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Bohemian   Listen
adjective
Bohemian  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to Bohemia, or to the language of its ancient inhabitants or their descendants. See Bohemian, n., 2.
2.
Of or pertaining to a social gypsy or "Bohemian" (see Bohemian, n., 3); vagabond; unconventional; free and easy. (Modern) "Hers was a pleasant Bohemian life till she was five and thirty." "Artists have abandoned their Bohemian manners and customs nowadays."
Bohemian chatterer, or Bohemian waxwing (Zool.), a small bird of Europe and America (Ampelis garrulus); the waxwing.
Bohemian glass, a variety of hard glass of fine quality, made in Bohemia. It is of variable composition, containing usually silica, lime, and potash, rarely soda, but no lead. It is often remarkable for beauty of color.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Bohemian" Quotes from Famous Books



... I had deplored this rather Bohemian taste of the Honourable George which led him to associate with Americans as readily as with persons of his own class; and especially had I regretted his intimacy with the family in question. Several times I had observed them, on the occasion ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... laws and manners are unknown, the very chief of the Irish, as well men as women, go naked in the winter time, only having their privy parts covered with a rag of linen, and their bodies with a loose mantle. This I speak of my own experience; yet remember that a Bohemian baron coming out of Scotland to us by the north parts of the wild Irish, told me in great earnestness, that he, coming to the house of O'Kane, a great lord amongst them, was met at the door by sixteen women, all naked, excepting their loose mantles, whereof eight or ten were very ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith

... the Trentino with more success than the Germans had anticipated. But the Austrians had not calculated upon Russia. In July General Brusiloff attacked the Austrian forces in the neighbourhood of Lusk, succeeded in persuading or bribing a Bohemian army corps to desert and started through the Austrian positions like a flood over sloping land. Brusiloff not only took several hundred thousand prisoners. He not only broke clear through the Austrian ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... his wars with them lasted for thirty years. Under him the greater part of Germany was compulsorily civilized, and converted from Paganism to Christianity, His empire extended eastward as far as the Elbe, the Saal, the Bohemian mountains, and a line drawn from thence crossing the Danube above Vienna, and prolonged to the Gulf of ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... this occasion was that she must have her portrait done by a real Bohemian artist, and offhand she gives ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford

... round this assemblage of foreign-looking persons, no doubt guessing at the various nationalities indicated by physique and complexion—Prussian, Pole, Rhinelander, Swiss, and what not. If the company, in English eyes, might have looked Bohemian—that is to say, unconventional in manner and costume—the Bohemianism, at all events, was of a well-to-do, cheerful, good-humored character. There was a good deal ...
— Sunrise • William Black

... the artist, she heard a quick, snapping sound, and saw the beautiful Bohemian glass paper-cutter her guardian had been using lying shivered to atoms on the rug. The fluted handle was crushed in his fingers, and drops of blood oozed over the left hand. Ere she could allude to it, he thrust his hand into his pocket and desired ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... Just how great this was, it is impossible to determine, and yet a calculation can be made, yielding figures near enough the actual to be of service. From the middle of the fifteenth century there had been a considerable increase in the production of silver from German, Bohemian and Hungarian mines. Although this {474} increase was much more than is usually allowed for—equalling, in the opinion of one scholar, the produce of American mines until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century—it was only enough to meet the expanding demands of commerce. Before America ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... had received a new book from Germany. It was a tragedy, and the first attempt of a Saxon poet of whom my brother had been taught to entertain the highest expectations. The exploits of Zisca, the Bohemian hero, were woven into a dramatic series and connection. According to German custom, it was minute and diffuse, and dictated by an adventurous and lawless fancy. It was a chain of audacious acts and unheard-of disasters. The moated fortress ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne

... Romish Church in ceremonies and doctrines, with the single exception of the administration of the Communion, in which the Hussites communicated in both kinds. This privilege had been conceded to the followers of Huss by the Council of Basle, in an express treaty, (the Bohemian Compact); and though it was afterwards disavowed by the popes, they nevertheless continued to profit by it under the sanction of the government. As the use of the cup formed the only important distinction of their body, they were ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.

... foaming bumpers. Like red roses shone their faces, And like radishes their noses. "Want a big glass?" asked the waitress Our old Anton, who assented: "To be sure! hot is the weather, And when I woke up, already In my throat I felt a dryness." So good Anton soon was drinking From his large Bohemian bumper, Turning over in his mind well, How he ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel

... elephantine Flossie wagged a playful finger at me. "Oh, now, you can't make us believe that, just because we're from the country! We know all about you gay New Yorkers, with your Bohemian ways and your midnight studio suppers, and your cigarettes, ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... come for the Monday market, pots and pans and vegetables strewn in heaps all over the ground, on the rough paving stones, up to the great gateway of the castle, leaving but just room for us to drive through their midst. I had the sensation of an enormous building: all Bohemian castles are big, but this one was like a royal palace. Set there in the midst of the town, after the Bohemian fashion, it opens at the back upon great gardens, as if it were in the midst of the country. I walked through ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... mysterious dispensation of Providence, and a good deal to Leslie Graeme, that I found myself in the heart of the Selkirks for my Christmas Eve as the year 1882 was dying. It had been my plan to spend my Christmas far away in Toronto, with such Bohemian and boon companions as could be found in that cosmopolitan and kindly city. But Leslie Graeme changed all that, for, discovering me in the village of Black Rock, with my traps all packed, waiting for the stage to start for the Landing, thirty miles away, he bore down upon me with ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor

... tentative attitude. Still, he wrote something about his own position and his needs. He was a teacher in a school in South London, living in lodgings, with his evenings mostly unoccupied. His habits, he declared, were Bohemian. Suppose, by way of testing each other's dispositions, they were to interchange views on some book with which both were likely to be acquainted: say, Keats's poems? In conclusion, the "O. W." of the advertisement signed ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing

... a class that, living as I did in a small way, with slender domestic resources, I often appealed to my models to render. They liked to lay hands on my property, to break the sitting, and sometimes the china—it made them feel Bohemian. The next time I saw Miss Churm after this incident she surprised me greatly by making a scene about it—she accused me of having wished to humiliate her. She hadn't resented the outrage at the time, but had ...
— Some Short Stories • Henry James

... Hussonnet addressed a letter to him announcing in a gay fashion that the Marechale had got rid of Cisy the very day after the races. Frederick was delighted at this intelligence, without taking the trouble to ascertain what the Bohemian's motive was in giving him ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert

... that hat was, there was in it an attempt, though indescribably humble, to be something melo-dramatic, foreign, Bohemian, and poetic. It was the mere blind, dull, dead germ of an effort—not even life—only the ciliary movement of an antecedent embryo—and yet it had got beyond Anglo-Saxondom. No costermonger, or common cad, or true Englishman, ever yet had that indefinable touch of the opera-supernumerary ...
— The English Gipsies and Their Language • Charles G. Leland

... stingy aunt in America for whom she was named, and who had never sent her a thing, and whom her mamma called "Old Sauerkraut." Bessie was very communicative, and Miss McPherson learned in a few minutes more of the Bohemian life and habits of her nephew and his wife than she had learned at her brother's house in London, where she had been staying for a few weeks, and where Mistress Daisy was not held in very high esteem. And all the time she talked, Bessie's little hands were busy with the folds ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes

... they should advance now rapidly, resolutely, directly toward my front, the odds would be too overwhelming; if they should tarry, or if I should succeed in causing them to hesitate until I have got my Bohemian corps in line, I should defeat them. Let us try it, therefore; let us feign inactivity and timidity, so that they may not become active. Cunning is the best ally of a general; let ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach

... is from a certain Bohemian woman I come. What matter, then, if the dead receive me?" And thus speaking, the stranger dropped ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... matter to drift into free and easy manners and call them "bohemian" than to cleanse your reputation of their stain, or lift your mind from the mire ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... reign of force woman never freed herself by force. She could not fight, or would not. Bohemian annals, indeed, record the legend of a literal war between the sexes, in which the women's army was led by Libussa and Wlasla, and which finally ended with the capture, by the army of men, of Castle Dziewin, Maiden's Tower, whose ruins are still visible near Prague. The armor of Libussa ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various

... for me." Then one of the party, a blithesome girl, having, in the Provencial fashion, hung a tambourine round her neck, Cadiere skipped and danced about like the rest; with a rug thrown across her shoulders, she danced the Bohemian measure, and made herself giddy with ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... the tears started to my eyes, and I could hardly gulp out a word or two of thanks. What a crisscross of qualities in one human soul! It was not the deed or the words; but it was the almost womanly look in the eyes of this broken, drink-sodden old Bohemian—the sympathy and the craving for sympathy which I read there. Only for an instant though, for he hardened again into his usual reckless and half ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... Christ was burned at the stake July 6, 1415, by order of the General Council of Constance. When the fagots were piled up around him ready for the torch, he said to the executioner, "You are now going to burn a goose [Huss signifying goose in the Bohemian language]; but in a century you will have a swan whom you can neither roast nor boil." Fox's Book of Martyrs. This was fulfilled in ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith

... nightly, wetting his royal throat with thin beer, in presence of his fat and of his lean Mistress, if there were no other company. Tobacco,—introduced by the Swedish soldiers in the Thirty-Years War, say some; or even by the English soldiers in the Bohemian or Palatinate beginnings of said War, say others;—tobacco, once shown them, was enthusiastically adopted by the German populations, long in want of such an article; and has done important multifarious functions in that country ever since. For ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... sort of general agreement in these matters, their arrangements will be a matter of secondary importance to the Western Allies—saving our duty to Serbia and Montenegro and their rulers. Russia may not find the German idea of a Polish plus Bohemian border State so very distasteful, provided that the ruler is not a German; Germany may find the idea still tolerable if the ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... has gained a great reputation in Europe during recent years is the Bohemian Quartet, consisting of Carl Hoffmann, first violin, Joseph Suk, second violin, Oscar Nedbal, viola, and Hanus Wihom, violoncello. They play with a great deal of vim and abandon, and the ensemble ...
— Famous Violinists of To-day and Yesterday • Henry C. Lahee

... many months. He drew out a tray, sat down by the light and began to look them over. At first only small inanimate objects, gradually as from tray after tray they glittered duskily up at him, they began to yield their riches as they had so often done before. Spanish, French, Italian, Bohemian, Hungarian, Russian and Arabian, rings small and rings enormous, religious rings and magic rings, poison rings, some black with age for all his careful polishing—again they stole deep into Roger's imagination with suggestions of the many hands that had worn them through the centuries, of women ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole

... for lunch. There was a smart club called the Bohemian, where one met artists, actors, writers. Among them were young Keith, the landscape painter, who gave promise of a vogue; Charley Stoddard, big and bearded; they called him an etcher with words; and there were Prentice Mulford, the mystic; David Belasco of the Columbia ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... the rest of my life. Ugh! Talking sappy to an endless stream of silly women, palming off on them such useless junk as this! Look at it! Egyptian scarabs, made in Connecticut; Ceylonese coral, from North Attleboro, Mass.; Bohemian glassware, from Sandsburg, Pa.; Indian baskets woven by the Papago tribe, meaning Rutherford, N. J. Bah! For nearly twelve years I've been doing this. And you're to blame for it, you and Irene and Georgianna. You got me into it when I could find nothing else ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... have starved but for his fiddle. A year found him back in Melbourne, penniless. Here he met another German in the same condition. They decided to work their way overland to Sydney, Hans playing the fiddle and his mate singing. Then began a Bohemian life of music by the wayside inns, sleep in the open air, and meals when it pleased God to ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... War was not so much a single conflict as a series of conflicts, which ultimately involved nearly all western Europe. It began in Bohemia, where Protestantism had not been extinguished by the Hussite wars. [37] The Bohemian nobles, many of whom were Calvinists, revolted against Hapsburg rule and proclaimed the independence of Bohemia. The German Lutherans gave them no aid, however, and the emperor, Ferdinand II, easily put down the insurrection. ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... "It was then the Bohemian revolt broke out, your King Frederick V of the Palatinate was slain here, and there was great ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg

... page whom the late countess had found and fancied among a wandering Bohemian horde, and the high-born daughter of the feudal house, an attachment had sprung up, nurtured by the isolation in which they lived, and the romantic character and youth of the parties. About to be separated from his mistress for a long time, the page had implored ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... be held in the Rotunda. An imposing list of names headed the prospectus, and it was confidently stated that all the lady patronesses would attend. Mrs. Barton fell into the trap, and, to her dismay, found herself and her girls in the company of the rag, tag, and bobtail of Catholic Dublin: Bohemian girls fabricated out of bed-curtains, negro minstrels that an application of grease and burnt cork had brought into a filthy existence. And from the single gallery that encircled this tomb-like building the small tradespeople looked down upon the multicoloured ...
— Muslin • George Moore

... Organist Ignaz Laemml, introduces himself to Dal Segno, the celebrated Italian singing-master as the Bohemian singer Howora. He obtains lessons from the capricious old man, who however fails to recognize in him the long-absent son of his old enemy. Cornelia, Dal Segno's daughter however is not so slow in recognizing the ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley

... Watch," "Delirium"; of the actors, in "How I Was an Actor" and "In Retirement." We have circus life in "'Allez!'" "In The Circus," "Lolly," "The Clown"—the last a one-act playlet; factory life, in "Moloch"; provincial life, in "Small Fry"; bohemian life, in "Captain Ribnicov" and "The River of Life"—which no one but Kuprin could have written. There are animal stories and flower stories; stories for children—and for neuropaths; one story is dedicated to a jockey; another to a circus clown; a third, if I remember rightly, to a race-horse... ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... was cordial enough, though a trifle flustered. Whatever thrifty, hard-working farmer folk might think of gay, Bohemian Blair Stanley in his absence, in his presence even they liked him, by the grace of some winsome, lovable quality in the soul of him. He had "a way with him"—revealed even in the manner with which he caught staid Aunt Janet in his arms, swung her matronly form around as though ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Norwegian! Swede! Dane! Icelander! you Prussian! You Spaniard of Spain! you Portuguese! You Frenchwoman and Frenchman of France! You Belge! you liberty-lover of the Netherlands! (you stock whence I myself have descended;) You sturdy Austrian! you Lombard! Hun! Bohemian! farmer of Styria! You neighbor of the Danube! You working-man of the Rhine, the Elbe, or the Weser! you working-woman too! You Sardinian! you Bavarian! Swabian! Saxon! Wallachian! Bulgarian! You Roman! Neapolitan! you Greek! You lithe matador in the arena at Seville! You mountaineer ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... Bohemian, and with the Bohemian propensity for picking up things, has picked up the English language. The public is somewhat divided in its estimate of her skill in speaking English. One-half of her average audience insists that she speaks better English ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various

... wine-color grew instinct with richer radiance: as far as eye could see, and flashing in the crystalline splendor of the Arabian sun, was a glorious sea of rose. The dusky red sandstone hills, with a border of white sand and green and flowered foliage, like an elaborately wrought cup of Bohemian glass enameled with brilliant flowers, held the sparkling liquid petals of that rosy sea. The surface, on examination, proved to be covered with a thin brickdust layer of infusoriae slightly tinged with orange. Placed in a white glass bottle, this ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... luck—sudden and unlooked for—in the humble creation of "rhyme-ads" for a Sixth Avenue furniture store. So, having his Bohemian young head somewhat turned by his first check of twenty dollars, he had promptly celebrated his return to affluence by as promptly spending a goodly portion of that wealth. He had bidden a cadaverous animal painter ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... Norton of our company," she went on. "Poor dear old Rosy. She's fifty-three—grey hair smooth back, you know, and a kind of look of anxious mamma. And it gets into her eyes and chokes her, poor dear; but blow her if she won't be as Bohemian as anybody. I've seen her smoke in a bonnet with strings tied under her chin. I got up ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... theatrical, men who worship George Sand, a genou bas between an oath and an ejection of saliva." When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites or Atheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the early occultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairly right in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to a social tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirably Philistine feelings, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton

... art. All artists carry them; and the poorer the artist the more attached is he to his cane. Canes are indispensable to the simple vanity of the Bohemian. One of the most memorable drawings of Steinlen depicts the quaint soul of a child of the Latin Quarter: an elderly Bohemian, very much frayed, advances wreathed in the sunshine of his boutonniere and cane. Canes are invariably an accompaniment of learning. Sylvester ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday

... medival writer, and was taught neither by Wycliffe nor by Hus. But the Brethren held it at the outset, and hold it still. It is found in the works of Peter of Chelcic;158 it was fully expounded by Gregory the Patriarch; it was taught by the Bohemian Brethren in their catechisms; it is implied in all Moravian teaching to-day. To Moravians this word "essentials" has a definite meaning. At every stage in their history we find that in their judgment the essentials ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... besides Bret Harte had found shelter there. James Gillis himself had fine literary instincts, but he remained a pocket-miner because he loved that quiet pursuit of gold, the Arcadian life, the companionship of his books, the occasional Bohemian pilgrim who found refuge in his retreat. It is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis's cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment. One could mine there if he wished to ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... that there are still relatively few educated women who deliberately cut loose from monogamic standards; and that they are most commonly found among certain intimate and unconventional groups of students and professional workers, especially those who are united in "Bohemian life" by artistic or literary interests. But while such sexually anarchistic women are not common in America, there is reason for fearing that, unless some unexpected check comes to this undercurrent towards sexual freedom, it may be found ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... August 1738, his christian name, so often suppressed, being duly recorded in the register of the neighbouring church of St. George's, where he was buried. The admirers of our great novelist owe Mr. Latreille a debt of gratitude for this opportune discovery. It is true that a certain element of Bohemian picturesqueness is lost to Henry Fielding's life, already not very rich in recorded incident; and it would certainly have been curious if he, who ended his days in trying to dignify the judicial office, should have begun life by acting the part of a "trading ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... used to go to his mother, who fondled her and seemed to say, "Thank Heaven you are not like that little Bohemian!" This was my aunt's stinging epithet for me in moments of anger. I used to go up to my room with a heavy heart, thoroughly ashamed and vexed, vowing to myself that I would never again jump the ditch, but on reaching my room I used to find the gardener's ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... a pleasant little Mountain Town, in the Principality of Schweidnitz, high up, on the infant River Bober, near the Bohemian Frontier—(English readers may see QUINCY ADAMS'S description of it, and of the long wooden spouts which throw cataracts on you, if walking the streets in rain [John Quincy Adams (afterwards President of the United States), Letters on Silesia (London, 1804). ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... to dream of handling, or drinking liquor, foretells for her a happy Bohemian kind of existence. She will be good natured but shallow minded. To treat others, she will be generous to rivals, and the indifference of lovers or husband will not seriously offset ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... agreed with theirs. It was enough for her that he was a Booth, and knew how to behave in a drawing-room, because he belonged there and was not lugged in by the scruff of an ill-fitting dress-suit to pose as a Bohemian celebrity. Moreover, he was a level-headed, well-balanced fellow in spite of his calling; which was saying a great deal, proclaimed the mother of Vivian in opposition to her own argument that painters never ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... condition that Callot should engrave their portraits, and hence his curious book of engravings entitled "The Beggars." Louis is said to have offered Callot a pension of 3000 livres provided he would not leave Paris; but the artist was now too much of a Bohemian, and prized his liberty too highly to permit him to accept it; and he returned to Nancy, where he worked till his death. His industry may be inferred from the number of his engravings and etchings, of which he left not fewer ...
— Self Help • Samuel Smiles

... inside of a mould is to be coated with jelly. There is an easier but extravagant way, namely, to fill the mould with jelly, then scoop out the centre neatly, leaving a shell of jelly an inch thick. The centre, of course, might be made hot and bottled for another occasion, or to make Bohemian cream jellies. When the mould is masked, fill it with the custard, which must be half frozen; then cover securely, and pack in ice and salt at least five hours before ...
— Choice Cookery • Catherine Owen

... for all that, let me do it justice. Never was black tea less herb-like; never draught of sillery, quaffed from goblet of rare Bohemian glass, more delicious! And so, with thank-yous that were not only from the lip, we toil on some distance yet, to the shaft by which we are to ascend,—one quite remote from that by which we began ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various

... show could not be made with it. But Captain de la Tour was rather insistent and got on her nerves. In an hysterical fit, therefore, she made a clean breast of the story to her husband. When she had described to him as well as she could what was in the letters, and what a Bohemian sort of life she had led in Bel-Abbes, Grant decided that it would be romantic as well as sensible to buy the Chateau de la Tour. Josephine had actually been born there; and they could either keep the place or sell ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson

... "troubadour"—Mr. Fayliss. The Main Attraction was decidedly prepossessing. Tall, peculiarly graceful both in appearance and manner, dressed with an immaculateness that seemed excessive in this post-Bohemian circle. There was a decided musical quality to his speech, as he made polite comments upon being introduced to each of us, and an exactness in sentence-structure, word-choices and enunciation that bespoke the foreigner. ...
— The Troubadour • Robert Augustine Ward Lowndes

... parts by the Danube, which enters at its most westerly point, and leaves it at its eastern extremity, near Pressburg. North of this line is the low hilly country, known as the Waldviertel, which lies at the foot and forms the continuation of the Bohemian and Moravian plateau. Towards the W. it attains in the Weinsberger Wald, of which the highest point is the Peilstein, an altitude of 3478 ft., and descends towards the valley of the Danube through the Gfoehler Wald (2368 ft.) and the Manhartsgebirge ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... of his news, hesitated slightly. The assurance with which Douglas Kelly's words had filled him was oozing out rather rapidly. It was one thing to decide on a literary career when one was in a Bohemian club and the time was long after midnight; but, somehow, in an essentially staid drawing-room, where there was more than a hint of Victorian influence in the furniture, and with a sense of a heavy dinner still oppressing him, matters seemed different. ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt

... (Salviati), which were most beautiful and artistically arranged by different artists. They had turned a long gallery which had once served as a ballroom into the theater. I was asked to sing in a tableau representing a Bohemian hall, where, as a background, Bohemian peasants in brilliant costumes sat and stood about. I was also dressed in a Bohemian dress, and leaned against a pillar and held a tambourine in my hand. Tosti played the accompaniment ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone

... doors. Trade and industry will not revive for some time; they will consequently be entirely dependent upon the State for their means of subsistence. Even if work is offered to them, many of them not be able at once to reassume their habits of daily industry; the Bohemian life which they have led for the last four months, and which they are still leading, is against it. A siege is so abnormal a condition of things, that the State has been obliged to pay them for doing ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... children; and behind the schoolroom were the cells and the constables and the little yard where they gave their "twenty lashes". Sylvia shuddered at the array of faces. From the stolid nineteen years old booby of the Kentish hop-fields, to the wizened, shrewd, ten years old Bohemian of the London streets, all degrees and grades of juvenile vice grinned, in untamable wickedness, or snuffed in affected piety. "Suffer little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... sundry metals, and at such and such constellations, knots, amulets, words, philters, &c., which generally make the parties affected, melancholy; as [1276]Monavius discourseth at large in an epistle of his to Acolsius, giving instance in a Bohemian baron that was so troubled by a philter taken. Not that there is any power at all in those spells, charms, characters, and barbarous words; but that the devil doth use such means to delude them. Ut fideles inde magos (saith [1277]Libanius) ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... the gibes of his associates had stung him to a feeling of forward, lawless mutiny; a defiant, challenging, atavistic recklessness. Spirit of corsair, adventurer, lover, poet, bohemian, possessed him. The stars he saw above him seemed no more unattainable, no less high, than the favour of Miss Peek or the fearsome sweetness of her delectable lips. His fate seemed to him strangely dramatic and pathetic, and ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... known in Society, is spending the summer at Atlantic City. Hector was formerly a Bohemian glass blower, but he is now rich enough to leave off the last part of his occupation, so he calls himself just a Bohemian—which is different. Hector is paying deep attention to Phyllis Kurdsheimer, the daughter of Mike Kurdsheimer, the ...
— Get Next! • Hugh McHugh

... sterilised knife cut it up. Then he made it slightly alkaline with a little sodium carbonate, talking half to us and half to himself as he worked. The next step was to place the matter in a glass flask in a water bath where it was heated. From the flask a Bohemian glass tube led into a cool jar and on a part of the tube a flame was playing which heated it to redness for two or ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... was not fond of the conventional "society" circles of the Irish capital, and lived for the most part a Bohemian life of her own, becoming notorious by her extreme ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard

... nothing. My uncle caused enquiries to be made in every direction, but without success. Once only a neighbour at Marienberg, who had been travelling on the Bohemian frontier, told us that he had met at a village inn a wandering clarinet-player, who bore so strong a resemblance to my brother that he accosted him by his name. The musician seemed confused, and muttering some ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various

... in considerable variety and at all prices, and to match any colour scheme; so use them as notes of colour on the glass shelves in your bathrooms. Here, too, is an opportunity to use your old Bristol or Bohemian glass, once regarded as inherited eyesores, but now unearthed, and which, when used to contribute to a colour scheme, have a distinct ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood

... ingenuity. He is popular wherever he goes, for he invades every house as an uproarious child. People are getting suspicious of all the respectable disguises for a scoundrel; so he always uses the disguise of—what shall I say—the Bohemian, the blameless Bohemian. He always carries people off their feet. People are used to the mask of conventional good conduct. He goes in for eccentric good-nature. You expect a Don Juan to dress up as a solemn and solid Spanish merchant; but you're not prepared when he dresses up as Don Quixote. ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... Bach in his married life was Franz Josef Haydn. After a boyhood of poverty and struggles, he obtained a position as Kapellmeister to a Bohemian nobleman, Count Morzin. This post was none too lucrative, however, for it brought the composer only about one hundred dollars a year, while his teaching could not have provided him with much extra wealth, and his ...
— Woman's Work in Music • Arthur Elson

... compose his first quartet, and thus turned his attention to the branch of composition in which he was later on to excel. At the instance of this patron Haydn, in 1759, received the appointment of music-director to a rich Bohemian nobleman named Count Ferdinand Morzin, who was an ardent lover of music, and maintained a small orchestra at his country seat. This was a great step in his advancement, and the year which witnessed it is also memorable ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham

... "smell-sin-long-noses" of the day; but not finding any thing very attractive in that godly company, I passed on to where Isabella of Croye and the gallant Quentin Durward were holding earnest converse—not aware, unfortunately, that the snaky eye of the Bohemian ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various

... the eighteenth of March was created general by the Commune, and gathered round him in guise of staff the most illustrious, or least ignoble, of those foreign parasites and vagabonds, who have made of Paris a grand occidental Bohemian Babel. These soldiers of fortune, most of whom had been "unfortunate" at home, formed the marrow of the Commune's ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... not a nook or a corner in the whole horse fit to lodge any respectable ghost, for every part was as open to observation as a literary man's character and condition, his figure and estate, his coat and his countenance, are to his (or her) Bohemian Majesty on a tour of inspection through ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... They did not trust the amicable gentleman from the polished circle of the Pope's immediate counselors. At Leipzig, Eck had been driven into the corner by Luther's unanswerable arguments from Scripture; then he turned to abuse and called Luther a Bohemian and a Hussite, and finally left the hall with the air of a victor to celebrate his achievement in the taverns and brothels of the city, where he found his customary delights learned from his masters at Rome. Can any language ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... generosity to come and see his work, he could not let him go away, they would lunch together at the hotel where he lived. They would open a bottle of Chianti to recall their life in Rome; they would talk of the merry Bohemian days of their youth, of those comrades of various nationalities that used to gather in the Cafe del Greco,—some already dead, the rest scattered through Europe and America, a few celebrated, the majority ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... of my own feelings. The readiness with which I adapted myself to my new surroundings, the zest with which I entered into the friendships of my new comrades, certainly indicated that I had something, at all events, of the Bohemian in my nature. Of the public events of that year, 1861, there is comparatively little to be said. I remember, indeed, that I happened to be acting for the first time as sub-editor in the temporary ...
— Memoirs of Sir Wemyss Reid 1842-1885 • Stuart J. Reid, ed.

... all the air dissolved in the water and adhering to the solid substances, we first placed our flask in a bath of chloride of calcium in a large cylindrical white iron pot set over a flame. The exit tube of the flask was plunged in a test tube of Bohemian glass three-quarters full of distilled water, and also heated by a flame. We boiled the liquids in the flask and test-tube for a sufficient time to expel all the air contained in them. We then withdrew the heat from under the test- tube, and immediately afterwards covered the water which it contained ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... Well, if you approve of these Bohemian arrangements it's not my business. I have my own opinion of Harry de Freyne; I always have had—and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... in many drawing-rooms and known many women, more or less intimately, but he had never, in all his purposeless Bohemian life, come across exactly this type of woman—a type in which refinement counts for more than beauty, culture for more than grace. With a sudden leap of memory, he recalled some scenes of which he had been witness years before, when a woman, hot, red, excited with wine and with furious jealousy, ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... he could and under cover of friendly night had moved on to parts unknown, leaving us dazzled by the careless, somewhat patronizing brilliance of his manner, and stuffed to our earlobes with tales of the splendid, adventurous, bohemian lives that newspaper men ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... so nicely with their names?' [Footnote: 'Hus' is Bohemian for 'goose' [the two words being in fact cognate forms]; and here we have the explanation of the prophetic utterance of Hus, namely, that in place of one goose, tame and weak of wing, God would send falcons ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... had gone up to London, taken chambers in Gray's Inn, where two or three of his college friends were established, and joined a Bohemian Club, where he made the acquaintance of several artists, and soon became a member of their set. He had talked vaguely of taking up art as a profession, but nothing ever came of it. There was an easel or two in his rooms and ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty

... at the national literature: every book they condemned was destroyed, even those of antiquity; the annals of the nation were forbidden to be read, and writers were not permitted even to compose on subjects of Bohemian literature. The mother-tongue was held out as a mark of vulgar obscurity, and domiciliary visits were made for the purpose of inspecting the libraries of the Bohemians. With their books and their language they lost their national character ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... is not always in accord with modern taste. Cut glass, in whatever form it is met with, is appreciated, in that the workmanship involving so much studious labour is recognized. Continental glass has at all periods been imported into this country, and especially so Bohemian glass, of which there are decanters of ruby, claret, blue, and other rich colours; some remarkable effects have been produced upon red glass by adding tinted colours and white decoration interspersed ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess

... constant ally of Napoleon, to the King of Saxony, in that character Austria ceded some Bohemian enclaves in Saxony end, in his capacity of Grand Duke of Warsaw, she added to his Polish dominions the ancient city of Cracow, and all ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... Architectural Club mingles work and play in a thoroughly Bohemian fashion. A recent invitation card bid its members to attend a "Rip-Snorter at the Club House," stating that "provisions and provisos would be provided and Frou Frous be on tap." The exact significance of this cabalistic description is known ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Vol. 1, 1895 • Various

... but he was thoughtful for a few minutes. Afterwards, when they sat at a small round table in the somewhat Bohemian restaurant which was the fashionable rendezvous of the moment for ladies of the theatrical profession, ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... always did ultimately meet one's future mother-in-law, but the prompt and dutiful way in which Roger brought out his suggestion seemed like a sentence culled from some Early Victorian book. Certainly it was altogether alien to Nan's ultra-modern, semi-Bohemian notions. ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... said Flavia, who kept her father on thorns by her gay and frolicsome criticisms, "you will no longer blame me for falling in love with a poor Bohemian, for you see that he is a Champdoce, and that ...
— The Champdoce Mystery • Emile Gaboriau

... this Note, two days later, to Seckendorf; indicating that the process of "borrowing" has already, in some form, begun,—process which will have to continue: and to develop itself;—and that his Majesty, as Seckendorf well knows, is resolved upon his Bohemian journey:— ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. IX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... imposing—apartment on the first floor looking upon the street is approached, as most front offices in London City are approached, from a landing leading through an open office. Upon the table are a water-jug and a couple of goblets of cheap and distinctly unlovely Bohemian glass. A tobacco-box, hardly less ugly (coeval, one would say, with the room itself), a snuff-box, and long pipes serve to recall that respect for the past and for tradition which is one of the most delightful, as it is one of the most ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann

... those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or Bohemian dairymaids," we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused us from our muse with a sharp "What?" we explained, "Of course they were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were dairymaids ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... week. He was married, you know, quite happily; an ordinary sort of person; she had money; he rather let his work go. But they were happy; a large family; a villa on a hill somewhere; pictures, bric-a-brac and bohemian intellectualism. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... company with twenty to thirty English men and women. Next day the number of English increased to fifty. If I ever marry, it must be an English woman." Some years later, however, with the fickleness of genius, he writes about Ernestine, the daughter of a rich Bohemian Baron, "a delightfully innocent, childish soul, tender and pensive, attached to me and to everything artistic by the most sincere love, extremely musical—in short, just the kind of a girl I could wish to marry." ...
— Chopin and Other Musical Essays • Henry T. Finck

... New York; she stayed a few days with Mrs. Macmichael, who wanted her to buy lace for her in Brussels and Bohemian glass in Prague; then a few days more with her cousin, Geraldine Raxley; and then ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

... other, perhaps had also seen the girl's blush. "Are you looking for Beate?" asked our hero to hide his embarrassment. "No," answered his brother, "she is not at the dance—and it's just as well. Nothing can come of it, after all; I must get another—and until I find one, Bohemian beer is my sweetheart." ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various

... would, perhaps, not care to go for a ride in the Bohemian waggons, as they are so fond of doing in ours during harvest-time. These waggons are made of a few long, wide planks, nailed together so as to form a kind of huge trough, and strengthened on the outside by cross-pieces ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... strength of his opinions, and the girl was brought up to all such principles. La Pechina would consider herself your equal; for the old man has made her, as he says, a republican,—just as Pere Fourchon has made Mouche a bohemian. As for me, I laugh at such ideas, but you might be displeased. She would revere you as her benefactress, but never as her superior. It can't be otherwise; she is wild and free like the swallows—her mother's blood counts for a good ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... luxurious couch that formed the useful furniture of the tiny apartment. Etageres of carved and gilded wood occupied each corner, and, together with the low mantelshelf (which was upheld by two dancing nymphs in Carrara marble), were crowded with costly trifles in Bohemian glass, Dresden and Sevres porcelain, gilded bronze, carved ivory and Parian ware. An easel, drawn toward the centre of the room, supported the one painting that it contained, the designs on the walls being unsuited for the proper display of pictures. This one picture ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.

... "Preferred his old Bohemian ways, eh? You can't change those fellows, Conny. They can't get over the fascinations of vagabondage. Sorry your lady-patroness scheme didn't work. Pity you couldn't have promoted him in the line of his profession, as the Grand Duchess of Girolstein ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... a nice little thick pair of riding or driving gloves; beautifully made and ornamented. These came from Eloise, Daisy's other cousin. Mrs. Gary had brought her two beautiful toilet bottles of Bohemian glass. Daisy's end of the ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner

... indefatigable industry and capability in the public interest that position of power or pre-eminence which his detractors acquired either by accident of birth and connexions or else by the vile arts of political intrigue. He began at the bottom of the ladder, mixing with the Bohemian society that haunted the Temple, practising oratory in the free and easy debating societies of Covent Garden and the Strand, and writing for ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... throw a plummet-line into my waters, my boy; and let me tell you that in case of success you will obtain such powerful influence that you will be able, like me, to retire upon a fine marriage when you are bored with your bohemian life." ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life. The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers anything to work, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... deal of Turkish blood in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The languages, however, are practically identical, formed largely of pure Slavonic materials, and, curiously, much more closely connected with the eastern Slav group—Russia and Little Russia—than with the central group, Polish and Bohemian. A Russian of Moscow will find it much easier to understand a Slovene from Goritzia than a Pole from Warsaw. The Ruthenians in southern Galicia and Bukowina, are identical in race and speech with the Little ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish

... at an unpretentious German beer-garden far out on the North Side. Bragdon and Milly had discovered this particular retreat, which was small and secluded and usually rather empty. It seemed to Milly quite "Bohemian" to drop into the garden late in the afternoon and rouse the sleepy proprietor to fetch them cool stone mugs of foaming beer, which the artist drank and which she ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... symphony are about as full of accent and infidelity as Mlle. Yvette Guilbert's picturesque efforts to sing in English. But almost anything is better than the phlegm that says, "The old ways are good enough for all time;" and the Bohemian missionary must always hold a place in the chronicle ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... composite section of society which embraces the neck of music, poetry, and the drama. She was a success, but secretly she felt that she did not belong to it, nor, in truth, did Fiorsen, who was much too genuine a bohemian, and artist, and mocked at the Gallants and even the Roseks of this life, as he mocked at Winton, Aunt Rosamund, and their world. Life with him had certainly one effect on Gyp; it made her feel less and less ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... I had hired a Bohemian as my servant[303] while I remained in London, and being much pleased with him, I asked Dr. Johnson whether his being a Roman Catholick should prevent my taking him with me to Scotland. JOHNSON. 'Why no, Sir, if he ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... the subject of the strife, they seldom appear to advantage in the poems which chronicle it, or in the verses devoted to the praise of heroes. Remove the "Iliad," the "Nibelungenlied," some English, Spanish, and Northern ballads, two or three Old-Bohemian, the war-songs composed by Ziska, and one or two Romaic, from the field of investigation, and one is astonished at the scanty gleaning of battle-poetry, camp-songs, and rhymes that have been scattered in the wake of great campaigns, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... his work or how threadbare his clothes—if he was a worker; if he really tried to express beauty, all of his eccentricities were pardoned and his pot-boiling granted absolution. But the would-be Bohemian, or the man in search of a thrill, or if in any manner the party on probation suggested that Madame Siron was not a perfect cook and Monsieur Siron was not a genuine grand duke in disguise, he was interviewed by Bailley Bodmer, the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... London police such as it was, and indirectly of that of the whole kingdom. His temper was in some ways as aristocratic as his birth: but though Horace Walpole's accounts of his fancy for low company are obviously exaggerated, there is no doubt that he was a good deal of what has since been called a "Bohemian." His experience of variety in scene was much wider than Richardson's, although after he came home from Leyden (where he went to study law) it was chiefly confined to London and the south of England (especially Bath, Dorsetshire, where he lived for a time, and the Western Circuit), ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury



Words linked to "Bohemian" :   bohemia, gitana, European, gypsy, recusant, Czech Republic, Bohemian waxwing, Romani, gipsy



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