"Airy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... confiscating cotton as if he were a Union provost-martial, and singing many songs, with his mouth full of plunder; and there he watches over his household, all through the leafy June, perched often upon the airy cradle-edge, and swaying with it in the summer wind. And from this deep nest, after the pretty eggs are hatched, will he and his mate extract every fragment of the shell, leaving it, like all other nests, save those of birds of prey, clean and pure, when the young are flown. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... from the transient sentiment of the times, effects, extensive, lasting and useful."—But however great have been your exertions; however much they have been guided by the precepts of humanity and religion, your public reward has been censure and criticism; but let not such airy weapons damp your ardour for doing good; your just reward is in Heaven, ...
— Anti-Slavery Opinions before the Year 1800 - Read before the Cincinnati Literary Club, November 16, 1872 • William Frederick Poole
... question or two about his own fortune. The astrologer pointing to the little coffin, our squire understood the hint, and deposited another shilling. The sage had recourse to his book, erected another scheme, performed once more his airy evolutions with the wand, and having recited another mystical preamble, expounded the book of fate in these words: "You shall neither die by war nor water, by hunger or by thirst, nor be brought to the grave by old age or distemper; but, let me see—ay, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... is not the wind that wakes with the day; For see, the gulls that wheel and call, Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar, Catching the sun-dawn on their wings, Like snow-flakes or like rose-leaves fall, Flutter and fall in airy rings; And drift, like lilies ruffling into blossom Upon some golden ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... Tayloe, a member of the well-known family of the Octagon House in Washington, and beautiful old Mount Airy in Virginia. As a widow in her old age, she had a steady admirer, a general, who came every afternoon at the same time in his Victoria, and took her to drive. I can see her now, a small, slight figure in her cape, and little black bonnet tied under her chin, and holding one ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker
... an interesting, but by no means surprising fact, that Cupid planted himself in the midst of this party, and, with his fat little legs, in imminent danger of capsizing the dishes, began to draw his bow and let fly his arrows right and left. Being an airy sprite, though fat, and not at any time particularly visible, a careless observer might have missed seeing him; but to any one with moderate powers of observation, he was there, straddling across a dish of salad as plain ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... inevitable pensiveness and gravity of a person who possessed what a friend of his called "the awful power of insight"; but his mood was always cheerful and equal, and his mind peculiarly healthful, and the airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his home. He saw too far to be despondent, though his vivid sympathies and shaping imagination often made him sad in behalf of others. He also perceived morbidness, wherever it existed, instantly, as if by the illumination ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... here was the very tub where he washed his clothes. Without caution the window of the bedroom fell out into the back yard. But to atone for these defects, up through the scuttle in the hall there was an airy perch upon the roof. Here Freshmen might smoke their pipes in safety—a privilege denied them on the street—and debate upon their affairs. Who were hold-off men! Who would make [Greek: Boule!] Or they ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... be of stones fitly set, brought down in ships from the land of 'les Yankees,' and it should have an airy belvedere, with a gilded image tiptoeing and shining on its peak, and from it you should see, far across the gleaming folds of the river, the red roof of Belles Demoiselles, the country-seat. At the big stone gate there should be a porter's lodge, and it should be a privilege ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... but what Charles had proposed at his absurd dinner—love: an airy magical love.... If only people would not interfere. She had proposed to herself to give Charles his triumph and then to settle his foolish mundane affairs. She knew she could do it, if only Verschoyle and these others would not complicate them still further. As for Charles being sent away to ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... that seems to me hopelessly bad. But I have been able to dwell in their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds and shepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and I take the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves and sorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their polite anguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as the purling streams of their enamelled meadows. I wish there were more of that sort of writing; I should like very ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... image." "Folly is there seen at the height—the moon is at the full—it is the very error of the time. There is a perpetual error of eccentricities, a tilt and tournament of absurdities, pampered with all sorts of affectation, airy, extravagant, and ostentatious! Yet he is as little a caricaturist as he is a painter of still life. Criticism has not done him justice, though public opinion has."[4] "A set of severer satires," ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Otherness is one of the classes of Being. They are aspects rather than classes of Being. Not-being can only be included in Being, as the denial of some particular class of Being. If we attempt to pursue such airy phantoms at all, the Hegelian identity of Being and Not-being is a more apt and intelligible expression of the same mental phenomenon. For Plato has not distinguished between the Being which is prior to Not-being, ...
— Sophist • Plato
... having been ill once, when her friends called her the White Lady of Avenel; and that is just her picture now. Her dress made her fairness so apparent,—the gossamer tissue, the bright scarlet, and raven hair and dark eyes and lashes. The tones of her voice were very airy and distant, so that I could scarcely catch her words; and this I have observed in several English ladies. "Where could Zenobia have found her ever-fresh, rich flower?" asked Mrs. Holland. It is singular to observe how familiar ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... and this proves the existence of the organ, the eye—for the cognition of colour; in a similar manner the existence of the earthly organ (organ of smell), the aqueous organ (organ of taste), the akas'ic organ (organ of sound) and the airy organ (organ of touch) may be demonstrated. But without manas none of these organs is found to be effective. Four necessary contacts have to be admitted, (1) of the sense organs with the object, (2) of the sense organs with the qualities of the ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... impossible to sleep after her journey, there was such a lively clatter of tongues on the piazzas, and so many feet going to and fro in the halls. She lay down obediently while Mrs. Minot settled matters in the two airy rooms and gave her some dinner, but she kept popping up her head to look out of the window to see what she could see. Just opposite stood an artist's cottage and studio, with all manner of charming galleries, towers, steps, and even a sort of drawbridge ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... a vengeance. His blow shivered to fragments the airy castles which Maximilian and Ferdinand were busy constructing. Their plans for reviving the empire of Charlemagne, creating a new kingdom in Italy, inducing Louis to cede Milan and Genoa and assist in the conquest of Venice, disappeared like empty dreams. The ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... from view; the spray becomes very delicate and abundant, from top to bottom, hanging over, and revolving around the torrent, till it becomes lighter and more evanescent than the whitest fleecy clouds of summer, than the finest attenuated web, than the lightest gossamer, constituting the most airy and sumptuous drapery that can be imagined. Yet, like the drapery of some of the Grecian statues, which, while it veils, exhibits more forcibly the form beneath, this does not hide, but exalts the effect produced by ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... The disposition of these vast sums by gentlemen wearing patched breeches awakened no sense of the ludicrous, nor did any doubt, reservation, or contingency enter into the plans of the charming enthusiasts themselves. The foundation of their airy castles lay already before them in the strip of rich alluvium on the river bank, where the North Fork, sharply curving round the base of Devil's Spur, had for centuries swept the detritus of gulch and canyon. They had barely crossed the threshold of this treasure-house, ...
— Devil's Ford • Bret Harte
... the colonel returned. "I'll have my camp-bed put up there," he said promptly, indicating an airy cart-shed, and he refused altogether to look at the empty cottage. So Bushman and I had beds made up in the tent, and then the three of us sat down to a welcome and memorable al fresco supper opposite our horse lines. Our table was a door balanced ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... seen those hardy and sinewy Frenchmen gliding in the dusk of evening from cottage to cottage, passing the word that the Americans had arrived, saying airy things and pinching one another as they met and hurried on, you would have thought something very amusing and wholly jocund was in preparation for ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... my side, with a book before her. Kate was working away most assiduously, as was her wont. Not far off in a corner sat Chico, as busily, though not so usefully, employed in cracking nuts. We were in a large airy hut, formed, as far as I could see, very much after the fashion of those we had before constructed. I was so placed as to be in the shade, and at the same time to obtain as much air as possible. I heard ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... you are a most unfortunate creature; for you have never known what it was to be in Heaven, nor eke the other place. Oh the delight, the blessedness of the languor of recovery, when one finds himself in a large airy room, with a dreamy indistinct recollection of great past suffering, endured in a small miserable vessel within the tropics, where you have been roasted one moment by the vertical rays of the sun, and the next ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... this airy manner, I start upon my rounds afresh, with a bag full of coloured tickets all with pins attached, and all with legible inscriptions: "Old Germany," "California," "True Love," "Old Fogies," "La Belle France," "Green Erin," "The Land of Cakes," "Washington," "Blue Jay," "Robin ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rakishly set at an angle on his fair hair, which was meticulously rolled in curls above his ears, and the curls were caught at his neck with a black velvet ribbon. Beside Claggett Chew's offensive bare skull, the hat, in its delicate blue velvet, silver braid, and airy rim of ostrich feathers, was ludicrous. Osterbridge Hawsey's costume was of a piece with the hat, for his coat was of fine blue velvet of too pale a shade for any use outside a drawing room. It, too, ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson
... said I. "I have often wished I had a little more room, but, like you, I couldn't afford the whole expense. We can have a piano, and the child can play there. Don't you see?" I added, with great earnestness and touching his arm. "It is a large airy room; he can run about there, and make as ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... He hummed an airy strain as he blackened the tip of his nose. "It's rather a curious coincidence, really. Her name ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... cobbleress), or la gente Saul cissiere, du coin (the pretty Sausage girl at the corner). But he has invented for some of those natural regrets which incessantly recur in respect of vanished beauty and the flight of years a form of expression, truthful, charming, and airy, which goes on singing forever in the heart and ear of whosoever has once heard it. He has flashes, nothing more than flashes, of melancholy. . . . It is in reading the verses of Clement Marot that we have, for the ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... the pioneers their best fire-wood, their coolest shade, and their sweetest food. Vivid blue sparks were still flashing among the little white stars of the gray moss on the big backlog. From the blazing ends of the log there came the soft, airy music and the faint, sweet scent of bubbling sap. This main room of Cedar House was very large, almost vast, taking up the whole lower floor. It was the dining room as well as the sitting room; and when some ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... sing fuller, clearer, sweeter notes! He began at the very first, and rollicked through a story of adventure, colouring it with every wild, dashing, catchy note he could improvise. He followed that with a rippling song of the joy and fulness of spring, in notes as light and airy as the wind-blown soul of melody, and with swaying body kept time to his rhythmic measures. Then he glided into a song of love, and tenderly, pleadingly, passionately, told the story as only a courting bird can tell it. Then he sang a song of ravishment; a song quavering with ...
— The Song of the Cardinal • Gene Stratton-Porter
... recommend a human creature." He would not for the world be present at her death: "I should be a trouble to her, and a torment to myself." If Stella came to Dublin, he begged that she might be lodged in some airy, healthy part, and not in the Deanery, where too it would be improper for her to die. "There is not a greater folly," he thinks, "than to contract too great and intimate a friendship, which must always leave the survivor miserable." ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... of his own and the adjoining counties accepted invitations to attend. Among the guests was William Dulan. He was presented to Miss Raymond, the young hostess of the evening, by Mr. Keene. Young Dulan was at first dazzled by the transcendent beauty of her face, and the airy elegance of her form; then, won by the gentleness of her manners, the elevation of her mind, and the purity of her heart. One ball in a country neighborhood generally puts people in the humor of the thing, and is frequently followed by many others. It was so in this instance, and William Dulan and ...
— The Rector of St. Mark's • Mary J. Holmes
... presents you with the most perfect view of the choir—a magical circle, or rather oval—flanked by lofty and clustered pillars, and free from the surrounding obstruction of screens, &c. Nothing more airy and more captivating of the kind can be imagined. The finish and delicacy of these pillars are quite surprising. Above, below, around—every thing is in the purest style of the XIVth and XVth centuries. The central tower is a tower ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 'Twas on the Morn when laughing FOLLY rules, And calls her Sons around, and dubs them Fools; Bids them be bold, some untry'd path explore, And do such deeds as Fools ne'er did before; 'Twas on that Morn, when Fancy took her stand Beside my couch, and, with fantastic wand, Wav'd, from her airy cells, the Antic Train That play their gay delusions on the brain: And strait, methought, a rude impetuous Throng, With noise and riot, hurried me along, To where a sumptuous Building met my eyes, Whose gilded turrets ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... are windows which are arranged to open inwards, being hinged at the bottom and fitted with hopper checks to avoid direct draught. Ridge ventilation and skylights are given, so that all parts of the stable are well lighted and airy. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... course of a balloon His mind conceived the wondrous screw. Some day he hopes unto the moon To guide the course of a balloon. Of 'airy navies' admiral soon, We'll see him 'grappling in the blue'— To guide the course of a balloon His mind conceived the ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... shadows of the cypress forest. He followed the course of the foaming cascade which came rushing and tumbling over the rocks through a mass of flowers and odorous shrubs, and stopped suddenly before the marble portico of an airy pavilion, where a flight of steps cut in the solid porphyry and polished like mirrors, led down to the baths of the 'tzin. For an instant the courier stood erect and motionless as a statue, then, swiftly stooping to the earth, he laid the open palm of his right hand on ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... the girls working at which did not live in dormitories but outside. At a winding and hanking factory which was airy and well lighted the hours were from 6 to 6. At a factory where the hours were from 4:30 to 7 some reelers had been fined. Japanese Christian pastors sometimes came to see the girls, and on the wall of the recreation room there were paper gohei ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... in this June sunshine. But there is little of the new about it. The horses are taken from the breack, we leave at the hotel a requisition for lunch, and move forth for a survey. The chief streets are wide and airy, but a turn places one instantly in an older France. We ramble with curiosity in and out among the streets and shops, finding no one preeminent attraction, but an infinite number of minor ones which maintain the equation. In fact there is little for the guide-book sight-seer in Bayonne. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... church, who gave to angels subtile bodies of an airy nature, explained, according to their principles, more easily the predictions made by the demons, and the wonderful operations which they cause in the air, in the elements, in our bodies, and which are far beyond what the cleverest ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... I wait? The nights alone are kind; They reach forth to a future day, and bring Sweet dreams of you to people all my mind; And time speeds by on light and airy wing. I feast upon your face, I no more sing, How ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... structure. The main part is three and a half stories in height, with wing and rear extension two and a half stories in height. It contains kitchen, dormitories and sitting-rooms for teachers and girls, and a spacious, airy and attractive ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 2, April, 1900 • Various
... it is no proper shame to be afraid of ghosts, seeing how helpless the living are in their hands. And then these ghosts were invisible, which made the matter the worse, as it seemed to me. They might be in the room with us at that moment—we could not know. I felt airy touches on my shoulders and my hair, and I shrank from them and cringed, and was not ashamed to show this fear, for I saw the others doing the like, and knew that they were feeling those faint contacts too. As this went on—oh, eternities ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a trifle on the water, he completed a voyage which never lost its charm to him, notwithstanding the rude hardships. He wished to make all kind of inquiries into natural history, and when the weather fell calm he would go off in a boat and shoot sea birds. Not the airy albatross, perhaps, for in it he realised the melody of motion, and it was not rare to naturalists. To shoot, from a ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... the Rue Coquebert—a comparatively new quarter of the city where champagne establishments are the rule—the courtyard of which, alive with workmen at the time of our visit, is broad and spacious, while the surrounding buildings are light and airy, and the cellars lofty, regular, and well ventilated. In a large cellier here, where the tuns are ranged side by side between the rows of iron columns supporting the roof, the firm make their cuve; here too the bottling of their wine takes place, and ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... see old Jord. Did I tell you that he insisted on Aleck's having the room next his, precisely as big and airy as his own? There's a door between, and when it's open they can see each other. When I left Jord the door was open, and he was staring in at Aleck, who was still sleeping off the anesthetic, and a big tear was running down ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond
... those whose pastime was to make midnight mushrooms, reminded them that he had, among other mighty deeds, by their aid, rifted. Jove's stout oak, plucked up the pine and cedar, and roused sleepers in the grave. But this rough magic, he informed them, he would abjure, after working his airy charms. This being done, he would break his staff, bury it deep in the earth, and drown his book. Ariel re-entered, and after him Alonso, Gonzalo, Sebastian, Antonio, Adrian, and Francisco, and stood charmed within a circle which ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... sunstroke, place the person attacked in a cool, airy place. Do not allow a crowd to collect closely about him. Remove his clothing, and lay him flat upon his back. Dash him all over with cold water—ice-water, if it can be obtained—and rub the entire body with pieces of ice. This treatment is used to reduce ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... wrong, while all authority, both human and divine, is on the side of the persecutor. Haunted by the grave, sad eyes of Guido Reni's picture of Beatrice, so that the very streets of Rome seemed to echo her name—though it was only old women calling out "rags" ('cenci')—he was tempted from his airy flights to throw himself for once into the portrayal of reality. There was no need now to dip "his pen in earthquake and eclipse"; clothed in plain and natural language, the action unfolded itself in a crescendo of horror; but from the ease with which he wrote—it cost him ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... majestically down between vast sandstone cliffs, or among wooded hills, piled thick with trees rich in blossom; or I see stately buildings crowded together among woodlands, with long carved fronts of stone and airy towers. These dreams are peculiarly uplifting and stimulating, and I wake from them with an extraordinary sense of beauty and wonder; or else I see from some window or balcony a great ceremony of some quite ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles, which was a type. The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur, was a singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy. There the modest purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the quarters vast and airy. The galleries and the park afforded a diversion, and then Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was within reach. At the time I knew it, the colony was fairly prosperous, many of its members living in the two ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... good one it is," replied the other, "if we could only follow it up as we ought. Every one here wondhers at the change that's come over me—I that was so light and airy, and so fond of every divarsion that was to be had, am now as grave as a parson; but indeed no wondher, for ever since that awful night at the Grey Stone—since both nights indeed—I'm not the same man, an' ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... lived a quiet, retired life. The estate was situated about two miles from Busseto, and was very large, with a great park, a large collection of horses and other live stock. The residence was spacious, and the master's special bedroom was on the first floor. It was large, light and airy and luxuriously furnished. Here stood a magnificent grand piano, and the composer often rose in the night to jot down the themes which came to him in the silence of the midnight hours. Here "Don Carlos" was written. In one ...
— The World's Great Men of Music - Story-Lives of Master Musicians • Harriette Brower
... be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometimes tyrannize and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 491, May 28, 1831 • Various
... glad whenever Adam plucks up heart of grace and gets in a word edgeways. Mr. Bagehot has complained of Milton's angels. He says they are silly. But this is, I think, to intellectualize too much. There are some classes who are fairly exempted from all obligation to be intelligent, and these airy messengers are surely amongst that number. The retinue of a prince or of a bride justify their choice if they ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... to herself as she visited his haunts, and went about in a happy sort of dream, with her head full of Highland Mary, Tam o' Shanter, field-mice and daisies, or fought terrific battles with Fitz-James and Marmion, and tried if "the light harebell" would "raise its head, elastic from her airy tread," as it did from the Lady of the ...
— A Garland for Girls • Louisa May Alcott
... long cast down. 'Twas his best point, the charm of him. He had once in his life taken it into his head to be a tiller of the soil, 'twas an inspiration had come to him. True, he had not made a success of it, but he had taken up other plans in the same airy way and got on better; and who could say—perhaps his samples of ore might after all turn out something wonderful in time! And then look at Barbro, he had got her fixed up there at Maaneland, and she'd not be leaving Axel Stroem now, that he could swear—'twas plain ...
— Growth of the Soil • Knut Hamsun
... an involuntary desire to escape seized him. He had come from his own airy room, bright with the twilight afterglow. Here it was dark and stuffy. Two tallow candles in brass candlesticks threw some light on the table and the reading-desk, but out in the room nothing was visible, save a row of ...
— Skipper Worse • Alexander Lange Kielland
... turning the two over with a wooden shovel, partly by kneading them together with the hands. The pemmican is then firmly pressed into leathern bags, each capable of containing eighty-five pounds, and being placed in an airy place to cool, is fit for use. It keeps in this state, if not allowed to get wet, very well for one year, and with great care it may be preserved good for two. Between three and four hundred bags were made here by each of the Companies ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... and the stables. There was accommodation for many horses and carriages; but I need only describe the stable into which I was taken; this was very roomy, with four good stalls; a large swinging window opened into the yard, which made it pleasant and airy. ...
— Black Beauty • Anna Sewell
... mind, to be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with prison- life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to inflict no wanton hardships ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the hand, with the sure airy gesture, though it was little above A she got with her voice, whatever she touched with her finger. Often Bowers let such things pass—with the right people—but this morning he snapped his jaws together and muttered, "God!" Miss Darcey tried again, with the same gesture ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... and sly fashion purloined anything she cared for. Several times when she was taken by the police she invented clever stories, without the least faltering, that seemed entirely fitted to the occasion. As the investigator said, she talked incessantly with not the slightest hesitation and was always airy and sure. No one to whom she had gone with her misrepresentations questioned her veracity— she always came out with a clearly connected and plausible story. We noted that her parents in comparison seemed ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy
... and Helmsley was alone—save for the silent company of the little dog stretched out upon the hearth. And he lost himself in a profound reverie, the while he built a castle in the air of his own designing, in which Self had no part. How many airy fabrics of beauty and joy had he not raised one after the other in his mind, only to see them crumble into dust!—but this one, as he planned it in his thoughts, nobly uplifted above all petty limits, with all the light of a broad beneficence shining upon ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... to the touch, and mantled with a quickly-blasted-away coat, yet such a one as is of a delicious taste and savour to all shrill and sweetly-singing birds, such as linnets, goldfinches, larks, canary birds, yellow-hammers, and others of that airy chirping choir; but it would quite extinguish the natural heat and procreative virtue of the semence of any man who would eat much and often of it. And although that of old amongst the Greeks there was certain kinds of fritters and pancakes, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... as to the desirability of doubling our capital once or twice at least, before we threw up our hands and gave up the game. I need hardly tell the reader that what at first was a philosophical speculation, an airy theory of a possibility, rapidly crystallized into steadfast purpose and determinate resolve, and soon our brains were working, and readily brought forth a new scheme. For was not there the Bank of England, with uncounted millions in ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... rather queer. It was very old; there were strange tablets on the walls and monuments in the corners, and part of the pavement was gravestones—the side parts, not the middle. But it was new too. There weren't any pews, and it was all open and airy. But still it had the feeling of being very old. I don't know much about architecture—it's one of the things I mean to learn. I know pews are all wrong, still they're rather fun. At one church near Furzely, where we sometimes go in wet weather, there ...
— The Girls and I - A Veracious History • Mary Louisa Stewart Molesworth
... as a garrison for American troops, and on it, the soldiers made many improvements. It is built one story high, in the shape of a hollow square, and has the size of an ordinary block in a city. Around the whole runs a fine veranda. With its lofty ceilings, large and airy rooms, and its fine yard in the centre of the square, which is well stored with its fowls, pigeons, and other pet animals, with appropriate kennels; with antlers of noble buck and elk; hams of venison, buffalo meat, wild turkeys, etc., and near by a fine vegetable garden; altogether, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... gathered flame may break Through the furnace, wroth and high. When the copper within Seethes and simmers—the tin Pour quick, that the fluid that feeds the Bell May flow in the right course glib and well. Deep hid within this nether cell, What force with Fire is molding thus In yonder airy tower shall dwell, And witness wide and far of us! It shall, in later days, unfailing, Rouse many an ear to rapt emotion; Its solemn voice with Sorrow wailing, Or choral chiming to Devotion. Whatever Fate to Man may bring, Whatever weal or woe befall, That metal tongue ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... and we shall show you what can be done without the aid of the north." Several servants in tidy dresses, their white aprons looking so clean, come bustling into the room and invite missus and her guest into an airy ante-room, where a table is bountifully spread with cake, fruit, fine old Madeira, and lemonade. Mr. Scranton bows and asks "the pleasure;" Mrs. Rosebrook acknowledgingly takes his arm, while the negroes bow and scrape as they enter the room. Mr. Scranton stands a few moments ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the surf flies high above them; but silently and slowly sink the waves, and the silver palms arise from the midst of the inundation, the breeze stirs their branches, playing with the long leaves, and they spread like the sails of a ship gliding over the airy ocean. Do you see how she rolls along, how the spray-drops sparkle on her breast, how the waves slide along her sides. And where is she?... and where am I?... You cannot imagine, dearest Maria, the sweetly solemn feeling produced in me by the sound ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... her Venetian toilet-glass, could have known that the Cavaliere Odo Valsecca's devoted glance saw her through the medium of a countenance compared to which her own revealed the most unexpected shortcomings, she might have received him with less airy petulance of manner. But how could so accomplished a mistress doubt the permanence of her rule? The Countess Clarice, in singling out young Odo Valsecca (to the despair of a score of more experienced cavaliers) had done him an honour that she could no more imagine his resigning than an adventurer ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... exquisite ease with which they seemed to float through space, circling and reversing and winding among the other dancers, he ever alert, watchful, quick as a cat and lithe and strong as a panther—she all yielding lissome airy grace. That dance was "Gov" Prime's reward, and almost only reward for hours of impatient waiting. Other women, charming and pretty and better women, would gladly have been his partners. Some two or three whom he met at the hotel even intimated as much. But not ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King
... life without sickness, and all are liable to accidents. The injured or afflicted youth, taken straight from his rough, hard life and poor cottage, wonders at the place he finds himself in—the wide, clean, airy room and white, easy bed, the care and skill of the doctors, the tender nursing by women, and comforts and luxuries, all without payment, but given as it seems to him out of pure divine love and compassion—all ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... walked towards the door with as much dignity as her trembling frame could assume. He was abashed; his fine speeches jumbled in meaningless fragments, his airy castle ready to topple on his unlucky head. He would have been glad to rebuke her fickle humor, as he thought it; but he knew he had made a fool of himself, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... and led the way upstairs, entering a large, airy chamber in which a fire burned brightly in the grate. The furniture here was dainty and feminine. In an alcove stood a snowy bed, the ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in Society • Edith Van Dyne
... Ell, it beat against Dead Man's Mount (henceforth to the vulgar mind more haunted than ever), it echoed up the Castle's Norman towers and down the oak-clad vestibule. Away over the common went the glad message of Earth's Saviour, away high into the air, startling the rooks upon their airy courses, as though the iron notes of the World's rejoicing would fain float to the throned feet of the World's ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... given by Linne—although botanists and zoologists were no longer counted by dozens, but by hundreds, hardly any notice was taken of Wolff's theory. Even when he established the truth of epigenesis by the most rigorous observations, and demolished the airy structure of the preformation theory, the "exact" scientist Haller proved one of the most strenuous supporters of the old theory, and rejected Wolff's correct view with a dictatorial "There is no such thing as evolution." He even went on to say that religion was menaced by the new theory! It ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the accumulated lumber of the past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable civitas hominum, however remote from the ideal, to a sham civitas Dei or a real Cloudcuckootown. ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... justice in various ways; and many gaps would still have to be filled up by means of more or less bold assumptions. Those who have not wandered much in this region of research would then readily believe that they were standing upon firm ground, where mere fancy had thrown an airy bridge; those acquainted with the subject, on the other hand, would soon find out these weak points in the structure, but would then be easily led to regard even what was founded upon well considered facts, as merely floating in the ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... last, though far from least, there was Ethelyn herself to waken when the clock should chime the hour of six, and this was a pleasure which good Aunt Barbara would not for the world have foregone. Every morning for the last sixteen years, when Ethelyn was at home, she had gone to the pleasant, airy chamber where her darling slept, and bending over her had kissed her fair, glowing cheek, and so called her back from the dreamless slumber which otherwise might have been prolonged to an indefinite time, for Ethelyn did not believe in the maxim, "Early to bed and early ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... deep in what must be called the slough of dissipation. Excited by just a glass too much, he stretched himself on a settee after dinner, sunk in physical and mental ecstasy, which Madame Marneffe wrought to the highest pitch by coming to sit down by him—airy, scented, pretty enough to damn an angel. She bent over Wenceslas and almost touched his ear as she whispered ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... she stepped up on the sloping sward above the haugh, with the pale moonlight just lighting her airy dress, and her face all sad ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... say That literal answers come from Heaven, But I know this—that when I pray A comfort, a support is given That helps me rise o'er earthly things As larks soar up on airy wings. ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... me and wert busy with other things. Now I step out before thee with shoes of gold and my silvery arms hanging down carelessly—and wait. Then thou raisest thy head, involuntarily thy gaze is fixed upon me as I describe magic circles with airy tread. Thy eye leaves me no more; thou must follow me in my movements, and I experience the triumph of success! All that thou scarcely divinest I reveal to thee in the dance, and thou art astonished at the wisdom concealed in it. Soon I cast off ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... all the lids! Lily, did the milliner put the trimming on the box and forget to send home the hat?" Then grabbing her fur coat from the closet she ran screaming down to the lawn, certainly somewhat promiscuous as to raiment, for her nightie was an airy affair and she carried her coat over ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... vacation from his boys and girls, busy with "Old Maid" in the extension room, and whispering with his hand in mine, "Oh, don't I wish she were here!" when a fresh invoice of ladies, just unpacked from the dressing-room in all the airy elegance of evening costume, floated through the ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... have carried him to the side of the unities, he goes straight to the truth of experience, obtains there a decisive answer, and records it in a few pages of masterly reasoning. The first breath of the facts, as known to every one who has visited a theatre, is brought to demolish the airy castles of pedantry: and it is shown that unity is required not for the sake of deceiving {213} the spectators, which is impossible, but for the sake of bringing order into chaos, art into nature, and the immensity of life ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... the seed: And still at evenings on before his horse The flickering fairy-circle wheeled and broke Flying, and linked again, and wheeled and broke Flying, for all the land was full of life. And when at last he came to Camelot, A wreath of airy dancers hand-in-hand Swung round the lighted lantern of the hall; And in the hall itself was such a feast As never man had dreamed; for every knight Had whatsoever meat he longed for served By hands unseen; and even as he said Down in the cellars merry bloated things ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... cunning, "yer don't know the man ez kem into the loft from the alley last night—p'r'aps yer didn't see an airy Frenchman with a dyed mustache, eh? I thought that would fetch ye!" he continued, as the man started at the evidence that his vision of last night was a living man. "P'r'aps you and him didn't break into this ship last night, jist to run off with ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... a valley of its own; The scorching sun, the rains and winds of Heaven, Mar not the calm—yet virgin of all care; But ever with sweet joys it buildeth up The airy halls of life." ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... cocoa-nuts on to dry. For when I asked, as well as I could, the use of them, a man took me to one, loaded with cocoa-nuts from the bottom to the top; and no words could have informed me better. Their situation is well chosen for this use, as most of their large houses are built in an open airy place, or where the wind has a free passage, from whatever direction it blows. Near most, if not all of them, is a large tree or two, whose spreading branches afford an agreeable retreat from the ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... of moment, but still or much less than those inherent or inherited brute principles and laws that sit upon us (in the character of conscience) as heavy as a shirt of mail, and that (in the character of the affections and the airy spirit of pleasure) make all the light of our lives. The house is, indeed, a great thing, and should be rearranged on sanitary principles; but my heart and all my interest are with the dweller, that ancient of days ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... attachship in 1854- 1855, contributed to these airy structures. In my diary for that period, I find it jotted down that I observed and studied at various times the Michael Palace in that city as a very suitable structure for a university. Twenty years ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... there was the Mad Major. Mounted on his airy steed, he flitted above the clouds, below the clouds. Sometimes swallowed in the smoke of the enemy's big guns; sometimes diving to avoid a shell; sometimes staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself. There would be the Mad Major ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat
... daily or yearly ceremonies, and that the sun might perhaps continue to rise and trees to blossom though the ceremonies were occasionally intermitted, or even discontinued altogether. These sceptical doubts would naturally be repelled by the other with scorn and indignation as airy reveries subversive of the faith and manifestly contradicted by experience. "Can anything be plainer," he might say, "than that I light my twopenny candle on earth and that the sun then kindles his great fire in heaven? I should be glad to know whether, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... humor. And Mrs. Farwell always insisted that she discussed the weightiest problems of life when she was running for a trolley. Lois was the exact opposite, an artist, a dreamer of dreams, who, when her mind was off on some airy flight, was maddeningly indifferent to everything else. They were ideal friends, for they acted as a balance, the one for the other. They were so much together that no one ever thought of ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... recognized him as the same child. He was not only making up for lost time—he was incomparably outstripping his earlier self; he seemed to have emerged from a mental and physical cocoon—to have cast aside an incrustation of deterrent clumsiness, and to be hastening onward with the airy case and accuracy of perfect self-possession. At the end of a year he was to all intents and purposes ten years old; and what was most remarkable about this swift advance lay in the fact that a year had seen the whole of it. Though he had been eight years in the world, the first seven had ...
— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne
... Meg in the summer-parlour, an airy and delightful room, full now of afternoon sunshine and the rustle of trees; for the three long windows opened on the garden. The great music-room was at one end, and at the other, in a deep alcove hung with purple curtains, a little household shrine had been made. Three portraits ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... bed of whispering reeds 5 His airy harp[37] shall now be laid, That he, whose heart in sorrow bleeds, May love through life ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Miss Barry. "It will have but little sentiment for the next generation. A change to me now would be like tearing up an old tree by the roots. I could not endure it. They may have their elegant new houses; but give me my large airy rooms and my old-time flowers, my nectarines and apricots. Let me live my few years in ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... resolutions before now—too many! And they had known but a short lifetime. But never before had they been born of suffering, and never before had they been strengthened by prayer. This last resolution was made in a very humble and anxious spirit, strangely different from Dreda's former airy complacence. ...
— Etheldreda the Ready - A School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... silk, made the blue bird comparison not altogether unapt,—the bird was hardly more fair and dainty in his way than the lady in hers. She stood still for a minute, shading her eyes with her hand, and looking off down the road; a slight, delicate figure, with that sort of airy grace which has a natural poise for every position,—then she turned abruptly and ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... glory of the English style. It can truly be said that stone seems, by the cunning labour of the chisel, to have been robbed of its weight and density and suspended aloft as if by magic, while the fretted roof is achieved with the wonderful minuteness and airy security of a cobweb. Similar roofs appear in Bath Abbey (the architect of which was Dr. Oliver King, a member of King's), in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster, in Sherborne Minster, and in the ambulatory of the choir of Peterborough; ...
— A Short Account of King's College Chapel • Walter Poole Littlechild
... lady fair, Dear spirit of the air, We long to see thy face, Thy form of airy grace. Some things we long to know Thou well can'st tell, ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... vain it buffets with its wings, In vain it wheels around; Still screaming, in its airy rings, It ...
— Ballads - Founded On Anecdotes Relating To Animals • William Hayley
... of my own society, being much addicted to reading, though little to study. Whatever was the cause, the effect was dejection and a sense of impending evil; this was especially so in Dr. Mannering's study, although that room was the lightest and most airy in the house. The doctor's life-size portrait in oil hung in that room, and seemed completely to dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the picture; the man was evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old, with iron-gray hair, a smooth-shaven ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... capable of doing; but, as far as possible, university training shuts out of the minds of those among them, who are subjected to it, the prospect that there is anything in the world for which they are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt to still the intellectual hunger airy of the men I have mentioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the roll of Ciceronian prose! Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men, that the education ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... behind the chariot of Hera, ready to do the bidding of her royal mistress. She appears under the form of a slender maiden of great beauty, robed in an airy fabric of variegated hues, resembling mother-of-pearl; her sandals are bright as burnished silver, she has golden wings, and wherever she appears, a radiance of light, and a sweet odour, as of delicate spring flowers, pervades ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... of the finest India mull, very simply yet beautifully made, over an underskirt of plain white silk—an airy, gauzy thing, just ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... of the practical life I have lived that I worship utility and have come to believe that utility and beauty should be one, and that there is no utility that need not be beautiful. What finer beauty than strength—whether it be airy steel, or massive masonry, or a woman's hand? A plain black leather strap is beautiful. It is all strength and all utility, and it is beautiful. It efficiently performs work in the world, and it is good to look upon. Perhaps it is because it is useful that it is beautiful. I do ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views, on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested titles, invented ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on the magic slide, Forth from the darkness of the past we glide, As living shadows for a moment seen In airy pageant on the eternal screen, Traced by a ray from one unchanging flame, Then seek the dust ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
