (between you and me) a name which was received with a flattering outburst of spontaneous applause when the long list ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... theory of poetry are contained in the notion that the poet is inspired. Genius is often said to be unconscious, or spontaneous, or a gift of nature: that 'genius is akin to madness' is a popular aphorism of modern times. The greatest strength is observed to have an element of limitation. Sense or passion are too much for the 'dry light' of intelligence which mingles with them and becomes discoloured ...
— Ion • Plato
... Katherine to her needlework, and advanced to meet him. At her spontaneous act of welcome a light came into his eyes. He removed from his lips the short corn-cob ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... a fatal distrust in the minds of the people. The indulgence which has been so liberally imputed to her as a merit was, in truth, extorted from her weakness and timidity by the courageous opposition of the nation; she had never departed from the strict letter of the royal commands by her own spontaneous resolution; never did the gentle feelings of innate humanity lead her to misinterpret the cruel purport of her instructions. Even the few concessions to which necessity compelled her were granted with an uncertain and shrinking hand, as if fearing ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... fault-finding with their lot in life, or their daily surroundings and circumstances. Their conversation was joyous, cheerful, and helpful to one another. Nor was it forced and out of place, but rather it was the natural, spontaneous outflow of loving, humble, glad hearts filled with the Spirit, in union with Jesus, and in love and sympathy with ...
— When the Holy Ghost is Come • Col. S. L. Brengle
... the smile played over her countenance like the sickly gleam of a wintry clay through clouds, and seemed rather to chill than to warm what before was cold. It was a formal tribute to the customs of society, not the spontaneous outburst of joy. She presented the tips of her fingers with all the grace of an accomplished lady, to Holden, and meant that her reception of him should be kind, but the hand was cold, and apparently as unfeeling as marble, and the Solitary dropped it as ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... same unaffected, spontaneous Tim as of yore, and hugely embarrassed by any reference to his winning of the Military Cross, firmly refusing to discuss the manner ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... been martyrs more exalted above the circumstances of their fate than Jeanne. She was no abstract heroine. She felt every pang to the depth of her natural, spontaneous being, and the humiliation and the deep distress of having been abandoned in the sight of men, perhaps the profoundest pang of which nature is capable. "He trusted in God that he would deliver him: let him deliver him if he will have him." That ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... others yet unknown or unregarded. The principal articles obtained by the traders are sarsaparilla, Peruvian bark, annatto, and other dyes, vanilla, Brazil nuts, Tonka beans, hammocks, palm fibre, and several other kinds of spontaneous vegetable productions. Monkeys, toucans, macaws, parrots, and other beautiful birds, also enter into the list of Amazonian exports; while the imports consist of such manufactured articles as may tempt the cupidity of the savage, or the weapons necessary to him either in war ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... law and public opinion are more nearly the spontaneous outcome of the life of a community, they may with more justice be taken as expressions of the social will of that community as it is at the time. Yet, even here, we ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... way into the moral codes of nations, have arisen from the arbitrary disposition of certain individuals happening to be in authority at particular junctures. Even the general community, acting in a spontaneous manner, imposes needless restraints upon itself, delighting more in the exercise of power, than in the freedom of ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... present in a state of equilibrium, which cannot have been attained until all the spontaneous combustions or oxygenations possible in an ordinary degree of temperature had taken place.... To illustrate this abstract view of the matter by example: Let us suppose the usual temperature of the earth a little changed, and it is raised only to the degree of ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... carried away by his genius, or delivering passionate utterances from the Delphic tripod, but the master of all his powers, the conscious and skillful ruler of his own inspirations. If the sense of spontaneous freshness is sometimes lost, perhaps there is a gain in breadth and finish. If Schubert has unequaled melody and dramatic force, Schumann drastic and pointed intensity, Robert Franz deserves the palm for the finish and symmetry of ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling, there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would ask Mary to marry him. The idea was so spontaneous that it seemed to shape itself of its own accord before his eyes. It was then that he turned round and made use of ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... elsewhere in the master's own work, who can fail to admire the natural and unstudied grouping of the figures, the artlessness of the whole, the loving simplicity with which the painter has done his work? All is spontaneous; the spirit is not that of a laborious imitator, painfully seeking "effects" from another's inspiration; sincerity and naivete are too apparent for this to be the work of any but a quite young artist, and one whose style is so thoroughly ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... spring of 1897 I gave a glass ball to a young lady, previously a stranger to me, who was entirely unacquainted with crystal gazing, even by report. She had, however, not infrequent experience of spontaneous visions, which were fulfilled, including a vision of the Derby (Persimmon's year), which enriched her friends. In using the ball she, time after time, succeeded in seeing and correctly describing persons and ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... missionary's abode." They would take no denial; and forthwith forming themselves into gangs, some set to work to clear away the ruins, while others went off to cut fresh uprights and rafters to replace those that were broken. It was gratifying, as being so purely spontaneous, and showing the high estimation in which they held their missionary for his work's sake. Thus, aided by zealous ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... is in the contrary direction. The larger the scale on which manufacturing operations are carried on, the more cheaply they can in general be performed. As manufactures, however, depend for their materials either upon agriculture, or mining, or the spontaneous produce of the earth, manufacturing industry is subject, in respect of one of its essentials, to the same law as agriculture. But the crude material generally forms so small a portion of the total cost that any tendency ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... of the Church with its antiquated methods; a new, a creative epoch was dawning; the civilisation of Europe, opposed to all barbarism and orientalism, rose like a brilliant star on the horizon of the world. Spontaneous feeling for the race, for nature and for the divine verities ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Testing Machines.—VII., Lubricating Greases. Rosin Oil, Anthracene Oil, Making Greases, Testing and Analysis of Greases.—VIII., Lubrication. Friction and Lubrication, Lubricant, Lubrication of Ordinary Machinery, Spontaneous Combustion of Oils, Stainless Oils, Lubrication of Engine Cylinders, Cylinder Oils.—Appendices. A. Table of Baume's Hydrometer—B. Table of Thermometric Degrees—C. Table ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech
... notable lack of unconsciousness—of pure singing quality. Such things as Pinkney's "Health" and Holmes's "Old Ironsides" are the exception. The poems are composed cleverly, but they do not quite sing themselves to their own music. The best American verse, while not insincere, is seldom wholly spontaneous. This is not saying that much spontaneous verse has not been written in this country; much has been, but the singer's voice has too often been uncultivated, and ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... mode of conception may seem incompatible with the systematic adherence to a fixed class of subjects referred to in an earlier chapter. But it by no means is so. With Mr. Browning the spontaneous creative impulse conforms to ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the fatal facility for self-advertisement. Things he did, no matter how adventitious or spontaneous, struck the popular imagination as remarkable. And the latest thing he had done was always on men's lips, whether it was being first in the heartbreaking stampede to Danish Creek, in killing the record baldface ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... proved capable. Without undue confidence, I can say that I achieved a triumph, and put to rout the various uncomplimentary conjectures that the world had hazarded in regard to me. Society opened its arms to me as a returning prodigal, and my revulsion of feeling was all the more spontaneous from the fact, that, if some of my former acquaintances were as frivolous as ever, they had learned to conceal their emptiness by an adaptability which made them agreeable companions. There was a keen satisfaction, too, in the consciousness which became mine, ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... their invitations for me to go to the Assembly to hear an interesting discussion, which was to be brought forward upon the King's spontaneous ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "Good heavens! do you make no account of the spontaneous tendencies of genius? Is Nature a mere vulgar cook, turning out men, like soups, from one common stock, with only a dash of flavoring here and there to give them variety? No—Nature is a subtle chemist, and her workshop, depend on it, is stored with ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... have said it must be quite evident that the principle of knightly honor has no essential and spontaneous origin in human nature. It is an artificial product, and its source is not hard to find. Its existence obviously dates from the time when people used their fists more than their heads, when priestcraft had enchained the human intellect, the much bepraised ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... imprecations which were none the less fervid for being slowly and haltingly uttered. The dark-skinned, unwholesome-looking Bread-winner found a singular delight in tormenting the powerful young fellow. He felt a spontaneous hatred for him, for many reasons. His shapely build, his curly blond hair and beard, his frank blue eye, first attracted his envious notice; his steady, contented industry excited in him a desire to pervert a workman whose daily life was a practical argument ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... the pomp of declamation, all may aspire to it; they cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like the outbreaking of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force. The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country, hang on the ...
— Practice Book • Leland Powers
... greenbacks. There is no doubt that the ideal principle of democratic progress demands the absolute non-interference of Government in all enterprises whose benefit accrues to a part of its citizens, or which can be stimulated into life by the spontaneous operation of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... men once lived on the spontaneous fruits of the earth, just as other animals do. In that stage of existence a man was just like the brutes. His existence was at the sport of Nature. He got what he could by way of food, and ate what he could get, but he depended on finding what Nature gave. He could wrest nothing from ...
— What Social Classes Owe to Each Other • William Graham Sumner
... on the victorious side. I was, no matter whether deservedly so or not, a representative of that side of the controversy. It is a significant and gratifying fact that Confederates should have joined heartily in this spontaneous move. I hope the good feeling inaugurated may continue to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... self-division. There are, in fact, types of animals, as the Zooephyta, where these appear the normal modes of reproduction, and the egg only an exceptional process. From this he thinks it but a slight step to admit the possibility of spontaneous generation, and he accordingly does admit it. Touching the development theory, his conclusion is that the barriers between the five great divisions of the animal world are insurmountable, but "that, by the multiplication and intensifying of individual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... bright effusion with all her spontaneous enthusiasm. Bostwick supplied her with the address, and presently took the letter in his hand. He had much to do at the bank, he informed her, by way of preparing for the deal. He promised ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... trifling though it was, served rather to increase than to diminish my nervousness; but upon my entering the assembly hall, where my young friends were gathered together awaiting my coming, all sense of trepidation vanished, so spontaneous and uproarious was their greeting. The chorus of lusty young voices raised in instantaneous cheering was to me sufficient reward for all the pains to which I had been put. One and all, they manifested the deepest interest in the ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... New York and embraced her rapturously. Patsy was really fond of Beth; but it was her nature to be fond of everyone, and her cousin, escaping from her smacking and enthusiastic kisses, told herself that Patsy would have embraced a cat with the same spontaneous ecstacy. That was not strictly true, but there was nothing half hearted or halfway about Miss Doyle. If she loved you, there would never be an occasion for you to doubt the fact. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... names, this is teaching superstition. It is unfortunate to use the word; so few people have read history, and so many have dipped into little atheistic manuals, that the majority will rush to a conclusion, and suppose the labour lost. And far from that: These semi-spontaneous superstitions, varying with the sect of the original evangelist and the customs of the island, are found in practice to be highly fructifying; and in particular those who have learned and who go forth again to teach them offer an example to the world. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... active life, leading to the free use of the limbs and lungs, affects the shape and proportions of the whole body. It is probable that some breeds, such as the semi-monstrous niata cattle, and some peculiarities, such as being hornless, &c., have appeared suddenly from what we may call a spontaneous variation; but even in this case a rude kind of selection is necessary, and the animals thus characterized must be at least partially separated from others. This degree of care, however, has sometimes been taken even in little-civilized districts, where we should least have expected ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... my life; yet I could not prevail upon myself to shake off a being who seemed to hang upon me for support. In truth, the generous traits of character that beamed through all this gloom had penetrated to my heart. His bounty was lavish and open-handed. His charity melting and spontaneous. Not confined to mere donations, which often humiliate as much as they relieve. The tone of his voice, the beam of his eye, enhanced every gift, and surprised the poor suppliant with that rarest and sweetest of charities, the charity not merely of ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... vociferous, so spontaneous and hearty, that nothing approaching it ever had been heard at The Colonial. But it stopped as suddenly, for in the middle of it Pinkey gathered himself and sprang through the air like a flying-squirrel, to bowl the Smith boy over. "You said you wouldn't tell about that 'Craw de gare,' ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... possible she would have detained her daughter forever in the physique of a child; she feared the time when Mary would become too evidently a woman, when all kinds of equalities would come to hinder her spontaneous and active affection. A woman might object to be nursed, while a girl would not; Mrs. Makebelieve feared that objection, and, indeed, Mary, under the stimulus of an awakening body and a new, strange warmth, was ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... all sharks, save me from the ghastly White Shark. For though we should hate naught, yet some dislikes are spontaneous; and disliking is not hating. And never yet could I bring myself to be loving, or even sociable, with a White Shark. He is not the sort of creature to enlist ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... would be jolly decent of you." The wistfulness vanished in a laugh that was quick and musical, wholly spontaneous. ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... as it contemplated the Cross of Christ, has been rapt itself into a passion of gratitude, an ecstasy of wonder and of love, which is beautiful, honourable, just, and in the deepest sense most rational, whenever it is spontaneous ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... Australians and South African soldiers on leave to cheer on the new-coming Americans with such spontaneous expressions as "Come on, you Yanks," "Now let's get 'em," and "Eat 'em up, ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... in a change of expression, produced one knew not how, one phase melting into another like flitting lights upon a stream in woodland. It was a subtly morbid physiognomy, and impressed one with a sense of vague trouble. There was none of the spontaneous pleasure in life which gave Lydia's face such wholesome brightness; no impulse of activity, no resolve; all tended to preoccupation, to emotional reverie. She had not yet completed her seventeenth year, and ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... whisky. But he believed that he would not find them as bad as he had pictured them at first, even though the Nest was a horrible place for the girl. Her running away was the most natural thing in the world—for her. She was an amazingly spontaneous little creature, full of courage and a fierce determination to fight some one, but probably to-day or to-morrow she would have been forced to turn homeward, quite exhausted with her adventure, and nibbling roots along with Tara to keep herself alive. The thought of her hunger and of ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... certainly marvellously agreeable. His talk (for conversation is not the word for it) is totally unlike that of anybody else I ever heard. It comes forth without the slightest effort, provided he is in spirits and disposed to talk at all. It is the spontaneous outpouring of one of the most fertile and restless of minds, easy, familiar, abundant, and discursive. The qualities and peculiarities of mind which mar his oratorical, give zest and effect to his conversational, powers; ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... from his defense of the Revolution, in its historical development, to a bare faith in the abstract idea. He clung to theories, the free and joyous movement of his sympathies ceased; opinions stifled the spontaneous life of the spirit, these opinions were tested and retested by the intellect, till, in the end, exhausted by inward debate, he yielded up moral questions in despair ... by process of the understanding alone Wordsworth could attain no vital body of truth. Rather ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... Constitution), while the importation of slaves into the South continued to be carried on by Northern merchants and Northern ships, without interference in the traffic from any quarter, until it was prohibited by the spontaneous action of the ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... each Osmia in the right half had bored to the right, without touching the partition on the left. The shape of the orifices and the surface condition of the partition showed this, if proof were necessary. There had been a spontaneous decision, one half in favour of the left, one half in favour of ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... well in a pair o' trousers as in them," she continued in the same unimpassioned voice, so that the unfriendly criticism of the Dewy family seemed to have been more normal than spontaneous. "Such a cheap pair as 'twas too. As big as any man could wish to have, and lined inside, and double-lined in the lower parts, and an extra piece of stiffening at the bottom. And 'tis a nice high cut that comes up right under your armpits, and there's enough turned down inside ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... in calling upon him was oratorically voiced from available platforms and landings, in the halls and stairways, until it was pretty well known throughout the Golden Gate Hotel that the Hon. Mr. Paul Hathaway had arrived from Sacramento and had received a "spontaneous ovation." ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... between the Christian era and the tenth century. The second was the particular work of the old French school, the Netherlanders, and of all who composed music between about 1100 A.D. and the epoch of Palestrina, about 1600. The third, the spontaneous application of musical material to the expression of feeling, had in it another element, that of tonality, concerning which it is proper to say something ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... is rare with the average girl. She either heartily approves or frankly disapproves of those things that cross her path or claim her attention. But with the coming of the teens those closely associated with the girl often become conscious of the loss of that spontaneous response which has made her such a delight. The teacher is puzzled by this change, wonders if she has offended the girl, redoubles her efforts to make the lesson interesting and seeks to win the girl's confidence. Sometimes her efforts ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... books which suddenly became vital at the time of the Renaissance, had long lain neglected on the shores of the dead sea which we call the Middle Ages. It was not their discovery which caused the Renaissance. But it was the intellectual energy, the spontaneous outburst of intelligence, which enabled mankind at that moment to make use of them. The force then generated still continues, vital and expansive, in the spirit ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... pledge of fraternity at parting. There was no material substance to promise. I took it to mean that he would stand by any generous impulses I might have; that he would be, as it were, a patron of spontaneous as opposed to organized charity; a patron of those who are never too poor to give to some one poorer; of those who have no scientific reasons for giving, no statistics, only compassion and pity; of those who want to aid not only the promising but the hopeless cases; of those whose ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... a sensitive and generous nature, the spontaneous expression of one spirited, affectionate, ardently ambitious, and blessed with ...
— The Record of a Quaker Conscience, Cyrus Pringle's Diary - With an Introduction by Rufus M. Jones • Cyrus Pringle
... nothing special to do but talk. Nothing is more tedious than to be in a company assembled for no particular reason, and every host, if he asks more than two persons at the outside, ought to provide some entertainment. Talking is worth nothing unless it is perfectly spontaneous, and it cannot be spontaneous if there are sudden and blank silences, and nobody can think of a fresh departure. The master of the house is bound to do something. He ought to hire a Punch and Judy show, or get ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... caught fire during the night, and so rapidly did the flames extend, that no efforts availed to put them out, and upwards of 250 souls, among whom were two merchants and two women passengers, perished. It was supposed that the fire was caused by the spontaneous combustion of some coals stowed ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... and associate them with vocal sounds, he had obtained possession of a symbol by which he was able to deliberately communicate his desires and his intentions to other men in a more precise and definite way than he had been able to do through the medium of spontaneous emotional expression. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Stories occupy the place of books, and tales of the marvellous furnish a substitute for the evening papers. Not that there should be any set rule or system, in regard to the ordering of the matter, but a sort of spontaneous movement, an implied understanding, growing out of the necessities of the position of isolation occupied by those who are away from the resources of civilization. The doctor had a genius for story telling, or rather a genius for invention, which required only a moderate development ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... other hand, many instincts—indeed, probably the greater number—are not perfect, but "imperfect." Imperfect instincts are those which do not fully equip the animal with the function in question, but only take him part way to the goal. He has a spontaneous tendency to do certain things, such as building a nest, singing, etc.; but he is not able to do these things adequately or perfectly if left to himself from birth. This sort of endowment with imperfect instincts has been the field of some of the most interesting ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... lyrics are likely to be, these early rhymes of Daudet's have a flavor of their own, a faintly recognizable note of individuality. He is more naturally a poet than most modern literators who possess the accomplishment of verse as part of their equipment for the literary life, but who lack a spontaneous impulse toward rhythm. It may even be suggested that his little poems are less artificial than most French verse; they are the result of a less obvious effort. He lisped in numbers; and with him it was rather prose that had to be consciously acquired. His lyric note, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... sometimes he does not shrink from diluting them with clear water)—Christophe was too young and too sure of himself not to despise such contemptible practices. He dreamed impossibly of producing nothing that was not absolutely spontaneous. If he had not been deliberately blind he would certainly have seen the absurdity of his aims. Ho doubt he was at that time in a period of inward abundance in which there was no gap, no chink, through which ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... him, her eyes fastened eagerly upon a great bunch of crimson roses in a blue china bowl, which Noel had gotten in honor of her coming. She did not, of course, suspect this, but he saw that here, at least, was a vivid and spontaneous feeling apart from her child, as she bent above the mass ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... time he had started his cigars, De Marsay began to see the events of the night in a singular light. Like many men of great intelligence, his perspicuity was not spontaneous, as it did not at once penetrate to the heart of things. As with all natures endowed with the faculty of living greatly in the present, of extracting, so to speak, the essence of it and assimilating it, his second-sight had need of a sort of slumber before it could ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac
... is a Sulphite? Ah, that is harder to define. A Sulphite is a person who does his own thinking, he is a person who has surprises up his sleeve. He is explosive. One can never foresee what he will do, except that it will be a direct and spontaneous manifestation ...
— Are You A Bromide? • Gelett Burgess
... fair lady, may I presume to inquire your mission in this land of magnificent wastes?" Chloe's laughter was genuine as it was spontaneous. ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... picture, which will always make it enchanting, even to those who cannot make their way through any other letter in the New Heloisa.[56] Such qualities place it as an idyllic piece far above such pieces in Goethe's two famous romances. They have a clearness and spontaneous freshness which are not among the bountiful gifts of Goethe. There are other admirable landscapes in the New Heloisa, though not too many of them, and the minute and careful way in which Rousseau made their features real to himself, is accidentally shown in his urgent prayer for exactitude in the ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... for your sisters from nature and habit; but friendship is voluntary, spontaneous, and a much stronger feeling—friendship ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... earliest discourses the Buddha argues that the Skandhas, including mental states, cannot be the Self because we have not free will to make them exactly what we choose[71]. But throughout his ethical teaching it is I think assumed that, subject to the law of karma, conscious action is equivalent to spontaneous action. Good mental states can be made to grow and bad mental states to decrease until the stage is reached when the saint knows that he is free. It may perhaps be thought that the early Buddhists did not realize the consequences of applying their doctrine ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... these things are not human trifles, but the commandments of the Divine Majesty, who insists upon them with such earnestness, is angry with, and punishes those who despise them, and, on the other hand, abundantly rewards those who keep them, there will be a spontaneous impulse and a desire gladly to do the will of God. Therefore it is not in vain that it is commanded in the Old Testament to write the Ten Commandments on all walls and corners, yes, even on the garments, not for the ...
— The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther
... without being persuaded that the idea of their being printed, even in part, never was present to his mind; and I should not feel myself justified in laying them before the public if it were not that their unlaboured and spontaneous character adds to their biographical value all, and perhaps more than all, that it detracts from their ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... me you said that beauty was my curse." Charley laughed a curt, distant little laugh which was no more the spontaneous humour lying for ever behind his thoughts than his eye-glass was the real sight of his eyes, though since childhood this laugh and his eye-glass were as natural to all expression of himself as John Brown's outward and showy frankness did not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... much vexed about all this. I am calmer now. My handwriting shows it. The spontaneous burst of indignation is a little quieted. It is soothing to write or ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... graceful as could be. And when she shook hands with me a short while afterwards through the carriage window, she thanked me for our long-sufferance with more spontaneous cordiality than she had ever before exhibited. I returned to my roses, feeling that, after all, we had done something to help the poor little lady on her way. If I had been a cat, I should have purred. After an hour or so, Barbara summoned me from ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the Romanticists, who followed close upon Fichte, were dissatisfied with so hard and exclusive a conception of spiritual being. Life, they said, is not all duty. Indeed, the true spiritual life is quite other, not harsh and constrained, but free and spontaneous—a wealth of feeling playing about a constantly shifting centre. Spirit is not consecutive and law-abiding, but capricious and wanton, seeking the beautiful in no orderly progression, but in a refined and versatile sensibility. ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... It was a spontaneous tribute of working-men to a fellow-workman; and, gladly as Peveril would have modified the form of the ovation, he was more proud of it than of any ever tendered him for having stroked the Oxford 'varsity eight ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... conferred by the "codicils" may have been, it is not easy to discover.[110] But there is no doubt that the authority which Clovis up to this time had exercised by the mere right of the stronger, over great part of Gaul, was confirmed and legitimised by this spontaneous act of the Augustus at Constantinople, nor that this eager recognition of the royalty of the slayer of Alaric was meant in some degree as a demonstration of hostility against Alaric's father-in-law, with whom Anastasius had not then ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the other hand, he supposes that all the congruities of which we have spoken, were the effect not of fraudulent design, but of happy accident,—that they arranged themselves in spontaneous harmony—he must believe that chance has done what even the most prodigious powers of invention could not do. And lastly, he must believe that these same illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... is the Spanish-bayonet; to the utilitarian, who values a thing only as it is of use to him, it is the soap-weed—ignoble name, referring to certain qualities pertaining to its roots. When we remember that this flower is not the careful product of the garden, but of spontaneous growth in the most barren and hopeless-looking plains, we may well regard it as a type of Colorado's luxuriance in these loveliest ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... direction, of already-existing breeds of micro-organisms, or whether they are new, absolutely new, breeds themselves just spontaneously generated. The latter hypothesis is tenable, for we theorise that if spontaneous generation still occurs on the earth, it is far more likely to occur in the form of simple ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... man; but the answer was not spontaneous, and Louis's eyes rolled around with an expression of fear. I was watching him closely myself, and I could not help seeing that against his will his glance sought always Florence Lloyd, and though he quickly averted it, he was unable to refrain ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... relied upon for special pleading when sentence was about to be passed on the dimple by those who disapproved of dimples, drooped with disappointment. But the light-brown hair continued to curl facetiously—it was the sort of hair whose spontaneous rippling conveys to the seeing eye a sense ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... fascinated her—his audacious, often witty way of putting things, and the irrepressible bubble of laughter that would keep breaking from him. He disclosed his past, such as it was, freely—public-school and college life, efforts at the bar, ambitions, tastes, even his scrapes. And in this spontaneous unfolding there was perpetual flattery; Gyp felt through it all, as pretty women will, a sort of subtle admiration. Presently he asked her if ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "natural" to put it was originally suggested to Bergson by his study of the important work on amnesia carried out by Charcot and his pupils, and also by such evidence as was to be had at the time when he wrote on the curious memory phenomena revealed by the use of hypnotism and by cases of spontaneous dissociation. It is impossible to prove experimentally that no experience is ever destroyed but it is becoming more and more firmly established that enormous numbers of past experiences, which are inaccessible to ordinary memory and which therefore ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... a company of "Noelites"—those vast organizations of boys and girls in France—singing the Laudate Mariam to my Ave Maria; now in the middle of a group of shop-girls who exchanged remarks with one another whenever they could fetch breath. I think it was all the most joyous and the most spontaneous (as it was certainly the largest) human function in which I have ever taken part. I have no idea whether there were any organizers of it all—at least I saw none. Once or twice a solitary priest in the midst, walking backward and waving his arms, attempted ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson
... that the father and mother of Lady Jane, anticipating that she might one day become a queen, watched and guarded her incessantly, subjected her to a thousand unwelcome restraints, and repressed all the spontaneous and natural gayety and sprightliness which belongs properly to ...
— Queen Elizabeth - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... absolute stillness; then spontaneous applause broke out from Nancy's friends, which was instantly ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... them rouses enthusiasm, but not everybody's; in each case a part of the attention, interest, and enthusiasm is a matter of habit and custom, and another part of it is official and perfunctory. Cup Day, and Cup Day only, commands an attention, an interest, and an enthusiasm which are universal—and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup Day is supreme it has no rival. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, which can be named by that large name—Supreme. I can call to mind no specialized annual day, in any country, whose approach fires the whole land with a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his woes indignant told, Melanthius, master of the bearded fold, The goodliest goats of all the royal herd Spontaneous to the suitors' feast preferr'd; Two grooms assistant bore the victims bound; With quavering cries the vaulted roofs resound; And to the chief austere aloud began The wretch unfriendly to the ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... recovery of the equipoise, sustains them and bears them along. With them flying is a luxury, a fine art; not merely a quicker and safer means of transit from one point to another, but a gift so free and spontaneous that work becomes leisure and movement rest. They are not so much going somewhere, from this perch to that, as they are abandoning themselves to the mere pleasure ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... commencement of their acquaintance he had not done justice to her merits; but he was also aware that, until he had explained to her the nature of his sentiments, she must naturally regard his attentions with suspicion, and consider them rather as acts of duty towards his mother than as the spontaneous expression of his own attachment. He therefore, in the most simple and candid manner, laid open to her the secret of his heart, and in all the eloquence of real passion, poured forth those feelings of love and admiration with which ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... unexpected and so forcible that at first Babbacombe stared at the man in amazement. Then, with that spontaneous kindness of heart that made him what he was, he grabbed ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... have enough out-of-door exercise to keep him sturdy and strong, his mother superintended his lessons, as well as those of his sister, Therese. Although Marie Antoinette was young and pleasure-loving and was often called frivolous because of the spontaneous gaiety into which her nature often led her, yet she was a devoted mother, and every morning at ten o'clock, Therese, the Dauphin, and their teachers went to the queen's rooms, and there learned and ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... had invited the bishop to settle in his country near Magomero, adding that there was room enough for both. This spontaneous invitation seemed to decide the bishop ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... Is it not the birthright of every Italian to have a voice? I began to realize I had a voice which might be cultivated. I had always sung a little—every one does; song is the natural, spontaneous expression of our people. But I wished to do more—to express myself in song. So I began to teach myself by singing scales and vocalizes between my piano lessons. Meanwhile I studied all the books on singing I could lay hands on, and then tried to put the principles I learned ...
— Vocal Mastery - Talks with Master Singers and Teachers • Harriette Brower
... person or body, but mentally. It matters little whether the body is sitting, kneeling, or standing; riding, walking, or lying down; the throne of grace is equally accessible, if the spirit is prostrate before it—the spontaneous effusions of the soul in sighs or groans, or joyful exclamations, or the pouring forth of heart-felt words; but all must be under a sense of ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... object and the aim of civilization—to encourage and to compel each individual to be frankly himself—herself. That is the profound meaning of freedom. The world owes more to bad morals and to bad taste that are spontaneous than to all the docile conformity to the standards of morals and of taste, however good. Truth—which simply means an increase of harmony, a decrease of discord, between the internal man and his environment—truth is a product, usually a byproduct, ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... up even beside the most dusty highways of life—a creature not to be shaped into a merely useful instrument, but bound by one law with the blue sky, the dew, and the frolic birds. Of all persons whom I have known, she had in her most of the angelic,—of that spontaneous love for every living thing, for man, and beast, and tree, which ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hour Poppy was an enchanting companion, wholly womanly, gentle and delicate; eager, too, with the pretty spontaneous eagerness of a child, at the recital of stories and exhibition of treasures beloved by her companion. The lonely cedar tree, lamenting its exile as the wind swept through the labyrinth of its dry branches, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... hand, took his place at the altar, and a few minutes later Bill Carmody entered with Sheridan and strode rapidly up the aisle. At the sight of the boss the crew rose as one man and the room rang with a loud, spontaneous cheer. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... division of labor, which the English carry into mechanical and commercial affairs, the French also apply to the economy of life and to Art; but, as these latter interests are more spontaneous and unlimited, the result is often a perfection in detail, and a like deficiency in general effect. Thus, there are schools of painting in France more distinct and apart than exist elsewhere; usually the followers of such are distinguished for excellence in the mechanical aptitudes of their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... very wide one, was certainly not a narrow critic, just as he certainly was not a feeble one. In the before-mentioned Peter's Letters (which, with all its faults, is one of his best, and particularly one of his most spontaneous and characteristic works) the denunciation of the "facetious and rejoicing ignorance" which enabled contemporary critics to pooh-pooh Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Coleridge is excellent. And it must be remembered that in 1819, whatever might be the case with ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... general, if a man's small actions impress us as minutely planned, we turn from him. It is not the self-reflecting persons, cautious of all they do, say, or think, who are popular. It is rather those instinctively spontaneous creatures characterized by abandon—men and women who let themselves go, and with all the wealth of the world in them, allow it to come out of itself—that we take to our hearts. We prize them for their want ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... transition are equally significant. Amongst the modifications of habit slowly proceeding in the village to-day, there are some which should be regarded rather as a final relinquishment of old ways than as a spontaneous forward movement into new ones. Thus, although the people comply more and more willingly with the by-laws of the sanitary authority, I could not say with conviction that this is anything more than a compliance. As they grow less used to squalor, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... bear's condition. He was undecided whether to skate with his right leg, or with his left leg, or with both his legs. He tried his right leg, and immediately it glided off at right angles with his body, while his left leg performed a similar and spontaneous movement in the contrary direction. Having captured his left leg, he put it cautiously forwards, and immediately it twisted under him, while his right leg amused itself by describing an altogether unnecessary circle. Obtaining ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... the mother, and the heavy water-jug were in the centre of that narrowing ring, and the natural and spontaneous thing to do was to run in the direction away from the careening harvester. They ran, but only for a few yards, for by the time they thought that they were nearing a point of safety at the circumference of the circle, the horses were nearing that point also, and to ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... the book again, but found that his brain had reached the limit of spontaneous mental effort. He looked for Old Mizzou and the cribbage game. The miner had gone to visit Arthur again. Bennington ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... so full of passionate abandon, and yet shaded with such delicacy. At the conclusion of the act, where the orchestra adds its overpowering tour de force to the singers', the audience burst into applause that lasted for several minutes. It was the spontaneous gratitude of hundreds of war-tired souls whose bonds had been relaxed for an hour by ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... popular author in the world. In a sense not easily misunderstood, Mark Twain has a place in the minds and hearts of the great mass of humanity throughout the civilized world, which, if measured in terms of affection, sympathy, and spontaneous enjoyment, is without a parallel. The robust nationalism of Kipling challenges the defiant opposition of foreigners; whilst his reportorial realism offends many an inviolable canon of European taste. With all his incandescent wit and comic irony, Bernard Shaw makes his most ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... of immortality so unhesitatingly avowed (?) affects me as nothing from Theodore Parker on the same subject ever did. The love and joy in God flowing out of it is so spontaneous and kindling as to make me long to say,—I now no longer hope only, but I am sure. In any case I do rejoice that others can so believe, and I pray that if this be a mere cloud over my eyes, ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking
... images and personifications, and a carefully sustained atmosphere of delicate unreality, all unite to impart a characteristic beauty to the lines. This beauty, searchingly analysed, reveals itself as something more sylvan and spontaneous than studied and bookish; indeed, all of Mrs. Jordan's verse is ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... would try to repress it, to hide it, to overcome it, so that it would eventually become paler and less acute and its consequences would be less significant, less disastrous for both the victim and for the persons concerned. Feelings, let us bear in mind, are not spontaneous things uninfluenced by any environmental factors. Feelings are like plants; under one environment you may foster their growth and make them develop luxuriantly; under another environment you may dwarf ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... stately phrases are used when simpler ones were at hand, and would have rendered the meaning of the original better. The entire version has the appearance of being hammered out with great labor, and as a whole it is cold and constrained; scarce any thing seems spontaneous; it is only now and then that the translator has caught the fervor of his author. Homer, of course, wrote in idiomatic Greek, and, in order to produce either a true copy of the original, or an agreeable poem, should have been translated into ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... Mussulmans were slain, the survivors were inspired with a desperation which the mandarins had never contemplated. From one end of Yunnan to the other the Mohammedans, in face of great personal peril, rose by a common and spontaneous impulse, and the Chinese population was compelled to take a hasty refuge in the towns. At Talifoo, where the Mohammedans formed a considerable portion of the population, the most desperate fighting occurred, and ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Andrea's sight as he hugged Chico close and with reiterated expressions of gratitude made his way down the hospital steps. The heart within his soldier's coat was pulsating with joy at the spontaneous words of praise and the assurance that Chico would not die. Anything ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... It gives me a sense of freedom to know that a deed of deliberate courage is still possible in this world,—a deed of spontaneous beauty. ...
— Hedda Gabler - Play In Four Acts • Henrik Ibsen
... and at its close the had been almost taken by an English squadron. Under these circumstances, how rapturously we inhaled the balmy, air of Provence! Such was our joy, that we were scarcely sensible of the disheartening news which arrived from all quarters. At the first moment of our arrival, by a spontaneous impulse, we all repeated, with tears in our eyes, the beautiful lines which Voltaire has put into the mouth ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... was calmly enjoying the beauty of the morning, the freshness of the air, the warmth of the dancing beam, and not least, perhaps, his own peaceful thoughts,—the spontaneous children of a contemplative spirit and a quiet conscience. His was the age when we most sensitively enjoy the mere sense of existence,—when the face of Nature and a passive conviction of the benevolence of our Great Father suffice to create ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book V • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... no mistake, accidentally, spontaneous-like, as you might say. Do you know, I planned the rigging-out of that boat so that she might go up big rivers ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... before. It seemed as though she were making every effort consistent with her integrity and self-respect to please me. Outwardly she conformed to the mould; but I had long been aware that inwardly a person had developed. It had not been a spontaneous development, but one in resistance to pressure; and was probably all the stronger for that reason. At times her will revealed itself in astonishing and unexpected flashes, as when once she announced that she was going to change ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... good both with regard to us men and to the highest Lord of all; there however is that difference between the two cases that the representations of the Veda which the supreme Person forms in his own mind are spontaneous, not dependent on an ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... meant. This spontaneous, warm-hearted person with—oh, horror,—a white satin tie, and a low, turned-down collar, filled her with the gentlest and most affectionate amusement. And as he was to be her father-in-law, why not enjoy him? "It is kind of you to be so pleased," she ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... daughter's spontaneous hospitality, and pleased with the friendly acceptance it had met with, was quite ready to second the invitation. Erica was delighted; she carried off the cat and the toast into the next room, eager to tell her ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... idiot became intelligent and spoke during spontaneous somnambulism (Steinbach's Der Dichter ein Seher). This is a case which appears to us difficult to explain fully; indeed, if the impression of the higher vibration on that portion of the brain which presides over intelligence ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... hold its own against any blood with which it mingles, had dowered him well with Celtic characteristics. A trace of the brogue still lingered in his speech, along with the slurred r's and the soft drawl of his southern tongue, while his spontaneous rebellion under restraint and his brilliant disregard of the consequences of his behavior were as truly Celtic as was the honey-sweet persuasiveness with which he could convince his friends that whatever ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... in great numbers crowded around the platform to see Mr. Maxwell and to bring him the promise of their consecration to the pledge to do as Jesus would do. It was a voluntary, spontaneous movement that broke upon his soul with a result he could not measure. But had he not been praying for is very thing? It was an answer that more than met ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... occupying a rectangle on the black mixture before my eyes. It was not a known and familiar scene, but a brilliant sketch, made out of materials I remembered, but could not by a deliberate effort have combined so effectively. It was a spontaneous throe of the imagination, which had force to overpersuade the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
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