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Virginal   Listen
noun
Virginal  n.  (Mus.) An instrument somewhat resembling the spinet, but having a rectangular form, like the small piano. It had strings and keys, but only one wire to a note. The instrument was used in the sixteenth century, but is now wholly obsolete. It was sometimes called a pair of virginals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Virginal" Quotes from Famous Books



... has been suddenly placed in new circumstances, in whom there is much that you recognise, and much that is entirely strange. How purely, divinely white when the last snowflake has just fallen! How exquisite and virginal the repose! It touches you like some perfection of music. And winter does not work only on a broad scale; he is careful in trifles. Pluck a single ivy leaf from the old wall, and see what a jeweller he is! How he has silvered ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith

... all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned, as some have thought, the Goddess of Death; on the opposite side the Goddess of Life, with her flowers and fruit. Towards her three young maidens are advancing—were they still alive thus, graceful, virginal, with their long, plaited hair, and long, delicately-folded tunics, looking forward to carry on their race into the future? Presented severally, on the other sides of the dark hollow within, three male persons—a young man, an old man, and a boy—seem to be bringing ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... poor, though he affected to belong to the Bohemia of learning. He liked the snow, the pale street lamps, the sharp black tracks left in the first snow by the feet of the passers-by. He liked the air, and especially that limpid, tender, naive, as it were virginal tone, which can be seen in nature only twice in the year—when everything is covered with snow, and in spring on bright days and moonlight evenings when the ice breaks ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... well as their admirers will soon learn the art of handling composing-sticks and type; they will know the pleasure of coming together—all admirers of the work to be printed—to set up the type, to shape it into pages, to take it in its virginal purity from the press. These beautiful machines, instruments of torture to the child who attends on them from morn till night, will be a source of enjoyment for those who will make use of them in order to give voice to the thoughts of their ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... that came along with her stirred her skirts, and fluttered her scarlet ribbons, and the curls about her temples. You might think Spring herself had paused for a lovely moment in the Parish House garden and stood before you in this gracious and virginal shape, at once delicate ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... a virginal soul, but full-blooded. An unsuspected passion beat in her veins. Not for nothing did she have the deep, languorous eyes, the perfect scarlet lips, the sumptuous grace of an artist's ideal. Fires lay banked within her in spite of the fine purity ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... wholly—their warm bodies, that the bitter cold and the wind and the sightless death touch as with women's hands. In these contacts between living beings and force, there is something carnal, virginal, divine. ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... divides just as though there had been! The whole progeny of cells, successively formed, are the pure offspring of the maternal egg-cell and its nucleus. The tadpoles and young frogs so produced are examples of what is called "parthenogenesis"—that is to say, virginal reproduction—reproduction without fertilisation by material derived from a male parent! The needle, which gives off no material, but simply makes a tiny break in the surface of the egg, does all that ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... stood speechless, trying to formulate the lie he could utter most boldly, until he was struck with the double thought that to defend Diane's honor with a falsehood would be to defame it further, while a lie to this pure, trusting, virginal spirit would ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King

... scattered around it.[831] Death by a thunderbolt had always a meaning, which was sometimes hard to find; but here the gods had not left the inquiring votary utterly in doubt. The nakedness of the stricken maiden was a riddle that the priests could read. It was a manifest sign that a virginal vow had been broken, and that some of the keepers of the eternal fire were tainted with the sin of unchastity. The destruction of the horse seemed to portend that a knight would be found to be a partner ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... unknown belonged, so to say, to the refined and delicate type of Prudhon's school, but had also the poetic sentiment which Girodet gave to the inventions of his phantasy. The freshness of the temples, the regular arch of the eyebrows, the purity of outline, the virginal innocence so plainly stamped on every feature of her countenance, made the girl a perfect creature. Her figure was slight and graceful, and frail in form. Her dress, though simple and neat, revealed neither ...
— The Purse • Honore de Balzac

... The virginal revealment, Your bosom's wavering slope, Concealment, 'Neath fainting heliotrope, Of whitest ...
— Silhouettes • Arthur Symons

... a Pope to draw lines from pole to pole, and across the deep of the sea. Yet the poles sleep still in their icy virginal sanctity, and the blue waves through which that papal line passes shift and shimmer and roll in their free salt loneliness, unaffected by his demarcation; the heathen also, it appears, since that distant day, have had something to say ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... French Huguenot who had preferred her religion to her country. She had received a liberal and even learned education from her father, and was as attractive in person as she was accomplished in mind. "She was beautiful with that pure virginal beauty which depends on early youth" (Sainte-Beuve). In 1757 she was the talk of Lausanne, and could not appear in an assembly or at the play without being surrounded by admirers; she was called La Belle Curchod. Gibbon's curiosity was piqued to see such a prodigy, and ...
— Gibbon • James Cotter Morison

... guaranteed. Unwatched by Mrs. Grundy, unhindered by permanent domestics, she could receive lame ducks at any hour of day or night, and not seldom had a duck without studio of its own made use of June's. She enjoyed her freedom, and possessed herself with a sort of virginal passion; the warmth which she would have lavished on Bosinney, and of which—given her Forsyte tenacity—he must surely have tired, she now expended in championship of the underdogs and budding 'geniuses' of the artistic world. She lived, in fact, to turn ducks into the swans she believed ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... across the ocean. Indeed, it would be no strange thing were Queen Fashion to ordain that American maidens should adopt the style of dressing the hair now in universal vogue in Japan. The shimada or virginal coiffure, however, is changed after marriage, and Kiku, like the rest of her wedded friends, now wore the maru-mage, or half-moon-shaped chignon, which is wound round an ivory, tortoise-shell or coral-tipped ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... sitting or standing. However, I don't mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don't mean the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... these revelations; but soon a German clergyman, Dzierzon, discovered parthenogenesis, i. e. the virginal parturition of queens, and contrived the first hive with movable combs, thereby enabling the bee-keeper henceforth to take his share of the harvest of honey, without being forced to destroy his best colonies and in one instant annihilate the work of an entire year. This hive, still very imperfect, ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck

... journeyed on, a Saracen mounted on a horse came up with him. In the course of the conversation mention was made of the Blessed Virgin. The stranger remarked that though he admitted that the Mother of Christ had conceived without detriment to her virginal purity, yet he could not believe that after the conception of her divine Son she was still a virgin. He was so obstinate in holding this opinion, that no amount of reasoning on the part of Ignatius could force him to abandon it. Shortly ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola

... the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman's wailing, the crying of child without check— Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told. ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... intercession, orison, holy breathing; petition &c. (request) 765; collect, litany, Lord's prayer, paternoster[Lat]; beadroll[obs3]; latria[obs3], dulia[obs3], hyperdulia[obs3], vigils; revival; cult; anxious meeting, camp meeting; ebenezer, virginal. thanksgiving; giving thanks, returning thanks; grace, praise, glorification, benediction, doxology, hosanna; hallelujah, allelujah[obs3]; Te Deum[Lat], non nobis Domine[Lat], nunc dimittis[Lat]; paean; benschen[Ger]; Ave Maria, O Salutaris, Sanctus[Lat], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... but the shrinking, trustful bride. The flashing, imperious expression that so well became her bold beauty at other times had given place to a shy and blushing softness, inexpressibly charming to her lover. In her shining eyes a host of virginal alarms were mingled with the tender, solemn ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy

... American in the toga and sandals, exiled from the island he loved so well, had a message for the Tahitians or others of the Polynesian tribes of the South Seas; Essenism, maybe, or something to do with virginal beards and long hair, or sandals and the simple life. I wished he ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... O youth! O virginal beauty of woman! Only for an instant can ye gleam before me,—in the early morning of ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... far from hence The Adriatic breaks in a warm bay Among the green Illyrian hills, and there 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, the mountain flowers More virginal and sweet ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... well-meaning men and women have been trying to abolish this double standard and to introduce a single standard of morality. That is, they are demanding that the man going to the marriage bed should be just as chaste, just as virginal as his wife is. Whether or no the efforts of these good men and women will ever be crowned with success we will leave open. Whether or no it is even desirable that their efforts should be crowned with success we will also leave open. A complete discussion of these questions belongs to a ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson

... of the piece is the struggle between the feverish passion of Aminta and the virginal coldness of Silvia. Of this motive and of the manner in which it is treated it is not altogether easy to speak, and this less from any inherent element in the subject or from the difficulty of accurately ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... Don Clemente's lofty forehead, his blue eyes, so serene and pure, have known passion? In the soft, submissive, almost timid voice of the young Benedictine there was—to Maria's mind—a chastity too delicate, a purity too virginal. ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... they crushed their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebulae; and there was the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie,[162] the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched with ivy on the edges—ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... for girls perpetuate the ancient but absurd emphasis on the virginal significance of the hymen; and a recent book from a prominent publisher goes so far as to try to frighten girls into remaining chaste by stating that a physician could discover if they have been unchaste. This is far from being always true, ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow

... thou Motive, — Laborer Heat: Yea, Artist, thou, of whose art yon sea's all news, With his inshore greens and manifold mid-sea blues, Pearl-glint, shell-tint, ancientest perfectest hues Ever shaming the maidens, — lily and rose Confess thee, and each mild flame that glows In the clarified virginal bosoms of stones that shine, It ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier

... were like a virginal on The peritoneum, or caul wherein an organ. his bowels were wrapped, like His nails, like a gimlet. a billiard-table. His feet, like a guitar. His back, like an overgrown rack- His heels, like a ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais

... that went out to him because he needed it. The walk had whipped the color into her cheeks and she bloomed in that squalid cell like a desert rose. There was in the fluent grace of the slender, young body a naive, virginal sweetness that took him by the throat. He knew that she believed in him and the trouble rolled from his heart like a cold, ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... but, at the motion, the virginal instincts of the young girl's nature rallied to the defence; and, with a sudden spring, Dora sat upright, her face very pale, but her eyes clear and steadfast ...
— Outpost • J.G. Austin

... and the Casa de Limas was a veritable paradise of tender virginal green and delicate mystically perfumed blossoms, when Willa, a frail shadow of herself, ventured for the first time to the veranda, on Sallie ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... tokens of betrothal—did this mean that the honeymooning question was already settled? If it were so, the fact would account for the girl's absence of embarrassment in his own company; all the same, he did not believe it, for there was in her manner a calm, virginal composure, an absence of sentimentality, which seemed to denote that the citadel had not ...
— Flaming June • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... who was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no advantage in his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of things. Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her, up to an ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy

... Florence, they found it, as Rose Hawthorne says, very hot—much too hot to enjoy the city as it should be enjoyed. Her reminiscences of their life at Florence, and especially of the Villa Manteuto, have a charming freshness and virginal simplicity, although written in a somewhat high-flown manner. She succeeds, in spite of her peculiar style, in giving a distinct impression of the old chateau, its surroundings, the life her family led ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... the gesture—a pathetic, half-childish appeal, as though the shy, virginal youth of her sensed the distant tumult of awakening passion and would ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler

... loved Turgenev, the singer of virginal love and purity, of youth, and of the melancholy Russian landscape; but he loved virginal love, not from knowledge but from hearsay, as something abstract, existing outside real life. Now he assured himself that he loved Anna Akimovna platonically, ...
— The Party and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... art of the East; But I love more the inimitable art of the West, Where nature's handiwork lies in virginal beauty. Amidst the hum of city life I saunter back to dreams of home. Astride the back of my trusty steed I wander away, losing myself In ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various

... of the thirty-second floor, while he was being quietly butchered by the floor-clerk on the thirty-third floor, an agent of the Green Claw (that formidable organisation); and all because the two floors looked exactly alike to the virginal Western eye. The original point of my own story was that the man to be entrapped walked into his own house after all, in spite of it being differently painted and numbered, simply because he was absent-minded and ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... there is no other exhilaration so exquisite as that with which one reads an inspiring book in the solemn freshness of early morning. One's nerves seem peculiarly strung for exquisite impressions in the first dewy hours of the day, there is a virginal sensitiveness and purity about all our senses, and the mere delight of the eye in the printed page is keener than at any other time. "The Muses love the morning, and that is a fit time for study," said Erasmus to his friend Christianus of Lubeck; and, certainly, if early rising agrees with one, ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others

... existed for the defacement of the virginal scene by an unlovely dwelling—the, imposition of a scar on the unspotted landscape? None, save that the arrogant intruder needed shelter, and that he was neither a Diogenes to be content in a tub nor a Thoreau to find in boards an endurable ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... protested the major, "such knowledge would have a terrible effect upon young girls!" He rose and began to pace the floor again. "Daughter, you are letting yourself run wild! The sweetness, the virginal innocence of young and pure women—if you take that from them, there'd be nothing left to keep men from falling to the level of ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair

... UTERUS.—The womb, which is small before marriage, is converted by pregnancy into the largest organ of the body. The virginal uterus, shaped somewhat like a pear, and placed with apex downward, is carefully protected within the bony basin between the hips, which is commonly called the Pelvis. The upper and larger part of the organ, known as the body, lies at the bottom of the abdominal ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons

... of unmistakable distinction; regard that expression of face,-so pure, so virginal: comme il faut ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... await the bride for that time, amid the laughter of those who a few days before saw her running and leaping about like a mad she-goat, while on this day she deports herself with so great a demonstration of sedateness and virginal modesty. The precision of her steps, they say, is a necessity, because she is coming bound even to the feet. That is the ceremony that they practice for the reception of the husband who is the one who must come to take those bonds and shackles ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin

... custom, but she felt she ought not for fear he might misunderstand. And yet she wanted to kiss him as she had never wanted to kiss a man. When it came, her face upturned to his, she realized that on his part it was an honest kiss. There hinted nothing behind it. Rugged and kind as himself, it was virginal almost, and betrayed no long practice in the art of saying good-bye. All men were not brutes after ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... flat folds, deserves description, it was so dainty and simple. The light coming through the texture and the lace produced a partial shadow, the soft shadow of a light upon the skin, which gave her the virginal grace that all painters seek and Leopold Robert found for the Raffaelesque face of the woman who holds a child in his picture of "The Gleaners." Beneath this fluted frame of light sparkled a white and rosy and artless face, glowing ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac

... fighting blindly to delay death's coming for a moment. No, it is heroism freely donned, deliberately and unanimously hailed, heroism on behalf of an idea and a sentiment, in other words, heroism in its clearest, purest and most virginal form, a disinterested and whole-hearted sacrifice for that which men regard as their duty to themselves, to their kith and kin, to mankind and to the future. If life and personal safety were more precious than the idea of honour, of patriotism ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... unconsciousness of what is called, in highly civilised circles, "propriety." The very freedom of manners which, in some countries, might denote laxity of morals, is here the evident stamp of their purity. The thought has often recurred to me—which is the most truly pure and virginal nature, the fastidious American girl, who blushes at the sight of a pair of boots outside a gentleman's bedroom door, and who requires that certain unoffending parts of the body and articles of clothing should be designated by delicately circumlocutious ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... in—Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly picture. I repeat that she is a picture, as her companions are pictures; she is a charming piece of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic exhibition. But she is described, like her companions too, so subtly and lovingly that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with her behind her abominable little counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a still more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so vividly depicted. It was a figure needing a much more subtle ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... purely American that it seems that it must be as uncomprehended by one not familiar with the scene as the beauty of Greece or Italian glows; it is poetry locked in its own land. This presence of the pure, the pristine, the virginal in the verse, this luminousness, spaciousness, serenity in the land, this immemorialness of natural things, is the body and spirit of the true wild, such as Bryant's eyes had seen it and as it had possessed his soul. In ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... admiration, although they were already familiar with the funereal splendours of Egyptian art. Thus lighted up, the Golden Hall flamed, and for the first time, perhaps, the colours of the paintings shone in all their brilliancy. Red and blue, green and white, of virginal purity, brilliantly fresh and amazingly clear, stood out from the golden background of the figures and hieroglyphs, and attracted the eye before the subjects which they formed could be discerned. At first glance it looked like a vast tapestry of the richest stuffs. ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... feminine aristocracy of perfect pureness! Ah, she was no wife for your dance-haunting young millionaire. The man who won her must fight for her, fight like a tiger for its young, fight even the girl herself, because in her unstirred nature was all the virginal resistance to surrender that belongs to a wild creature of ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams

... write, I must speak, or else I shall cry out. Did I ever mention to you Father Domenico of Casoria, the confessor of our Convent of the Stigmata? A young man, tall, emaciated with fasts and vigils, but handsome like the monk playing the virginal in Giorgione's "Concert," and under his brown serge still the most stalwart fellow of the country all round? One has heard of men struggling with the tempter. Well, well, Father Domenico had struggled as hard as any of ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... be fulfilled." The Imam enquired, "And what may be the requirement of my lord the Emir? Haply when I hear it I may devote my life thereto until I can fulfil it." Quoth the Prince, "My object is to marry a maiden who must be comely exceedingly, aged fifteen years; pure, chaste, virginal, whom man hath never soiled and who during all her days never lusted for male kind: moreover, she must be unique for beauty and loveliness." The Imam rejoined, "O my lord, this be a thing hard of finding ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... believe that this eager girl in a striped blue and yellow and purple skirt, and rough white crash hat, was the bored, the remote, the much-feared Mrs. Clarence Breckenridge. Something free and sweet and virginal had come back to her, or been born in her. She was like no phase of the many phases in which he had known her; she was a Rachael who had never known the sordid, the disillusioning side of life. Even her seriousness had the confident, eager quality of youth, and her gayety ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... once to broad male feet, The "Happy Garden Seat," Invaded now by the non-smoking sex, Virginal scruples vex, And matronly anathemas assail. Alas! and what avail Man's immunities of time or place? The sweet she-creatures chase From all old coigns of vantage harried man. In vain, how vain to ban Beauty from billiard-room or—Morning ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various

... walls, ceiling, wooden beds, tables, the toilet service, the bookcases. For there were books here, too, books which Lucrezia examined with an awful wonder, not knowing how to read. In the window-seat were white cushions. On the chest of drawers were more red roses and geraniums. It was a virginal room, into which the bright, golden sunbeams stole under the striped awning outside the low window with surely a hesitating modesty, as if afraid to find themselves intruders. The whiteness, the intense quietness of the room, through whose window could be seen a space ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... been exalted above every one in the whole world, that man, instead of receiving the glory that was his due, was suddenly degraded and dishonored! What for? Who had judged him? Who could have decreed this? Those were the questions that wrung his inexperienced and virginal heart. He could not endure without mortification, without resentment even, that the holiest of holy men should have been exposed to the jeering and spiteful mockery of the frivolous crowd so inferior ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... exposures of sentiments and of life offend that virginal modesty of soul, of which outward modesty is but an imperfect emblem? You show ourself unvailed, and you do not ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... Violate malrespekti. Violation malrespekto. Violence perforto. Violent perforta. Violet violo. Violet color violkoloro. Violin violono. Violinist violonisto. Violoncello violoncxelo. Violoncellist violoncxelisto. Viper vipero. Virago (fig.) drakino. Virgin virgulino. Virginal virga. Virginity virgeco. Virgin, The Blessed La Sankta Virgulino, Dipatrino. Virile vira. Virility vireco. Virtue virto. Virtuous virta. Virtuoso virtuozo. Virulent venena, malboniga. Virus veneno. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... and, perhaps, desired. Stout Neapolitan fathers, with bulging eyes, immense brown cheeks, and peppery mustaches, were promenading with their children and little dogs, looking lavishly contented with themselves. Young girls went primly past, holding their narrow, well-dressed heads with a certain virginal stiffness that was yet not devoid of grace, and casting down eyes that were supposed not yet to be enlightened. Their governesses and duennas accompanied them. Barefooted brown children darted in and out, dodging pedestrians and ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... wasn't, he decided, so much because of her actual person— although since her marriage she had shown practically no change—as from a spirit of rigorous purity; she was, in spite of everything, Lee realized, completely virginal in mind. ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer

... voluptuousness of a devout young heart whose pulsations had never learned to beat for earthly objects. M. de Molins is preparing a volume of these manuscripts; but I am glad to present one of the seguidillas here, as an illustration of the tender and ardent fantasies of virginal passion this Christian Sappho embroidered upon the ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... fingers were tapered, but the articulations were not generally indicated. In the male form the chest was high, arched, and prominent. In the female form, especially in that of goddesses and virgins, the form of the breasts is virginal in the extreme, since their beauty was generally made to consist in the moderateness of their size. They were generally a little higher than nature. The abdomen was without prominence. The legs and knees of youthful figures are rounded with softness ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy

... opportunity to warm herself in the golden rays of the sun, in order to throw off the rigidity of the chrysalis. New life shone out in every part of her young being. Everything she met with was good and beautiful. Her love was manifested with virginal grace, and innocent in thought, she saw nothing to cause her to put on false blushes. However, she was wont to cover her face with her fan when they joked with her, but her eyes would smile and a gentle tremor would pass over ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal

... punishest; but rather It is that, when we slacken in perceiving The world's intent towards us, and fatally, Enticed out of suspicion by fair signs, Go from ignoring its proposals, down To parley,—thou our weakness dost permit. In all my days I from the greed of the world Virginal have kept my spirit's dwelling,— Till now; yea, all my being I have maintained Sacredly my own possession; for love But made more beautiful and more divine My spirit's ownership. And yet no warning, When I infatuate went down to be Procuress of myself to the ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie

... fair altar, like a priest, I'd tend, Trimming the tapers to a constant blaze, And to each lovely and beloved friend Garlands I'd bring, and virginal soft sprays From April's bodice, and moon-breasted May's, And there should be a sound for ever of streams And birds 'mid happy leaves in that still place,— Kneeling within that cloister of ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... part of it is of such poetic freshness that I think it must be a waif from the earlier years of his poetry. Nor is there better imaginative work in his descriptive poetry than the image of the naked moon, in virginal distress, flying for refuge through the gazing heaven to the succourable cloud—fleece on fleece of piled-up snow, drowsily patient—where Pan lay in ambush for ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... believe it. She was too young and shy and virginal. The accents of her candor rebuked his skepticism. He merely told himself these things because the last vestige of his expiring common ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... and in her simple religion! She is not even conscious of her beauty; my admiration has never made her vain. Heaven knows that I have made no secret of it. You must have observed the singular transparency of her expression, the lovely modesty of her glance. And was there ever such a truly virginal brow, such a natural classic elegance in the wave of the hair and the arch of the forehead? I have studied her; I may say I know her. I have absorbed her little by little; my mind is stamped and imbued, and I have determined now to clinch the impression; ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James

... intelligence. Nor do you. He understood the teachings of the giants. So do you. But they irked him. To revenge himself he laid penny crackers under their pedestals. His whole intellectual fortune was spent in buying penny crackers. There was something cheeky and pre-adolescent about him—a kind of virginal ferocity. That iridescent charm of sexlessness which somebody, one of these days, must be good enough to analyse for us! He lacked the male attributes of humility, reverence and sense ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... moved with royal deliberation, patronizing luxurious hotels, celebrated landscapes, notable art collections. The governess was supplemented with the best local teachers of music and languages; but it was Aunt Althea, with her proud fastidiousness, her eclecticism at once virginal and ardent, who set the keynote ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... bodies, a coordination of every muscle and nerve, a richness of aspect in color and form, that is more sensuous, more attractive, than any feminine graces I have ever gazed on. They have the forwardness of boys, the boldness of huntresses, yet the softness and magnetism of the most virginal of their white sisters. One thinks of them as of old in soft draperies of beautiful cream-colored native cloth wound around their bodies, passed under one arm and knotted on the other shoulder, revealing the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... the sweet and tender poetry of Bembo and Vittoria Colonna and Tasso; the bluff sensuality of novelists like Bandello and Masuccio, the Aristophanesque laughter of the comedy of Bibbiena and of Beolco; seeing in our mind's eye the stately sweet matrons and noble senators of Titian, the virginal saints and madonnas of Raphael, the joyous angels of Correggio;—recapitulating rapidly all our impressions of this splendid time of exuberant vitality, of this strong and serene Renaissance, we answer without hesitation, and with only a smile of contempt at our credulous ancestors—no. The Italy ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... waking up at length to a full glow of interest. "That's why I don't want to go and stare at pictures. In the spring, to see the fresh, virginal, delicious green of a bush against an old dry brick wall, gives a keener pleasure than the best picture ...
— Master of His Fate • J. Mclaren Cobban

... have more room. He must get out into the dawn—out where he could share these emotions which now surged in upon him with some virginal passion as big and fresh as the new-born day. He crossed to the window and looked out upon the dormant city. The morning light was just beginning to wash out the dark and to sketch in the outlines of buildings and the gray path of ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was theirs now! She was almost virginal—as though she had never been touched by their passion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or—— ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... see too far all at once, dear Moses. Too much of a bird's-eye view across the Promised Land to the shore. Come down, and walk across, old fellow. And you won't see all that milk and honey and grapes the size of duck's eggs. All the dear little budding infant with its tender virginal mind and various clouds of glory instead of a napkin. Not at all, my dear chap. No such luck of a ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence

... invention in plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end they begin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them a paradoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . Love that disguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak of weakness, virginal innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence, wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. By this means they hope to make an effect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, and conscientious study of character." He mentions Octave Feuillet ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... gone to Sheldon, Senior, in the morning and in return for McGuire's check had been given cash in the shape of ten virginal five hundred dollar bills. This money had been put into an envelope and was now folded carefully in Peter's inside pocket. Sheldon, Senior, to be sure, had asked questions, but with a good grace Peter had evaded him. Dick Sheldon was out of town, so Peter put in the ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... room and shut the door, but could not shut out her image. The picture she had unwittingly supplied of herself took possession of his imagination: he saw her almost as a dream-figure—the virginal figure he knew—standing by the stream in the sunset, amid the elms and silver birches, with daisies in her hands and bluebells at her feet, inhaling the delicate scent that wafted from the white hawthorn bushes, and watching the water glide along till ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... second glance assured him she was not, and he then reflected that she was too innocent indeed for that. After a supreme hesitation he asked her if he might go and look at the yellow room, which seemed so attractive yet so virginal. He had been there already with Osmond, to inspect the furniture, which was of the First French Empire, and especially to admire the clock (which he didn't really admire), an immense classic structure of that period. ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James

... touch of his ice-axe, his crampons, and the rope in which he rewound himself, he burned to attack a real mountain, a summit deprived of a lift and a photographer. He hesitated between the Finsteraarhorn, as being the highest, and the Jungfrau, whose pretty name of virginal whiteness made him think more than once ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet

... marries, and wakes to torment her like a biblical devil if she does not. There is no miser like a reformed spendthrift, and no ascetic will go to such extremes of self-mortification as a converted libertine; in the same way, there are no such portentously virginal old maids as those who might have been the most womanly wives; the opposite is certainly true also, for the variety 'Hemiparthenos,' studied after nature by Marcel Prevost, generally makes an utter failure of matrimony, and becomes, in fact, ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... bonnes, Maman having not yet emerged from the French mamma's chrysalis condition of morning crimping-pins, petticoat and short gown, and list slippers. The bonnes who thus serve as chaperons are often as young as or even younger than the demoiselles whose virginal modesty they are supposed to protect. That they are anything more than a mere form of guardian, a figment of the social fiction that a young French girl never leaves her mother's side till she goes to her husband's, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... of seeing our men so pleased. Forty bedsteads and beds complete we found in that district, until the bare white-washed walls of the jail were transformed. White paint, too, we discovered in plenty, and soon our wards were virginal in their whiteness. And when I tell you that at one time I had no less than thirteen gunshot fractures of thigh and leg alone and other wounds in proportion, in the hospital, you may judge ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... his master's bidding when she replied "His reward be upon the Almighty." Then the Wazir returned and reported the woman's prayer to the Commander of the Faithful, who cried, "Hie thee to her and enquire an she be married or virginal; and, if she be unwedded, do thou ask her an she be willing to wive with me."[FN94] So Ja'afar fared to her and questioned her, whereat she answered, "A spinster." Quoth he, "The Youth who sent the dinar to thee desireth to mate with thee;" and quoth she, "An ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... human race, magnificent to behold against the mass of other faces, worn, old, wrinkled, and grimacing. So women, too, admire such young people with that eager pleasure which men take in watching a pretty girl, elegant, gracious, and embellished with all the virginal charms with which our imagination pleases to adorn the perfect woman. If this hurried glance at the population of Paris has enabled us to conceive the rarity of a Raphaelesque face, and the passionate admiration which such an one must inspire at the first sight, the prime interest of our ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... fright I look already!" Isabelle complained, gazing at the dark circles under her eyes in the glass. She thought of Aline, whose complexion like a Jacqueminot rose had been roughened and marred. Something still virginal in her soul rebelled ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... can I ever again catch at her lovely virginal hands? [he lifts one very gently] Her hands have the sudden beauty and strange fragrance of flowers that bloom among shadows. How can I ever press my lips against them again without bruising their dear shy softness by this weight of ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... Then she ran hastily up to her room, took the little coffer of carved oak clamped with iron, her treasury, which contained her lover's letters from first to last, unfastened from the mirror above her bed the white and virginal chaplet that hung there; put into her belt a watch her father had given her, and passed into her mother's bedchamber. There she stooped and kissed the pillow where her mother's head had lain, knelt before the Christ at ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... familiar to the imagination of medieval Europe and therefore quite permissible to a poet who had set out to romanticize. If, therefore, Schiller had made his heroine fall in love in human fashion, and had then connected this lapse from virginal ideality a little more clearly with the final catastrophe, there could be no reasonable objection to his fundamental idea, and we should have, probably, the best imaginative basis for a romantic tragedy on the story of Joan of Arc. One ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... a young woman, and this passage merely deals with the approaching birth of a son to the king or the prophet himself. This error of the Septuagint is one of the sources of the legend relating to the virginal birth of Jesus. As early as the second century A.D. the Jews perceived it and pointed it out to the Greeks, but the Church knowingly persisted in the false reading, and for over fifteen centuries she has clung to ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... him. Slender, rounded, white of arm and throat, she had fulfilled gloriously all of the fair promise of her youth. The rich heritage of womanhood had stamped the softly curved form and the sweetly pensive face. Virginal, she ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson

... of the full moon which darted its rays upon him. It is a curious thing that one might cite other examples of dreams where the rays of the moon, caressing the eyes of the sleeper, evoked before him virginal apparitions. May we not suppose that such might have been the origin in antiquity of the fable of Endymion—Endymion the shepherd, lapped in perpetual slumber, for whom the goddess Selene, that is, the moon, is smitten ...
— Dreams • Henri Bergson

... spruce wood and entered the orchard his heart gave a sudden leap, and he felt that the blood rushed madly to his face. She was there, bending over the bed of June lilies in the centre of the garden plot. He could only see her profile, virginal ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... the midnight train. She was desperately anxious and at a loss which way to turn. And yet through all her being there rolled a mighty undernote of joy. As to the dweller on the coast the voice of the sea is the undertone to all the sounds of man's activities, so beneath all her virginal hesitancies, her half terror of what she had done, surged and sang the knowledge that Creed was hers, her avowed lover. She, Judith, had him here safe; she had brought him away out of the mountains, from those who would have harmed him—and those who would have loved him ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan

... but all of them, little and big, looked at him—very shyly, and yet with intense interest. He stood staring after them, and presently their tuneful young voices sounded again, filled the air with virginal music. He swung his leg over the stile, and went along the path through the trees where he ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... justify his conclusion. While the young virgin, however, is more modest and shy than the young man of the same age, the experienced married woman is usually less so than her husband, and in a woman who is a mother the shy reticences of virginal modesty would be rightly felt to be ridiculous. ("Les petites pudeurs n'existent pas pour les meres," remarks Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt, vol. iii, p. 5.) She has put off a sexual livery that has no longer any important part to play in life, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... the delight with which Giovanni has dwelt, though without exaggeration, on the muscles of the breast and ribs in the Adam; while he has subdued all away into virginal severity in Eve. And then note, and with conclusive admiration, how in the exact and only place where the poor modern fool's anatomical knowledge should have been shown, the wretch loses his hold of it! How he has entirely ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin

... an exquisite morning, too virginal for June, too richly warm for May. When the two exchanged the sunny road for the factory office, a north room none too light, it was a moment before their dazzled eyes perceived no one was present. This was Bailey's ...
— The Flying Mercury • Eleanor M. Ingram

... but his abstraction did not lift. By this time his imagination was hard at work. He pictured the girl in the mirror as stretched on her virginal cot in the final exhaustion of starvation; and the successful effort to keep away from the studio building till four o'clock called for all his will power. Suppose the boy blundered, or wasn't in time. Suppose the girl really had not eaten anything since ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... her as she entered his office the next day. He even affected not to notice that she had put on her best clothes, and he made no doubt appeared as when she had first attracted the mature yet faithless attentions of Deacon Hotchkiss at church. A white virginal muslin was belted around her slim figure by a blue ribbon, and her Leghorn hat was drawn around her oval cheek by a bow of the same color. She had a Southern girl's narrow feet, encased in white stockings and kid slippers, which were crossed primly ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various

... spread fans and now and then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold grace and elegance of feeling that Watteau would certainly have sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is essentially an original which means that she invents ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... for resemblances may find certain analogies between these adepts of "virginal virginity," or of "the great garden of the Tsar"—for both these names were applied to them—and the adamites or aryanists; for eager minds seeking supreme salvation are apt to meet upon the great road that ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... and mother in one, See the wealth of your son. Forests primeval, and virginal sod, Wheat-fields golden and splendid: Riches of nature and opulent God For the use of his children intended. A courage that dares, and a hope that endures, And a soul ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... She in her virginal beauty As pure as a pictured saint, How should this sinning and sorrow Have for her danger ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner

... them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared. Old Virginal's stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens. One whimper, and she is away full-mouthed through the wood, and the pack after ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... these virginal days, when there was a restless stirring among the young bucks, who smelled the wide waters, the pines and the wild shrubs; who heard the cry of the loon on the lonely lake and the whir of the wild duck's ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... stooped to a basket which lay near her, and, taking from it a pair of garden scissors, knelt beside Paul, and began to snip his bonds. He woke to find her thus engaged, and a virginal sweet sense of shame filled him. Her fingers touched his skin at times, and he ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... of the olden time was lately presented to the museum of the Northern Institution, by William Mackintosh, Esq. of Milbank—an ancient virginal, which was in use among our ancestors prior to the invention of the spinnet and harpsichord. Mary, Queen of Scots, who delighted in music, in her moments of "joyeusitie" as John Knox phrases it, used to play ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various

... made an interjectory movement, but the Prince went on. "I was twenty, and I was still virginal. To speak frankly, I was amazed at myself, perhaps even amused. Yes, even now I am inclined to think that, among princes, my record must have been exceptional. This lady, to whom I owe nearly the whole of my domestic experience, saved ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... listener took on a pathetic droop, and her voice quivered as she spoke with an effective semblance of virginal terror. ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana

... Obviously, in the presence of these zoophyte and mollusk specimens, the fine lad was classifying his head off. Polyps and echinoderms abounded on the seafloor: various isis coral, cornularian coral living in isolation, tufts of virginal genus Oculina formerly known by the name "white coral," prickly fungus coral in the shape of mushrooms, sea anemone holding on by their muscular disks, providing a literal flowerbed adorned by jellyfish from the genus Porpita wearing collars of azure tentacles, and starfish that ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... the room filled with a brilliant crowd. Within the large circle of armchairs were Madame de Wesson, about whom people told frightful stories, and who kept, after twenty years of half-smothered scandal, the eyes of a child and cheeks of virginal smoothness; old Madame de Morlaine, who shouted her witty phrases in piercing cries; Madame Raymond, the wife of the Academician; Madame Garain, the wife of the exminister; three other ladies; and, standing easily against ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... skin was so snowy, you could hardly tell where the dress ended. Her complexion was exquisite, her eyes of the softest blue; at twenty-three she did not look more than seventeen; and yet there was such a contrast between these virginal traits, and the worn, faithless, hopeless expression, that she looked, as Philip said, like a depraved lamb. Does it show the higher nature of woman, that, while "fast young men" are content to look like well-dressed stable boys and billiard-markers, ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... revealed the emptiness of life without Rachel, the emptiness of courtrooms, verdicts, crowds. Yes, even the emptiness of the struggle between good and evil. He sat thinking of her now, contrasting the virginal figure of her with the coarseness of the thing in which he had been engaged. There was something about her ... something ... something. And the old refrain of his dream like a haunting popular ballad, started again here in the ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... adventure peculiar to itself. The shore, at best, had been only a foster-mother; the hill was the true child of the sea. Since its birth it has had a more or less enforced separateness, in experience, from the country to which it belonged. Whether temple or fortress, whether forest-clad in virginal fierceness of aspect, or subdued into beauty by the touch of man's chisel, its destiny has ever been the same—to suffice unto itself—to be, in a word, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... extremity of virginal pride and modesty, I hated even myself because he had touched me and could have disfigured ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan

... becoming modest she would become commonplace. It would have been otherwise had she always remained in that sanctuary not frequented by men; her power of love, restrained and concealed beneath the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her heart those decent melodies which belong at once to the woman and the angel. However that may be, audacity of ideas and voluptuousness of manners form a spot not before ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various

... naught to her that he had been a martyr to idleness and wealth, which combination had prematurely aged him. Mr. Boutwood was really younger than George Cannon, and Florence Bagster certainly seemed as old as Hilda. Yet the juxtaposition of the young, slim, and virginal Florrie and the large, earth-worn Mr. Boutwood ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... to catch hold of in a biscuit-box by Huntley & Palmer," replied Raffles; "that was why I sent you for one. And I didn't write a word upon a sheet of paper which could possibly be traced. I simply printed two or three on a virginal post-card—another half-penny to the bad—which might have been bought at any post-office in the kingdom. No, old chap, the G.P.O. was the one real danger; there was one detective I spotted for myself; and the ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... afraid of my Father. Whenever she could, she withdrew to the room she called her 'boudoir', a small, chilly apartment, sparsely furnished, looking over what was in process of becoming the vegetable garden. Very properly, that she might have some sanctuary, Miss Marks forbade me to enter this virginal bower, which, of course, became to me an object of harrowing curiosity. Through the key-hole I could see practically nothing; one day I contrived to slip inside, and discovered that there was nothing ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... he played a considerable part, both giving and receiving hospitality; and it was the traditional pleasantry to chaff him as an inveterate bachelor, at whom all the young ladies of the place were setting their virginal caps. These jests he received very much as Tim Linkinwater received the allusions of Mr. Cheeryble to the "uncommonly handsome spinster," rather encouraging them as tributes to the fact that, ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... colour. She had angularly placed it on a footstool, since she was too high in the seneschal's chair. This foot was of narrow proportions, delicately curved, as broad as two fingers, and as long as a sparrow, tail included, small at the top—a true foot of delight, a virginal foot that merited a kiss as a robber does the gallows; a roguish foot; a foot wanton enough to damn an archangel; an ominous foot; a devilishly enticing foot, which gave one a desire to make two new ones just like it to perpetuate in this lower world the glorious works of God. The page was ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac

... "Jhesus Maria" with three crosses. Oftentimes she reverently fixed her gaze upon it, for once she had had it touched by Saint Catherine.[1529] And that the Saint should have actually touched it was not incredible, seeing that some years before, in 1413, Sister Colette, who was vowed to virginal chastity, had received from the Virgin apostle a rich golden ring, as a sign of her spiritual marriage with the King of Kings. Sister Colette permitted the nuns and monks of her order to touch this ring, and she confided it to the messengers she sent ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... impertinence in her air of not having suffered from an exertion which had wrought so powerfully on every one else. Ransom broke into a genial laugh, which he instantly swallowed again, at the sweet grotesqueness of this virginal creature's standing up before a company of middle-aged people to talk to them about "love," the note on which she had closed her harangue. It was the most charming touch in the whole thing, and the most vivid proof of her innocence. She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James

... river from Astoria, we had always in view the snow-white cone of St. Helen's, one of the principal peaks of the Cascade Range. Nothing can be conceived more virginal than this form of exquisite purity rising from the dark fir forests to the serene sky. Mount Baker's symmetry is much marred by the sunken crater at the summit; Mount Rainier's outline is more complicated: this is a pure, beautiful cone. It is so perfect a picture of heavenly calm, that it ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton

... a thoroughly prepared victim was I! A poor, shy, over-susceptible, virginal savage—Uncas, the son of Chingachgook, astray for the first time in a fashionable ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... thy chair-days, thus To die in ruffian battle?—Even at this sight My heart is turn'd to stone; and while 't is mine It shall be stony. York not our old men spares; No more will I their babes; tears virginal Shall be to me even as the dew to fire, And beauty that the tyrant oft reclaims Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax. Henceforth I will not have to do with pity; Meet I an infant of the house of York, Into as ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic. They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of one of the nipples was a white pearl. It was a drop of ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... violets, Fills earth full of her scents, voices and violins: Thus one cunning in music Wakes old chords in the memory: Thus fair earth in the Spring leads her performances. One more touch of the bow, smell of the virginal Green - one more, and my bosom Feels new ...
— New Poems • Robert Louis Stevenson



Words linked to "Virginal" :   pure, harpsichord, virginal membrane, chaste, pair of virginals, vestal, cembalo, virginity, virtuous



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