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Buoyant   Listen
adjective
Buoyant  adj.  
1.
Having the quality of rising or floating in a fluid; tending to rise or float; as, iron is buoyant in mercury. "Buoyant on the flood."
2.
Bearing up, as a fluid; sustaining another body by being specifically heavier. "The water under me was buoyant."
3.
Light-hearted; vivacious; cheerful; as, a buoyant disposition; buoyant spirits.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Buoyant" Quotes from Famous Books



... the importance of the western trade and the necessity of consolidation. Vanderbilt was a man of vision, a man who combined magnitude of plan with the vigorous grasp of the practical details necessary for the realization of his ambitions. He was buoyant, energetic, confident, ambitious, determined, despotic. Unhampered by modern conceptions of public duty, undeterred by the hostility of powerful opponents, with eyes fixed upon the combination and control of ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... did not wish to go. Standing with her pretty brows knit, and one heel deep in the soft ground into which she had stamped it, she heard approaching footsteps, and turning, saw the bishop. He came forward with a buoyant step. ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton

... locked it up in a drawer. Alicia did not speculate about it, and the whole soul of it was tangled now in a speculation. There had been a time filled with the knowledge and the joy of this new depth in her like a buoyant sea, and she had been content to float in it, imagining desirable things. Stanhope's waiting contract made a limit to the time—a limit she brought up against without distress or shock, but with a kind of recognising thrill in contact at last with the necessity ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... Yet Nature, ever buoyant, ever young, If let alone, will sing as erst she sung; The course of circumstance gives back again The Picturesque, erewhile pursued in vain; Shows us the fount of Romance is not wasted— The lights and ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller

... guests of "Wake Robin" were driven indoors. Olga, when she wasn't playing auction, wandered from window to window, looking out at the dreary skies, venting her ennui on anyone within earshot. Archie Westcott, who was losing more money than he could afford to lose, now lacked the buoyant spirits which carried him so blithely along the crest of the social wave and scowled gloomily at his cards which persisted in favoring his opponents. Crosby Downs, whose waistband had again reached its fullest tension, sought the tall grasses of the smoking-room ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs

... ——, Esq. of —— Hall, Worcestershire, was formally announced in the daily Journals, and the unexpected claims of William being acknowledged, he succeeded to a very fine property and estate, and died as much respected in a good old age as he was beloved in his buoyant childhood, when the gossips and the maidens of Poole agreed that the orphan boy promised to be a "nice young man."—"And not word of a lie in it," said Dick Hart, as he finished his story, his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 535, Saturday, February 25, 1832. • Various

... is said that fools regard fulfillment of desire in heavenly happiness as the best thing; for although they have their 'reward in the top of heaven, yet, when the elevation caused by their good works ends, as it will end, when the buoyant power of good works is exhausted, then they drop down to earth again. Hence, to worship the creator as the [a]tm[a] is indeed productive of temporary pleasure, but no more. "If a man worship another divinity, devat[a], with the idea that he and the god are different, ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... to the house appointed for all living.' Even with all such remembrances brought home to him by means to which we are not likely to resort, the good priest and martyr Robert Southwell tells us how hard he found it, while in buoyant life, to rightly consider his end. But in perfect cheerfulness and healthfulness of spirit, the human being who knows (so far as man can know) where he is to rest at last, may oftentimes visit that peaceful spot. It will do him ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... defense are of two kinds—buoyant and ground. The buoyant are usually spherical, and contain from 400 to 500 pounds of explosive. They bring the charge near to the ship's bottom, but are difficult to manage in a tideway, and can be easily found by dragging. The ground mines can be made of any size and are not easily found by dragging, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various

... society of scholarly men, having an innate bent to exactitude, and with a ready tongue docile to the curb, she stepped into the world armed to be a match for it. She cut her way through the accustomed troops of adorers, like what you will that is buoyant and swims gallantly. Her quality of the philosophical humour carried her easily over the shoals or the deeps in the way of a woman claiming her right to an independent judgement upon the minor rules of conduct, as well as upon matters of the mind. An illustrious foreigner, en tete-a-tete ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... years of age, and in the full maturity of manly beauty, while his gracious manners and captivating speech made him the favorite of the people, as well as of the old nobility. The season was full of charms, and the spirits of all classes were buoyant with hope. Every thing conspired to give a glow to the popular enthusiasm. A long line of illustrious monarchs was restored. The hateful fires of religious fanaticism were apparently extinguished. An accomplished sovereign, disciplined in the school of adversity, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... work was done. The black boy's ambitions that had only needed an encouraging word had awakened into buoyant life. He looked his destiny squarely in the face, and saw that the great world outside beckoned to him. From that time his dreams were eagle-winged. The farm looked narrower to him, the cabin meaner, and the clods were harder to his feet. He learned to hate the ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... wealth alone could procure, and the kindly influences of loving associates were brought to bear to speedily hasten the restoration of their Princess to her former health and spirits. Health was slowly but surely gaining the ascendency, but the spirits of heart and mind were not of that buoyant, external ...
— Within the Temple of Isis • Belle M. Wagner

... in agony when man weeps." Absurd! her tears have relieved her agony. Like the elastic and pliable willow, she has yielded to the storm of grief, and her buoyant spirit rises comparatively uninjured from ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames

... sufficiently I took him to see his former companion. He found her in a pleasant home, looking buoyant and happy. All that was demoniac had vanished from her face. Surprised, he burst into tears as he beheld her. "Weep not," said she, "for I am happy now. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn

... of course, been puzzling in my mind as to whether he had succeeded or not, though from his cheerful appearance and buoyant talk, it was tolerably clear to me that all was well with him. I was, however, surprised when, as we walked along a quiet, curving avenue, with great houses standing in their own grounds upon either side, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... sounds, with all that could captivate the senses and exalt imagination. This twofold life of meanness and magnificence so wrought upon her nature as to develop almost two individualities. The one hard, stern, realistic, even to grudgingness; the other gay, buoyant, enthusiastic, and ardent; and they who only saw her of an evening in all the exultation of her flattered beauty, followed about by a train of admiring worshippers, addressed in all that exaggeration of language Italy sanctions, pampered by caresses, and honoured by homage on ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... powerless to control, she was anxious not to distress in any way, not to seem to be despising those humbler mortals over whom that current flowed, by whom it was everywhere arrested. I can see again to-day, above her mauve scarf, silky and buoyant, the gentle astonishment in her eyes, to which she had added, without daring to address it to anyone in particular, but so that everyone might enjoy his share of it, the almost timid smile of a sovereign lady who seems to be making an apology for ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... are so young, so boyish, so buoyant, Reginald. What would your future constituents have said had they seen you creeping up the ivy? They are a grave people who take themselves seriously. Egad, this would be a lovely story for one of those prying society papers. 'The Philanthropist and the Picture.' ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White

... sports, our studies, and our souls were one: Together we impell'd the flying ball, Together waited in our tutor's hall; Together join'd in cricket's manly toil, Or shar'd the produce of the river's spoil; 260 Or plunging from the green declining shore, Our pliant limbs the buoyant billows bore: [ix] In every element, unchang'd, the same, All, all that brothers should ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... against Serbia, which, it felt sure, would be a mere military parade. Not for a single night were Count Berchtold's slumbers disturbed by the vision of the Russian peril. He is, indeed, at all times a buoyant soul, who can happily mingle the distractions of a life of pleasure with the heavy responsibilities of power. His unvarying confidence was shared by the German Ambassador, his most trusted mentor. We can hardly suppose that the Austrian ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... home of a friend. He never had seen her looking so beautiful, so full of the joy of living. Her friendly, sparkling smile sent a momentary pang of shame into his calloused heart, but it passed with the buoyant justification of his decision to do nothing in the end that might mar his ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon

... that the lockers remained tightly closed when the boat capsized, nothing had been lost out of them, and they had also served to make the gig more buoyant. Practically nothing was missing from the boat save the personal belongings of Bob and the others—their clothing in the valises, the mast which had floated away, and some of the captain's papers relating to ...
— Bob the Castaway • Frank V. Webster

... Goldsmith was in his teens, he left home for Edgeworthstown, riding a good horse, borrowed from a friend, and in high glee, if money braces the manly heart. With a golden guinea in his purse, he was as proud as wealth untold can make a buoyant spirit, in the days when life is very bright and happiness is everywhere. He loitered on the journey. The horse nigh slept, whilst the rider mooned on in meditative peace, and a lad's romantic building ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland

... sheered, and was thrown violently upon her broadside in the midst of it, and had it not been for the shores lashed to each mast, she must inevitably have capsized. The whaleboat fared better; being lighter she was the sooner afloat, and besides her buoyant bow was the better able to receive and resist the shock. When the tide slacked we returned to the deep water off Escape Point, and spent the remainder of the night in quiet, I would fain hope, so far as most of us were concerned, not without ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... as we could tell from our brief scrutiny a great change had come over the dwellers in southern Belgium. In August they had been buoyant and confident of the ultimate outcome and very proud of the behavior of their little army. Even when the Germans burst through the frontier defenses and descended on them in innumerable swarms they were, for the most ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... rehearsed, on her way down-stairs, even to the chair in the bow window which she indicated, having seated herself, for him to sit down in. She had up to that point an extraordinarily buoyant sense of self-possession. This left her for one panicky instant when she felt him looking at her a little incredulously as if, once more, he wondered whether she were ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster

... and tried to lasso him in dark corners. And now he was adrift among them, under notorious circumstances of superlative villainy, at last dragged to light; and yet he blandly smiled, politely offered his cigar-holder to a perfect stranger, and laughed and chatted to right and left, as if springy, buoyant, and elastic, with an angelic conscience, and sure of kind friends wherever he went, both in this life and the ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville

... the restaurant Laurie had selected he chatted to his companion in his buoyant, irresponsible fashion, but he had put through the details of the episode with tact and delicacy. He knew that in front of a club two doors away from the studio building a short line of taxicabs was always waiting, with the vast patience of their kind. A gesture brought one of these to the ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... day. He forced her to use up all of the strength that she possessed each day so that she would drop with exhaustion at night. To me he left most of the comforting of Nell—and Harriet. Like all women of buoyant and shallow nature, Nell soon began to rebound from her tragedy and it was hard to keep Billy within decorous bounds in his comforting of her. It would have been impossible to have done it at all with the former Billy, but the quiet, steady light that shone in his honest eyes ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... as she might to any number of her more intimate acquaintances. Even the very silence was magnetic. Further utterance would dispel the charm. That she would enlist in his service she knew as well as she knew her own existence, but that he should arouse so keen an interest in her, so buoyant an attitude, so secure an assurance, amazed her and filled her with awe. She had never before experienced quite the same sensation that now dismayed her nor had any one ever brought home to her her worth as did this young soldier. Yes she would help ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett

... ... The sunshine in the happy glens is fair, And by the sea, and in the brakes The grass is cool, the sea-side air Buoyant and fresh. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... evening meal is eaten and the things are cleared away, then we sit around repeatin' cares and triumphs of the day; and the high resounding rafter echoes to our harmless jokes, to our buoyant peals of laughter, while tired mother sits and smokes. Thus her jaded mind relaxes in an atmosphere so gay, and she thinks no more of taxes or of bills that she must pay; smiles are soon her face adorning, in our nets of love enmeshed, ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason

... tread of quick-moving feet, once more John Barty feinted cunningly—once more his fist shot out, but this time it missed its mark, for, ducking the blow, Barnabas smacked home two lightning blows on his father's ribs and danced away again light and buoyant as a cork. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... imagination kept her buoyant. Hope lured her on with renewed promises from city to city. At last, on her homeward journey, he whispered the magic name of Monte Carlo, and her heart was aflutter in anticipation ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... and started for Oakville, slightly crestfallen but still confident. In the open air Esther's fears gradually subsided, and, invigorated by the morning and the gallop, we reached our destination after our night's adventure with hopes buoyant and colors flying. ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams

... affected by the citizens of London, but smiths' and armourers' work entailed a freer use of it than less grimy trades; and a bath and Sunday garments made Stephen more like himself, though still he felt so weary and depressed that he missed the buoyant joy of release to which ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge

... religion, and rarely suggests to him the supreme test of the value of our faith as contrasted with his own. The glories of our heaven do not appeal to the stolid, weary, transmigration-ridden soul of the Hindu as they do to the youthful, hopeful, buoyant soul of the Christian. And this is a fact which the missionary would do well to keep in mind at ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... thought Emerson Mead unaccountably despondent about the probable outcome of his trial, and at times even indifferent to his fate. He wondered much why this man, formerly of such buoyant and determined nature, should suddenly collapse, in this weak-kneed fashion, lose all confidence in himself, and seem to care so little what happened to him. The lawyer finally decided that it was all on account of his client's honesty and uprightness of character, which would not ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... fertile of varied independences: he complained that "the most galling of yokes is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor," the obligation of thinking as he thinks. He had a keen, almost reckless wit and delicious buoyant humor, whose utterances never pall by repetition; few authors so abound in tenaciously quotable phrases and passages of humorous intellectuality. What is rarely found in connection with much humor, he had a sensitive dreaminess of nature, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... unknown guest, met his look, as he offered her, with marked attention, one of the little civilities of the table; and the heart of the girl, which had begun to throb with violence, regained a pulsation as tempered as youth, health, and buoyant spirits could allow. While yet seated at the table, Caesar entered, and laying a small parcel in silence by the side of his master, modestly retired behind his chair, where, placing one hand on its back, he continued in an attitude half ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... our beautiful rich black soil averages ten feet in depth, but I think this understates the case—at least our beautiful black dirt roads seem to be deeper than that in the spring. What we need in the spring in Illinois are locks and harbor lights, and the man who invents an automobile buoyant enough to float on its stomach and paddle its way swiftly to and fro on the heaving bosom of our April roads will be ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... story, will best describe the heroine: A TOAST: "To the bravest comrade in misfortune, the sweetest companion in peace and at all times the most courageous of women."—Barbara Winslow. "A romantic story, buoyant, eventful, and in matters of love exactly what the heart could desire."—New ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz

... good armour in the best of fights, and secure, if possible, the comforts of his creed for coming generations of ecclesiastical dignitaries. Such a work required no ordinary vigour; and the archdeacon was, therefore, extraordinarily vigorous. It demanded a buoyant courage, and a heart happy in its toil; and the archdeacon's heart was happy, and ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope

... she received him so? She had gone too far—much too far. But, somehow, she had not been able to bear it—that buoyant, confident air, that certainty of his welcome. No! She would show him that she was not his chattel, to be taken or left on his own terms. The, careless good-humor of his blue eyes was too much, after those days she ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... reputation, by pressing into the palace and claiming the right of speech with her? Rasher deeds were not seldom done under the promptings of desperation. Trembling beneath the sway of such imaginings, each footfall that resounded in the hall seemed like the light and buoyant step of him who had trodden with her the sands of Ostia—each figure that passed by bore, for the instant, the outline of his form—even at the open window the well-known face seemed to peer in at ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... graphically before my eyes as in a kaleidoscope; all the horrors and carnage of the battle, the misery of my maimed comrades, who only yesterday had answered the battle-cry full of vigour and youth, the pathos of the dead who, cut down in the prime of their life and buoyant health, lay yonder on the veldt, far away from wives and daughters and friends for ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... supervision of human life, or any hereafter for man; the dominion over all existence of purely material law,—this seems to us to destroy man's dearest faith and hope. This is the teaching of Lucretius, yet on this road he marches with a step so firm and buoyant, an eye so awake to all beauty and grandeur, a spirit so elate, that as we read we catch the energy and elation. The reading of the riddle is this: the religion against which Lucretius made his attack was not the soaring idealism of Plato, nor ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... 'Naturally buoyant spirits, the gift of a merry heart, are a great help; for oftentimes a man may have to spend months without any white man within hundreds of miles, and it is very depressing to live alone in the midst of heathenism. But there must be many many ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... apparatus discharging under normal conditions. The heavy matter, sand, stones, etc., falls to the bottom into a receptacle which can be lifted out from time to time and emptied. The lighter buoyant matters, straw, vegetable debris, paper, etc., remain at the surface, and are retained by the filter; the water passing through the holes in the sheet iron rushes in a filtered condition through the annular ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... the shaded hillside streets A trace of old-time welcome greets The passer-by who has a flare For scenes of old. No longer there A buoyant Georgetown stands alone, The Federal City having grown Until their boundaries overlap; So that, deleted from the map, Though once the Federal City's host, Georgetown ...
— A Portrait of Old George Town • Grace Dunlop Ecker

... temperament or idiosyncracy. Unconsciously he described himself, to a T, in Nicholas Nickleby. "There's genteel comedy in your walk and manner, juvenile tragedy in your eye, and touch-and-go farce in your la'ugh," might have been applied to himself in his buoyant youth quite as readily and directly as to Nicholas. The author, rather than the hero of Nickleby, seems, in that happy utterance of the theatrical manager, to have been photographed. It cannot but now be apparent that, as an unpremeditated preliminary to Dickens's ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... stretching his buoyant body on the shelflike berth, his soles firmly against one wall, his head touching another, and wondered how a man could sleep in that bunk who was over six feet one. The Swastika had come from the railroad ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... to stand a great way off and listen to my own shrieks, there came to me a moment of calm. I knew that my one tenuous thread of hope lay in launching myself into that wild flood that was tearing through into the cove. I was not a strong swimmer, but a buoyant one. I might find refuge on some half-submerged rock on the shores of the cove—at least I should perish in the open, in the sunlight, not trapped like a desperate rat. And I began to fight my way toward ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... returned home and well-pleased and delighted. Then that monarch, the slayer of his enemies, with a delighted heart, placed heaps of gold on diverse spots, and distributing the immense wealth to the Brahmanas, he looked glorious like Kuvera, the god of wealth. And with a buoyant heart, the king filled his treasury with different kinds of wealth, and with the permission of his spiritual preceptor, he returned (to his kingdom) and continued to rule the entire realm extending to the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... in this volume, as in all of Miss Sinclair's other productions, the same lively intellect, the same buoyant good humour, the same easy and vigorous style, the same happy talent for observation and description, the same warfare against the fashionable follies of the day, and the same assiduity in inculcating the lessons of morality and ...
— The Bracelets • Maria Edgeworth

... fallen in the night, and the river was buoyant, and the grass sparkled, the mountains were of sapphire blue, and above the shallows clouds of flies and gnats were fluttering, waterlilies were blossoming where the water was still, and in the marshes buffaloes pushed their dark forms ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... did he not bring! His graceful form and motion were in my mind's eye all day. When you have seen a fox loping along in that way, you have seen the poetry there is in the canine tribe. It is to the eye what a flowing measure is to the mind, so easy, so buoyant; the furry creature drifting along like a large red thistledown, or like a plume borne by the wind. It is something to remember with pleasure, that a muskrat sought my door one December night when a cold wave was swooping down upon us. Was ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... opprest. Nor, indeed, must the body alone be supported, but the mind and the soul much more; for these also, unless you drop oil on them as on a lamp, are extinguished by old age. And our bodies, indeed, by weariness and exercise, become opprest; but our minds are rendered buoyant by exercise. For as to those of whom Caecilius speaks, "foolish old men," fit characters for comedy, by these he denotes the credulous, the forgetful, the dissolute, which are the faults not of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume II (of X) - Rome • Various

... at his appearance. The skin seemed tightly drawn about his cheeks, and he was very white. As though in contradiction to his ill-looks, however, his eyes were unusually brilliant and clear, and his manner almost buoyant. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... roll'd on, and changeless found Those their bright rise had lighted to such joys As rarely they beheld throughout their round; And these were not of the vain kind which cloys, For theirs were buoyant spirits, never bound By the mere senses; and that which destroys Most love, possession, unto them appear'd A thing which each ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... our departure came. The concourse of birds setting out on their annual journeys was immense, and oh, what joy it was to soar aloft on buoyant pinion high up in the blue sky, over housetops and tops of trees, skimming along above rushing waters or tranquil streams in quiet meadows. Mere existence was a keen delight. The sense of freedom, of lightness, of airiness, was gloriously exhilarating, ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson

... smiled mournfully. His enthusiasm was not, in reality, less than that of his companion. But he had none of the gaiety, and little of the buoyant spirit, which enabled Guy Muschamp to make himself, at all times and seasons, a favourite in castle hall and lady's bower. 'I fear me, brave Guy,' said Walter, after a brief silence, 'that the caliph is too great a potentate to be dealt with as you would wish. But, come what may, I ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar

... and buoyant mood, Peter joggled the key in the lock of his stateroom door, slipped in, and was before long dreaming of a cottage built for two, of springtime in California, albeit snoring almost loud enough to drown out the throb of the Persian Gulf's old but ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts

... clandestine raids and open wars, it might be thought that the little nation of New France had vent enough for the buoyant energy of its youth. While the population of the English colonies was nearing the million mark, New France had not 60,000 inhabitants by 1759. Yet what had the little nation, whose mainspring was at Quebec, accomplished? Look at ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... a certain point before we start for Naples.' Besides the mantle, Tischbein was doing the Campagna. I remember that some years ago an acquaintance of mine, a painter who was neither successful nor talented, but always buoyant, told me he was starting for Italy next day. 'I am going,' he said, 'to paint the Campagna. The Campagna WANTS painting.' Tischbein was evidently giving it a good dose of what it wanted. 'It takes no little time,' writes Goethe to Frau von Stein, 'merely to cover so large ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm

... the buoyant soul, Unconscious ranges, fancy free, Draining the sweets of pleasure's bowl, And thinking all as blest ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent

... answer to Rosalie's question lay in the fact that his eyes had never been so keen, his face so alive, or his step so buoyant as in this week of double duty. His mind was more hopeful than it had ever been since the day he awoke with memory restored in the silence of a ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... fists clenched and arms tense. The hot, dark countenance receded, became an alert hostility, watching its chance. Denton for one instant felt confident, and strangely buoyant and serene. His heart beat quickly. He felt his body alive, and glowing ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... a little, and he laughed. "That little rat! Has she been talking? It's all right if it's only to you, but Madge will have to cork her up." Then anxiety and unhappiness seized Dick's buoyant soul again. "Bishop, let me talk to you, will you please? I'm knocked up about this, for there's never been trouble between my father and me before, and I can't give in. I know I'm right—I'd be a cad to give in, and I wouldn't if ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... age of Louis XIV, or the age of Lorenzo, the Magnificent; time is too short and democracy too rigid for such splendors; but the nearest equivalent to one was the "age," let us call it that, of Theodore Roosevelt. There was the central figure—an age must have a central figure—a buoyant personality with a Renaissance zest for life, and a Renaissance curiosity about all things known, and unknown, and a boundless capacity for vitalizing everyone and everything with which he came ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous

... of foam fell from the bit upon the point of a satiny shoulder, and the dusky face of the coachman leaned forward at once over the hands taking a fresh grip of the reins. It was a long dark-green landau, having a dignified and buoyant motion between the sharply curved C-springs, and a sort of strictly official majesty in its supreme elegance. It seemed more roomy than is usual, its horses seemed slightly bigger, the appointments a shade more perfect, the servants ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad

... caprice, struck the taste of the Venetians, and without emancipating himself from the tendencies of the time, contrives to introduce a fresh accent. All round him was a weak and self-indulgent world, but within himself he possessed a fund of buoyant and inexhaustible energy. He evokes a throng of personages on the ceilings of the churches and palaces confided to his fancy. His creations range from mythology to religion, from the sublime to the grotesque. All Olympia appears upon his ample and luminous spaces. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... bade him welcome, and we twain Discussed with buoyant hearts The various things that appertain To bibliomaniac arts. "Since you are fresh from t'other side, Pray, tell me of that host That treasured books before they died," Says I ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... with terror. Stahl and the Bishop steered the boat and held their breaths. It looked like rushing into the jaws of death, but the life-boat mounted the big waves one after another, sometimes shuddering with the strain, but buoyant and stiff. The danger past, the crew praised Allah and the good boat; and they, as well as Stahl who had behaved so well at the time of danger, fell into a fit of ague from the nervous shock. We knew on the top of the hill that a fearful storm was raging, ...
— Sketches of Our Life at Sarawak • Harriette McDougall

... great globe. All the warmth from cooking and heating; the heat and smoke from our pipes and cigars; yea, even the animal heat which radiates from our bodies, all subserve the one great purpose and function—keeping up the temperature and buoyant effort of the globe. Do you begin to catch on?" fairly shouted ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman

... healed, for there dwelt in the house One whose office it is to bind up the broken-hearted. It was not that she did not grieve, or that no void cried out again and again to be filled. But she learned a paradox as the days went on: of an inexplicable peace beneath the sharpest pain, and of a buoyant joy that would not be held down by sorrow. Hubert looked on, making mental notes as to what had happened, ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock

... conceived, not as of a naturally brutish and depraved disposition,—a view taken by many commentators, with apparently little knowledge of human nature, and no recollection of their own youthful impulses,—but rather as a buoyant, restless youth, tired of the monotony of home, and anxious to see what lay beyond the narrow confines of his father's farm, going forth in the confidence of his own simplicity and ardor, and led gradually away into follies and sins which at the outset would ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... humor; and, if his experience had been most unfortunate, there was in him an ability to appreciate the ludicrousness of its changeful situations. Indeed, one could but conclude that originally he must have been of a buoyant, not to say sanguine disposition; and, if one could but prevail upon him to narrate the incidents of his life, they would be found ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... buoyant, on this bright June morning go I also to reap my harvest,—pursuing a sweet more delectable than sugar, fruit more savory than berries, and game for another palate than that ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... tell me that I possessed a power that inflamed every vein, that heated all the blood in my system, that filled, till they seemed buoyant, every cell of my brain? As much need as to tell the expectant mother she has a ...
— To-morrow? • Victoria Cross

... eunuch that the one was a pillow, and the other the head of an animal. Having committed the explanation to memory and accepted a cup of tea, the eunuch took his departure; and old lady Chia, noticing in what buoyant spirits Yuean Ch'un was, felt herself so much the more elated, that issuing forthwith directions to devise, with every despatch, a small but ingenious lantern of fine texture in the shape of a screen, and put it in the Hall, she bade each of her grandchildren secretly ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... the purity of the air that one seems to be taking in at every breath the veritable elixir of life. Your spirits are buoyant, and all nature seems to be smiling and gay. As we journeyed we overtook the scouts, who were returning to apprise us of the exact location of the buffaloes. After making their report, they would wheel into line and sweep on ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman

... outsoars the joyful bird, Swift on the weary road his footfall comes; The dusty air that by his stride is stirred Beats with a buoyant march of fairy drums. "Awake, O Earth! thine ancient slumber break; To the new ...
— Poems: New and Old • Henry Newbolt

... the sources of General Garfield's success as an orator that he was very emotional and sentimental. He happily carried with him amid all struggles and disappointments, as well as successes in the making of a career, the buoyant, hopeful, companionable, and affectionate interests which characterize the ambitious senior who has just left college to take his plunge into the ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... forward against the desk, her chin in her hand, looked thoughtfully out of the window. Then after a pause she answered, "Glad and thankful—a deep quiet sort of gladness like a bottomless well, and a queer, uplifted buoyant feeling as if I had been given wings, and could attempt anything. There's nothing in the world," she added slowly, as if talking to herself, "quite so sweet as the realization of one's ambitions. I was almost ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston

... broke her crook in an excess of indignation. But it was too much to bear. She fell upon the bank, and uttered a plaintive cry. At that cry—at sight of his poor Daphne fainting upon the grass, he rushed like a madman across the stream, buoyant with love and despair. He ran to his insensate shepherdess, regardless of the exclamations of the fair Clotilde, and raised ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various

... a clear sanity, for the brooding mists had vanished from his spirit. And even as he heard and felt the throb of mighty engines that came to him from afar, and considered what mastery over the deeps they represented, the thought occurred to him that he, too, was master of the boundless water, buoyant at his will. An exaltation sprang up in him as he realised throughout all his fibre its sensuous vastness, ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... preparing his escape; only for him it passed more slowly. Unlike other men, who enter with ardor upon a perilous resolution and grow cold as the moment of execution approaches, the Duc de Beaufort, whose buoyant courage had become a proverb, seemed to push time before him and sought most eagerly to hasten the hour of action. In his escape alone, apart from his plans for the future, which, it must be admitted, were for the present sufficiently vague and uncertain, there was a beginning of vengeance ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... crossed the Alps we do not know. But Stanislaus saw first from afar the white peaks, with their everlasting snows, shining in the sun. Then he went up and up, into cooler and rarer air, where one's lungs expand and one's step is light and buoyant, but where one gets tired more easily than in the plains. High up in the passes he felt the cold of Winter, although it was as yet ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.

... tail, to Beau, the Blenheim with blue ribbons round his neck; all things loved her, and she loved all things. It seemed doubtful at that time whether she would ever have sufficient steadiness and strength of character. Her beauty and her character appeared so essentially womanlike—soft yet lively, buoyant yet caressing—that you could scarcely place in her that moral dependence that you might in a character less amiable but less yieldingly feminine. Time, however, and circumstance, which alter and harden, were to decide whether the inward ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... say?—we must simply wait and see. But it would surprise me very much. The worst is over. In such cases, if women mean to commit some act of madness, they do it in the first moment. The countess has her mother with her, she has three children, she has, from all I hear, an extremely buoyant nature, her despair will soon calm down. If not, it is always open to you to return in a year's time and do the prodigal son, and have the ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... and Blanche lay down without removing her outside garments, in the same bed in which she had slept that first night in this wild land—that beautiful, buoyant spring night. How far away ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland

... Thorndyke declared afterward that it was over ten thousand feet. When the elevator stopped Captain Tradmos led them out, and both of the captives were conscious of breathing the purest, most invigorating air they had ever inhaled. Instantly their strength returned, and they felt remarkably buoyant as they were led along over another pavement ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben

... serve her, and that anything beyond that—any attempt to win her confidence, to enter into her thoughts, or make her understand my feelings and aspirations—was regarded as pure presumption on my part. The result was that I was less happy than I had been before knowing her: my naturally buoyant and hopeful temper became tinged with melancholy, and that vision of exquisite bliss in the future, which had floated before me, luring me on, now began to look pale, and to seem ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson

... writes his biographer, "a brother poet, a true son of nature and genius, hardly conscious of his powers.... As yet, his naturally kind and simple character had not been exposed to any of the dangerous flatteries of the world; his heart was pure; his enthusiasm buoyant as that of a happy child; and well as Scott knew that reflection, sagacity, wit and wisdom, were scattered abundantly among the humblest rangers of these pastoral solitudes, there was here a depth and ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... see the boats put out towards the wreck, than they left the vessel, though not before they had set fire to her, thus performing an act which was of great service to the crew of the Alceste; for by burning her upperworks and decks, everything buoyant could float up from below and be more easily laid hold of. The ship continued to burn during the night, and the flames, as they darted from her sides, shed a ruddy glare upon the wild scenery around, and breaking through the shade of the thick and lofty trees ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly

... I should not bang it to square-leg, a stroke which has become fashionable since my time, but in those old days, you did not often see it in first-class Cricket. It was rather regarded as "an agrarian outrage." Foreigners and ladies would find Cricket a more buoyant diversion if all the world, and especially LEWIS HALL and SHREWSBURY, played on my principles. Innings would not last so long. Not so many matches would be drawn. The ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, February 27, 1892 • Various

... over the seas in all their fury? Would ye spare the lives of those who toil for you? Let your ships he harder than the rocks, swifter than the message-bird, more buoyant than the swan, and as enduring as ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)

... affectionate, and sympathetic disposition, she could not feel at ease when another was suffering, and particularly when that other was one standing so high in her estimation as Algernon Reynolds. Naturally, too, possessing light and buoyant spirits—fond of gaiety where all were gay—she exhibited on the present occasion the effect of two strong but counteracting passions. Her features, if we may be allowed the comparison, were like the noon-day heavens, when filled with the broken clouds of ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett

... with a joy that cannot be described; what it was to feel themselves going forwards on a buoyant craft again, instead of on the semi-wreck it was before, none but a seaman feels, and few of them ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... foe, the Iroquois or Five Nations, and a flotilla of canoes from the Huron country, bringing furs to one of the trading- posts on the St Lawrence, was an annual event. The Recollets, therefore, felt confident of a friendly reception among the Hurons; and it was with buoyant hopes that Le Caron girded himself for the ...
— The Jesuit Missions: - A Chronicle of the Cross in the Wilderness • Thomas Guthrie Marquis

... Poltavo went on gaily. His heart was light and his spirits as buoyant as ever they had been in his life. All the prospects which this envelope, now bulging in his pocket, promised, rose ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace

... Providence, Septimius?" asked Rose, a feeling of solemnity coming over her cheerful and buoyant nature. Then she burst out a-laughing. "How grave he looks, Robert; as if he had lived two or three lives already, and knew all about the value of it. But I think it was worth while to be born, if only for the sake of one such ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... conscientious objector, are all touched lightly, tactfully, and with a kindly humour that saves the book from its very obvious danger of becoming pedantic. In his brief preface Mr. CHAPMAN has crystallised very happily into a couple of words his ideal for the British attitude towards the War—buoyant sternness. It is the reflection of that quality in its pages that gives this little ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various

... lightly forward, and as the wind struck the face of Bull Hunter he suddenly rejoiced. This was what he had dreamed of, to be carried thus lightly, easily. The weight that had crushed other horses was nothing to Diablo. It made him feel buoyant. He became tinglingly alert. On the back of Diablo not a horse of the mountains could overtake him if he fled; and not a man of the mountains could escape him if he pursued on ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... think that "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" will be looked upon, fifty or a hundred years from now, as the picture of buoyant, dramatic, human American life. I feel, deep in my own heart, pretty sure that they will be. They won't be looked on then as the work of a "humorist" any more than we think of Shakespeare as a humorist now. I don't mean ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... four hundred men, it was slowly forced along its way. Having arrived at the Neva, it was floated down the river by what are called camels, that is immense floating fabrics constructed with air chambers so as to render them very buoyant. ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... paler, that was all, but the same enchanting Doris, was the facile inspiration of the returned lover. And we walked down the platform talking, my talk full of gentle reproof—why had she waited up? There was a reason.... My hopes, till now buoyant as corks, began to sink. "She is going to tell me that I cannot come to her hotel. Why did I send that telegram from Lyons?" Had it not been for that telegram I could have gone straight to her hotel. It was just the telegram ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore

... his boots and then felt for the little steps in the rock. The shade of the cliff above obscured the point he wanted to gain, but he could see dimly a few feet before him. What he had attempted with care he now went at with surpassing lightness. Buoyant, rapid, sure, he attained the corner of wall and slipped around it. Here he could not see a hand before his face, so he groped along, found a little flat space, and there removed the saddle-bags. The lasso he took back with him to the corner and looped ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... company which has advertised for a girl to feed a Gordon press. I have never heard of a Gordon press, but I make up my mind not to leave the label company without the promise of a job for the very next day. The stairway is dingy and irregular. My spirits are not buoyant as I open a swinging door and enter a room with a cage in the middle, where a lady cashier, dressed in a red silk waist, sits on a high stool overlooking the office. Three portly men, fat, well nourished, evidently of ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst

... bloom! When the heart is withered, do the old love to remember how it once was fresh and beat with warm emotions? When the spirits are languid and weary, do we like to think how bright they were in other days, the hope how buoyant, the sympathies how ready, the enjoyment of life how keen and eager? So they fall—the buds of prime, the roses of beauty, the florid harvests of summer,—fall and wither, and the naked ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... smoke bush. She would be safe with Philip always, but safety had no special charm for one of her age, who had never been in peril. Mark's superior knowledge of the world, moreover, his careless, buoyant manner of carrying himself, his gay, boyish audacity, all had a very distinct ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin

... Vseslavitch and her brother had changed—Paul noticed that immediately. Now that with Boris's death the cause of their former disquiet had been removed forever they were two entirely different persons. It made Paul's heart glad to hear the buoyant note in Natalie's voice as she talked with them gaily. And his own spirits rose as well, for now, he thought, the obstacle to his suit had ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous

... fortnight, now, since Henry's last letter. He wished that Henry would write oftener. He told himself that one of Henry's impulsive, buoyant letters would furnish the only efficacious antidote to Mirabelle. And he needed an antidote, and a powerful one, for during the past two weeks Mirabelle had been surpassing herself. That is, if one can surpass ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... on this animated liquid lustre, a buoyant delight seemed infused into my senses; all terrors conceived before were annulled; the phantoms, whose armies had filled the wide spaces in front, were forgotten; the crash of the forest behind was unheard. In the reflection ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... comes of a want of purpose. She wanted a companion and she wanted an object. Presently she met a young man who looked at her intently as they approached each other, and as he looked his face brightened. Beth's pulse quickened pleasurably and her colour rose. Her steps became buoyant. She held up her head and glowed with animation, but was unaware of the source of this sudden happy stimulant, nor did she try to discover it. She was living her experiences then, by-and-by she would reflect upon them, then inevitably ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... been accustomed to see at Quito; and in the harbour were a number of vessels—large ships and small ones, and curious rafts, on which the natives were sailing or paddling about, called balsas. They were made of light balsa wood, which is very buoyant. They were of all sizes, and some had come in from a considerable distance along the coast. Then my father accompanied us on board a big ship, and took an affectionate leave of my mother and sister and ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston

... members were in their intercourse with one another. They had their enthusiasms, but they had also their jests. Their humour was not perhaps the boisterous fun of William Morris and Rossetti, but it was lively and buoyant enough to banish all suspicion of priggishness. Just because their enthusiasm was for the best in literature and art, Tennyson was quickly at home among them. Already he had learnt at home to love Shakespeare and Milton, Coleridge and Keats, and no effort was required, in this circle of ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... allowed to the author, would yield a net profit of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to its publishers. Huck Finn would yield fifty thousand dollars more. The sales of his other books had considerably increased. Certainly, at fifty, Mark Twain's fortunes were at flood-tide; buoyant and jubilant, he was floating on the topmost wave. If there were undercurrents and undertow they were down somewhere out of sight. If there were breakers ahead, they were too far distant to be heard. So sure was he of the triumphant consummation of every venture that to a friend ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... measure, heart-occupying, as a well-handled ship under sail in a stormy day. Any ship, from lowest to proudest, has due place in that architecture of the sea; beautiful, not so much in this or that piece of it, as in the unity of all, from cottage to cathedral, into their great buoyant dynasty. Yet, among them, the fisher-boat, corresponding to the cottage on the land (only far more sublime than a cottage ever can be), is on the whole the thing most venerable. I doubt if ever academic grove were half so fit for profitable meditation as the little strip of shingle between two ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... talks nonsense, and your Majesty, in your own person, furnishes the best proof of it. Observe, Sire, the advantage and pleasure the hunter derives from the chase. Freed from all grosser influences, his frame Loses its sluggish humors, and becomes Buoyant, compact, and fit for bold encounter. 'Tis his to mark with joy the varied passions, Fierce heats of anger, terror, blank dismay, Of forest animals that cross his path. Then what a thrill transports the ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... betrayed the deep love she felt: it was the woman whose martyr spirit was her strength. And yet, spite of himself, he hoped. Isabella, in parting with him, had spoken such words as sent a thrill of delight over his whole being, and he quitted Segovia buoyant and glad-hearted, to wait weeks, months, he thought even years: so certain did he ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... three separate schools. Nearest to them in temper is the school of Matthew Arnold and Clough; they have the same quick sensitiveness to the intellectual tendencies of the age, but their foothold in a time of shifting and dissolving creeds is a stoical resignation very different from the buoyant optimism of Browning, or Tennyson's mixture of science and doubt and faith. Very remote from them on the other hand is the backward-gazing mediaevalism of Rossetti and his circle, who revived (Rossetti from Italian sources, Morris from Norman) a Middle ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... one could get along very well, if he could keep his pupils close enough to him, but the chances are, as I have found, that they will put bugs down one another's collars, and while you are hearing one class the other children will chase one another about. Their buoyant spirits will not permit them to keep quiet while they are in the open. It is pretty hard to hear a class reciting and at the same time to witness a boxing-match, but those who teach in the open air must be prepared for ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various

... as neatly as if they had every one served an apprenticeship to the handicraft. Then the little vessel herself was a perfect beauty; graceful in shape, notwithstanding her extreme breadth of beam; powerful, yet buoyant; and with lines so cunningly moulded that, whilst it would doubtless require a good strong breeze to show her off to the utmost advantage, Nicholls and Manners—who might both be expected to know a good hull when they saw ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... if it light on a sprig too slight The feathery freight to bear, Yet, conscious of wings, tosses fearless, and sings, Then drops—on the buoyant air.[159] ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville

... parts of which he renewed his correspondence, occupying his active mind with provisions for forwarding the cause of Great Britain and her allies. Under his many anxieties, however, he preserved his buoyant, resolute temper, not worrying over possible happenings against which he was unable to provide. "The force is at present not so large as might be wished," he writes to Ball, "but I will do my best with it; they will give me more ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... which signifies an ability to do every thing without trying, and to know every thing without learning, and to make more use of one's ignorance than other people do of their knowledge. This quality in James was mingled with an elasticity of animal spirits, a buoyant cheerfulness of mind, which, though found in the New England character, perhaps, as often as any where else, is not ordinarily regarded as one ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... mysterious fluted calls. A victim of torturing uncertainty, he strained his ear for that swift footfall. Suddenly he felt her come upon him from behind, buoyant, like a warm wave, and press firm hands over his eyelids. Her hair stung ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... that I did something to redeem myself," answered Sally. "After all," she continued a trifle wearily, for in spite of the petting and being made much of even her buoyant nature was beginning to feel the strain of events, "after all, I should not have been obliged to do it. Peggy and I are in our own city. It hath been a long war, and from the first we have shown our patriotism by doing what ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison

... in the late afternoons the two friends would stroll on the Normandy beach with their arms around each other's shoulders. They are described as very different in appearance,—Browning vigorous and buoyant, Milsand nervous, thin, reserved,—but akin in a certain delicate sensitiveness, a swift susceptibility to impressions. Of Browning Milsand said that what he really valued most was his kindness, his simple, open, radiant goodness. "All the chords ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... there was, I believe, a genuine element in it, for puffing can send upward only things that have a buoyant, rising quality in themselves; but there was also a great feeling of personal sympathy for my father and mother, of kindly indulgence for my youth, and of respectful recollection of my uncle and aunt; ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... two incidents connected with the Mole of Puteoli afford! The Roman Emperor, glittering like the morning star in purple mantle and jewelled cuirass, riding on his charger across the solid road that to humour his own caprice had been flung across the buoyant waters, accompanied by soldiery, by music, and by bands of wealthy sycophants; and the Apostle, poor, in bonds, a despised prisoner in an alien land, meekly threading his way through the crowds towards his mean lodging. Where is the proud ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... Dutch; a People apt to be heavy in the stern-works. They are quite languid about Pragmatic Sanction, these Dutch; they answer his Britannic Majesty's enthusiasm with an obese torpidity; and hope always they will drift through, in some way; buoyant in their own fat, well ballasted astern; and not need such swimming for life. "What a laggard notion," thinks his Majesty; "notion in ten pair of breeches, so to speak!" This stirring up of the Dutch, which lasts year on year, and almost beats Lord Stair, Lord Carteret, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... from off the Eastern hills, So lily-like and fair; Your very presence stirs and thrills Our buoyant Western air; The plains grow lovelier in their span, The skies above more blue, While the heart of Nature and of man Beats quick ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... felt all my native pride buoyant within me; I no longer walked with my eyes bent to the dust; hope elevated them to the skies; my soul was lit up with fresh fires, and ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole

... painful trials a visitor of the sick endures is, to go moneyless to a chamber that has been crossed by want, and whose inmate is utterly unable to supply his own necessities; but when the visitor can relieve the physical as well as the spiritual necessities of the sufferer, with what a buoyant step and cheerful heart he enters the abode of poverty and suffering! And his words, instead of falling like icicles on the sufferer's soul, fall on it as refreshing as a summer rain, warm as the tempered ray, and welcome as a mother's love. Such a visitor ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... effect is almost always lively and rich: all is buoyant and full of movement. That it is also odd, that we see strange costumes and hear a language often formal and obsolete, that we are asked to take for granted some very unaccustomed supposition and extravagant assumption, does not trouble us more than the usages and sights, so strange to ordinary ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church

... condition in the midst of all that wealth could give, was a contrast to Emily Ferrars' buoyant delight in the burrow which was her first married home, and proved a paradise to many a stray officer, aye, maybe, to Lieutenant-General Sir William Ferrars himself. Her letters were charming, especially a detail of Fred meeting Bryan O'More coming out of the trenches, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge

... country leaves us nothing to relate, which may interest a mind surrounded by such buoyant scenes as yours. No matter; I will still tell you the charming though homespun news, that our crops of wheat have been abundant and of superior quality; that very great though partial drought has destroyed ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... magnetic attitude is a close compound of the magnetic thought and the success-thought, buoyant in hope and courage and bound together ...
— Mastery of Self • Frank Channing Haddock

... customary trip into the Black Forest. We were on foot most of the time. One cannot describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they inspire him. A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep sense of contentment; another feature of it is a buoyant, boyish gladness; and a third and very conspicuous feature of it is one's sense of the remoteness of the work-day world and his entire emancipation ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain



Words linked to "Buoyant" :   buoyancy, light, non-buoyant, cheerful, perky



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